WASHINGTON — They were sitting in a hearing room at the Minnesota State Capitol here on Friday when the congressman took the call. Twenty-eight members of Congress had flown in from across the country to hear what happens when your federal government decides to terrorize you in your own neighborhood. An hour in, and already the testimony was making grown men look at their shoes.
Americans calling 911 for protection from the federal agents who are supposed to protect them. American citizens arrested and held for nine hours and told by their captors: “You guys gotta stop obstructing us. That’s why that lesbian bitch is dead.”
Rep. James Walkinshaw (D-VA) stepped out between witnesses. Smart guy. Knows the law. The kind who actually read the Constitution instead of just waving it around like a rally prop.
He’d just met with Governor Tim Walz, who told him something that cut through all the Department of Homeland Security’s horseshit about public safety and fighting fraud: What’s happening in Minnesota isn’t about immigration enforcement. It’s about political retribution. Trump believes he won Minnesota three times, and he’s punishing Minnesotans because they had the nerve to prove him wrong at the ballot box.
Three times Trump lost here. Three times Minnesota told him to get lost. And now 2,000 federal agents — masked, unidentified, operating like some third-world secret police — are making the Twin Cities pay for their electoral choices.
On January 7, one of these agents, a ten-year ICE veteran named Jonathan Ross, shot and killed a 37-year-old mother of three named Renee Good. She was a poet and writer, lived a few blocks from where she died, described by her mother as “one of the kindest people I’ve ever known.” She’d dropped her six-year-old son at school that morning. In her car were the kid’s stuffed animals.
The feds say she tried to run them over. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, who saw the video, called that claim “bullshit” and told ICE to “get the fuck out of Minneapolis.”
Walkinshaw knows what comes next because he’s studied history instead of trying to erase it.
“Google the Bijon Guy Sar case,” Walkinshaw said. That’s the one where US Park Police shot an unarmed man in Virginia. Trump’s Justice Department didn’t charge the officers. But a grand jury in Fairfax County did, and those officers got booked into the Adult Detention Center just like any other accused criminals.
See, the Trump administration is telling ICE agents they have total immunity. They’re promising them they can do whatever they want, to whoever they want, and nobody can touch them.
That’s a lie.
State and local prosecutors can bring charges. And there will be civil lawsuits. There’s already one in New York — an ICE agent assaulted a woman outside a courthouse.When she filed suit, she didn’t even know the agent’s name.
Now she does. Because 4,500 ICE agent names got leaked to the ICE List.
That list is out there now. All those agents who thought they were operating in the shadows, promised immunity by political hacks who won’t be around when the bills come due — their names are public. And Americans with good lawyers and righteous anger are coming for them.
“If those agents think they have absolute and complete immunity with respect to those lawsuits,” Walkinshaw said, “they should get their own lawyers and talk to their own lawyers who will tell them that ain’t the case.”
Here’s what else the congressman knows: Schools have gone into lockdown. Businesses have closed. Minnesota police have already worked more than 3,000 hours of overtime dealing with the chaos ICE is causing, at a cost of more than $2 million to taxpayers. Citizens unsure whether they’re witnessing an ICE arrest or a kidnapping are calling 911.
And in Washington, Senate Democrats were negotiating to fund ICE. Their big reform ideas so far? Body cameras and de-escalation training, according to Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), who was righteously dragged on the Internet for his comments. Body cameras that can be turned off. Training that can be ignored.
Walkinshaw isn’t buying it. He wants restrictions with teeth: Agents must identify themselves, no more secret police. Warrants required before detaining people. Use of force standards that are actually enforced, with discipline for violations.
But he knows the Republicans won’t vote for any of that because Trump would throw a tantrum. Which means the appropriations bill won’t get Democratic votes.
Meanwhile, the whole apparatus is rotted through. “This entire apparatus needs to be taken down and rebuilt in a way that is humane and consistent with our Constitution and our civil liberties,” Walkinshaw told me.
What the hearing made clear is that Trump created this chaos, and he could end it today by withdrawing the agents. But he won’t. Because the cruelty is the point. The chaos is the point. The terror is the point.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey was clear: There’s one simple action Trump could take to restore order and peace. Withdraw the thousands of federal agents who are creating the chaos and the violence.
Instead, Trump threatened Thursday to invoke the Insurrection Act. To send in troops against American citizens protesting the killing of an American citizen by federal agents.
You want to know what authoritarianism looks like? It looks like masked federal agents with no name tags shooting mothers in their cars. It looks like American citizens detained without charges and told the woman they killed deserved it for being a lesbian. It looks like a city where the first recorded homicide of 2026 was committed by a federal immigration officer.
The congressman and 27 of his colleagues came to Minnesota to send a message: If the Trump administration won’t provide accountability now, a future Democratic Congress will. There will be hearings. There will be subpoenas.
And for the agents who think promises of immunity from Stephen Miller are worth the paper they’re not written on: There will be lawsuits. There will be state prosecutors. There will be accountability.
Renee Good’s name will be remembered. So will the names of the 4,500 agents on that list.
