THE PROBLEM ISN’T ICE. IT’S ICE WATCH:
Now, consider why [Renee Nicole Good] was there. As Steven Vago, Chris Nesi and Natalie O’Neill of the New York Post reported, Good “was part of a group of activists who worked to ‘document and resist’ the federal immigration crackdown in Minnesota . . . Good became involved in ‘ICE Watch’ — a loose coalition of activists dedicated to disrupting ICE raids in the sanctuary city . . . Coalitions similar to ICE Watch have cropped up all over the country — with activists using phone apps, whistles and car horns to warn neighborhoods when ICE shows up. ICE Watch and adjacent groups can also turn confrontational — with numerous instances of activists ramming agents with their cars in the past.”
As the Post report notes, “ICE agents have faced an unprecedented spike in car attacks, surging by some 3,200 percent over the last year, shocking data released by the Department of Homeland Security revealed to The Post.”
Our own Haley Strack has more in depth-reporting on ICE Watch:
ICE Watch chapters, which have cropped up in communities across the country in recent years, train activists to monitor ICE activity using purpose-built apps and alert allies who have been trained to flood an operation area and interfere with arrests being made. An Instagram account identified as “MN Ice Watch” instructs to report the locations and appearances of ICE agents. The account has posted photos across Minneapolis of law-enforcement agents, vehicle license plate numbers, and ICE officers’ faces; the account generates information via anonymous reports and submissions from local activists.
On a tab titled “Education,” the account promotes information about how to “de-arrest” individuals who have been arrested by law-enforcement by “physically removing an arrestee from a law enforcement officer’s grips, opening the door of a car or pressuring law enforcement officers to release an arrestee.” The “de-arrest primer” goes on to describe the benefits of blocking police vehicles. “If you don’t have a crowd asserting pressure there may be some interference charges that come with blocking a police vehicle that may be more easily handed down for only one or two people blocking a police vehicle, but in many cases these are misdemeanor offenses and catch and release,” the primer notes.
Read the whole thing; this is far beyond simply engaging in protest speech to bring attention to a political controversy or an injustice. It’s a campaign that aims at two ends, neither of which is mutually exclusive: thwarting the enforcement of laws passed by Congress, and/or provoking conflict and confrontation with armed federal agents in the hope of discrediting the enforcement of those laws. And ICE Watch chapters and similar organizations are doing this sort of thing all across the country. Good’s death is the inevitable, and to some extent intended, outcome of this style of direct action, which is designed to create headline-grabbing conflict and drama.
NRO’s Jeffrey Blehar compares “Ice Watch” and their ilk to the libertarian-leaning “sovereign citizen” movement:
There is a vast swathe of people on the activist left who either explicitly or implicitly deny the legal authority of ICE to exist and do what it does – either out of ignorance but more often simply because they believe it to be "unrighteous."
They remind me of nobody so much as…
— Jeff Blehar is *BOX OFFICE POISON* (@EsotericCD) January 11, 2026
Tweet continues:
They remind me of nobody so much as “sovereign citizen” types. (Their arguments are of that caliber.) The problem is there are exponentially more of them.
A couple of weeks before Christmas, the YouTube algorithm offered me up police bodycam videos dealing with traffic stops where the drivers plays the “sovereign citizen” card assembled by Sgt. Christopher Curtis, a Marine and former member of the Las Vegas PD. These are people who believe if they just utter the correct magic phrases, including “I’m not driving, I’m travelling,” and “I am a sovereign citizen,” they can get out of a traffic stop, which they think works much the same way that Obi-Wan Kenobi can magically get past the stormtroopers patrolling Mos Eisley spaceport, by waving his hand while telling them “these are not the droids you’re looking for.”
Unlike Obi-Wan, these efforts inevitably end in disaster:
But while the sovereign citizen crowd think that magic words – and magic thinking — can allow them to avoid a speeding ticket, that’s very, very different from actively interfering with law enforcement:
Look at the training “MN Ice Watch” (which Renee Good belonged to) gives:
They train activists to assault law enforcement, to swarm, pressure, and open their car doors.
And they say each “de-arrest” is a “micro-intifada.” Do with that what you will.
H/t @StrackHaley pic.twitter.com/5TjXzJfljy
— Matt Whitlock (@MattWhitlock) January 11, 2026
The left have decided they get to have the heckler’s veto in America, which one way or another can’t end well:
They assume they’re protected by the same system they seek to dismantle because they have a fanatical belief in their own moral superiority but also because they have no reason to assume otherwise as we live in a relatively safe and comfortable society where luxury beliefs like… https://t.co/uXTtGxoUsr
— Anna Khachiyan (@annakhachiyan) January 10, 2026
Tweet continues, “where luxury beliefs like theirs are tolerated unlike in actual communist countries.”