No matter your political persuasion, I don’t see how you can not be horrified at what is happening in Minnesota.
In that state alone, there are now thousands of armed, masked federal agents grabbing people off the street, pulling them out of their cars, spraying chemical agents in their faces and terrorizing day cares, schools and stores with apparent impunity.
It is galling that at the same time we gather to honor the life and legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., people are being targeted based on their skin color, ethnic background and perceived immigration status, as well as those seen as “agitators” by the Trump administration.
Nationwide, federal immigration officers have shot 11 people since September, including two in Portland last week, NBC News reported.
On Jan. 7, in the most high-profile incident so far of the federal surge in Minnesota, a white mom of three, Renee Good, 37, was shot and killed by a federal agent while in her car. Her last words seen on one of the videos of the killing were “I’m not mad at you,” before ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot her multiple times.
President Donald Trump said Good “ran over” the officer, though several videos of the incident undermined his assertion.
Before many details had come to light, Trump administration officials accused Good of “domestic terrorism” and Vice President JD Vance called her killing “a tragedy of her own making.” Later, Trump offered another rationale for Good’s killing, her “highly disrespectful” attitude.
Last time I checked, in the U.S., a person’s “attitude” was not grounds for summary execution.
Instead of investigating Ross and the incident, the Trump administration investigated Good herself as well as her partner, Becca Good, leading six federal prosecutors to resign.
Last Thursday, Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act to quell protests in Minnesota, which would allow the armed forces to carry out law enforcement. A day later, he backed down.
I reached out to a former colleague, JaNaé Bates Imari, a minister who is the co-executive director of Twin Cities-based Faith in Minnesota, to understand more about what is happening on the ground.
Imari said the state is “under siege” and the onslaught of federal agencies in the area is horrific and “worse than what people actually imagine.” Day after day, she said, people are being taken from schools and jobs, and while Minnesotans have a sophisticated network of rapid response and legal observers, those observers too have had their windows broken and been physically assaulted by ICE. It’s overwhelming.
Renee Good’s killing in broad daylight, where, as her partner Becca Good wrote, “We had whistles. They had guns,” was followed by a demand that “we don’t believe our eyes,” Imari said.
She said Minnesota is a testing ground for what U.S. citizens will stomach and allow.
The same people who dismissed the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riots as a “day of love” are now calling protesters domestic terrorists for standing up in defense of their communities.
“Nothing is more American than to stand up for your rights and the rights of your neighbor,” Imari said. She said what Minnesotans are saying loudly and clearly through their actions is that they won’t be silent to injustice.
Minnesotans were not alone, as thousands joined protests nationwide after Good’s death to protest the immigration actions, many using the slogan “Be Good.”
Imari said it’s important for the rest of the country to see Minnesota’s resistance “because they need to pull together all of their moral courage to do the very same thing. And if they think, ‘oh, that’s just Minnesota,’ baby, believe it’s coming to you too. And so we need to be grounded and clear that we cannot acquiesce.”
Today is an apt time to remember that King stood for nonviolence but also noncompliance, Imari said.
“He refused to be complicit with a violent, dangerous regime that declared that some people were undeserving, that some people actually deserve to be harmed, hurt and murdered,” she said. “He said, ‘Absolutely not.’ ”
Angelique Davis, Seattle University professor of political science and the director of the African and African American studies program, said that what we are seeing in this moment is partly a function of “racial gaslighting,” or a political and social process that normalizes white supremacist realities by pathologizing those who resist.
The racial gaslighting framework, developed by Davis and her colleague Rose Ernst, can be seen in the killing of Renee Good and in the immediate rush to create narratives that craft reality in a particular way. Good was not a victim of an unaccountable, aggressive ICE officer, for example, but a domestic terrorist and therefore responsible for her own death.
Good’s killing also creates a message for other white people, Davis said, that “Look, if you stand up, this is what’s going to happen to you.”
As a scholar of law, Davis said, “just because something is legal, as we know, doesn’t mean it’s right.”
“All kinds of atrocities have been legal, and we’ve justified them, and then later condemned them,” she said, a point made powerfully in King’s 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”
“We can never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’ and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was ‘illegal,’ ” King wrote. “It was ‘illegal’ to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. But I am sure that if I had lived in Germany during that time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers even though it was illegal.”
It would be naive to think that what is happening in Minnesota could not quickly arrive at our doorstep as well.
Imari said this moment offers us all a choice.
“Every Minnesotan, every American, has to decide for themselves,” she said. “In what way are they ready to be written about in the history books? What did they do? How did they act, how did they react, and what kind of world are we setting up for (future) generations?”