The Problem Isn’t ICE. It’s ICE Watch
Renee Nicole Good’s death was predictable — from the direct-action protest style of ICE Watch.
Democrats in Minnesota, Oregon, and other blue areas have leaped at the political opportunity presented by the ICE shooting of Renee Nicole Good to demand what they were already advocating all along: the complete removal of federal immigration enforcement from their jurisdictions, thus ensuring an end to deportations of illegal aliens in those places. Their argument is that the confrontation that led to Good’s death was an inevitable consequence of the Trump administration’s broad dragnet and aggressive street-level tactics in rounding up illegal aliens for deportation. More sophisticated critics, such as Jeremiah Johnson in The Dispatch, argue that Good’s death “was the inevitable outcome of an immigration enforcement apparatus that has been poorly trained, sheltered from consequences, and empowered to behave recklessly.”
With a different set of facts, these critiques might have some validity. Large-scale deportations require a lot of law-enforcement interactions with people who very much don’t want to be apprehended, some of them violent, others just desperate. That greatly increases the odds of violence (and is only a modest preview of what the left’s preferred gun-confiscation policies would look like). There are very fair policy debates over whether the benefits of such a broad deportation policy really outweigh the costs. And there are genuine and fair concerns that ICE, having staffed up very rapidly, has recruited too many sketchy people and trained them inadequately — concerns that don’t necessarily nullify the legitimacy of the mission of deporting a lot of people who are in the country illegally.
But none of those criticisms have anything to do with the death of Renee Nicole Good. They don’t fit the facts. And more importantly, they go out of their way to ignore the actual cause of her death, which is likely to produce more dangerous and possibly deadly encounters of this kind: the leftist strategy of direct-action protest.
Good’s death wasn’t the natural result of the deportation dragnet. She was a citizen, one who hadn’t even lived in Minneapolis that long, and there’s no reason to believe that ICE was investigating her as a possible deportee. There’s no sign that ICE was interested in her at all — until she inserted herself in their business. Nor was she some bystander caught in a crossfire between ICE agents and someone else they wanted to apprehend. So, there’s nothing in ICE’s strategy or tactics that put her inevitably in their crosshairs. She had to actively try to make herself a target for an ICE agent. That was her choice, not ICE’s.
Nor was her death the result of poor training by the current Department of Homeland Security. The agent who fired the shots had reportedly been with ICE for ten years and was assigned to an elite tactical unit. He was an experienced agent who had previous experience with vehicle stops, including one last year in which he was dragged by a vehicle. That doesn’t place his decisions above criticism, but it does suggest that those decisions were not the result of inexperience, hasty recruitment, or inadequate training within the past twelve months.
Now, consider why she was there. As Steven Vago, Chris Nesi and Natalie O’Neill of the New York Post reported, Good “was part of a group of activists who worked to ‘document and resist’ the federal immigration crackdown in Minnesota . . . Good became involved in ‘ICE Watch’ — a loose coalition of activists dedicated to disrupting ICE raids in the sanctuary city . . . Coalitions similar to ICE Watch have cropped up all over the country — with activists using phone apps, whistles and car horns to warn neighborhoods when ICE shows up. ICE Watch and adjacent groups can also turn confrontational — with numerous instances of activists ramming agents with their cars in the past.”
As the Post report notes, “ICE agents have faced an unprecedented spike in car attacks, surging by some 3,200 percent over the last year, shocking data released by the Department of Homeland Security revealed to The Post.”
Our own Haley Strack has more in depth-reporting on ICE Watch:
ICE Watch chapters, which have cropped up in communities across the country in recent years, train activists to monitor ICE activity using purpose-built apps and alert allies who have been trained to flood an operation area and interfere with arrests being made. An Instagram account identified as “MN Ice Watch” instructs to report the locations and appearances of ICE agents. The account has posted photos across Minneapolis of law-enforcement agents, vehicle license plate numbers, and ICE officers’ faces; the account generates information via anonymous reports and submissions from local activists.On a tab titled “Education,” the account promotes information about how to “de-arrest” individuals who have been arrested by law-enforcement by “physically removing an arrestee from a law enforcement officer’s grips, opening the door of a car or pressuring law enforcement officers to release an arrestee.” The “de-arrest primer” goes on to describe the benefits of blocking police vehicles. “If you don’t have a crowd asserting pressure there may be some interference charges that come with blocking a police vehicle that may be more easily handed down for only one or two people blocking a police vehicle, but in many cases these are misdemeanor offenses and catch and release,” the primer notes.
Read the whole thing; this is far beyond simply engaging in protest speech to bring attention to a political controversy or an injustice. It’s a campaign that aims at two ends, neither of which is mutually exclusive: thwarting the enforcement of laws passed by Congress, and/or provoking conflict and confrontation with armed federal agents in the hope of discrediting the enforcement of those laws. And ICE Watch chapters and similar organizations are doing this sort of thing all across the country. Good’s death is the inevitable, and to some extent intended, outcome of this style of direct action, which is designed to create headline-grabbing conflict and drama.
Direct action is a longstanding leftist protest approach, which predates the Trump era by decades. In its broadest definition, the term can simply mean staging a fairly passive conflict with an unjust law and demonstrating that injustice by provoking arrests — think of civil rights-era arrests of lunch-counter sit-ins. Progressives and liberals tend to think that all forms of direct action are harmless or beneficial because of this heritage. But the justice of the civil rights movement does not retroactively justify every tactic that was used in its cause, and not every tactic is equally virtuous.
The immediate risk of constant appeals to direct action is that it tends to encourage violence in the protesters. If you tell people to get in the faces of others, to bring a gun to a knife-fight, to give your political opponents no rest at home or at work, or otherwise to engage in direct, personal confrontations rather than simply appeal by speech to the general public, you will trigger in some of your audience a desire to go the next logical step. While that’s always a risk in high-octane political rhetoric, it’s a much more vibrant risk when you advocate not just a profound emotional animus but also a tactic of close, personalized confrontation.
This is how you get the assassinations, assassination attempts, and assassination plots against Donald Trump, Charlie Kirk, Brett Kavanaugh (and his fellow justices), and UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, among others. It’s how you get senators chased into elevators and out of restaurants, protests at Supreme Court justices’ homes, speakers shouted off campuses, and all manner of volatile confrontations. It’s an approach specifically geared to create a climate of fear of physical violence in its targets, and to set both the protesters and the targets on the very edge of their last nerve. Even when we can justify this kind of thing in American history, from the Boston Tea Party to the Vigilance Committees that thwarted the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act, what we tend to see at the end of that road is revolution or civil war.
This is why the question of the day right now for every Democratic politician and commentator in this country should not be how much they hate ICE and its agents, or whether they want to see federal law nullified by disabling its enforcement. It should be whether they encourage ICE Watch and other similar tactics of creating potentially violent confrontations by protesters inserting themselves in the face of agents on duty to obstruct the enforcement of the law. Because if they do, the blood is on their hands, not ICE’s.
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