Minneapolis Grieves, Again

Mass of people attending a candlelight vigil outside on the street holding candles signs and flags

Community members during a vigil in Minneapolis for Renee Nicole Good.

Photograph by Jaida Grey Eagle / Bloomberg / Getty

Before sunrise today, I watched hundreds of people rally outside a federal building in Minneapolis that houses the area’s immigration court and serves as an operating base for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other units of the Department of Homeland Security. “No more Minnesota nice,” they chanted. “We don’t want the fascist ICE.” The crowd briefly blocked long queues of trucks and S.U.V.s from entering or exiting the building’s parking lot, and faced off with dozens of masked, uniformed, and heavily armed agents. I witnessed two arrests—young men pinned to the icy asphalt—and interviewed teen-agers who had been caught in a cloud of pepper spray.

Many of the protesters had been out last night as well, at a candlelight vigil for a woman named Renee Nicole Good, a thirty-seven-year-old mother of three who had recently moved to the city. Yesterday morning, a masked ICE agent shot and killed Good while she was in the driver’s seat of her S.U.V., not far from where George Floyd was murdered by local police, in 2020. Video taken by bystanders showed Good appearing to steer away from a group of officers when one of them walked in front of her car and opened fire. (President Trump and members of his Administration have said that the agent was defending himself.)

The previous day, Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, had accompanied ICE officers on the deportation raids that they have been conducting in greater Minneapolis for months, primarily in Somali and Latino neighborhoods. She announced that two thousand more federal agents would soon be sent to the area.

It was Floyd’s murder, by Minneapolis police, that catalyzed an uprising for Black lives—the largest demonstrations in U.S. history. George Floyd Square still marks that moment, with grand sculptures of raised fists and graffitied murals. Now another death, another Minnesotan tragedy, has distilled the stakes of yet another form of state violence. “A woman was murdered in broad daylight,” Cathy Fuller, a woman I met at today’s protest, told me. “Minnesota has been hit really hard.”

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Erin Neil contributed to today’s edition.

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