Two people are dead in Minneapolis, and it didn’t have to end this way.
Reporting by City Journal points out that in less than a month, two civilians involved in what’s called “ICE watching” were shot and killed during encounters with federal immigration agents. One was a mother of three. The other was a nurse who worked in a VA ICU.
They were regular people who put themselves in the middle of armed law enforcement operations.
The first death happened January 7. Renée Good, 37, was shot while confronting ICE enforcement. On January 24, Alex Pretti, also 37, was killed in a separate incident participating in similar activity.
Supporters of ICE watching like to call it “community safety.” That sounds nice. It sounds like people just looking out for their neighbors.
But the details tell a very different story.
In Minneapolis, activists were trained to track ICE vehicles, share locations in real time using encrypted apps, and rush toward enforcement scenes.
Some chats operated like amateur dispatch centers, complete with radio-style language and constant updates.
That’s not observing from a distance. That’s inserting yourself directly into a high-risk situation and hoping nothing goes wrong.
Most people know better than to get cute. You don’t block traffic. You don’t ignore commands. You definitely don’t treat the scene like a protest stage.
You comply first. You complain later. That’s survival.
Video footage from the January 7 shooting shows Renée Good blocking traffic with her car, then attempted to proceed forward while an officer was still in the way. When she tried to move the vehicle, she was shot.
Instead of pausing after Good’s death and asking whether these tactics were reckless, organizers reportedly treated it like a recruiting opportunity.
City Journal reports that new training sessions were held almost immediately. Volunteers were encouraged to be willing to take even greater risks.
Then Alex Pretti was killed weeks later.
Details of that shooting are still being argued over, but the big picture hasn’t changed. Another civilian, motivated by politics and peer pressure, stepped into the immediate space of armed agents and paid the ultimate price.
And yet the activists pushing this model keep going.
That’s the part that should bother everyone, no matter where they fall on immigration policy.
You don’t have to agree with ICE. You don’t have to like federal immigration laws.
But encouraging untrained civilians to interfere with armed agents is not protest. It’s virtue-signaling negligence.
The people calling the shots usually aren’t the ones bleeding. They aren’t the ones being buried.
They’re the ones sending out the next group message.
Two families in Minnesota are now living with permanent loss because someone convinced their loved ones that blind confrontation was courage.
It wasn’t. It was reckless.
And pretending otherwise doesn’t honor the dead. It just sets the stage for the next tragedy.
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