In the wake of the shooting of reported Minnesota ICE Watch “warrior” Renee Nicole Good, Democrats and leftist activists immediately rushed to her defense, dubbing her a “legal observer.”
By invoking this title, Trump administration critics cast Good not only as an innocent bystander, but one enjoying specially protected status, wantonly murdered by the very anti-immigrant army whose presumed misconduct she was there to record. They persistently pursue this narrative rather than acknowledge Good’s role as an instigator who impeded a federal law enforcement operation and disobeyed officers’ commands, before threatening to run one over with her SUV while fleeing, and tragically lost her life for it.
This deception has a purpose that transcends cynical attempts to spark a George Floyd 2.0 conflagration and delegitimize nationwide surges of ICE officers — surges compelled by Democrats’ sanctuary policies. It has the effect of covering up the fact that Good needlessly died, in effect, as a pawn of a revolutionary anti-American movement. This movement not only fuels an insurrection against authorities laboring to reverse the effects of President Biden’s open border policies; it also seeks to eviscerate our sovereignty and bring the republic to its knees.
In truth, a “legal observer” is not the equivalent of a poll watcher for protests. Observers need not have obtained formal certification, let alone a J.D. More saliently, they are not neutral. Nor are they necessarily opposed to breaking the law.
Observation is a practice consistently and historically used to advance the causes of the radical left. The networks that observers serve promote incendiary actions against authorities. And, unsurprisingly, there has been a dramatic increase in threats to and crimes committed against said authorities as those networks have mushroomed during the second Trump administration.
The “legal observer” designation, in turn, may be used as a sword and shield against an unsuspecting and unknowing public by those rebelling against a government they revile.
The National Lawyers Guild (NLG), historically identified as the legal battering ram for the Communist Party in the U.S., and long a defender of left-wing revolutionary causes and individuals, is most closely associated with legal observation. It notes on its website that related practices originated in the Black Panthers’ organizing of “armed citizens’ patrols … to monitor the behavior of law enforcement officers” in Oakland during the 1960s.
The Guild adopted parts of these “copwatch” activities to standardize a legal observer program, training like-minded leftists to monitor and report alleged police misconduct during protests, and to deter police actions they oppose.
To the extent all that legal observers affiliated with NLG or otherwise are doing is chronicling ICE enforcement actions, they may be serving a reprehensible cause, supporting agitators engaging in despicable acts, and backing illegal aliens over American citizens — to our great detriment. But their conduct is arguably legal provided they are not materially supporting criminals.
The issue then is when observation becomes action — a distinction the anti-ICE cadre seems to want us to gloss over in the case of Good and more broadly.
The “copwatch” practice, from which legal observation derives, persists today, including via the Minnesota ICE Watch group with which Good was reportedly affiliated. According to social media postings, that self-described “autonomous collective” exists not only for the purpose of “documenting” and “archiving” but “resisting … ICE, Police and all Colonial Militarized Regimes” (emphasis added). It goes without saying that such groups are not opposed to police misconduct but policing itself.
In turn, a review of Minnesota ICE Watch’s Instagram account shows the insurgency group disseminating materials advocating for: surveilling ICE agents, sharing actionable intelligence about their movements and operations, and tipping off illegal aliens to impending raids; taking “direct action” against authorities to prevent such a “kidnapping,” including harboring those being pursued in one’s car or a “lockable room,” “block[ing] … kidnappers cars,” or forming a human wall of “white witnesses;” and forcibly “de-arresting” those in custody. Each such “de-arrest” constitutes a “micro-intifada which can spread and inspire others until we may finally shake off this noxious ruling order all together,” according to an ICE Watch manual.
That is, the group with which Good was affiliated believes in taking actions, including knowingly illegal ones, to aid and abet illegal aliens and obstruct law enforcement from doing its job as part of a radical and revolutionary movement against government authorities writ large.
Such copwatch groups have sprung up in cities across the country as the Trump administration has moved from closing our borders to securing our interior. Consequently, there has been a surge of anti-ICE activism and lawless interference in the agency’s operations. Is it any wonder that the Department of Homeland Security has reported a 1,300 percent increase in assaults, a 3,200 percent increase in vehicular attacks, and an 8,000 percent increase in death threats against ICE officers?
Law enforcement, already forced to engage in dangerous operations compelled by left-wing politicians’ opening of our borders and shielding of those who flooded them, have had those operations made infinitely more challenging and dangerous because of the networks fueling these figures.
Meanwhile, these very networks, by provoking confrontations and filming them, self-evidently seek to stoke and exploit tragedies to create a further backlash — to delegitimize and kill efforts to restore American sovereignty, and law and order itself.
Those emphasizing Renee Nicole Good’s “legal observer” status are shamefully trying to blind the American people to these nefarious machinations. She was a victim of them.
