The Crime of Witnessing

The Gap

Something is wrong. Not the violence—you've seen violence. What's wrong is the distance between what you just watched and what you're being told you watched. A man is on the ground surrounded and shot, and the official statement says he attacked them. Either your eyes are lying, or the government is.

A woman reverses her car to turn around on an icy street. They say she tried to ram them. Three bullets. A nurse steps between an agent and a woman who has been knocked to the ground. They say he lunged at them with a gun. The gun was still in his holster. A journalist films inside a church. Two judges say there was no crime. They indict her anyway.

That gap—between the footage and the press release, between the body on the pavement and the phrase "acted in self-defense"—that's where this story lives. It keeps happening. And each time it happens, the government's next move isn't to close the gap. It's to go after the people who can see it.

Operation Metro Surge

On January 6, 2026, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) deployed over 2,000 federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers to Minneapolis. This act, framed as immigration enforcement, operationally resembles military occupation: over 2,000 agents deployed to civilian spaces like neighborhoods, schools, and donut shops; community members creating encrypted group chats to track ICE sightings; empty market stalls as residents alter daily routines; US citizens carrying IDs everywhere due to racial profiling; and federal agents blocking state investigators from crime scenes.

DHS characterizes it as an "enforcement operation," but residents encounter military-style checkpoints and no-knock entries, a semantic gap that mirrors the broader distance between official narratives and lived reality. This is the logic of occupation dressed as enforcement. Deploy overwhelming force into civilian space, control movement, criminalize observation. The cycle is self-sustaining: presence justifies action, action produces witnesses, witnesses become targets, targeting witnesses requires expanded presence. Each rotation of the wheel creates the conditions for the next.

The key mechanism isn't the violence, but the gap between what happens and what can be officially acknowledged. A person is killed, the state says they attacked, the video shows otherwise. That gap must be defended, which means the video must be discredited, which means the person holding the camera must be transformed from observer to participant, from journalist to conspirator, from witness to threat.

The First Killing

A single day after the beginning of the ICE occupation, 37-year-old U.S. citizen Renée Good was shot three times in her car by agent Jonathan Ross. Video evidence shows Good attempting to pull away from the agents when Ross pulls out a firearm and fires three shots into the vehicle, two of which were fired after he was already clear of the vehicle. Official narrative echoes the opposite, claiming that Ross acted in self-defense, that Good used her vehicle as a weapon. Hennepin County Medical Examiner ruled the death a homicide. Such a narrative was said to be “bullshit” according to Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey

The Trump Administration ordered the investigation of Good’s widow, rather than the agent deemed to have committed a homicide. This decision led to the resignations of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division's criminal section chief, principal deputy chief, deputy chief, and acting deputy chief, among other prosecutors, on January 13.

This narrative, one which we can see with our own eyes, demonstrates the weaponization of the death of a U.S citizen and mother of three for political gain. It became a tool to target activists and family members rather than to examine law enforcement conduct.

The Witnesses

After the shooting of Good, the “ICE Watcher” movement kicked up a storm, a volunteer movement acting as a constitutional observer and documenting ICE actions. Flyers were distributed across the city, recruiting volunteers and educating people of their rights, appearing everywhere from coffee shops to laundromats.

This peaceful movement, built on the bones of the George Floyd movement, served as the core activity keeping ICE accountable for their actions, and smartphones became the primary tool in documenting ICE activity.

The transition from observation to documentation to activism was not a leap. Residents who began by simply filming ICE vehicles in their neighborhoods found themselves, within days, coordinating watch shifts, establishing signal systems, and creating infrastructure for legal support.

By mid-January, the Quinnipiac poll showed that 82% of registered voters had seen the Good shooting video represented something unprecedented: near-universal witness to a contested state killing, in real time, before the official narrative could calcify. The video didn't just document what happened; it created a shared evidentiary basis that made official denials unsustainable outside closed systems.

This is what terrified the architects of the operation. Not the protests themselves, but the impossibility of maintaining narrative control when everyone had the same footage. The gap between what happened and what could be officially acknowledged became visible to the majority. In this context, visibility was the threat.

The Second Killing

Just over two weeks after Good was killed, Alex Pretti, a VA intensive care nurse and U.S citizen, was shot and killed by U.S Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents after he stepped between an agent and a woman who had been shoved to the ground. He was pepper-sprayed, wrestled down, and shot in the back by six officers. Pretti was filming on his cellphone and was legally carrying a concealed weapon, with a concealed carry permit on his person.

DHS called this an “armed struggle,” stating the man approached the officers weapon in hand. Pretti, in fact, did not have a weapon in hand. He held his cellphone. Bystander videos show Pretti holding the cellphone. Agents appear to have removed the handgun from his waist after he was already on the ground. These videos contradict every element of the official statement, yet this was the narrative pushed to the masses.

Following the shooting, DHS personnel prevented the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) from accessing the crime scene, a state agency specifically tasked with investigating officer-involved shootings. Even after BCA obtained a signed warrant from a judge, DHS still blocked them from entering, despite standard practice for state investigative bodies to handle federal officer-involved shooting investigations.

The pattern is clear: a citizen documents federal agents exercising their constitutionally protected right to record. Then comes intervention—Pretti stepping between an agent and a woman on the ground, Good trying to pull away from approaching agents. The intervention ends in an unlawful killing. And finally, the investigation is systematically obstructed.

The Crime of Reporting

We next look to Cities Church in St. Paul on January 18, where an Anti-ICE protest is taking place. Journalist Don Lemon was present, livestreaming the protests. According to a Washington Post review of protest footage, Lemon was at the protest for 45 minutes and spoke with 4 parishioners and 5 protestors. He did not participate in protest chants and left seven minutes after being asked.

On January 20, the Department of Justice (DOJ) asked Magistrate Judge Douglas Micko to sign a warrant for Lemon’s arrest, to which he declined. After several appeals, the DOJ secured a Grand Jury indictment and arrested Lemon in LA on January 30 while he was covering the Grammys.

Lemon had done nothing but his job, recording and reporting an ICE protest as protected by the First Amendment, yet the DOJ sought to arrest the journalist for shining light on their operation.

Georgia Fort was another journalist livestreaming the same protest and was arrested at 6 AM in her Minnesota home by around two dozen federal agents, with two daughters watching, and a third asleep. She was charged with conspiracy against religious freedom, a statute never previously used for a protester. She was yet another journalist doing her job, protected by the First Amendment, and was taken from her home away from her kids for simply reporting the facts.

The Protest About the Protests

On January 20, 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and father were detained in Columbia Heights, Minnesota. During this period, a photo of Ramos’s Spider-Man backpack goes viral as a symbol of the severity of enforcement. The father and son were both flown around 1,300 miles (2,092 kilometers) to the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas.

After their arrival, protests began on January 24 outside the facility. Inside the facility, detained families were chanting “Libertad” (”freedom” in Spanish), and a teenage girl was separated from her family for speaking out. After the protest began, 40 Department of Public Safety (DPS) officers arrived on a school district bus dressed in full riot gear. The officers deployed pepper ball grenades and projectiles against around 150 protestors, suppressing the protest.

During the same period, there were concurrent protests at the Houston detention center and a rally in Austin with thousands of attendees. These were part of a wave of protests against ICE and CBP in Texas, organised by a diverse group of individuals from various walks of life who shared the same cause. These protests demonstrate the abnormality of the situation; when thousands of people take to the streets, it should signal that something is seriously wrong.

Members of Congress Joaquin Castro and Jasmine Crockett visited the facility on January 28 and spoke with Liam and his father for approximately 30 minutes. They reported Liam as “lethargic” and noted that his father stated that he “hasn’t been eating well.” The child also had no change of clothing during his detention. They also noted that the water at the facility is not safe to drink, and that there were many other children—some only several months old—living in the same conditions as Liam.

The Architecture of Impunity

After the shooting of Renée Good, the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ was told not to look into the killing of Good, and federal prosecutors were pressured to investigate Good’s widow. Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) was ordered to investigate the Pretti shooting despite being an agency that does not normally investigate officer shootings. They then refused to release body camera footage, and agents have still not been publicly identified in the Good shooting.

State investigators were formally shut out of both cases, and they both fell under bipartisan congressional scrutiny with Representative Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland, Ranking Member of the House Oversight Committee), Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), and Representative Andrew Garbarino (R-New York, Member of the House Homeland Security Committee) all requesting records from the cases.

The defense behind both killings was self-defense, yet in neither incident was an officer attacked, nor were they in danger. They simply opened fire on an American citizen.

The structural failure here is that accountability mechanisms exist on paper but are systematically disabled by those responsible for enforcing them. Agents shot Renée Good, but no investigation occurred. Lemon was arrested for reporting and was indicted within days. Who’s supposed to defend the victims?

The Ratchet Cannot Run Backward

This creates a self-reinforcing cycle: officers are deployed, someone is killed in front of witnesses, the witness account is suppressed, protests emerge in response, and those protests are then suppressed. Each step provides legal or rhetorical justification for the next, and this is the universal mechanism of authoritarian regimes throughout history.

What makes this moment different is the speed at which the cycle completes. From Good's shooting on January 7 to Lemon's arrest on January 30 was 23 days. In that span: two killings, mass witness documentation, federal obstruction of state investigators, journalist indictments, and nationwide protests met with tactical suppression. Each cycle rotation now takes days, not months. The mechanism isn't new, but the velocity is.

The acceleration of the cycle is staggering, with such events taking place over a couple of weeks while people watch on, wondering what the next tragic thing will be. The cycle breaks when we stop allowing our government to censor our right to bear witness to them, the very idea that our country was founded on.

The fundamental question is not about immigration policy but rather whether citizens are permitted to observe what their government does.