The officer and the activist: A perfect storm in Minnesota |
Picture it: a crisp January morning in Minneapolis, snowy sidewalks crunching underfoot, the low hum of morning traffic, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer Jonathan Ross and “ICE Watch” activist Renee Good, strangers until that moment, crossed paths on a residential street near 34th Street and Portland Avenue.
I won’t pretend to know more than the broad strokes of either’s lives. But their roles in the current American political drama — one enforcing the law, the other resisting it — reveal how these strangers became bound by tragedy.
A good beginning point for the story of Good and Ross might be the moment former President Joe Biden took the oath of office. Biden immediately halted border wall construction and suspended the “Remain in Mexico” program that required asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico for U.S. court hearings.
These moves, combined with political instability across Latin America, including Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela, fueled massive migrant caravans north. Credible estimates suggest 5 million to 15 million illegal crossings over four years, overwhelming communities and shifting the political winds decisively.
President Donald Trump‘s 2024 reelection was powered largely by a promise to end the chaos. Back in office, he tapped South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem as homeland security secretary and Tom Homan as border czar — both hard-liners who embraced visible, aggressive enforcement with little patience for oversight. Raids intensified, rhetoric sharpened, and the Department of Homeland Security deployed militarized teams to round up targets.
Meanwhile, an increasingly violent and radicalized Left seized on the highly........