The Patriot Post® · ICE Watch Comes Under Scrutiny
When Renee Good made her fatal mistake of not following the orders of the ICE agents who told her to step out of her car, Democrats and the Leftmedia portrayed her as an innocent bystander. It wasn’t until later that we all found out she was a trained “legal observer” for ICE Watch, a shadowy group dedicated to impeding the progress of immigration enforcement, such as they were doing in the Twin Cities area in the wake of the Somali daycare scandal.
Surprisingly, we learned about the Goods’ involvement with the ICE Watch cause early on, thanks to reporting from the New York Post, which noted that Renee and Rebecca Good learned of the group through the school their child attended. Southside Family Charter School was described as “unabashedly dedicated to social justice education,” according to its founder.
But to hear CNN tell it, ICE Watch is just a group of concerned citizens. “‘I mean, gosh, we’re like, moms in Toyota Corollas,’ said one Minneapolis-area activist who participates in anti-ICE patrols and declined to give her name because she feared retribution from the administration.”
If it were a court case, though, this could be construed as obstruction, as their job isn’t simply to observe but to interfere. “The group aims to do one or both of two things: Make illegal alien roundups harder and provoke headline-grabbing confrontations that ‘discredit’ law enforcement,” said our Nate Jackson on Monday. “And it’s pushing for more recruits after Good’s death.”
Jill Garvey, a trainer for virtual “ICE Watch and Community Defense” programs, insists that they “emphasize documenting ICE’s actions, supporting those being targeted and deescalating to mitigate violence.”
“It’s also not about interference,” she adds. “We’re pretty explicit that we don’t recommend interference. We don’t recommend putting your body between an ICE agent and their target. And certainly, don’t put your hands on any federal agent — that’s incredibly dangerous.” Garvey also conceded that “most people in these situations panic.”
The Minneapolis incident has resulted in a surge of interest in ICE resistance, with training classes reportedly “at capacity,” but that claim about the training not being about interference falls on its face, according to Sarah Bedford of the Washington Examiner. “Immigration authorities have struggled with the spread of ICE Watch networks across the country, some of which used phone apps to track the movement of officers,” wrote Bedford. “Apple and Google removed the most widely used ICE tracking app in October, but crowdsourced networks, such as the one in Minneapolis, continue to complicate immigration enforcement.”
National Review’s Haley Strack also tells us, “The [MN Ice Watch] Instagram account also recently promoted the ‘Stop ICE Plate Tracker,’ just one of many ICE-tracker services that ‘catalogues vehicles identified in public spaces used in raids.’ Although last year the Trump administration pressured Apple to remove from its App Store some of the most popular ICE-tracker apps, many are still available. A cursory search of tracking services after the ICE shooting in Minneapolis on Wednesday shows how activists are using them to monitor officers.”
This understandably frustrates the administration. "The use of apps to monitor the routines, locations, and happenings of DHS law enforcement strongly resemble obstruction of justice,“ said Assistant DHS Secretary Tricia McLaughlin. "This type of garbage is contributing to our officers facing a more than 1,300% increase in assaults and a more than 8,000% increase in death threats against them as they arrest the worst of the worst offenders, including murderers, sexual predators, terrorists, and gang members.”
Funding has also become a concern. CNN reported that a Bluesky appeal by activist Nick Benson raised enough to fund over 400 dash cams for ICE Watch and others to record encounters. But as columnist Gary Bauer points out, that’s small potatoes. “ICE Watch is part of the vast left-wing network we reported on last week. This network thrives in Democrat-run cities. It is funded largely by communist Chinese operatives, and its purpose is to drive radical socialists, Marxists, and anarchists into the streets in open rebellion against the United States.”
The far-left astroturf group Indivisible is one source of funding for the protests, but other groups considered more mainstream have joined in, at least locally. “A major protest, billed as ‘ICE out of Minnesota,’ in late December was organized by local arms of the national AFL-CIO and the Service Employees International Union, as well as the Minneapolis Federation of Educators, a teachers’ union in the state. Thousands of people joined the protest,” said Bedford. “Unidos MN, which has in recent years taken funding from the Sixteen Thirty Fund, a prominent liberal dark money group, and from a massive progressive advocacy group called the All Hands on Deck Network, was also listed as a sponsor of the protest.”
As written elsewhere, the unrest in Minneapolis spread across the country last weekend, as numerous protests were held around the nation, attempting to create the impression that public opinion is turning against ICE in particular and law enforcement in general. It’s a shame because protesters used to cooperate to some degree with law enforcement, said former Fort Worth Police Chief Jeffrey Halstead to Fox News, but it appears these radical groups are no longer interested in helping out by keeping their protests peaceful.
Given our current trajectory of left-wing opposition to enforcing our immigration law and the money being donated to the cause, it’s only a matter of time before the Left gets its next martyr.