NationWide Protests

 

With more such events set for Sunday, hundreds of demonstrations took place in cities large and small across the United States on Saturday to denounce the killing of Renee Nicole Good by a federal immigration enforcement officer last week in Minneapolis.

The wave of “ICE Out for Good” protests arrives as a consolidated expression of outrage directed at President Donald Trump for his authoritarian tactics, cruel policies, and a lawlessness seemingly without end. Just a day after Good was killed in Minnesota, two other people were shot and wounded by federal agents in Portland, Oregon.

“Renee Nicole Good and the Portland victims are just the most recent victims of ICE’s reign of terror,” said the 50501 movement, one of the groups behind the weekend protests, said in a statement. “ICE has brutalized communities for decades, but its violence under the Trump regime has accelerated.”

The killing of Good by Jonathan Ross, a 10-year veteran of the Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) agency, came just days after Trump’s unlawful military attack on Venezuela which culminated in the arrest of President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. Many who protested Saturday noted that the two events are deeply related as they epitomize the increasingly violent nature of the president’s second term.

Also notable is how the act of war against Venezuela and the killing of Good bookended the fifth anniversary of the Trump-backed insurrection that took place on January 6, 2021. While many marked that occasion with solemn remembrances, the Trump administration released a fabricated version of the day that was denounced as Orwellian and gaslighting of the highest form.

As Mother Jones’ David Corn wrote on Thursday: “The military assault on Venezuela, the shooting of a Minneapolis woman by an ICE agent, the launch of the White House’s new revisionist website about January 6—these three events convey a powerful and unsettling message from Donald Trump and his crew: Violence is ours to use, at home and abroad, to get what we want.”

Saturday’s protests—organized by the Not Above the Law Coalition, MoveOn, the ACLU, Indivisible, and others—took place from Minneapolis to New York and from Chicago to Los Angeles. Demonstrations and rallies also took place in Portland, Oregon as well as Portland, Maine, with hundreds of events and rallies in smaller cities and communities nationwide.

More details about the events, including a growing list of Sunday’s demonstrations and rallies, is available here.

“It feels like maybe we’re hitting a tipping point,” 49-year-old Ben Person, who marched in Minneapolis, told the New York Times.

“We’re here to say fuck Trump, abolish ICE, arrest Jonathan Ross, impeach [Homeland Security Secretary] Kristi Noem, and bring justice to anyone who’s ever been wronged by the patriarchy and fascist communities,” another demonstrator in Minneapolis told Status Coup News.

“The shootings in Minneapolis and Portland were not the beginning of ICE’s cruelty, but they need to be the end,” said Deirdre Schifeling of the ACLU. “These tragedies are simply proof of one fact: the Trump administration and its federal agents are out of control, endangering our neighborhoods, and trampling on our rights and freedom. This weekend, Americans all across the country are demanding that they stop.”

At a rally in Portland, Maine on Saturday evening, Troy Jackson, the Democratic former president of the State Senate now running for governor, said the killing of Good in Minneapolis made clear to him that such violence against regular citizens could indeed happen anywhere:

For one demonstrator in Minneapolis, the imperial and authoritarian drive of the Trump administration reminded him of the galactic villains of the Empire in the Star Wars series: The organizers of the weekend protests said that public shows of dissent will remain key in the coming days, weeks, and months.

“We will resist the government’s attacks by building community, by documenting atrocities, by protesting nonviolently, by showing kindness and solidarity at all times,” said Pablo Alvarado, co-executive director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, another of the organizing groups.

“We will meet them in the streets, in the courts, at the day labor corners. We will meet them everywhere. And we will win. We are not afraid or discouraged. And we will not be defeated,” Alvarado added. “The more we stand together as a community of determination and love, the harder it will be for them to divide and destroy us.”

-Jon Queally, Common Dreams