Activists in Minneapolis have developed sophisticated networks dedicated to surveilling and obstructing immigration enforcement operations in the Twin Cities, including by following suspected Immigration and Customs Enforcement vehicles, tracking their movements across the city, and quickly mobilizing protesters to the places where ICE officers are attempting to make arrests — or even just trying to get breakfast.
The “ICE Watch” community in Minneapolis has replicated some of the practices activists have used against immigration officers in Chicago and Los Angeles, where the Trump administration has conducted major enforcement operations over the past year.
Some of the efforts appear decentralized, coordinated on large neighborhood Signal chats that date back to the 2020 riots over the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police.
But some of the massive protests against ICE operations in Minneapolis and beyond are organized by well-funded progressive groups that specialize in making demonstrations appear spontaneous and organic.
Tensions in Minneapolis boiled over this week after an ICE officer shot and killed a woman who had driven her SUV in the path of ICE vehicles operating in the area. Top Department of Homeland Security officials said the officer had acted in self-defense as the woman drove her car toward him while refusing commands to exit her vehicle. Minnesota Democrats quickly accused the ICE officer of committing an unprovoked murder, and bystander videos of the confrontation did little to clear up which narrative is closest to the truth.
After her death on Wednesday, Renee Good, 37, was widely described by Democrats and activist groups as a “legal observer,” a term used by activists to describe people who follow and document what ICE officers are doing in the field.
While it’s unclear whether Good was coordinating with an activist group on the day an ICE officer shot her, some reports indicate she was part of a protest intended to hinder ICE operations in the neighborhood that morning. Others suggest Good and her wife were simply returning from dropping off Good’s son at school when they came upon the ICE officers.
A social media account appearing to belong to Good’s wife was following a page called “MN ICE Watch,” which describes itself as an “autonomous collective documenting & resisting against ICE, police, & all colonial militarized regimes.” The Instagram account encouraged followers to organize against ICE and to submit sightings of immigration officers to the network of activists. The Instagram account appearing to belong to Good’s wife also followed Unidos MN, a progressive activist group promoting “legal observer” training, as well as “healthcare worker resistance training” for doctors and nurses who want to help patients evade ICE.
Immigration authorities have struggled with the spread of ICE Watch networks across the country, some of which used phone apps to track the movement of officers. Apple and Google removed the most widely used ICE tracking app in October, but crowdsourced networks, such as the one in Minneapolis, continue to complicate immigration enforcement.
”The use of apps to monitor the routines, locations, and happenings of DHS law enforcement strongly resemble obstruction of justice,” Assistant DHS Secretary Tricia McLaughlin told the Washington Examiner. “This type of garbage is contributing to our officers facing a more than 1,300% increase in assaults and a more than 8,000% increase in death threats against them as they arrest the worst of the worst offenders, including murderers, sexual predators, terrorists, and gang members.”
Well-funded groups organize Minnesota protests
Within hours of Good’s death, the Minneapolis arm of a sprawling progressive group called Indivisible was calling on supporters to mobilize for a protest against ICE at a federal government building where immigration officers have been staging operations.
Indivisible started in 2017 as a Google document proposing ways to organize protests against President Donald Trump’s agenda and has since morphed into a multimillion-dollar organizing powerhouse. Left-wing billionaire George Soros helped Indivisible get off the ground with a $350,000 grant in 2017 and has since provided the organization with an additional $7.2 million, according to Soros’s philanthropy, the Open Societies Foundation.
Indivisible has helped organize many of the most high-profile demonstrations against the second Trump administration, including the nationwide “No Kings” protests and the smattering of “Tesla Takedown” protests at the dealerships of Elon Musk’s electric car company across the country. Tesla Takedown events were intended to look like organic expressions of anger at Musk’s involvement with the Trump administration and were frequently covered that way by the media, but many were organized by Indivisible, which provides its local chapters with training, recruitment tools, and even templates for their protest signs.
Minneapolis’s Indivisible group has also organized training sessions for activists who want to serve as legal observers to ICE’s activity in the city, which has ramped up in December and January.
But Indivisible is far from the only group facilitating immigration protests in Minneapolis.
A major protest, billed as “ICE out of Minnesota,” in late December was organized by local arms of the national AFL-CIO and the Service Employees International Union, as well as the Minneapolis Federation of Educators, a teachers’ union in the state. Thousands of people joined the protest. After Good’s death, Minneapolis schools closed for the rest of the week and offered a remote learning option for students through mid-February.
Unidos MN, which has in recent years taken funding from the Sixteen Thirty Fund, a prominent liberal dark money group, and from a massive progressive advocacy group called the All Hands on Deck Network, was also listed as a sponsor of the protest.
Vigilante surveillance efforts target ICE
Other activist groups have mobilized to track ICE’s presence in Minneapolis — down to the license plate numbers of federal vehicles and the individual officers who drive them. These groups tend to be less funded and more diffuse, but they have significantly affected ICE’s ability to move around the city.
One group, Defend the 612, aims to connect dispersed neighborhood watch groups. It has held ICE Watch trainings, and supporters circulate resources, such as a running spreadsheet of ICE vehicles’ license plate numbers and details about who is seen in them.
An entry into the spreadsheet from a volunteer ICE tracker on Christmas Day, for example, describes an incident in which the “aggressive driver” of an ICE vehicle sped off from an activist who was tailing him in traffic.
Another crowdsourced resource used by the activists describes the exact locations where ICE officers were seen mobilizing, the precise times they were there, how many officers were present, and details about what they appear to be doing.
Guidelines for ICE Watch members lay out how activists patrolling the city in their cars can attempt to chase off ICE officers they identify in the field.
“Many people are laying on their horns and/or blowing their whistles when they confirm abductor presence to warn others,” the guidelines say. “Many times abductors leave.”
DHS leaders have said protest activity that crosses the line into obstruction of immigration enforcement operations is illegal. Many ICE Watch tactics appear to blur those lines, particularly because the stated goal of the activist groups is to prevent the arrests of illegal immigrants.
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The surveillance can go beyond ICE operations and involve what ICE officers are doing in their downtime. For example, activists tracked a dozen ICE officers to a local restaurant on Wednesday and followed them inside. “Legal observers” trailed the officers, who were not in uniform, into the restaurant and blew whistles at the ICE officers, who left without being served.
ICE officers staying at a Marriott hotel in Minneapolis this week had their personal information leaked when an activist who worked at the hotel shared their names, emails, and pictures of their faces with fellow anti-ICE activists.
Anna Giaritelli contributed to this report.