scholar_vit

Posted by Anna North

https://www.vox.com/policy/475166/nyc-universal-child-care-mamdani-hochul-new-york

https://www.vox.com/?p=475166

It looked like one of Zohran Mamdani’s most ambitious promises.

Between a $6 billion price tag and the complexity of hiring and training potentially thousands of educators, the mayoral candidate’s proposal to offer universal child care in New York City drew widespread skepticism during last year’s campaign. Though 71 percent of likely voters supported the proposal in one poll, only about 50 percent thought he could actually get it done. Annie Lowrey at The Atlantic wrote that it “would require a mammoth tax hike that Albany would need to approve, which it has shown no interest in doing.”

But barely a week into Mamdani’s term, he appeared with New York Gov. Kathy Hochul at a Brooklyn YMCA to announce a plan to expand care for nearly 100,000 children, backed by a $4.5 billion commitment to fund the program.

“I’ve been working on the issues for a couple of decades, and I can count on one hand the times in which a room and announcement was filled with so much support, and, frankly, optimism,” Raysa Rodriguez, executive director of the Citizens’ Committee for Children, a Manhattan-based advocacy group, told me.

It’s perhaps the clearest sign yet that the politics of child care have changed, with taxpayer-funded initiatives, once dismissed as socialist pipe dreams or even assaults on the American family, now finding support across the political spectrum.

“Mamdani caught child care as it is starting to have a real moment,” Elliot Haspel, a family policy expert and senior fellow at the think tank Capita, told me.

It’s not just New York. New Mexico made headlines last year as the first state to announce free, universal child care. Red states from Montana to Kentucky have also expanded their offerings. Even President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill included increased funding for child care, though critics cautioned that the expanded tax credits would do little for lower-income families.

New York City is still years away from anything approaching universal child care. And initiatives around the country will face obstacles from a lack of infrastructure to political fallout from Minnesota’s social-services fraud scandal.

Nonetheless, experts say it’s no accident that Mamdani was able to notch an early win on child care, and that lawmakers around the country may finally be willing to tackle an issue that’s plagued families for too long.

“It is something that is so broadly needed; it is so absurdly expensive, it is so difficult for people, not just who are lower-income, but even middle or upper-middle-income, to be able to afford, that it really resonates,” Haspel said.

Mamdani’s child care plan, explained

Building on New York City’s existing universal preschool program for 4-year-olds, Mamdani’s plan would expand preschool for 3-year-olds to make it truly universal. It would also create a new city program offering free care for 2-year-olds, called 2-Care, beginning with 2,000 children and offering a seat to any family that wants one within four years.

Under the plan, which still needs to be approved by the state legislature, Hochul will also work to offer universal preschool to all 4-year-olds in the state.

One reason Mamdani’s plan gained traction is that New York already has a long history of political organizing around child care. Its program for 4-year-olds, the signature achievement of Mayor Bill de Blasio, launched in 2014 and quickly became popular. A program for 3-year-olds followed, and though it was not yet truly universal, families began counting on it as a lifeline in a city where day care can cost as much as $4,000 a month.

“I knew people who were like, ‘I just have to get to 3-K or pre-K, and then I can stay in New York,’” Rebecca Bailin, executive director of the advocacy group New Yorkers United for Child Care, told me.

When Eric Adams became mayor in 2022, he canceled the efforts to make 3-K universal and began announcing cuts, citing concerns about program quality and unfilled seats in some neighborhoods. Parents revolted. Organizing thousands of families, New Yorkers United for Child Care launched a successful push to beat back the cuts, and in 2024 and 2025, every family who applied to 3-K eventually got a seat. Last year, the group announced a campaign focusing on 2-year-olds; Emmy Liss, who helped develop that campaign, now directs the city’s child care office. 

An early leader in universal preschool, New York has more to build on than many areas when it comes to expanding child care; some existing 3-K programs already offer care for 2-year-olds, for example, though they are not yet subsidized. The existence of an organized parent body that already sees the benefits of subsidized care for older children also provides momentum behind Mamdani’s plan.

It’s not just New York talking about child care 

The early success of the proposal is an example of an approach that can work nationwide, experts and advocates say. As Vox’s Rachel Cohen Booth has reported, voters overwhelmingly support making child care more accessible, but often don’t put a very high priority on the issue. Mamdani, however, made care part of a larger promise to make city life more affordable, a promise that resonated with New Yorkers, whether they had young children or not.

“I think that messaging is generalizable,” Haspel said. “You’re very much casting child care as essential to the good life, rather than just this instrumental thing that helps you attach a parent to the labor force.”

Since Mamdani’s victory, other candidates have emerged with similar platforms. Jason Esteves, a former Georgia state senator, has made universal child care part of his campaign for governor. Francesca Hong, a Democratic socialist running for governor of Wisconsin, has proposed universal child care alongside investments in public schools and elder care. “These types of social insurance programs are designed to ensure that working class people can not only get by, but be able to take care of themselves and their families in the ways that they see fit,” Hong told the Wisconsin Examiner.

Republican candidates have been less supportive of subsidized care, often proposing direct payments to families instead, said Elizabeth Palley, a professor of social work at Adelphi University who has studied child care policy. But even some red states are setting aside more public money for care.

Last year, Montana created a trust fund to help pay for child care and other programs. And in Texas, lawmakers added $100 million to the state budget for child care scholarships.

“We are seeing more states take action that acknowledges the current system is not working,” Haspel said. “The market isn’t capable of solving child care.”

Some of these efforts have already run into problems. In Montana, for example, Gov. Greg Gianforte last summer vetoed a bill to expand child care aid, arguing that the state trust fund should be enough — even though the fund only provides a fraction of the money necessary to care for the state’s kids. In New Mexico, promises of universal care have yet to become reality, with a shortage of day care centers calling into question when and whether every child will really get a spot. 

New York still needs to make its vision into reality

New York will face its own challenges. The money Hochul promised last week will only sustain the program for two years, after which it will need new sources of funding. Skeptics are absolutely right that care is expensive, especially for very young children who need low student-to-teacher ratios. 

The city will also have to expand on a patchwork infrastructure that includes public schools (some of which house pre-K and 3-K programs), larger day care centers, and smaller in-home providers, as well as a workforce with different skill sets and levels of professionalization. Mamdani hopes to raise wages for child care workers to match those of public school teachers — around $85,000 per year — but some workers now make as little as $25,000. Raising labor costs will also raise the costs of the program. 

“It’s paying the workforce, training the workforce, and then finding spaces for that workforce,” said Grace Bonilla, president and CEO of United Way of New York City, a nonprofit that focuses on low-income New Yorkers. “All of those are incredibly complicated infrastructure challenges.”

National headwinds could also put the program at risk. New York is one of five states whose child care funding the Trump administration has frozen in the wake of a viral video making unsubstantiated claims of day care fraud in Minnesota (that freeze has been blocked in court for now). Nick Shirley, the creator of the video, has criticized Mamdani’s child care plan, calling day care centers “a great place to launder money.”

It remains to be seen how much Shirley’s video will influence public opinions on child care nationwide, Haspel said, but “I don’t see it as something that’s going to kneecap Mamdani or Hochul’s efforts.”

And within New York, there’s a new level of optimism and excitement around the potential to solve a problem that for decades seemed intractable. “There’s an opportunity for New York to be a national model of what it looks like when local and state government work together to put children and families first,” Rodriguez said.

https://www.vox.com/policy/475166/nyc-universal-child-care-mamdani-hochul-new-york

https://www.vox.com/?p=475166

Posted by Katherine Kelaidis

https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/472863/pope-leo-catholics-maga-trump-resistance-politics

https://www.vox.com/?p=472863

Donald Trump’s second administration has been a reckoning for America, and perhaps especially for America’s Christians. From the deployment of masked paramilitary thugs to enforce immigration policy to the full-throated assault on transgender Americans to an unrelenting campaign against the rights of women and girls, reactionary Christianity is riding high. This agenda pursued by the administration has been made possible through 50 years of campaigning by the religious right, a coalition of white evangelical Protestants, conservative Catholics, and conservative Eastern Orthodox Christians and Jews that formed the core of the late 20th- and early 21st-century Republican Party.

But in this season of their triumph, a genuine faith-based opposition is finally beginning to break through.

The evidence of religious resistance first emerged on Inauguration Day. During the National Prayer Service at the National Cathedral, Mariann Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, DC, stared down from the pulpit at the new president and told him in a sturdy voice:

Let me make one final plea, Mr. President. … In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now.

These words, a public reminder that there is diversity within the Christian tradition with respect to political opinion, were only the beginning. The Episcopal Church has since ended its relationship with the US government’s refugee resettlement services over the administration’s controversial decision to admit Afrikaners as refugees.  

There appeared to be some coalition-building when a dozen or so religious organizations sued the administration over new policies that gave immigration officials more latitude in making arrests in and around houses of worship. And, in July, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, Sean Rowe, penned an op-ed at Religion News Service with the headline: “Once the church of presidents, the Episcopal Church must now be an engine of resistance.”

Yet all of this is happening within some of the most liberal denominations in the country. These are also denominations that have been in demographic decline for decades, and only 11 percent of the American public identifies with the mainline Protestant traditions. This is hardly encouraging for the possibility of a mainstream political movement or resistance.

Enter American Catholicism, a group that may redefine the role religion has played in politics and public life.

The bargain

The political power of the religious right depended in large part on religious conservatives agreeing to adopt the GOP’s positions on issues such as labor rights, immigration, environmental regulation, and even taxes. In exchange, the Republican Party embraced their reactionary consensus on certain social issues, largely related to gender and sexuality. First came opposition to abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment, later to marriage for same-sex couples, and today to transgender inclusion.

To understand why the compromise made sense for both sides, it is important to remember the seminal role that race, and particularly the civil rights movement, played in forming the religious right. The end of segregation in public schools galvanized white evangelical Southerners to reenter politics in the early 1970s. The first allies they found — allies that made them a national and not a regional force — were second-generation immigrants, whose parents had come to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century from southern and eastern Europe (and Ireland). These groups were, by a large margin, Catholic. 

Upon their arrival, these immigrants had not been considered “white.” After growing up largely in ethnic neighborhoods in northern cities like New York and Chicago, the children of these early 20th-century immigrants found economic prosperity in the post-World War II boom and through government programs such as the GI Bill. The only thing they now lacked was admission into the top tier of America’s racial hierarchy. The alliance with white evangelicals provided just that. For example, in the battles over school busing, white evangelicals — and the national media — publicly framed Catholics as fellow defenders of white neighborhood schools, treating them not as foreign outsiders but as part of a unified white Christian community.

The shared concern of evangelicals and Catholic “ethnics,” once very antagonistic American groups, was what we now euphemistically call “cultural anxiety,” a reaction to a rapidly changing and racially integrating society. Anyone surprised that the children of not-quite-white immigrants would join with white Southerners against Black progress must remember that racial tensions between newly arrived immigrants and Black Americans in northern cities were among the most intense conflicts in early 20th century America. The idea of Black Americans being able to replicate the rapid rise of the “newly white” was just as unacceptable to many of the descendents of these immigrants as it was for white Southerners, even if for different reasons. 

These founding foot soldiers of the religious right sought to slow social progress and turn back the clock on integration, and they were willing to trade away the economic policies that had brought them affluence. For a Republican Party that had long been shunned by these voters, the chance to win them was worth abandoning its once-enlightened, patrician stance on matters of personal conduct. The party that had once championed women’s suffrage and abolition, and tolerated reproductive rights, turned its back on all of that for this new base.

An uneasy alliance

It should go without saying that Christians are incredibly politically diverse. After all, there are over 2 billion Christians in the world, roughly a third of all human beings and 62 percent of Americans. If Christians all agreed on every public matter, politics as a competition of ideas would simply cease to exist in a number of countries.  But the success of the religious right has been so complete that their particular brand of reactionary Christianity has come to dominate the “Christian” label itself. In a strange way, conservative Catholics, through their alliance with evangelicals, ended up with more influence over public perception of Catholic teaching than the pope himself. But it was always a marriage where the threat of divorce lingered over the dinner table. 

For evangelicals, the gravitational center of the religious right, the grand compromise with the GOP was almost effortless. For Catholics, even the ones who eventually embraced it, the bargain was far messier, more conflicted, and never fully secure.

While the politics of evangelical Christians is by nature fluid and divided, Catholicism inherently demands greater ethical uniformity. And during the period in which the religious right was taking shape, Catholic social teaching was evolving in a direction that made this alliance particularly fraught. 

Since the middle of the 20th century, Catholic ethics globally has been increasingly concerned with poor people, with migrants, and with the responsibility of governments to provide justice to those on the margins. As the decades wore on, the Vatican’s teachings on social and economic justice were increasingly out of step with the GOP platform on almost every issue except abortion and marriage for same-sex couples. Catholic participation in the politics of the American religious right therefore relied on a certain level of inconsistency. The very people who demanded that Catholic, pro-abortion rights politicians such as Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi be denied communion often ignored Church teaching on the death penalty, the treatment of poor people, and immigration.

Importantly, the tension between the two traditions is not only one of abstract ideals. It also reflects the different demographics of their communities. Roman Catholicism in America is far more racially and ethnically diverse than evangelical Christianity, which might be why  the strident xenophobia of some white evangelicals is harder for American Catholics to embrace.

As a whole, Catholicism is increasingly concentrated in the Global South, with 72 percent of the world’s Catholics living in Latin America, Asia, or Africa. In the United States, it is increasingly a religion of new arrivals. A hundred years ago, immigrants to America came mostly from southern and eastern Europe, but that is no longer so. As a result of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, over the past 60 years, the largest share of immigrants coming to the United States are now arriving from Latin America and Asia. Of course, Latin America remains overwhelmingly Catholic (even in the face of recent declines), and, coincidentally, the two largest East Asian countries sending immigrants to the United States after China are Vietnam and the Philippines, both of which have substantial Catholic populations. 

These trends mean that, today, there are over 53 million adult Catholics in the United States, or approximately 20 percent of all Americans. While 70 percent of American evangelicals are white, just over half of American Catholics are. Notably, 40 percent of American Catholics are Latino. And while 12 percent of American evangelicals were born outside the United States, 29 percent of American Catholics were.

These Catholics, who are the present and future of the Catholic Church, are more likely to be someone, or know someone in their faith community, who is adversely affected by the MAGA paradigm. Plus, today’s American Catholics are more likely to feel solidarity with those in the Global South, because they are more likely to have familial ties there. For them, issues like immigration and foreign aid are often matters of life and death.

The simple fact is that changing demographics mean Catholics are being disproportionately affected by Trump’s draconian policies. Support and even silence are no longer a tenable position for the Catholic hierarchy and for an increasing number of Catholics, no matter how politically conservative they may be. Will they be loyal to their fellow Catholics or will they be auxiliary members of the new MAGA faith?

Remember that the original religious right offered their Catholic allies the promise of whiteness. Given the obvious historical parallel, one might think that a continuation of the alliance would allow newly arrived Latin American and Asian Catholics to benefit from the same deal that Italian and Polish Americans enjoyed. 

But today’s Catholics are not being made such an offer by politically ambitious evangelicals, who are much more concerned with immigration as an absolute evil than their forebearers were. Instead, anti-immigrant rhetoric occupies a more prominent place in America’s nationalist discourse than at any time since the 1920s. 

In the end, American evangelical Christianity is malleable to the cultural and political demands of the United States in any given historical moment. But Catholicism is different. The faith is ancient, its practice global, its people profoundly diverse, and its intellectual tradition one of growth and debate.

All this makes Catholicism a wild card in the shifting landscape of American alliances. And just as the alliance of evangelicals and conservative Catholics made the religious right, a new alliance of mainline Protestants and progressive and centrist Catholics could make a durable religious left. If this happens at the same time that enough conservative Catholics conclude that the compromises demanded by MAGA — especially on issues like immigration — are simply too much to accept, then American Catholicism may present a very different public face. And it will not be the ultra-conservative image promoted by the Catholic League and other auxiliaries of the religious right.

We may already be seeing the early outlines of such a transformation. 

What a religious realignment could look like

The pope from Chicago’s South Side may be the greatest symbol of that new alliance. Perhaps never before has a Pope challenged a US president as directly as Pope Leo XIV has Donald Trump.

“Jesus says very clearly, at the end of the world, we’re going to be asked…how did you receive the foreigner?” Leo, the first American-born pontiff, said in November, directly addressing the Trump administration’s immigration policies. “… And I think that there’s a deep reflection that needs to be made in terms of what’s happening.” These remarks are part of escalating criticism from the pope, which has strongly condemned  the “vilification” of immigrants, a not-so-subtle nod to the terror unfolding on the streets of many American cities

Leo’s words have been followed by deeds. The first American bishop appointed by the new pope is Bishop Michael Pham, the child of Vietnamese refugees. Pham will head the Diocese of San Diego, which has been among those worst affected by Trump’s war on immigrants. Pham has, in turn, been among the clergy who have attended immigration court hearings in support of those caught in the web of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And in December, Leo announced the replacement of New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the head of the New York Archdiocese and one of the most powerful and vocal proponents of a political ultra-conservative Catholicism. The new bishop, Ronald A. Hicks, is in many ways Dolan’s opposite and is widely known as a defender of immigrant communities.

This shift has broken part of the religious right’s spell. The idea that holding certain GOP- or MAGA-approved political views is synonymous with taking the “Christian” position is no longer tenable. The rhetoric once used to shame pro-abortion rights Catholics like Biden and Pelosi can now be applied equally to anti-immigrant Catholics such as Vice President JD Vance and Steve Bannon. After all, the pope has declared that support for immigrants and opposition to the death penalty are essential parts of a truly “pro-life” ethic. The tolerance for the old hypocrisy that made the religious right possible may be at an end. 

It’s true that some of the most reactionary Catholics in America, including Bannon, have rejected the papal intervention. Vance, American Catholicism’s most high-profile convert — who like many converts has a much more conservative political and theological outlook than many cradle Catholics — has tried to brush aside papal criticism. 

But Leo is the pope. And his increasingly strong stance on the dignity of immigrants demands that some American Catholics choose between obedience to the Church and loyalty to the Republican Party. For the first time in decades, there is space to imagine a genuine, nonpartisan, faith-based opposition to the religious right and its even more extreme successor in the MAGA faith. 

As in the movement’s original formation, any new coalition will require compromise, perhaps especially on issues related to gender and sexuality. But hurdles do not put such a deal off the table. The Catholic Church, internationally, is undeniably moving more toward the American mainline Protestant position on such issues and away from an increasingly hardline American evangelical perspective. And American Catholics have always had more diverse political views on these issues than their evangelical counterparts. This is to say, for a new coalition to form, compromise would be necessary but not impossible.

The religious right has defined American Christianity for half a century, reshaping politics, theology, and culture in its own image. But as Trump’s second administration pushes the coalition into increasingly extreme territory, new cracks are appearing. Mainline Protestants, though diminished, are asserting themselves, and Catholics are showing signs of resistance, a resistance that might even lead them into a new coalition. And if the history of the religious right teaches us anything, it is Catholics who are the key. A new faith-based opposition is still fragile, but if it can form, it could redefine both American Christianity and American politics.

https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/472863/pope-leo-catholics-maga-trump-resistance-politics

https://www.vox.com/?p=472863

Posted by Cameron Peters

https://www.vox.com/the-logoff-newsletter-trump/475275/donald-trump-justice-department-pam-bondi-investigations-powell-slotkin

https://www.vox.com/475275/the-logoff-template

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: President Donald Trump’s Justice Department is going after his enemies.

What’s happening? It’s a long list from this week alone: 

• On Sunday, we learned that the DOJ is investigating Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell in an attempt to coerce an interest rate cut.
• On Tuesday, a push to investigate the widow of Renee Good, 37, who was shot and killed by an ICE agent last week, resulted in a flurry of resignations by career DOJ officials.
• Today, the FBI raided a reporter’s home in Virginia and seized multiple devices; we also learned that all six congressional Democrats who appeared in a video reminding members of the military they can refuse unlawful orders are now under investigation.

As disparate as those headlines are, there’s a common thread: Under Trump, the DOJ — traditionally independent from the White House — is taking extraordinary steps to quash dissent and compel obedience.

Why does this matter? The Logoff has previously covered the dire economic implications of Trump’s Fed power grab; many of the others are best seen as attacks on free expression. They each matter on their own terms, but the big picture is that the Trump administration is weaponizing the DOJ at an alarming rate.

As my colleague Ian Millhiser reports, there’s also a second element: DOJ overreach is vandalizing the department’s credibility in court, potentially in a way that will last well after Trump’s time in office.

What’s the context? None of this behavior, I should stress, is new. Trump’s DOJ has been behaving egregiously since last year; lowlights, as far as the rule of law is concerned, include his (thus far unsuccessful) attempts at prosecuting former FBI director James Comey and New York state Attorney General Letitia James. 

But Trump clearly wants more: On Monday, we also learned that the president is increasingly frustrated with his attorney general, Pam Bondi, for not doing more to advance his priorities — including just this kind of weaponization.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

I come with reassuring news: You probably don’t have as much plastic in your body as you think. 

Specifically, researchers are now challenging the accuracy of a number of high-profile studies that found rising levels of microplastics in our brains, arteries, and elsewhere, as Vox reported yesterday in collaboration with The Guardian and Climate Desk.

That isn’t to say microplastics aren’t a problem or something to be aware of — but they’re maybe not something to panic about, either. Have a great evening, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow! 

https://www.vox.com/the-logoff-newsletter-trump/475275/donald-trump-justice-department-pam-bondi-investigations-powell-slotkin

https://www.vox.com/475275/the-logoff-template

Posted by Noel King

https://www.vox.com/podcasts/475248/ice-minneapolis-renee-good-immigrant-neighbors-protect-organize

https://www.vox.com/?p=475248

When Renee Good was shot by an ICE officer last week in Minnesota, it brought attention to the robust effort to combat US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the Twin Cities. Residents of Minneapolis and the surrounding areas are joining decentralized networks of activists who are committed to alerting their neighbors to ICE presence on their blocks.

Madison McVan, a reporter for the Minnesota Reformer, rode along with some of those activists to observe their tactics. The activists patrol their neighborhoods looking for ICE officers. When they find them, they alert their networks and tail the officers so their neighbors know where ICE is in the city. These patrols have led to tense standoffs with ICE officers and have drawn accusations of “domestic terrorism” from the Trump administration. 

McVan spoke with Today, Explained co-host Noel King about what she experienced while riding along with activists and how these networks sprang up in the first place. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

There’s much more in the full podcast. So listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

You’ve been riding along with Minneapolis residents who are tailing ICE as a form of resistance. What’s that been like?

It’s been intense. The idea is that if residents follow ICE and record them, that they can possibly prevent arrest from taking place at all.

And is it working?

The people I rode along with think it is working. They basically say if we follow ICE and we record them, they’re a lot less likely to get out of their cars and start asking people for their citizenship documentation and that kind of thing.

Tell me what you’ve experienced when you’ve been in the car with these people.

There’s usually one person driving and then a second person manning the phones. And so the passenger is following along with a group chat. They’re on a group call with other people in the neighborhood who are doing the same thing, so they can correspond about where they’re seeing ICE and notify each other when someone finds ICE and starts following the vehicle. 

This kind of plays out [in] a pattern that I’ve seen over and over now, which is that the observers start following an ICE vehicle. The ICE vehicle identifies themselves as federal officers by checking to see if they’re being followed. They turn into a side street or they do an aggressive maneuver, or they start weaving through parking lots — seeming to make sure they’re being followed. And then at some point they stop the vehicle, the observers stop behind them, the ICE agents get out of the car, surround the vehicle, and tell the observers to stop following them — that they’re obstructing ICE operations and that they may be arrested if they continue following.

When I was riding along with a pair of observers, they were following an ICE vehicle, and that exact thing happened. ICE officers got out of their vehicles, they surrounded the car, and one officer told the driver, stop following us or we’ll arrest you. The observers decided to continue following the car, and the ICE vehicle drove straight to the address of one of the observers that was in the car. So it seemed like they were doing some kind of, looking up of the identity of the person who owned the vehicle and then driving to their home address. 

The ICE vehicles stopped at the observer’s home and then kept going, and so the observers decided to continue following the vehicles. Two of the vehicles in the convoys split up and the observers decided to follow the third ICE car. As they were following that third ICE car, agents circled back to the observer’s house that they had just stopped in front of and went and banged on the door. The observer’s wife was home. She was terrified and she pretended she wasn’t home, and neighbors started coming out of their houses. Once they realized ICE was next door, [they started] blowing whistles, some people stopped and honked horns, and eventually the agents left. 

Much of the country was not paying attention to Minnesota before Renee Good was killed by an ICE agent last week. Was this going on before that?

There was an immigration enforcement surge starting in December, so that was when patrols really started ramping up. But even before that, people were organized in rapid response networks and starting when Trump took over for his second term. 

The idea behind the rapid response networks was that if we see an ICE action taking place, we can notify a bunch of people in the neighborhood, and the neighbors can respond to film ICE to inform people of their rights and to protest. But with this big surge in ICE agents arriving, they’ve kind of changed tactics. It seems like now the ICE agents are traveling in smaller groups; they’re conducting arrests quickly. They’re really trying to get in and out before people have time to respond en masse and start protesting. That’s why the rapid response networks have shifted more towards a proactive approach, following ICE agents in hopes of preventing raids or arrests before they even happen.

The Trump administration has suggested that the people doing this are organized activists who have, I don’t know, possibly mendacious goals. Tell me about them, though. Who are these people? How did they get organized?

Well, I think this is where it’s relevant to mention that Minneapolis police murdered George Floyd less than a mile from where an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good. So this neighborhood has been organized before. They’ve mobilized en masse against police brutality before. So I think that there’s already a culture — particularly in the south side of Minneapolis — of organization and protest.

The people who are doing this come from all walks of life. We’re seeing churches get involved in this. We’re seeing parents organize with people whose children go to the same schools, so that they can be standing outside during dismissal or so that they can escort immigrant parents when they’re dropping off their children at school. It’s people who have a lot of time and identify as activists, and it’s also people who are commuting to work in the suburbs saying, “Let me take a different route today to see if I spot ICE, and I’ll let you know if I see anything.”

Do you know if Renee Good was one of these people?

We don’t know the details of her involvement in any of these networks. The people I talked to who lived in her neighborhood, who were involved in some of these rapid response groups, said they did not know her. But it’s important to note that it’s possible she could have been in the group and they wouldn’t have known, because everyone uses anonymous nicknames. It’s possible she was there using an anonymous nickname, but I haven’t seen any evidence of that yet.

After Renee Good was killed by the ICE agent, it has seemed like things in Minneapolis have become pretty chaotic. How have these people changed their tactics since she was killed? Are they doing anything differently?

I think the killing of Renee Good has really only strengthened the resolve of a lot of the people who are already involved in this, and it’s driven more people to try to join the movement. I think a lot of people who are protesting ICE or who are going out on patrols are asking themselves what they’re willing to risk for this movement, knowing that someone was shot while protesting ICE.

You’re a journalist, so of course you’re sort of looking at all sides of this debate in Minneapolis. What do you make of the argument from ICE agents that this is threatening — that people following them in cars feels like a threat and that it shouldn’t be happening?

Well, I think that’s part of the point. I think the people on the ground here, many of them feel that this is an occupied city, and they want to show that they’re unhappy with that. They want to try to disrupt ICE operations within the bounds of the law to protect their immigrant neighbors. That’s how they see it. So I’m not surprised that ICE agents feel threatened by this. I think that’s part of the goal.

That’s very interesting, because as you know, the Trump administration has tried to paint Renee Good and others like her as a danger to the city itself. Kristi Noem called Renee Good a “domestic terrorist”. Vice President JD Vance has called this “classic terrorism.” 

How do you make sense of statements like that based on what you’re seeing and the activists who are doing this kind of work?

I think it’s important to remember that at least the activists I’ve been with are committed to doing this within the bounds of the law. So it’s really this gray area between what’s considered obstruction in a legal sense and what is practically obstruction of ICE’s work. Honking horns and following them is not physically blocking them from making an arrest, but it certainly discourages them from doing so. That’s kind of where a lot of the action is happening. 

And when it comes to Renee Good, it’s unclear what exactly her involvement may have been in any kind of organized movement to protest. But I think what her actions show is that the people of Minneapolis collectively — at least most of them, it feels like — have decided that when they see ICE, they’re taking action in whatever form feels right for them.

https://www.vox.com/podcasts/475248/ice-minneapolis-renee-good-immigrant-neighbors-protect-organize

https://www.vox.com/?p=475248