Minneapolis ICE Shootings: The Outrage That Finally Arrived When the Victims Were White
Renée Good and Alex Pretti are dead. Now thousands are marching in sub-zero temperatures. But children in cages didn't get this response. Neither did deported Purple Heart recipients.
It took the shooting of a white woman and a white man for the outrage to finally hit a crescendo from the liberal white left.
Renée Good was 37. She was a poet, a writer, a wife, a mom—a “shitty guitar strummer from Colorado,” as she described herself. On January 7th, she had just dropped her 6-year-old son off at school and stopped to support her neighbors when an ICE agent shot her dead in her car on a residential Minneapolis street. Alex Pretti was also 37. He was an ICU nurse at the VA hospital, someone who spent his days taking care of American veterans. On January 24th, he stood between a federal agent and a woman who’d been pushed to the ground. He was pepper-sprayed, tackled by six agents, and shot dead while holding nothing but his phone.
Two white Americans. Dead at the hands of federal immigration agents in the same city, in the same month. And now—now—people are ready to march in sub-zero temperatures. Now businesses are closing for a general strike. Now the outrage has finally reached the pitch that makes people do more than scroll and sigh.
Black and brown people have been living this nightmare for years. With a very brief pause during the Biden so-called “return to normal” interlude.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad everyone is outraged. I’m glad they’re finally ready to show up instead of being outraged while waiting in line at the grocery store, thumb-scrolling through their socials.
But I can’t help noticing what it took.
Children separated from parents wasn’t enough. More than 5,500 kids, including infants, ripped from their mothers and fathers between 2017 and 2021. “We need to take away children,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions told federal prosecutors in 2018. A government official literally saying the quiet part out loud. Officials were told not to maintain lists of separated children. Reunification was explicitly undermined because it “undermines the entire effort.” Nearly 1,400 kids still haven’t been reunited with their families. Audio leaked of children crying in detention. It didn’t stick.
People being kidnapped by ICE wasn’t enough. Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man, was picked up in Baltimore while driving home from work with his 5-year-old son. A sheet metal apprentice. He had a legal permit to work in the U.S. He checked in with immigration officials regularly. He was deported to an El Salvadoran mega-prison anyway—then the administration tried to send him to Uganda. His case became national news, but how many others never made it past local crime blotters?
Immigrants who served this country and earned medals doing so wasn’t enough. Sae Joon Park received a Purple Heart after being shot twice in Panama serving the U.S. Army. He was deported anyway. José Barco—Purple Heart recipient, traumatic brain injury from two tours in Iraq—deported to Mexico. Marlon Parris—Army Commendation Medal three times over, two tours in Iraq, diagnosed with PTSD before discharge—arrested outside his Arizona home two days after Trump’s second inauguration. Tens of thousands of veterans have been deported since 1996. The government doesn’t even keep good records of how many.
Black Lives Matter wasn’t enough—especially when so many decided to push back with their “all lives matter” and other bullshit. That phrase wasn’t born out of concern for humanity. It was born as a direct rebuke, a denial of the specific reality that Black lives were being treated as disposable by the state. It was a racist dog whistle dressed up as universal love. And for all the marching in the summer of 2020, for all the briefly kneeling cops and corporate statements, what changed? Police budgets went up in Republican cities. Support for the movement cratered. The backlash won.
When Trump not only won the electoral college but the popular vote, I remember feeling absolute dread at what was about to come. I had read Project 2025. I was already familiar with his administration’s absolute disregard for human rights. I knew the playbook.
But now you are outraged because two white people were killed.
Renée Good was described by the Trump administration as a “domestic terrorist” who was “weaponizing her SUV.” Video tells a different story—Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey saw the footage and said, “I want to tell everybody directly that is bullshit.” Alex Pretti was called a “domestic terrorist” who came to “massacre” federal officers. Video tells a different story—witnesses say he was holding his phone with one hand raised when agents tackled him. An eyewitness account says an agent removed a gun and moved away from Pretti less than a second before another agent opened fire.
Same playbook, different victims.
Good. Stay outraged. Stay angry. Peace is not the answer. Action is the only solution.
Because here’s the thing about what’s happening in Minneapolis right now: thousands of people marched in sub-zero temperatures. Hundreds of businesses closed in solidarity. A Republican candidate for Minnesota governor dropped out of the race because he couldn’t support “state retribution on the citizens of our state.” The Minneapolis police chief pointed out that his department went all of 2024 without shooting anyone—while recovering 900 guns and arresting hundreds of violent offenders—but federal agents have shot three people in Minneapolis in three weeks.
The state of Minnesota has filed for restraining orders. A federal judge blocked agents from retaliating against peaceful protesters. Governor Walz proclaimed “Renee Good Day.” This is what organized resistance looks like.
But it took two dead white people to get here.
More than 170 U.S. citizens have been detained by immigration agents during this administration. Federal officers have used tear gas on families with children. A 5-year-old boy named Liam Conejo Ramos was detained with his father—photographed in his blue bunny hat and school backpack, then shipped to a detention center in Texas. The administration called the largest immigration enforcement operation in DHS history and flooded Minneapolis with 3,000 agents.
And still, it took Renée Good and Alex Pretti.
I’m not saying their deaths don’t matter. They do. They matter immensely. They were human beings with families and lives and dreams. Renée wanted to write poetry and raise her son. Alex wanted to care for veterans. Neither deserved to die on a Minneapolis street.
I’m saying their deaths finally made something matter enough.
And that should make all of us—but especially white liberals who are just now finding their voices—deeply uncomfortable. Because if it takes the death of people who look like you for you to finally show up, then what does that say about all the times you didn’t?
Tear everything down. Because this is not working anymore. It never has worked—not for Black people, not for brown people, not for immigrants, not for veterans who served a country that turned around and deported them. The system isn’t broken. It’s functioning exactly as designed.
The only question is whether this moment of white outrage will sustain itself long enough to actually change something, or whether it will fade like all the others—like the family separation horror, like the Black Lives Matter summer—into another round of thoughts and prayers and nothing.
Stay outraged. Stay angry. Turn that anger into something that outlasts the news cycle.
Because if you go back to brunch after this, you’ll prove what so many have always known: that your outrage was never really about the principle. It was about proximity.