The Trump administration is making every effort to criminalize community observing. That only proves its power.
Renee Nicole Good’s tragic murder in Minneapolis at the hands of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent has become a turning point in the criminalization of community-based resistance to the Trump administration’s campaign of neo-fascist state repression.
Vice President JD Vance has gone so far as to lionize Good’s alleged killer, and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has scrambled to demonize Good, accusing her of having engaged in an act of “domestic terror” because of her support for her immigrant neighbors who were being targeted by ICE.
In reality, the murder of Good should best be understood as a public extrajudicial execution — an action that is deemed a crime against humanity under international law.
From this perspective, it is the administration’s policies and practices (which constitute a pattern of state terror) that culminated in Good’s murder. This is further compounded by efforts to criminalize the peaceful activities of Good, her wife, and others like them who take principled stands in solidarity against such abuses.
The Minnesota-based organization Community United Against Police Brutality recently told Reuters that Good was one of hundreds of community members who had volunteered to take part in a network of “neighborhood patrols” involved in tracking, monitoring, and documenting the deployment of ICE agents in Minneapolis.
City council members have similarly asserted that she was murdered in cold blood while “out caring for her neighbors.” And local and state public officials have confirmed and paid tribute to Good’s personal, faith-based commitment to acting in solidarity with her neighbors, including the city’s besieged Somali, Latino, Haitian, and other migrant communities.
This has recently been affirmed too by the Presbyterian Office of Public Witness in a statement issued in Good’s memory:
The federal government’s response to Good’s killing — its decision to frame someone who opposed ICE’s brutal mandate as a “terrorist” — underscores the crucial role that community-based organizing plays in pushing back against the Trump administration. This kind of organizing from below is more urgent than ever as we work to protect the rights of migrants who have been targeted, and more generally resist the intensifying national onslaught on fundamental rights and dissent.The Increasing Role of Community Observers
Since ICE escalated what has amounted to an armed occupation of multiple cities across the U.S., thousands of ordinary people, including hundreds in Minneapolis, have been trained at churches,temples, mosques, and community centers to observe and document ICE’s actions, in an attempt to protect neighbors from abduction.
I am personally involved in this work too, organizing through the network known as Witness at the Border. Since 2019, we have trained, accompanied, and supported the deployment of observers (“witnesses”) throughout the U.
