As deaths mount nationwide, pressure grows on city leaders to confront a federal agency operating with impunity.
By Rosie Knight
On Jan. 7, 2026, Minneapolis resident Renee Good was killed in cold blood by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent now identified as Jonathan Ross. He has not been charged with any crime, and it seems unlikely he will be at any time in the future. It was one of eleven shootings by Border Patrol and ICE since September 2025 at the time of writing. While community members in Los Angeles and San Pedro have been begging for concrete action against this federal force of violent kidnappers and would-be killers who have been stationed in our city for months, there has been none. But now that another innocent person has been murdered by the American state in cold blood, it is time for Los Angeles’ leaders to stand up and do something.
Before we get into any ancillary discourse about all the ways Los Angeles’ local and city governing bodies have failed them, feel free to check my previous reporting, social media presence, or general work. I have written about many of those problems previously, https://tinyurl.com/less-lethal-ammunition. But today I don’t write to highlight or challenge. Today, I am making a demand: Karen Bass and the rest of LA’s leaders need to stand up to ICE and make them leave our city. That is the simplest, only moderate, and centrist response at this point.
While Karen Bass did demand that ICE leave, saying after their first assault on the historic fashion district that their reasons for the raids were “an outright lie,” no further action seemed to be able to be taken. That is the nature of the current system, but that means our leaders need to start thinking outside of it. It is not an exaggeration to say that the fact that nothing was physically or even politically done to stop their attacks allowed ICE to make Los Angeles and the Harbor Area / Terminal Island / San Pedro their home. Now, eight months later, we are still dealing with hundreds of kidnappings a week. But it is not our leaders who are constitutionally protecting their citizens, but instead their neighbors. And Karen Bass should have demanded that ICE leave LA and Terminal Island after a local woman and activist, Amanda Trebach, was kidnapped at gunpoint, after an ICE agent attempted to use their vehicle to run her down.
Trebach was rescued and released after three days thanks to intense online activism. Bass and her team have put out strongly worded condemnations of the ICE agents who have been attacking the city and decried them as “UnAmerican.” But she appears to have little power to stop this deadly invasion, even after the gunpoint kidnapping of a U.S. citizen doing constitutionally protected work to protect her neighbors. That shows if anything, just how little power local authorities have against federal power when following accepted rules of play. That’s why we need more decisive and realistic action from our leaders now!
That assault and kidnapping occurred last year, and was an early warning bell for just how out of control and violent ICE would become, even against U.S. citizens who dared to stand up to them, like Trebach. Unfortunately, despite those strongly worded sentiments, a lack of actionable steps and concrete leadership from Bass and other LA politicians has allowed this violence and brutality to spread across the country.
With the murder of Renee Good — which won’t be investigated by the Justice Department, setting up a precedent for more killings of protestors and those who constitutionally watch ICE and BP — and the powerful protests in Minnesota, the rest of the country finally seems to be taking notice.
But as many activists and community members have mentioned, this was far from the first murder at the hands of an ICE agent in the last month. On New Year’s Eve, as Keith Porter was getting ready to enter 2026 with his family and loved ones, he was murdered in Northridge by an off-duty ICE agent with a history of extreme racism — Keith Porter was a Black man — gun charges, and child abuse.
This “law enforcement agency,” as they’re now being called, is made up of the worst of the worst: untrained abusers, fired cops, and security who lost their jobs for being too violent. Ironically, the allegedly “dangerous criminals” that ICE has been rounding up — while kidnapping our neighbors and tamale guys — are basically non-existent, with only 5% of those being picked up having criminal convictions.
Here in LA, we’re being held under occupation, and our leaders are allowing it because they want to secure police and Department of Homeland Security support and financing for the Olympics. Capitalism has caused our leaders to put money, prestige and profit over the people they are supposed to be protecting, safeguarding, and who most importantly elected them. ICE has only existed since 2003. A majority of Americans now favor its abolition. This isn’t even about imagining something better; it’s about failing an open-book exam. This is fascism, and it is on our streets right now. Outside your door.
In her famously posthumously published diary, the 14-year-old Jewish Holocaust victim Anne Frank wrote, “terrible things are happening outside. At any time of night and day, poor, helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. They’re allowed to take only a knapsack and a little cash with them, and even then, they’re robbed of these possessions on the way. Families are torn apart; men, women and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared. Women return from shopping to find their houses sealed, their families gone.”
This is our EVERY DAY experience in Los Angeles right now — except people are not allowed to take cash, belongings, or bags with them, or like in Minnesota, recently senior citizens seized only half-clothed — and have been for months. And our leaders aren’t doing anything about it. ICE has been dragging people from homes in Echo Park and Silver Lake without any warrants or identification. We are here. If you are asking what you would have done in the lead-up to the Holocaust, now you know. But it’s not too late to start.
The people of Los Angeles are already fighting back — you can check out orgs to support and access help at https://tinyurl.com/rln-ice-raids — and we will continue to. It’s about time that our leaders stood beside us. Not with well-written internet posts or calls for calm and peace. But by standing at the frontlines of our neighborhoods and the common areas of our cities, where our communities are being torn apart every single day. At the front doors of homes where seniors and minors are being manhandled by violent brutes. Take a stand. Now.
RIP to Keith Porter, Renee Good, and the millions of others killed by American state violence here and around the rest of the world. Solidarity is key, all our struggles are interconnected, and this is a call to both our LEADERS and READERS: Neutrality is no longer enough. Protest! Condemn ICE! Work to Abolish ICE! Get them out of our city, or we will get you the fuck out with them.