It took years to rebuild trust in Minneapolis after George Floyd. Then ICE came.

This story was originally published by The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America. Sign up for its newsletters here.

When Muhammad Abdul-Ahad got an alert about a shooting in the Central neighborhood of Minneapolis last week, he initially thought it was another community gun violence incident. Abdul-Ahad runs TOUCH Outreach, a grassroots violence intervention organization whose team works in Central to resolve conflicts before they escalate into deadly violence. 

About 20 minutes later, the alert updated: officer-involved shooting. Abdul-Ahad started putting the pieces together in his head. “When it said law enforcement, we automatically thought, ICE,” he said.

He assembled his team of outreach workers and violence interrupters and headed to the scene. Once they arrived, reality hit. An ICE agent had shot and killed a 37-year-old Minneapolis resident, Renee Nicole Good, during a federal operation on Portland Avenue. Good, a mother of three and a U.S. citizen, had just dropped her youngest child off at school before the fatal encounter. 

By the time TOUCH reached the spot where she was killed, protesters were already gathered. Federal officials, though, had left the scene, including Jonathan Ross, the ICE officer who fired the shot. The anger from demonstrators quickly turned toward Minneapolis police officers, even though the MPD had no role in the shooting. 

In that moment, Abdul-Ahad couldn’t help but think back to more than five years ago, when the murder of George Floyd less than a mile away sent the city into months of protest and upheaval. “It’s triggering and traumatizing to the entire city of Minneapolis,” he said, noting that a law enforcement shooting so close to where Floyd was killed tore open old wounds and cast doubt over how much healing has actually taken place. 

“Something like this happening… being done by an ICE agent, it can take us back,” he said. 

In the years since Floyd’s murder, Minneapolis has worked to repair both public safety and community trust. After a surge in violence immediately after his killing,  homicides fell more than 30 percent between 2021 and 2025, and shootings hit record lows, particularly on the North Side. But community leaders worry that this latest high-profile shooting could erode some of the fragile gains in violence reduction and trust between residents and law enforcement. 

Related: Tensions over ICE flare at Greater Minnesota council meetings

“It raises a lot of concerns, especially about what the role of local government is when you basically have a federal imposition happening,” said Sasha Cotton, who previously ran the city’s Office of Violence Prevention. With city leaders scrambling to respond, she warned, the disruption risks pulling attention away from daily work that keeps neighborhoods safe. “The city is in such chaos trying to manage this problem that the day-to-day functions of public safety might not be tended to as well as they should be.” 

Since Good’s shooting, protesters have taken to the streets in Minneapolis and other cities across the country, condemning the killing, calling for an end to ICE, and demanding that the agent be prosecuted. The investigation itself has been fraught. While the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension was initially expected to assist, the FBI soon announced it would handle the case alone. At the same time, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison have opened parallel state and local reviews, underscoring the jurisdictional uncertainty surrounding the case. 

On Monday, Minnesota officials filed a federal lawsuit against the Trump Administration to stop the ICE operation in the state, calling it dangerous, unconstitutional, and politically driven. “The unlawful deployment of thousands of armed, masked, and poorly trained federal agents is hurting Minnesota,” Ellison said at a press conference. “People are being racially profiled, harassed, terrorized, and assaulted.”

For the Rev. Jerry McAfee, a longtime community leader on the North Side, the shooting widened a crack that had begun forming. He said ICE’s presence in the city had spread fear long before Good was killed — specifically within the Somali immigrant community — and that fear was already straining relationships with law enforcement. “People were scared to come outside, and I think that was by design,” McAfee said. “They want people to be scared of them.” 

For ordinary residents, the distinction between federal and local law enforcement often collapses in moments like this. Thaddeus Johnson, a criminologist at Georgia State University and a former police officer, said local police frequently become a stand-in for broader frustration with government power. That confusion can quickly destroy trust. 

“People might hesitate before they call 911,” Johnson said. “They won’t know who they’re going to get. Will it be local police, ICE, or the federal government? And if you don’t know who’s showing up, you start asking yourself if it’s even safe to call.” 

Locally, police and city officials have publicly criticized the ICE deployments, warning that a deadly shooting involving ICE officers could happen, and they have vehemently pushed back on the Trump administration’s narrative about the circumstances around the shooting. 

Related: Free speech advocates see a pattern as ICE protesters, observers face violence in Minnesota

“I want to point out the juxtaposition, the difference between how our Minneapolis police officers are conducting themselves — short on numbers, they are incredibly tired — and they’re still doing an exceptional job, and how different that is from the way that these ICE agents and federal agencies are conducting themselves,” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey told CBS Minnesota.

Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara added that the department has a responsibility to examine the situation objectively, especially when something of this magnitude occurs. “Are we contributing to the problem, or… are we employing practices or methods that are unjustifiably placing the men and women who work for us, as well as the community, unjustifiably at risk without actually having a public safety benefit?” he said. 

The Mayor’s Office and the Police Department did not respond to a request for comment. 

The ramped-up fear on the streets is why activists and violence intervention workers say their presence matters in these moments, even as the risk grows. “We are from these communities. We have to show up,” Abdul-Ahad said. “If we’re out here every day and then a crisis like this happens, and we don’t show up, what does that say about our work? This is the time for us to be there.” 

As far as ICE goes, there’s no expectation they’ll slow down after this shooting. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced on Sunday that “hundreds” of additional federal agents are being sent to the city. 

“ICE ain’t going nowhere,” McAfee said. “They’re gonna pump it up.”

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