Even as Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem has promised to deploy an even greater surge of federal agents into Minneapolis, ostensibly to investigate fraud, city residents have shown up in large numbers to express their desire for ICE to, as Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said, “get the fuck out of Minneapolis.” Defying the strong resistance to ICE in the community following the tragic shooting last week of 37-year-old Renée Good, federal agents appear to have become even more aggressive in their enforcement activities. Agents have gone door-to-door demanding entrance; they’ve pulled people from their cars, arrested them for supposed immigration violations or specious infractions such as interfering with operations while filming. If a person is caught protesting or simply turning down the wrong street while driving, they are likely to face a wall of masked and armed agents. In addition to citizens with cellphones who diligently record the actions of DHS, local photographers have been joined by photojournalists from around the country and Canada to document federal agents and the stiff resistance they’ve faced from brave Minnesontans. Here are a few of their images from the past week. People react to the ICE agent killing of Minnesota resident, Renée Nicole Good, in Minneapolis.Cristina Matuozzi/Sipa USA/AP Larry T., who did not want to give his last name, is at the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul, holding a sign during a vigil honoring Renée Good.John Locher/AP Demonstrators confront counter-protesters during a protest outside the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis. Michael Nigro/Sipa USA/AP A person walks past signage memorializing Renée Good, who was fatally shot by an ICE officer earlier in the week.Christopher Katsarov/The Canadian Press/AP People embrace while visiting a makeshift memorial for Renée Good. US Border Patrol agents question a minor before arresting him during immigration enforcement operations.Mostafa Bassim/Anadolu/Getty Federal Agents clash with community members during the ongoing immigration raids in Minneapolis.Mostafa Bassim/Anadolu/Getty A Federal Agent deploys pepper spray against community members during the ongoing immigration raids in Minneapolis.Mostafa Bassim/Anadolu/Getty A federal officer breaks a car window as they remove a woman from her vehicle near an area where ICE was operating in Minneapolis. Octavio Jones/AFP/Getty ICE and other federal officers pull a woman from her vehicle in Minneapolis. Hundreds more federal agents were heading to Minneapolis, the US homeland security chief said on January 11, brushing aside demands by the city’s Democratic leaders to leave after an immigration officer fatally shot a woman protester.Octavio Jones/AFP/Getty Federal Agents arrest a woman after smashing her car windows for allegedly blocking the street during an Immigration Enforcement Operation in Minneapolis.Mostafa Bassim/Anadolu/Getty Demonstrators confront federal agents as they protest outside the Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis. Protests have popped up around the city after a federal agent fatally shot a woman in her car.Scott Olson/Getty A resident films as people gather to confront ICE agents after two people from a residence were detained. The Trump administration has deployed over 2,400 Department of Homeland Security agents to the state of Minnesota in a push to apprehend undocumented immigrants. Stephen Maturen/Getty Agents are hit with snowballs while patrolling the streets in Minneapolis.Michael Nigro/Sipa USA/AP

If the ICE officer who shot and killed Renée Nicole Good in Minneapolis last week is not prosecuted criminally, or even if he is, can he also be sued? Legal experts have different takes. Last week I spoke with a police misconduct attorney in Minnesota who seemed hopeful about the odds that Good’s family might face in court. Others I spoke with were somewhat less optimistic. Winning lawsuits against cops who kill “is challenging by design,” as Michelle Lapointe, legal director of the American Immigration Council, an immigrant rights advocacy group, wrote on the group’s website. To flesh that out, I caught up with Lauren Bonds of the National Police Accountability Project, a national group that works with civil rights attorneys to file lawsuits over police misconduct. Our conversation below, edited for length and clarity, explores the legal hurdles to beating an ICE officer like Good’s killer, Jonathan Ross, in civil court. It’s notoriously tough to sue police, but it’s even harder when the officer is federal. What are the challenges? You’re absolutely right: All the problems you have with suing a regular law enforcement officer exist, and then you have additional barriers. There are two distinct pathways to sue a federal officer for misconduct or excessive force: One is a Bivens action—a court-created pathway that allows you to sue federal agents for constitutional violations. And then there’s the Federal Tort Claims Act, a statutory provision that allows for these lawsuits to move forward. The problem with Bivens is it’s been really, really narrowed in recent years by this particular Supreme Court. First there was Hernandez v. Mesa, a 2020 case where a Border Patrol agent shot and killed a child on the other side of the border in Mexico. And the court said it didn’t fit within the narrow confines of Bivens. And then there was a case in 2022, Egbert v. Boule, that foreclosed any new Bivens action: Basically the court said that this type of civil rights violation is something you can pursue under Bivens, but if it’s anything new, we’re not going that far. The Federal Torts Claims Act (FTCA) is where more people are going to get relief for violations by federal officers. It basically says that any tort that you would suffer under state law [such as false arrest, assault, or battery] you can sue the federal government for—with vast exceptions: There’s one that comes up a lot for law enforcement cases, the “discretionary function” exception, which says an officer can’t be sued for anything that he or she needs to use discretion for. Courts have done a good job of interpreting that to mean discretion in terms of policymaking decisions, but some courts get it wrong. So those are the two pathways—they’re both narrow, and they’re both complicated. There’s the issue of qualified immunity for police officers, or even sovereign immunity for the federal government, right? Sovereign immunity [a legal principle that says the federal government can’t be sued without its consent] wouldn’t come up in an FTCA case, because it’s a statute in which Congress waived sovereign immunity and agreed to be sued under certain circumstances. It does come up as a defense when [the government is] saying, Oh, this case falls within an exception, but they can’t assert it otherwise. If you were to file a constitutional claim under Bivens, they could invoke qualified immunity, another protection that law enforcement officers have; it asks whether there is case law in the circuit that would have put the officer on notice that their conduct was unconstitutional. [If not, the officer is essentially off the hook.] A lot of courts have taken that requirement to an extreme place, basically saying it’s got to be identical facts—like there are cases that have been thrown out on qualified immunity because a person was sitting with their hands up versus standing with their hands up. That level of granularity has been applied to defeat civil rights claims. And so it’s a difficult barrier to overcome. Given how hard it can be to sue, what about criminal charges? It’s definitely possible. There isn’t any immunity from criminal prosecution that federal officers are entitled to, none that I’m aware of anyway. I know this issue came up when some ICE raids were planned to take place in San Francisco back in early fall, with the DA of San Francisco asserting that she did have authority to pursue criminal action against ICE agents if they broke California laws. What about the Supremacy Clause? It protects federal officers from state prosecution if they were performing their federal duties, right? The Supremacy Clause protects federal officers when they’re engaged in legal activity, and so if their conduct is illegal, they wouldn’t be protected. So in Minneapolis, if the officer engaged in a Fourth Amendment violation, he’d be beyond the protection of the Supremacy Clause. This issue has come up with California, too. The Trump administration is suing California over new state legislation that would create a crime for wearing a mask and obscuring your identity if you’re a law enforcement officer. And it’s suing Illinois [for a state law that allows residents to sue ICE agents in certain circumstances]. Those lawsuits have asserted that the Supremacy Clause makes these [state] laws unconstitutional—that you can’t take any action against federal law enforcement officers under state law. Have you heard of cases in this past year of ICE officers being sued or prosecuted for misconduct? I haven’t seen any prosecutions yet. In terms of lawsuits, we’ve seen an increase in FTCA cases against DHS agents. Regarding the recent killing in Minneapolis, what do you see as the main path to accountability, and the main challenges? There’s going to be all the standard barriers that we talked about, including the Supremacy Clause defense, particularly because you have so many high-ranking federal officials, including the president and Secretary Noem, who are saying that this shooting was the right thing to do and was consistent with him carrying out his obligations. On the civil side, this could be a potentially difficult Bivens or FTCA case. I would note, since we’re on the heels of January 6: Ashli Babbitt, the woman who died during the Capital insurrection, filed a FTCA case, or her family did, and got a $5 million settlement from the government. It’s hard to factually distinguish these cases. The federal government has authority to settle a case like that, but since the Trump administration is taking a very opposing position against Good, the woman who died in Minneapolis, I would be surprised if they would be willing to put money on the table.

Minneapolis remains on edge after the ICE killing of Renée Good last Wednesday. As ICE and Border Patrol operations intensify—Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Sunday that “hundreds more” agents are being sent to the city—residents continue to spill into the streets, filming, heckling, and tracking federal vehicles, block by block. Following this drama closely is reporter Amanda Moore, who puts it simply: “Yeah, it’s chaos.” Over the weekend she captured confrontations she describes as “extremely violent,” including a St. Paul gas station scene where agents “busted out the window of a car.” (According the DHS, the man driving the car was a Honduran national with a final removal order.) Amanda says the mood is a mix of fear and fury, with residents watching arrests unfold up close and, at times, finding themselves surrounded by “masked men… banging on your windows carrying guns.” Her bottom line on the enforcement posture: “Everything is very aggressive.” Even the timing, she notes, might be a signal of escalation. Amanda says Sundays were normally a day off from the front lines—“you could do your laundry and watch TV.” With the ramp-up of federal agents, “I guess not anymore.” Check out her latest dispatch.

Kristi Noem spent Sunday defending the actions of ICE agent Jonathan Ross, who shot and killed Renée Nicole Good in Minneapolis last week. The Trump administration, she asserted, was fully committed to ensuring that laws are enforced evenhandedly. But it quickly became clear that wasn’t true. During the Sunday interview on CNN’s State of the Union, the Secretary of Homeland Security reiterated the Trump administration’s position on the shooting, insisting that Good had supposedly been “breaking the law by impeding and obstructing a law enforcement operation.” Noem repeated the extremely dubious allegation that Good had “weaponized” her vehicle to “attack” Ross in “an act of domestic terrorism.” And she said that Good had “harassed” law enforcement at additional locations throughout the morning.  “These officers were doing their due diligence—what their training had prepared them to do—to make sure they were handling it appropriately,” Noem insisted.  But when anchor Jake Tapper played video of the January 6 insurrection, Noem struggled to explain how Trump’s mass pardons for the Capitol rioters could be reconciled with the administration’s current support for federal law enforcement. “Every single situation is going to rely on the situation those officers are on,” she said, without directly mentioning the Capitol attack. “But they know that when people are putting hands on them, when they are using weapons against them, when they’re physically harming them, that they have the authority to arrest those individuals.” > Tapper to Noem: "I just showed you video of people attacking law enforcement > officers on January 6. Undisputed evidence, and I just said, President Trump > pardoned all of them. You said that President Trump is enforcing all the laws > equally. That's just not true. There's a… pic.twitter.com/WjZPqgCVhj > > — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 11, 2026 As Tapper pointed out, Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of every single January 6 defendant on his first day back in office—suggesting that the president is willing to tolerate some assaults on federal law enforcement. But Noem, improbably, maintained that the Trump administration was consistent. “When we’re out there, we don’t pick and choose which situations and which laws are enforced and which ones aren’t,” she said. “Every single one of them is being enforced under the Trump administration.” “That’s just not true,” Tapper responded. “There’s a different standard for law enforcement officials being attacked if they’re being attacked by Trump supporters.” Later in the show, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey rejected Noem’s allegation that Good was intentionally attacking Ross and said that the Trump administration’s portrayal of Minneapolis as an unsafe city that requires more federal law enforcement is unfounded.  “You know how many shootings we’ve had this year? Two. And one of them was ICE,” Frey said. “ICE and Kristi Noem and everything they’re doing is making it far less safe.” According to an analysis of Minneapolis crime data by the Minnesota Star Tribune, gun violence peaked during pandemic lockdown, but shootings have declined since then in all but one of the city’s five police precincts. As Noah Lanard reported on Thursday, immigration agents across the country have shot at least nine people since September. All of them were in cars, despite cops being trained not to shoot at moving vehicles and, instead, to get out of the way. Noah spoke with Seth Stoughton, a professor of law and criminal justice at the University of South Carolina and a former Florida police officer, who cited the long history of people getting hurt when police shoot at moving vehicles. Meanwhile, many Democrats have called for new rules to curb abuses by federal immigration officers, including a requirement to show warrants prior to making arrests. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) is expected to introduce legislation to push these changes.  “In many ways they’ve become lawless at this point,” one House Democrat said Friday, according to the Hill. “No search warrants. Masks. Refusing to tell people why they’re being picked up. Deporting people to places without telling their family. You can’t have that.” On Sunday’s Meet the Press on NBC, Murphy said that his proposal is not a “sweeping” reform but simply aims to return to when ICE “cared about legality.” “It’s reasonable for Democrats, speaking on behalf of the majority of the American public who don’t approve of what ICE is doing, to say, ‘If you want to fund DHS, I want to fund a DHS that is operating in a safe and legal manner,’” Murphy said.

Scores of people are once again taking to their streets this weekend to protest the Trump administration’s ongoing offensive against immigrants and those who attempt to stand up for them. More than 1,000 demonstrations are slated for Saturday and Sunday after federal immigration agents shot three people in the past week. On Wednesday, ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renée Nicole Good in Minneapolis in her vehicle, and on Thursday US Border Patrol shot a man and a woman in a car in Portland.  “The murder of Renée Nicole Good has sparked outrage in all of us,” Leah Greenberg, co-executive director of Indivisible, one of the organizations spearheading the nationwide demonstrations, told Mother Jones. “Her death, and the horrific nature of it, was a turning point and a call to all of us to stand up against ICE’s inhumane and lawless operations that have already killed dozens before Renee.” > Just got home from our local ICE OUT protest. 24 degrees and snowing, hundreds > came out. Others were in the next town over responding to ICE trapping > roofers. > > — Ashley (@coyotebee.bsky.social) 2026-01-10T19:08:06.443Z The weekend protests are happening or poised to happen in blue cities like New York and Chicago, as well as Republican strongholds like Lubbock, Texas, and Danville, Kentucky.  The demonstrations are being organized by the ICE Out For Good Coalition, which in addition to Indivisible, includes groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, Voto Latino, and United We Dream.  “For a full year, Trump’s masked agents have been abducting people off the streets, raiding schools, libraries, and churches,” Katie Bethell, the civic action executive director for MoveOn, another organization in the coalition, said. “None of us want to live in a country where federal agents with guns are lurking and inciting violence at schools and in our communities.” According to tracking from The Guardian, 32 people died in ICE custody in 2025—the most of any year in more than two decades.  Additionally, The Trace reports that since June 2025, there have been 16 incidents in which immigration agents opened fire and another 15 incidents in which agents held someone at gunpoint. The outlet writes that, in these incidents, four people were killed and seven injured. The Trace noted that the number of incidents involving guns could likely be higher, “as shootings involving immigration agents are not always publicly reported.” Members of Concord Indivisible gathered outside First Parish in Concord, Massachusetts, to protest the killing of Renée Nicole Good by ICE agent Jonathan Ross.Dave Shrewsbury/ZUMA Since Wednesday, an already tense situation in Minneapolis—and in other cities—boiled over. In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, officers on the scene met protesters with chemical irritants. In the days since, border patrol agents outside the Whipple Building in Minneapolis have used violent tactics against protesters, including using chemical agents on demonstrators.  Online, some videos show escalating moments between immigration agents and those resisting them. In one instance, a border patrol agent is seen telling multiple women sitting in cars in Minneapolis: “Don’t make a bad decision today.” The women were seemingly attempting to interrupt immigration agents by taking up road space.  The coalition hosting the protests said in its list of stated goals that the groups hope to “Demand accountability, transparency, and an immediate investigation into the killing of Renee Nicole Good,” “Build public pressure on elected officials and federal agencies,” and “Call for ICE to leave our communities,” among other aims.  > Huge turnout for anti-ICE protest in Newport News. They’re along a street so > hard to get everyone in one photo. Hampton Roads does not often see these > sorts of numbers. #ReneeGood > > — Zach D Roberts (@zdroberts.bsky.social) 2026-01-10T19:09:00.009Z These are just the latest protests to take over cities since President Donald Trump was sworn in for the second time. In April, it was the “Hands Off!” protest against Trump and Elon Musk’s gutting of government spending and firing of federal workers. Months later, in October, the “No Kings” demonstrations sought to call out Trump’s growing, often unchecked executive power. According to organizers, each saw millions of protesters. And now, only the second weekend of the new year, people are once again angry and outside.  “The shootings in Minneapolis and Portland were not the beginning of ICE’s cruelty, but they need to be the end,” Deirdre Schifeling, chief political and advocacy officer with the ACLU, said. “These tragedies are simply proof of one fact: the Trump administration and its federal agents are out of control, endangering our neighborhoods, and trampling on our rights and freedom. This weekend Americans all across the country are demanding that they stop.”

A video reportedly filmed by the federal agent who shot and killed Renée Nicole Good in Minneapolis earlier this week was released on Friday by a conservative Minnesota outlet whose most prominent reporter is married to the city’s former police union head. Alpha News—notable in part for its sympathetic coverage of Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer convicted in 2021 of murdering George Floyd—has since Wednesday published a flurry of articles including “ICE shooting in Minneapolis: Minnesota attorney explains how presumed innocence has been ignored again” and “REPORT: Woman killed by ICE agent was member of ‘ICE Watch’ group working to disrupt immigration arrests.” Conservative commentators have seized on the 47-second clip to argue that it exculpates Ross and shows Good driving towards him. > 100 percent confirms they were left wing agitators intentionally trying to > provoke an altercation with law enforcement, and then they drove right at him. > > Any “conservative” who bought the media narrative on this case is permanently > discredited and there’s no coming back from it https://t.co/mTvu5KBOUi > > — Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) January 9, 2026 Other viewers see the clip as further evidence against Ross. > I synced up the video from the Johnathan Ross and a bystander to help show > what was happening when he fumbled his camera. He was already out of the way > at that point and already had his gun drawn. It wasn't him being hit, it was > him shooting Renee Good. > > — RagnarokX (@ragnarokx.bsky.social) 2026-01-09T19:20:37.388Z Vice President JD Vance has shared the Alpha News video multiple times as of early Friday evening, writing in one post, “What the press has done in lying about this innocent law enforcement officer is disgusting. You should all be ashamed of yourselves.” The Trump administration has maintained that Good was a “violent rioter” who “weaponized her vehicle” in order to carry out “domestic terrorism.” Visual investigations by publications including the New York Times, Bellingcat, and the Washington Post have refuted that account. Yet the fact that the video from the shooter’s perspective was released at all, and with such speed, is remarkable—as is who it was leaked to. Alpha News, founded in 2015, is a Minnesota outlet that has distinguished itself for years by running pieces that suggest Derek Chauvin suffered a miscarriage of justice. Its highest-profile reporter, Liz Collin, is married to former Minneapolis police union president Bob Kroll; in 2022, Collin published a book titled They’re Lying: The Media, The Left, and The Death of George Floyd. In 2020, the ACLU of Minnesota sued Kroll in connection with claims that Minneapolis police used excessive force against protesters, according to Minnesota Public Radio, leading to a settlement that barred Kroll from serving as a police officer in Hennepin County, where Minneapolis is located, and two neighboring counties, Ramsey and Anoka, for the next decade. A 2020 article by Mother Jones‘ Samantha Michaels details decades of allegations against Kroll of extreme brutality, as well as another lawsuit—filed by Medaria Arradondo, then the city’s chief of police—who accused Kroll of wearing a white power patch and referring to a Muslim congressman as a “terrorist.” (Collin’s book, in an excerpt published by Alpha News, decries protests against her husband: “‘Bob Kroll is a racist’ was a popular theme,” Collin writes.) It’s unclear how Alpha News obtained the video apparently taken by Ross as he killed Good. Collin and Alpha News’ editor-in-chief did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In the video, Ross exits a vehicle and begins circling Good’s SUV before pointing the camera at Good, who says, “That’s fine, dude, I’m not mad at you.” Ross films the rear of the vehicle and the license plate. The camera pans to Good’s wife, also filming, who speaks to Ross—saying, among other things, “Go home.” An agent instructs Good to “get out of the car.” Good reverses before appearing to turn away from Ross and drive away. Simultaneously, the angle of the video shifts quickly, no longer pointing at Good, and several gunshots are audible. The camera briefly refocuses on Good’s car, turning away moments before it runs into a nearby vehicle.  In the background, a voice says, “Fucking bitch.” 

After an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis this week, firing his weapon as she attempted to drive away, protesters have amassed around the country, many wondering: Can that officer be taken to court? The Trump administration, predictably, says the agent, Jonathan Ross, is immune from prosecution. “You have a federal law enforcement official engaging in federal law enforcement action,” Vice President JD Vance told reporters on Thursday. “That guy is protected by absolute immunity. He was doing his job.” But what do independent attorneys say? After the shooting, I reached out to Robert Bennett, a veteran lawyer in Minneapolis who has worked on hundreds of federal police misconduct cases during his 50-year career. “I’ve deposed thousands of police officers,” he says. “ICE agents do not have absolute immunity.” Bennett says the state of Minnesota has the right to prosecute an ICE agent who commits misconduct. But, he adds, that might be difficult now that the FBI has essentially booted the state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension off the case—blocking access, the BCA wrote, to “case materials, scene evidence or investigative interviews necessary to complete a thorough and independent investigation.” In the conversation below, edited for length and clarity, Bennett discusses how the shooting in Minneapolis unfolded and the legal paths forward. When you watched the videos of this shooting, what did you see? You saw what could be easily identified as four ICE officers. And they’re all experiencing, to a greater or lesser extent, the same set of operative facts, the same factual stimuli. But only one officer, seeing the set of circumstances, picked up his weapon. None of the other officers did. That’s a bad fact [for Ross]. Also, the officer walked in front of the car, which counts against him in the reasonableness analysis. If you look at the recent Supreme Court case of Barnes v. Felix, that’s problematic for the ICE agent. What happened in Barnes v. Felix? It’s a shooting case where the officer walked around the car, [lunged and jumped onto the door sill], and put himself in harm’s way. You can’t bootstrap your own bad situation [to] allow a use of force. What did the court find? They sent it back to the trial court to consider it. But there’s good language in there. You said it’s bad news for the ICE agent, Ross, that his colleagues didn’t pull their weapons. Can you talk more about that? Sure, we’ve had several other cases. There was a tactical semicircle, a bunch of officers aiming their guns at a couple fighting over a knife; one officer out of the eight or nine fired his weapon, none of the others perceived the need to. And that’s important because it suggests the officer who fired wasn’t reasonable, right? Under federal law, an officer can only use deadly force if they had a reasonable fear that they could otherwise be killed or harmed. It’s an objective reasonableness standard. So it’s not whether you were personally scared out of your wits and fired your gun. It’s: Would an objectively reasonable officer at the scene have fired his weapon, believing he was in danger of death or immediate bodily harm? In Ross’ case, there was a previous incident—Ross had shot [with a Taser] through a window before at somebody in the car, and the guy hit the gas, and Ross had stuck his arm through the broken window, and he got cut [and dragged about 100 yards]. And so he was supposedly reacting to that. He’s not an objective officer at that point. The Trump administration has suggested that Ross is immune from prosecution as a federal officer. Why do you say he’s not? There’s plenty of case law that allows for the prosecution of federal law enforcement agencies, including ICE. And it’s clear under the law that a federal officer who shoots somebody in Minnesota and kills them is subject to a Minnesota investigation and Minnesota law. Now, the feds just took that away this morning, and they’ve already decided who’s at fault. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension was going to do an investigation to find out. But I can tell you, the federal code provides that when there is a state criminal prosecution of a federal officer in Minnesota or any other state, the officer has the right to remove the case to federal court. So if Ross was charged in Hennepin County, he could remove the case to the United States District Court for the District of Minnesota, have a federal judge deal with his case. The code is explicitly predicting such a prosecution could take place. If there was immunity of an absolute nature, you wouldn’t need that section, right? The administration seems to argue that Ross is protected under the Supremacy Clause, which essentially says that states can’t charge a federal officer if the officer was acting within the scope of his duties. Do you think killing people is acting within the scope of their duties? What if they decided to kill the 435,000 people in the city of Minneapolis while they were here, would the Supremacy Clause give them a free pass? I don’t think so. Also, if there was an actual independent investigation, and you apply the actual federal case law to this, and you concluded that Ross violated her rights by using excessive deadly force, he could be indicted federally. Now, nobody believes that would ever happen now: For a guy who talked a lot about rigged things, this [investigation] is rigged. Kash Patel took over the autopsy, so who knows, maybe they’ll say she died of a heart attack when she was backing up. If the officer isn’t charged criminally, the other route is a lawsuit. What are the challenges there? My team and I think there are ways to do it. I hope that her mother, or her next of kin, calls us and we’ll figure out a Bivens action or a Federal Tort Claims Act case, or something else. If you look at this case carefully, it has all the hallmarks of cases we’ve either won or settled for amounts of money no reasonable person would pay us if we weren’t going to win. It is essentially a garden variety unjustified use of deadly force case. And that’s based on the facts we know now; I bet the case is going to get better.

Amanda Moore is a journalist who has been covering the rise of ICE across the US for months, writing news articles and posting clips of confrontations to her social media feeds and, in the process, becoming one of the most prominent chroniclers of Trump’s immigration crackdown from the front lines. Amanda will be filing stories for Mother Jones over the coming weeks and months about ICE and its operations, and I spoke to her as she arrived on the ground in the immediate aftermath of the shooting of Renee Nicole Good, the 37-year-old mother who was killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis on Wednesday, sparking mass protests. Below is our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity. James West: Tell me exactly where you are, what you’re seeing, and what the mood is like on the ground. Amanda Moore: I’m here outside of the Whipple Building. It’s a federal building. It’s where ICE has been staging since they got here. As you can see, there are now a bunch of federal Border Patrol agents. This morning, there were some protests that were larger than the previous ones that have been at the building, and protesters actually worked to block the driveway. So now we can see all of the Border Patrol agents are here because they came out to guard the facility. Amanda, you’ve been around the country for months covering escalating tactics used by ICE at these types of facilities, and you’re drawing comparisons between what you’re seeing there and other facilities like Broadview in Chicago. > “Once again, I was getting tear-gassed at 7 o’clock in the morning.” The first month at Broadview was extremely violent. People were being tear-gassed by 7 o’clock in the morning. They were picking up protesters and flinging them to the ground like rag dolls. And today, here at the Whipple Building, reminded me of Broadview. Once again, I was getting tear-gassed at 7 o’clock in the morning. You know, protesters were not really prepared for what was coming in the same way. They don’t expect it so early in the morning. And eventually, in Broadview, that kind of petered off because local police took over, and they no longer had Border Patrol out front. So as long as Border Patrol is guarding the facility, it seems to be a pretty similar pattern. One of the accelerants on the ground where you’ve been previously, Amanda, seems to be whenever the Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino rocks up. What vibe does he bring into a scene anytime you’re on the ground? Well, Bovino is the show, right? So when he comes into town, all the cameras are on him, and all the protesters know who he is—or if they don’t know, they learn very, very fast. And so he’s kind of in charge, and it’s the culture of Border Patrol under his direction that leads to some of that violence that we experience.  With Bovino himself, there’s obviously now a court record in place where even the courts aren’t believing the types of stories that federal law enforcement is bringing about some of these protesters. > “If a rock is kicked…in Bovino’s direction, then Tricia McLaughlin will tweet > that video and say a rock was thrown.” Yeah. In Chicago, in federal court, the judges began to just completely discredit everything that Border Patrol had to say. And so it’s this escalation that’s based on a reality that does not exist—one that’s not reflected in any of the video, photos, or the eyewitness experiences. If a rock is kicked on the ground in Bovino’s direction, then [DHS spokesperson] Tricia McLaughlin will tweet that video and say a rock was thrown—and that’s clearly not the case. This scene is one that attracts counter-protesters as well as pretty hardcore protesters against ICE. When these two forces meet, what do you typically see, and what should people be prepared to see as this type of confrontation unfolds over the next couple of days? We actually had some pro-ICE protesters here this morning. They came. One had an American flag. I believe one of them is still standing around in front of Border Patrol somewhere. And he was very direct. He said, we’ve already executed one of you, and basically, we’ll do it again. A lot of the pro-ICE protesters, they seem to be here to antagonize, not necessarily to really show support. It’s a lot of instigation, and many times it’s being done under the veneer of journalism, which, of course, that’s not. Tell me how you prepare for these types of excursions into the fray when you’ve been covering this. What are some of the challenges? What should our viewers expect to see from you in the coming days as you are on the ground in Minneapolis? A primary challenge would be tear gas. There’s a lot of it—they really go through it—and pepper balls. So you have to have safety gear. You have to have goggles and masks and helmets and all that stuff. But a real issue, I think, is going to be when you’re at these events, every agent in front of you has a gun, and you can guess that several people behind you have guns as well—especially when they’re in the neighborhoods, when protests pop up during a raid, not necessarily at the facility. And [Minnesota] is an open-carry state, so that comes into play here in a way it didn’t necessarily in most of Chicago. But there’s really only so much you can do. The agents can be very friendly to the press. They can be very willing to talk, or they can shoot you with a pepper ball when you try to ask them a question—you can never predict. So it’s a little bit of a guessing game.

The Supreme Court blocked President Trump on Tuesday from deploying National Guard troops in Chicago as part of his campaign to use the military to police the streets of Democratic-led cities. The Trump administration had argued that Chicago was in chaos—referring to protests against immigration enforcement—but the Supreme Court’s order reads, “At this preliminary stage, the Government has failed to identify a source of authority that would allow the military to execute the laws in Illinois.” In October, Trump called 300 members of the Illinois National Guard into federal service to protect federal agents enforcing immigration policies in Chicago under a federal law that allows the president to federalize members of the Guard if they are “unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States” or if “there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion.” He federalized members of the Texas National Guard the next day.  The state of Illinois and the city of Chicago challenged the deployment in court, arguing that Trump abused that federal law to punish his political opponents.  Lower courts ruled against Trump. On October 9, U.S. District Judge April Perry said she “found no credible evidence that there is a danger of rebellion” and issued a temporary restraining order in favor of the state. The Supreme Court agreed with the decision, saying that the president can only call on the National Guard if regular military forces couldn’t restore order.   Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissented.  “There is no basis for rejecting the President’s determination that he was unable to execute the federal immigration laws using the civilian law enforcement resources at his command,” Alito wrote. Trump has also tried to deploy the National Guard in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and Portland.  A federal appeals court ruled last week that the National Guard deployment in Washington can continue, but a federal judge blocked Trump from sending the National Guard to Portland in November, and another judge ordered the National Guard to leave Los Angeles earlier this month. The Trump administration has often gone to the Supreme Court for help when its policies have been blocked by lower courts. In this case, Trump is trying to normalize military policing of protests against him.  This is the first time the high court has weighed in on the president’s use of the National Guard to enforce immigration policies. While the decision only applies to Illinois, it will likely support similar challenges from other cities.

On a dark November evening, I find myself outside one of the units at a garden-style apartment complex in Memphis, its parking lot alight in flashing blues and reds. The police are here—about a dozen cars—responding to reports of a violent crime. I’m accompanied by Mauricio Calvo, a 50-year-old local whose friend Diego lives here. Calvo knocks. “Soy yo,” he whispers at the door—“It’s me.” “I told him not to open the door under any circumstance,” he informs me. The door cracks open and Calvo nudges me through. I’m disoriented. It’s pitch-black inside, curtains drawn, lights off. Diego stands in the entryway, but I only see the outline of his body, not his face. Buenas noches, he whispers, and guides us to the living room. A little boy comes up beside me. “I wanna play!” he says in English, gesturing toward the TV and Xbox. Nobody turns it on. This family has nothing to do with the situation outside, but still they are hiding. Diego, not his real name, explains that when the police pulled into the lot earlier that night, he instinctively hit the floor as though dodging bullets. “We were afraid, because what we are feeling these days is immigration is everywhere,” he tells me in Spanish, voice shaking. He and his wife—a Dreamer whose parents brought her to the United States as a child—and three of their four kids, all US citizens, stayed that way about 10 minutes, flat on the ground in the dark. Then they called Calvo, who leads Latino Memphis, an organization that helps immigrants. “I got very scared they could start knocking on doors looking for the suspect and scared they would take him,” Diego’s wife says, nodding at her undocumented husband. She knew that where police go in Memphis, lately at least, there will be immigration officers, too. On September 29, the Trump administration launched the Memphis Safe Task Force, deploying, according to the Washington Post, some 1,700 federal officers from a mix of agencies, ostensibly to help the Tennessee Highway Patrol, the Memphis Police Department (MPD), and the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office crack down on crime. It’s one of many such task forces the administration has launched, or plans to launch, nationally. The MPD has reported success—large declines in serious crimes reported since the feds arrived. The feds are getting something out of the arrangement, too; local cops are chauffeuring Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers around town, leaving many immigrant families afraid to leave their homes. Some refer to the task force as “the occupation” and say the feds are using the crime issue as a Trojan horse. “I feel nervous—I have to protect them and myself,” Diego’s 12-year-old daughter tells me as she sits beside her parents in the dark. “I’ve lived here for a long time,” Diego adds, “and I’ve never seen so many police cars.” Neither have I. Though I’m new to Memphis, I’ve been reporting on the criminal justice system for more than a decade and have spent time in cities with a lot of law enforcement. I’ve also lived in an authoritarian country overseas, yet I’ve never experienced a police presence like this. Some Memphians critical of the surge liken the city to a war zone, with helicopters circling over neighborhoods, National Guard officers patrolling downtown, and unmarked law enforcement vehicles in the streets. Immigrant citizens carry their US passports, lest they be detained. One volunteer I spoke with compared the vibe to 1930s Germany. Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, has welcomed the task force, and Memphis Mayor Paul Young, a Democrat, has cooperated, crediting the effort for reducing 911 calls about gun violence. But Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris, another Democrat, compares occupied Memphis to a failed state. “Our risk is that [America is] gonna become a Yemen or a North Korea, or something else altogether, where there is an armed individual with a semi-automatic weapon and military fatigues on many corners,” he told me. “There may be zero crime, but we also won’t be leaving our houses. I know that’s a dark scenario, but that’s kind of where we are.” My hours spent in the dark with Diego’s family—and talking with local activists, teachers, businesspeople, and residents—revealed how the militarized federal onslaught is reshaping daily life in blue cities like Memphis, keeping kids out of school and parents from work, and turning grocery shopping into a mission that risks one’s family being torn apart. When I finally left Diego’s complex that night, a police cruiser whipped past, lights and siren blaring, followed by another, and another—more than 20 in all—racing off to terrorize another neighborhood. Andrea Morales/MLK50 I had arrived in town three days earlier, hoping to document a local surge of federal law enforcement that hadn’t received nearly as much attention as those in cities like Chicago, Portland, and Los Angeles. That’s partly because the residents of Memphis—a blue city in a deeply red state—have not responded with the same headline-grabbing protests. There are no inflatable frogs, no sandwich-hurling federal employees, no throngs of demonstrators trying to block ICE vehicles. The thinking, Calvo speculates, is that “less resistance will make these people less interested in being here, and they will just move on. It’s like, why poke the bear?” But that doesn’t mean there’s no resistance, or that locals appreciate the expansive police presence. I meet up with Maria Oceja, 33, who recently quit her job at a court clerk’s office. She’s offered to drive me around to show me how pervasive the task force presence has become. It doesn’t take long. Shortly after we set out, we see two highway patrol vehicles on the side of the road. Then a police car, then another. “Look, we got an undercover over there,” she tells me, gesturing toward an unmarked car that’s pulled someone over.  Oceja, who sports a pink nose ring and has a rosary hanging from her rearview, co-leads Vecindarios 901, a neighborhood watch with a hotline to report ICE sightings. She’s exhausted: They’ve been averaging about 150 calls a day since the task force took shape in late September. The group has documented home raids, too, but traffic stops are the most common way ICE rounds people up. The highway patrol will pull over Black and Hispanic drivers for minor violations like expired tags or a broken taillight, or seemingly no violation at all: “‘You got over too slow. You’re going one or two miles over [the speed limit].’ Just anything!” says Tikeila Rucker of Free the 901, a local protest campaign. Then immigration officers, either riding shotgun or following behind in their own vehicles—or, occasionally, vehicles borrowed from the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency—swoop in. In one stop I witnessed, three Black friends were pulled over for their car’s tinted windows; one of them, from the Bahamas, was sent to ICE detention. The car’s owner, Keven Gilles, was visiting from Florida. He told me that he’d been pulled over five times in a week and a half in Memphis, and “every time, there’s at least five more cars that come, whether that be federal agents, more troopers, or regular city [police] cars.” Memphis is the nation’s largest majority-Black city, with more than 600,000 people in all. Ten percent are Latino and 7 percent are immigrants. The biggest contingent hails from Mexico—according to the Memphis Restaurant Association, the city has more Mexican restaurants than barbecue joints—but there are also well-established communities from China, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Vietnam, and Yemen, and more recently Nicaragua, Ukraine, and Venezuela. Oceja, whose parents immigrated from Mexico, says the city’s undocumented population is relatively young—lots of families with school-age children. She takes me to Jackson Elementary, which she attended as a child, to ask employees about how the policing surge has affected this immigrant-heavy neighborhood. “I’ve been here 22 years, and I’ve never seen it this bad,” PE teacher Cassandra Rivers tells me. Because people are afraid of being detained while dropping off their kids, the Memphis-Shelby County School Board has agreed to create more bus routes. Meanwhile, daily attendance is down at least 10 percent at Jackson, Rivers says. Some students are so anxious that she has started calling their homes in the afternoon just to assure them that their parents are safe and sound. Earlier, on Jackson Avenue, we’d passed a parking lot with a few men standing around. “This is where the day laborers come and ask for work,” Oceja told me. There are fewer lately, now that officers are pulling over contractors’ trucks and arresting workers at construction sites. “Prior to the occupation,” she explains after we leave the school and turn onto Getwell Road, “you could see immigrant vendors every morning on this street selling food.” We drive by shuttered fruit stands and yet another police car, then stop at a gas station, where I meet Jose Reynoso, a Guatemalan man selling tamales and arroz con leche out of a pickup truck. He says he doesn’t know how long his business will survive—customers are afraid to come out. At Supermercado Guatemala 502 on Summer Avenue, manager Rigoberto Cipriano Lorenzo gestures at empty aisles and recalls how packed his store used to be. Alex Lopez, a barber down the block, says many clients ask him to cut their hair at home now. Religious leaders are worried, too. A local imam told me members of his congregation are asking whether they must pray at the mosque, or can they do so from home? The county courthouse is overwhelmed. In its first six weeks, the task force conducted nearly 30,000 traffic stops, issued 25,000 citations, and made more than 2,500 arrests—creating a six-month backlog in traffic court, one attorney told me. That’s not including stops made by federal agents operating solo. An FBI agent speaking to a local rotary club noted that as long as the task force is operating, just about everyone in Memphis can expect to be pulled over at some point. (The latest, just-released figures show more than 4,000 arrests and nearly 200 people charged by the feds.) Jail overcrowding had resulted in detainees sleeping on mats on the floors, so the county declared a state of emergency and moved some of them to another location. “I don’t know how many times I have to say it, but the jail is at a horrific state right now,” Sheriff Floyd Bonner told ABC24 reporters during my visit. “We hear stories,” County Mayor Harris told me, of “individuals that are standing for 24 hours straight because there’s no room, or place for them to sit down. I don’t have the words for what’s happening over there.” Task force personnel near the intersection of Jackson Avenue and North Hollywood Street in Memphis, November 18, 2025.Andrea Morales/MLK50 In his darkened living room, blocked off from the glow of police cruisers outside, Diego speaks in hushed tones as he shares his story. I sit on a sofa beside his 6- and 16-year-old sons. He sits on another sofa, flanked by his wife and their 12-year-old daughter. Diego grew up in a small town in Chiapas, Mexico, where he worked as a farmer. He moved to the United States in 2004, at age 20, for more money and “a better future.” His sister’s husband lived in Memphis, so he settled there too, finding a landscaping job. It paid much better than he was used to, though the weather could be brutal, “very cold,” and he missed the food from back home. In 2006, he met his future wife, also from Mexico, who was selling tamales outside a convenience store. Their first son was born in 2007. Three years ago, they moved into this housing complex, eager for independence from their in-laws, with whom they’d been living. Today Diego works as a cook and janitor at a school where his wife is an assistant teacher. The Memphis Safe Task Force has affected the family’s routines in too many ways to count. Diego has a heart condition and needs to see a doctor every three weeks for monitoring—he was hospitalized not long ago. But he’s afraid to go to his next appointment, drive his kids to school, or commute to work. He’s heard about people getting pulled over for nothing. Immigrants are getting picked up despite having work permits or pending green cards—even people a decade into the legal residency process with just one hearing to go. Diego would have little chance to avoid deportation if he were pulled over. “I get very nervous, like shaky and sweating,” he says of his drives. His daughter, whom I’ll call Liliana, listens quietly as her father talks, gripping a blanket to her chest. Even though she’s a citizen, she has had to be vigilant about law enforcement, she says: “If I do a wrong movement, that would bring them here.” It’s very tiring. At school recently, a teacher asked her to complete a project that involved sharing personal information like her age and why her parents came to Memphis. “I got worried. Why are they asking those types of questions? I feel like it was a trap and they are trying to take information to them”—ICE—she tells me. Liliana is an intelligent, curious kid. She wants to be a nurse someday, Diego told me, which requires doing well in school. But she decided not to turn in her project, just to be safe: “I feel kind of overprotective,” she explains.  As Liliana talks, I try to remember she’s only in sixth grade. I ask her what she likes to do for fun. “Exploring,” she says, and shopping at the mall, but lately she spends most of her time at home. It’s not always pleasant; there’s a clogged sewer line, so the toilet keeps overflowing and flooding the bedrooms, and the property manager hasn’t fixed it. She watches TV trying to fend off cabin fever, and dreams of going on outings with her whole family, maybe to the park, grilling some food. “Most of the time I can’t go out,” she says, “because I’ll be scared.” A Customs and Border Patrol helicopter circles a community protest against an xAI data center development.Andrea Morales/MLK50 The Trump administration has used crime as a pretext to conduct its immigration operations, even in cities where crime is lower than it’s been in decades. In Memphis, it was at a 25-year low before the task force began. But most locals I spoke with said it’s still a problem: In 2024, Memphis had one of the nation’s highest rates of violent crime, higher than similarly sized cities such as Detroit or Baltimore. In six weeks, the Memphis Safe Task Force said it seized 400 illegal guns, and that, compared with the same period in 2024, robberies had dropped 70 percent, and murders were down from 21 to 12. The cops I encounter around town seem eager to emphasize the public safety aspect of their work, and markedly less eager to discuss immigration enforcement. At a gas station where I stop to refuel, I approach Sheriff’s Sgt. Jim Raddatz, a 32-year veteran who, along with federal task force officers, has just finished arresting someone—a criminal case, he says. Sitting in his cruiser, Raddatz tells me he appreciates the expanded police presence, as the sheriff’s office has lost some 300 patrol deputies in recent years. MPD has about 2,000 officers, and 300 highway patrol officers were diverted to the task force. Given the roughly 1,700 officers from more than a dozen federal agencies participating, the total for Memphis proper—even without sheriff’s deputies, who also police Shelby County—would be about 6.5 cops per 1,000 residents, a ratio more than triple the average for cities of this size. When I mention that I’ve heard the task force has made more than 300 noncriminal immigration arrests, he gets a tad defensive. “That might come from ICE. That’s not from us,” Raddatz says. He has neighbors who are immigrants, he explains, and wouldn’t want the sheriff’s office to target them: “All this ‘targeting, targeting, targeting’—we get sick of hearing about it, because we’re not,” he adds. “I understand they’re upset”—people see stuff on TikTok and other social media about immigration enforcement, and they get scared, “but it ain’t coming from us.” The sheriff’s office and the MPD, unlike the highway patrol, cannot conduct immigration arrests independently; for that they would need a special type of 287(g) agreement, the arrangements that govern local law enforcement cooperation with ICE. (The sheriff’s office can hold immigrants inside the jail under another type of 287(g) agreement.) But even if they can’t arrest immigrants, the local agencies are assisting with Trump’s deportation agenda by allowing federal agents to tag along on crime-related work—during traffic stops, the feds can legally ask for proof of citizenship, which inevitably leads to noncriminal immigration arrests. The federal officers I encountered while driving around town were similarly tight-lipped on immigration, and much chattier when talking about crime. At one point, I sat in my car watching some of them search for a sex offender at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac. One of the officers—who drove an unmarked vehicle—approached me. Don’t worry, he said, we’re just here “getting the bad guys.” They didn’t find their culprit, but their presence had ripple effects. After they left, I met an 18-year-old Hispanic man who lived next door to the house where the alleged sex offender was believed to be staying. He told me his immigrant mom was still inside—terrified—after the officers, looking for the perpetrator, had pounded on her door. She didn’t open it, and thankfully they left her alone. A traffic stop at Jackson Avenue and North Hollywood Street, November 18, 2025:.Andrea Morales/MLK50 In another neighborhood, I meet an 11-year-old named Justin. He’s standing outside his house, his dog and a soccer ball in the front yard. His mom is inside. It’s time for school. He carries a black camo backpack with a little tag on it; whoever picks him up at the end of the day will need a matching tag, and it won’t be his mom. Task force officers had come by the house a couple of weeks earlier with a warrant for a criminal suspect. That person no longer lived there, so instead they took Justin’s dad, an immigrant from Mexico who was undocumented. “A lot” changed after that, Justin tells me. As we talk, he squeezes some green slime that seems to function more as a stress ball than a toy. His mom, from Honduras, is afraid to emerge, even to shop for groceries. “She always stays at home,” he says quietly. “Before, she would usually go to the store.” With many immigrants in this mother’s situation, local volunteers have started delivering food. On a single day in October, 120 families reached out to the Immigrant Pantry, a project of Indivisible Memphis that normally serves about 50 families a week. Some other food pantries, especially those that accept government funding, require ID. This one doesn’t. “It blew up a few weeks ago,” says volunteer Sandy Edwards, whose T-shirt reads “Have Mercy.” “It’s about as sad as you can possibly imagine.” Edwards and her peers have seen a lot. There was the immigrant mother who resorted to feeding her baby sugar water—she didn’t have formula. Another was stuck in a motel room with four kids under 6, all citizens, and nothing to eat. Vecindarios 901, the neighborhood watch group, told me about a woman who called in tears because she couldn’t find her boyfriend; he’d been detained by ICE, leaving her in charge of his 3-year-old daughter. In another case, an undocumented mother begged agents outside a gas station to take her instead of her partner, who had a work permit, but they went for him anyway and left her with the baby and no means of support. The pantry volunteers drop off onetime emergency food and supplies to these desperate caregivers: canned goods, tortillas, diapers, plus $50 per family worth of fresh produce and meat. They organize the deliveries on Signal, an encrypted messaging app, and vet potential drivers online; the goal is to ensure they’re not in cahoots with the feds, who could use the delivery addresses to arrest people. “This is a vulnerable population,” notes Jessica Wainfor, another volunteer. “We cannot make mistakes.” A day before I visited, news broke that DHS was considering hiring private contractors to ferret out undocumented immigrants’ home and work addresses, bounty-hunter style—with bonuses for accuracy, volume, and timeliness. The volunteers asked me not to disclose their pantry location and said they were taking other precautions, like varying the stores where they shop and watching for unmarked vehicles that might be tailing them. It’s not only low-income immigrants who are afraid. At a Palestinian-owned café, I met Amal Arafat, a naturalized citizen from Somalia who moved to the United States at age 4. Now she lives in Germantown, an affluent suburb, and carries her US passport with her in case she’s pulled over for having dark skin and wearing a hijab. When I ask how this makes her feel, she starts to cry. “It’s a scary time, because there are people with citizenship being snatched away,” she says. She wonders whether the task force will really reduce violence—or just people reporting it. If she were a crime victim, I ask Arafat, would she call 911 now? “It does blur the lines of who is here to protect me, and who is here to terrorize and target me,” she replies. It’s a fair question. Back in October, Mayor Harris had told me that Latina survivors of domestic violence were not reaching out to a Shelby County program that helps them file for protective orders against their alleged assailants. “We know domestic violence hasn’t gone away, and we know Latina victims haven’t gone away,” he says. “What has gone away is their willingness to go to a public building and ask for help.” A Memphis pastor told me a story I have not corroborated about a local Guatemalan man who was beaten and stabbed but didn’t call 911 because he was afraid of being deported. Instead, he went home to heal, developed an infection, and died. It never made the papers. Harris, like many task-force critics, suspects violent crime is down primarily because all the police activity has made people reluctant to get out and about, for fear of getting stopped and harassed. What happens when the feds pack up and the task force dissolves? “I don’t think this is a long-term solution, and it’s making things really bad,” Calvo, Diego’s friend, told me. “You can pick your lane: This is really bad for the economy. Or this is really bad for our democracy. Or this is really bad for people’s wellbeing.” We need “fully funded schools. Money for violence intervention programs. Money for the unhoused community. A better transportation system,” adds local activist Rucker. “There are a lot of things we need—not more bodies that are gonna inflict more harm, pain, and trauma on an already traumatized community.” “This is not making us safer,” concurs Karin Rubnitz, who volunteers with Vecindarios 901 and shuttles Justin, the 11-year-old with the tag on his backpack, to school. “They are destabilizing the immigrant community.” Memphis may be a harbinger. On my last day in town, the Trump administration announced a similar task force in Nashville, where the highway patrol teamed up with ICE in May to arrest nearly 200 immigrants in a week. Other task forces were dispatched around the same time in Indianapolis, Dallas, and Little Rock, Arkansas—all purportedly focused on crime but co-led by DHS. More than 1,000 local law enforcement agencies nationwide are collaborating with ICE through 287(g) agreements. And the feds have launched their own immigration enforcement operations in cities from Chicago to Minneapolis. Tennessee Gov. Lee has said the task force in Memphis will continue indefinitely, despite the cost of bringing in hundreds of federal cops, housing them in hotels, and hiring extra judges to tackle the strain on local courts. (“We’re going to be millions of dollars in the red because of this,” Mayor Harris told the Washington Post.) Weeks into the occupation, so many immigrants are trying to self-deport that Calvo’s Latino Memphis now invites Mexican consulate officials to its office once a month to help process passports. “For the first time in the 17 years that I have worked here, we’re getting calls of people saying, How do I leave? And that is just devastating,” he says. Arafat’s husband, Anwar, an imam, told me his family is considering a move to a different part of the United States. “The people that are supposedly eliminating crime are making the city unlivable,” he says. “I really don’t want to leave,” their son Aiman, a high school freshman, told me. “I have a life here, a really good life.” Andrea Morales/MLK50 Back in the dark living room, Diego has a question for me. When will this all be over? Almost everyone I meet in Memphis asks the same thing. I have no answer, of course. If the task force carries on much longer, Diego says, he may have to return to Mexico and take his family with him. I ask Liliana how she feels about that. “Kind of sad and kind of happy,” the girl says. “I kind of want to be somewhere I feel safer. I can explore more, go more places.” It took a while, but my eyes have finally adjusted to the dark. Diego, clad in a T-shirt, is sitting beneath a joyous wedding portrait in which he sports a pink tuxedo and holds his wife’s hand. Now his hands are rubbing his head; he’s tense and exhausted. “I feel like my kids live here better than they would in Mexico, so I would like for them to stay, but if things continue to deteriorate, I don’t know what we will do,” he says. “I am more scared in the last month than in the last 20 years,” he adds. When the cops came, “I thought they were gonna kick down the door and take me away.” Diego suddenly realizes how long we’ve been talking. The police are still outside, but he figures maybe by now it’s safe to turn on a flashlight and make dinner for his family. He bids me a polite farewell, guides me out of the apartment, and closes the front door, upon which every knock brings a sense of dread.