Opinion | Where we are, two and a half weeks after the killing of Renee Good

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Minnesota Star Tribune opinion editor’s note: This article was written and prepared for publication before Saturday’s events in Minneapolis.

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“Have y’all not learned your lesson?”

It’s been a couple of weeks since a menacing Bubba in ICE camo issued that warning to a protester in Hopkins with a camera. His triumphal remark came just two days after the daylight killing by ICE agent Jonathan Ross of a young mother named Renee Good.

In parking her car sideways to obstruct some forgettable ICE action along a road near her home, Good had mounted a small act of civil disobedience in the manner of countless south Minneapolis creatives saddled with a conscience. And she obligingly began bailing on all of it, once a pair of mask-wearing freaks began trying to pull open her door.

Hustled from the scene like a hit man destined for hiding, Ross may never face justice. And somehow, the most troubling part of all of this is that a large portion of our state, if we are to judge from the reporting of rural bureaus holding microphones to men who describe what ICE is doing as a “job,” they are fine with this.

Were ours not a society chosen for catastrophe by one of its two major political parties, this state-sanctioned killing would ordinarily be galvanizing. Instead, the two and a half weeks now passed have become submerged by waves of fresh GOP trauma.

We all answer to 3,000 unnamed men with no faces, a paramilitary intent on mocking the dress and best practices of our own conscientious if checkered bodies of law enforcement. They, like us, also answer to a lawless crew of thugs, creeps, losers, suckers and sociopaths from away.

Was that too strong? Because it’s honestly a struggle to describe the madness of intentional car crashes on public streets. Of the zeal for smashing in car windows, coming through doors and stealing into databases to follow people to their homes — screaming profanity at all others who rub them the wrong way.

Of innumerable ICE abductions followed by detention and removal — to the land of the confederacy — of persons targeted for their ethnicity and race. Of the assault on observers for protected political speech and nonviolent protest. The GOP, lest we forget, has wrought all of this.

ICE is a sectarian campaign of ethnic cleansing and political retribution, one that we have agreed to discuss under a polite language of immigration enforcement. Nothing happens until we get to that inescapable fact of their work.

Moreover, we’ve been comparing ICE to the Gestapo, and while the comparison has much going for it, there is a better, American point of reference for what is happening, and it involves sheets, not gaiters.

Like ICE, the Ku Klux Klan wore face coverings “emboldening the abuser while scaring the victim,” as the historian Sally Hadden wrote in “Slave Patrols.”

Hadden describes how a rapid uptick in Klan membership accounted “for its quick descent into violence,” and that it was a Klan which attracted “bushwackers, desperadoes, and banditti already at large across the South.”

ICE is of course populated by agents of color. It’s part of the blinding tragedy of American susceptibility to arguments which center law over morality, keeping support for its abolition to a plurality for now, according to a new poll from YouGov.org.

This should be an easy one. In a free society, agents of the federal government shouldn’t get to function as the Ku Klux Klan.

They shouldn’t get to roam the neighborhoods of nonwhite populations with identities concealed, beyond the reach of the law, breaking down doors and shattering car windows in a campaign to force occupants out the state or face suffering.

They really shouldn’t get to lecture Minnesotans on their manners, as the thug captured on video did before he shoved the young woman from behind against a truck, made note of her young age, said she risked a bullet to her skull and tightened her collar around her neck when she talked back to him, according to an interview on WCCO.

Nor should they get to make the dark concession that a Minneapolis woman was killed in broad daylight for challenging their power, and that others will get the same should we persist.

“During a federal law enforcement operation in Minneapolis on January 7, 2026, a protester used a vehicle as a weapon against an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer,” was how my own congressional representative stepped forward to provide cover for the regime he serves in my name. “The officer subsequently discharged his firearm in self-defense.”

And he’s a mild-mannered figure, not given to seeking out every last microphone, picking culture war battles or getting a photo with Steve Bannon. Yet on the week after the shooting, he really did write his constituents to say this: “Wednesday’s incident in Minneapolis” — though I think he meant killing — “is a reminder of the dangers ICE agents face while doing their jobs.”

Finstad called ICE agents — figures who could be stand-ins for the bad guys in every action film ever made — “brave men and women who go to work every day putting their lives on the line.” And a week later he wrote another letter doubling down on all of it.

He never said anything, however, about the vulgarity of cold contempt Ross seems to have cursed in the first seconds after he fired those shots toward Good’s head, then walked calmly to her car as she careened forward in death.

That is why we are here.