George Floyd, Renee Good, and Brainworms Versus Reality

Finding social cohesion in fighting back against ICE

It seems fitting that Minnesota is once again ground zero in the national culture war. In 2020, the killing of George Floyd sparked months of rioting that left behind dozens of dead and billions in property damage. Just as Floyd’s death became a rallying cry among those who believed that black Americans were being oppressed by the police, the killing of Renee Good has come to symbolize the reign of terror that ICE has unleashed across American cities.

For purely demographic reasons alone, it is unlikely that anti-ICE protests are going to ever get as violent as those on behalf of BLM. In the same way that police pulled back in the months after the post-Floyd rioting, we may see greater agitation against ICE agents, making their lives much more difficult. The retreat of law enforcement led to more crime and disorder in 2020, but stopping street raids looking for immigrants is unlikely to have any discernible negative impacts on the communities affected.

We’re told that ICE agents are simply “enforcing the law.” It is true that the federal government has the right to deport people in the country unlawfully. Yet this is a red herring, as we understand that there are many cases where, if government sought to fully enforce the law, it would produce chaos and repression. Under Covid restrictions, many businesses were lax in enforcing mask requirements, and it would have been crazy for authorities to go around trying to stamp out every instance of this. Or picture a police force trying to ticket every individual who went one mile over the speed limit.

As of 2023, some 14 million people were in the United States illegally, which is about 1 in 24 Americans. To deport them all – or scare them enough that they leave – would wreck massive portions of the economy, and destroy countless lives among those left behind. About 40% of crop workers lack documentation. Nationwide, perhaps 20% of construction workers are undocumented, and in Texas it is about half. According to the nativist, they are all “taking jobs" from Americans, an economically illiterate argument under even the best of circumstances, but one that is particularly absurd in a country where the unemployment rate is at 4.5%, and has increased since the Trump administration began its crackdowns. If illegal immigrants weren’t here, many jobs simply would not get done, and this is even more true regarding those who come into the country legally.

If someone is working, contributing to society, and hasn’t committed any crimes, then under any kind of humane and logical system, authorities would exercise discretion and leave them alone. In addition to the economic damage averted, an additional reason to take a less aggressive approach is that, as we’ve seen, a project of mass deportation requires a violation of the rights of citizens and non-citizens alike. Since July, ICE agents have fired into at least 13 vehicles, shooting eight people, including five US citizens, and killing two.

All of this is happening not due to public pressure, but because Stephen Miller has demanded 3,000 arrests a day. Although ICE hasn’t reached those numbers, at-large arrests are about two and a half times higher than they were under Biden.

Propaganda from the administration focuses overwhelmingly on criminals it has picked up. But there aren’t nearly enough miscreant aliens for them to get the numbers they want. That is why between early October and mid-November, 47% of those booked into ICE detention did not have a criminal conviction or even a pending charge. Only 5% had been convicted of a violent crime.

The number of ICE detainees with no criminal charge or conviction rose 2,370% between January and November 2025, as the innocent now make up a much higher share of those detained.

Note that the controversies that set off BLM riots usually began when law enforcement was responding to some kind of illegal behavior. Derek Chauvin ended up killing George Floyd after he had used a counterfeit $20 bill, and Michael Brown attacked Officer Darren Wilson after being told to stop jaywalking. It is symbolic of the senseless cruelty of the administration’s immigration policy that its agents often target individuals while they’re at work. Stephen Miller asked ICE why they weren’t at Home Depot and 7-Eleven, and as a result people are being detained precisely for being in a place where they are making a contribution to society because the administration cannot find enough criminals to remove.

Of course, the motivation behind the ICE raids – along with other administration immigration policies – is to reduce the non-white population, no matter how it has to happen. To be this anti-immigration makes no sense in any other context, which is why administrations of both parties until now have for the most part left non-criminal illegal aliens alone. Now with Based Ritual types in power posting white nationalist slogans on the DHS X feed, there is no way to seriously dispute that a racial vision is what is driving administration policy.

Another similarity between Renee Good and George Floyd is that both controversies have involved a big lie regarding violence in America. In 2020, there was the widespread idea that police were gunning down large numbers of innocent black men. Today, we’re told that the nation has an immigrant crime wave, and we need stricter enforcement to keep us safe. Yet immigrants commit less crime than natives, and if you consider how much violence, property damage, and theft they absorb as a result of being in close proximity to our more crime-prone demographic groups, their effect on the safety of Americans already here looks even better. In each case, the side in the wrong refuses to admit its real motivations, and therefore has to rely on a blood libel against an entire group of people in order to justify actions that would otherwise strike most people as deranged.

Perhaps one reason to be optimistic here is that BLM’s big lie caused its own undoing. As it turns out, the moment that law enforcement backed off in major cities, violent crime went through the roof, and few ever wanted to defund the police. In fact, it’s difficult to come up with a more unpopular position. Urban black communities may have had their issues with cops in their area, but in the end they saw that authorities were doing valuable work and were needed in dangerous neighborhoods

Not so with ICE. Americans want criminal aliens removed, and they generally can be picked up in prisons and at courthouses. Among those who live in urban centers where ICE has a major presence, there is practically no constituency for raids on diners and construction sites, which interfere with the lives and well being of citizens and non-citizens alike. Note how ICE agents wear masks, something American police never felt the need to do even at the height of BLM-induced tensions. They should perhaps take that as a hint that they are the oppressors rather than the defenders of the communities in which they operate.

Those who have tried to put a less racist and hateful spin on immigration restrictionism will sometimes claim that we need fewer foreigners in order to maintain social cohesion. But what does social cohesion look like? How is it not a white woman in Minneapolis putting her life on the line to defend her black and brown neighbors against masked men there to satisfy anonymous lowlifes on social media? Or black and white Americans both insulting and shouting at the head of Border Patrol while he’s walking through Target with his face-covered underlings? You can also find it in the reaction to ICE raids in Los Angeles, which were condemned in one voice by a multiracial city where over 200 languages are spoken, in which Hispanics are a plurality, along with the city’s black mayor and the white governor of the state.

The right tells us multiculturalism doesn’t work, a view that is contradicted by the everyday experiences of Americans across the country and their shared resistance to the nativist project. And this is not even a red/blue divide. There has historically been very little organic anger at recent arrivals in places like Texas and Florida, with hostility to migrants being a new phenomenon following trends in national politics. The administration has been suing states to block in-state tuition for undocumented immigrants, sometimes working with Republican-led states to invalidate their own laws — policies that had drawn little controversy until recently. This is why so much right-wing rhetoric has to rely on the myth of immigrant crime. People whose brains have been turned to mush by internet memes are convinced they’re living in a hellscape, in direct contradiction to the views of the communities that they claim to be helping.

As with BLM, here there is a split between ideology and reality. The anti-police activists looked at inner-city violence and the state of race relations in America through the lens of the oppressor-oppressed framework and decided that law enforcement was the problem, no matter what the facts said. The nativist similarly starts with the conclusion that non-whites living in America is itself a problem, and then works backwards to enact a political agenda.

In both cases, reality refuses to cooperate. Law enforcement stepping back made inner city communities more dangerous rather than safer. Likewise, you will not deport your way into greater prosperity and a unified culture. Rather, the path the nativists have chosen requires a continuous war against American communities that do not want their masked agents there. A movement aiming for social cohesion in this way can produce nothing but a constant struggle, one with the regular threat of violence, between the federal government and its people whenever a Republican is in the White House.

But they will continue, since America as it exists is not what the nativists care about. They are motivated instead by a vision of demographic transformation, and if they can’t ever have a white America again – as it’s already too late for that – they’ll settle for the thrills that come with seeking and exercising power and inflicting pain on those they hate. It is up to us who believe in the real-life version of our country, its traditions, and the ideals that have kept people like them on the fringes to ultimately defeat this movement. May the memory of Renee Good provide inspiration as we fight to make sure she did not die in vain.