Crowds gathered again in Minneapolis on Wednesday, Jan. 7, marching through the same streets where some of them were protesting five and a half years ago after George Floyd’s murder.
The full force and fury of the federal government landed on Minnesota this week.
“You will be held accountable for your crimes,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Jan. 6, as the largest immigration enforcement action in agency history surged into the state. It felt like she was addressing all Minnesotans, not just the handcuffed man she paraded before the cameras.
Minnesotans reeled as masked ICE agents descended on the state. They said they’d come to root out fraud. They shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old woman who would still be alive if ICE had never come to town.
“Get the fuck out of Minneapolis,” said Mayor Jacob Frey, who remembers Memorial Day 2020 when a police officer murdered a man on camera as neighbors pleaded with him to stop kneeling on the helpless man’s neck.
Five and a half years ago, police tried to pass Floyd’s murder off as a “medical incident.”
On Jan. 7, Noem accused Good — killed by an agent who fired into her vehicle, on camera, at point-blank range — of being “a domestic terrorist.” The president claimed on social media that Good had run over the agent who shot her, despite clear video evidence from other angles that this was untrue. But this is the same administration that once tried — and failed — to level a felony assault charge against a man who hurled a salami sub at a Customs and Border Enforcement agent in D.C.
Five and a half years ago, protesters gathered and law enforcement pushed back with mace and foam bullets. The crowd marched from 38th and Chicago to the Third Precinct police station. For days, the violence escalated until the precinct was in flames, until Lake Street was burning, until the whole city smelled like smoke and tear gas and grief.
