January 11, 2026
Illustration by @joeymasonart
Renee Good was bravely confronting ICE when she was murdered.
ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot Renee three times point-blank in her face in front of her wife. After shooting her, ICE agents pointed guns at people who tried to give her medical assistance. Renee was a mother of three.
Before ICE opened fire, Renee’s car was a barrier between ICE and their intended target: Somali residents of Minneapolis, who have been the latest fixation among reactionary hacks and their smooth-brained social media army. Renee had been hounding ICE, and not just as a legal observer as the “protest peacefully” crowd has insisted.
With modern-day Gestapo terrorizing our cities, we need more than observers right now. We need fighters. Renee made the heroic decision to intervene, to face down ICE, and do everything she could to stop them. Other protesters taking similar action, like Marimar Martinez in Chicago last September, have been arrested, brutalized, and shot. Marimar saw ICE in her neighborhood, chose to follow them and warn people in the area, and was then shot five times by an ICE agent. She was then smeared in the media and taken into custody when charged with assaulting federal immigration agents. After she refused a deal, the US attorney’s office dropped the case after it came to light that ICE was lying. The courage of protesters in the face of intense risks should be an inspiration to us. Renee’s family and all other victims of ICE terror deserve justice.
ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot Renee in her car in cold blood, in the same fashion of at least 10 ICE shootings in recent months targeting both immigrants and protesters. This indicates a pattern in immigration enforcement to shoot at people to deter them from fleeing. Jonathan Ross should rot in prison, and while in prison he deserves the same fate as killer cop Derek Chauvin.
Federal immigration agencies are leading the violent suppression of protests in recent days. We need to beat back every case of repression to strengthen our ability to fight back harder.
Protests that Dare to Struggle led on Friday in San Francisco, Santa Ana, and Albuquerque were brutally repressed and ended in six arrests. On Saturday, a protest in Austin resulted in seven more arrests, bringing the total to 13.
In Santa Ana, CA, agents from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) jumped one protester unprompted, and they shot another protester point-blank in the eye with a “less lethal” munition. They dragged this person bleeding from their face into a building. In Albuquerque, DHS agents and private security brutally arrested one protester and left him bloodied. They later charged the crowd, including one agent holding a rifle, to snatch a protester who wasn’t on DHS property. In San Francisco, protesters pulled up on the ICE field office downtown to confront the people responsible for kidnapping, tearing families apart, and aiding and abetting murderers. After breaching the entrance, DHS and private security pounced and arrested two protesters and pepper sprayed the crowd. And in Austin, Austin PD used pepper bullets and teargas, charged at protesters, and a bike cop ran someone over when they were already walking away on the sidewalk.
So far, one protester from San Francisco is facing a felony charge, one is locked up in Santa Ana, two from Albuquerque are facing charges of assaulting a peace officer, and protestors in Austin are getting charged with obstruction of a motorway. We will fight each charge with everyone who wishes to, and we’ll stand with every person facing any repression from our protests.
In Minneapolis, 29 people were arrested Friday evening. In Portland, there have been seven arrests since Thursday. We want to put out a call to the people facing down the enemy and facing charges: Fight that shit to the end, and don’t let lawyers or feds intimidate you into taking a deal when you stand a strong chance of winning your legal battle.
Protesting the US government puts us on a path in direct antagonism against it. They will try to repress us every step of the way. Fighting and overcoming this repression is how we stay on that path. There is no other way. We’re not lawyers, but we will stand with you to take this on so hit us up if you want to hear from our experiences beating charges.
Leftist organizations are forging ahead with their M.O. of “safety of our bodies over the safety of immigrants.”
Following the murder of Renee Good, organizations like FRSO and PSL immediately rolled out their tired playbook: Organize protests (more like parades) with hundreds of people that sidestep direct confrontation with key political targets, like ICE detention facilities and offices, and aggressively intervene to “peace police” righteous protesters away from facing down police and the feds. In New York City at FRSO’s protest Thursday evening, we staged a takeover and led 50–60 people to march back to an ICE facility in lower Manhattan. Earlier in the protest, we were at this building when protesters began confronting the NYPD, shouting them down for collaborating with ICE and protecting the deportation machine. Right on cue, peace police in yellow vests, alongside at least one NYPD officer, shoved into the confrontation and pushed the crowd of people getting feisty away from the building entrance, away from the police, and up the street to begin marching again.
At our protest Friday evening in Santa Ana, scumbags from FRSO stopped by to split the crowd from those of us closest to the federal building, urging peaceful protest away from the ICE facility. When DHS attacked, much of the crowd was standing at a distance. Then when a news outlet interviewed FRSO, they patted themselves on the back for their passivity and didn’t have a word of support for the protesters left bleeding and hospitalized by DHS. Multiple people heard a FRSO member say, after she saw protesters get arrested and shot, “Let them get what they fucking deserve.” wE kEeP uS sAfe…
Slogans that Leftist organizations have taken up, like “ICE out of [insert city]” and “Stop ICE terror,” are bluster without substance when we hold them up to how these groups are moving in the streets. To zoom out our perspective, there’s a long history of the role of mass protests around the world to channel rage, aggression, and grief at those in power (we recommend reading Vincent Bevins’s If We Burn for a compelling narrative of protest movements of the 2010’s). Beyond just letting out our rage, the most explosive protests led by the people at the bottom of society have led to rapid gains in material reforms and meaningful, if brief, chances to change who holds political power. But the US Left’s particular brand of protest culture—a uniquely docile, police-friendly strain of protest—punishes expressions of rage and deters the masses from joining them.
We typically avoid Leftist protests entirely. We’d rather eat our own vomit. But when mass protests erupt, we can’t ignore the choking grip that Leftist organizations have over them, fast-tracking the outrage to ritualistic demonstrations that change nothing, and indoctrinating people in passivity and their weird way of talking and behaving. Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, protests rocked Minneapolis and the whole country, forcing the system to charge Derek Chauvin with murder and throw him in prison. People decided those risks were worth it. But coming out of the 2020 rebellions against police brutality, many oppressed people arrived at a destructive conclusion: Protest changes nothing, so it’s not worth the risk. For that, we primarily have the organized Left to blame. Because of the Left’s pernicious control over all protests against injustice, we will continue to contend with the Leftists who stand in the way of the masses overthrowing the system, until they are politically neutralized. We can’t take lightly how difficult it will be (and has been) to rebuild the trust, self-confidence, and faith among the masses that they have the power to transform society.
Democrats are standing back and letting ICE rock.
The Democratic Party has long served a crucial function in the mass deportation machine. They offer tepid criticism, keep the gears turning, and keep their careers and paychecks intact. Even when they manage to utter the word “fuck” in their press conferences, like Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner did this week, they always stop short of escalating the political battle against their associates in the Republican Party. And since we’re mentioning Krasner, we’re obliged to point out this progressive potty mouth still hasn’t freed political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. Free Mumia, and fuck all the Democrats standing in the way of Black political prisoners walking free.
What would escalating the political battle look like? For mayors and governors, wielding executive power over their cities and states could mean ordering police chiefs and district attorney offices to protect the people under attack from ICE, Border Patrol, and DHS invasions. They could get creative and bold, even if it’s not “legal,” and even if it invites the wrath of the federal government. If Democrats coordinated a nationwide political revolt against Trump’s Gestapo regime, would the Trump Administration have the brain cells to figure out a plan to counterattack? With 70,000 immigrants being held in detention in life-threatening conditions, separate from their families and communities, isn’t it worth trying? Instead, Democrats continue to fold, in recent days with slightly sharper tongues than usual. And with federal agencies now taking the lead on repressing protest, Democratic mayors get to wipe their hands of accusations of police departments collaborating with feds, which reeks of its own kind of back-door collaboration.
In this wave of protests, masses of immigrants are not leading the struggle. We have to confront how to break out of the cycle of routine protest that fails to pull in the masses.
The rebellions led by immigrants and Latino youth in Los Angeles last June demonstrated a powerful contrast to Leftist protests. It was the most significant mass protest since 2020 and rippled out to spark mass protest in several other cities. But since there isn’t strong political organization among immigrants in LA and beyond—organization capable of pushing spontaneous confrontations against ICE even further to actually stop mass deportations—the protests quickly died down with the deployment of the National Guard. We expect a similar arc with this current wave of protest (we hope we’re wrong).
So when the protests ebb, what follows? For one, we need to recognize how painstaking and difficult it is to build organization and collective political action among the people most oppressed in US society. With immigrants in particular, the federal government’s reign of terror has left families and communities isolated and in significant fear of violent retribution if we fight back. But to decide the best we can do is give free food or clothes to immigrants and call it “mutual aid,” or to stage our own demonstrations on behalf of immigrants without them taking political leadership, would be to capitulate and remain isolated ourselves.
Instead of this, we can employ a different organizing strategy, starting with doing social investigation among the masses to identify the sharpest conflicts that we can cohere people around fighting. In each of our cities and towns, there are public officials who aren’t doing anything to keep armed agents from kidnapping and killing. These are people we can confront and make their lives hell for not lifting a finger to stop deportations. Or maybe, rather than confronting ICE and politicians, we learn that federal cuts to SNAP benefits and Medicaid are sparking mass outrage among immigrants that proves more fruitful to build collective struggle around. We won’t know what moves to make until masses of immigrants are part of the conversation and we spend hours each week among them to learn about their lives, dreams, share ideas, and build trust to start struggling together.
Renee Good in Minneapolis, Silverio Villegas-González in Franklin Park, and Keith Porter in LA were just three of dozens of people killed by ICE or who died in ICE custody in the past year. The deaths and vicious separation of families will continue unless thousands of people decide to dedicate themselves to organizing collective struggle among immigrant masses. Decide for yourself: Is this status quo okay to you? Or is it time for something drastically different?
Dare to Struggle 