In less than a month, two “ICE watchers” have been shot and killed by immigration enforcement agents in Minneapolis. On January 24, a federal agent shot and killed 37-year-old Alex Pretti, a Veterans Affairs ICU nurse. His death follows that of Renée Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, who was killed on January 7.
Both Pretti and Good participated in “ICE watching,” an anti-immigration-enforcement tactic that can involve tracking ICE agents, filming arrests, and alerting other activists of enforcement actions. While participants frame ICE watching as a “community safety” measure, these tactics often place untrained civilians in direct, high-stakes confrontation with armed federal agents.
In Minneapolis, one key organizer of these activities is “Defend the 612.” The group, the membership of which apparently included Renee Good, oversees a massive network of Signal chats dedicated to monitoring and protesting ICE activity. It has become the beating heart of the city’s resistance to federal immigration enforcement. (The group’s name refers to the Minneapolis area code.)
City Journal reviewed Defend the 612’s trainings, entered its Signal network, and traced its organizational support. Our reporting reveals that members and related officials have encouraged protesters to impede law enforcement; pushed civilians toward legally and physically risky confrontations; and helped mobilize a counterprotest that turned violent.
The group’s growth threatens to stoke the city’s already-raging fire.
Defend the 612 lists ICE-watch trainings on its website, sometimes many per week. These trainings instruct attendees how to identify, document, and alert others to immigration enforcement, and to relay information through neighborhood-based Signal networks.
Some sessions are led by Defend the 612 organizers, while others are taught by outside groups such as States at the Core (STAC) and Project RP. None of these groups responded to City Journal’s request for comment.
STAC was co-founded in 2024 by organizer Jill Garvey. The group trains community members to amplify local disputes into national stories. In rural Tennessee, for example, STAC helped residents spin a real estate project into an international story about “white nationalists.” STAC operates within the largest funding networks in progressive politics. It is fiscally sponsored by the Hopewell Fund, part of the Arabella Advisors “dark money” network.
Garvey previously worked with Protect RP (Rogers Park), a Chicago-based group that developed an early and widely emulated ICE-watching template in 2017. She has turned that operational blueprint into a national strategy; STAC claims to have helped activists implement ICE-watch frameworks in 20 states since early 2025.
Project RP, which cohosts trainings with STAC, has used a template centered on direct interference with enforcement. A Project RP organizer, Gabe Gonzalez, explained in 2017 that the group’s activities were “about interfering with [immigration enforcement], confusing them, slowing them down so they can’t take more people, and doing it so well that they never want to come back.” Last November, he reiterated the group’s objective to make immigration enforcement “uncomfortable and inefficient.”
A version of this model reached Minneapolis in December 2025. On January 8, Garvey joined “ICE Watch Welcome and Orientation,” a training event hosted by Defend the 612 organizer and longtime activist Andrew Fahlstrom. On the call, Garvey said that she had worked with “organizers in Minneapolis over the last five weeks,” suggesting she may have been working with Defend the 612, which was founded on December 1, 2025.
While Defend the 612’s trainings are less explicitly supportive of enforcement interference than Project RP’s, they nevertheless encourage protesters to disrupt officers. At the same training, for example, Lex Horan, an instructor, encouraged participants to make ICE’s work “too expensive,” “too difficult,” and “too annoying” to continue. Horan recounted having blown a whistle at a protest, which, she claimed, allowed the person ICE was questioning to “g[e]t away.”
Later at the same meeting, Minneapolis City Council Member Dan Engelhart (who did not respond to a comment request), removed all doubt about the group’s mission. Defend the 612’s goal, he said, is to “slow [law enforcement actions] down and cost them money.”
Defend the 612 uses Signal, an end-to-end encrypted messaging platform, to bring these tactics from the classroom to the streets. The group operates an extensive network of neighborhood- and task-based Signal chats, where members monitor ICE activity, train fellow activists, and coordinate protests.
Until recent publicity prompted the group to change tactics, new members faced a straightforward onboarding process. Prospective members signed up through Defend the 612’s website and received an email directing them to join one of the “Neighborhood Networks”—large Signal chats that direct participants to a list of more than 150 neighborhood- and task-based groups across Minnesota.
After joining a neighborhood’s listed chat, administrators contact participants and ask them to choose from a menu of additional, unlisted role-based chats specific to that neighborhood, such as the “Non-Cooperation Team” (which “build[s] a larger strategy to resist ICE and authoritarianism”) and “Patrol Team” (which “[c]reates systems of safety” around “ICE hotspots”). Depending on the role, these chats are either vetted—meaning Defend the 612 administrators screen prospective group members—or unvetted. In unvetted chats, administrators and others encourage participants to use nicknames and avoid discussing illegal activity.
The most active unvetted chats are dedicated to “rapid response” at the neighborhood level. In these discussions, participants track suspected ICE agents—by car and on foot—and post suspected officers’ locations, photos, and license plate numbers. Alongside the text chat, a dispatcher hosts a live group phone call, employing paramilitary jargon—such as “copy,” “roger,” “eyes on,” and “keep the air clear”—to coordinate surveillance of ICE agents.
Each group’s Signal description contains reference links that help Defend the 612 members better surveil federal immigration enforcement. Some chats link to instruction documents that train members how, for example, to follow suspected ICE officers’ vehicles. Others link to crowdsourced logs, which include a running database of more than 4,800 license plates of confirmed and suspected ICE vehicles; a log of deportation-related travel; and a list of nearly 70 hotels where ICE agents have been known to stay.
Many neighborhoods have a “vetted” chat for members involved in “mutual aid”: coordinating grocery delivery, transportation, and rental assistance for immigrants. (Advocates generally used euphemisms, such as “vulnerable neighbors,” to avoid referring to immigrants’ legal status in communications.) In some cases, these members discussed how to bring supplies to immigrants’ homes to reduce the risk of detection. Members have discussed the tactic of writing down immigrants’ addresses on paper, not their phones, and eating the paper if confronted by law enforcement.
Another vetted chat, “Communications,” is dedicated to crafting an “external narrative-shaping strategy” for the ICE-watch movement. Members characterized their media work as “propaganda” and insisted on the need to “maintain control of your narratives.” To that end, participants discussed the need to condition their speech to journalists on retaining editorial control over how stories are written.
This arrangement runs counter to standard newsroom best practice. But chat participants claimed that the Minnesota Reformer—“an independent, nonprofit news” outlet whose parent organization was funded by the Arabella Advisors–managed Hopewell Fund—made an exception. In one exchange in the Communications chat, an account that appeared to belong to activist Elle Neubauer described allowing a Minnesota Reformer reporter to accompany him as he followed ICE agents in his vehicle, for a story published January 13. Neubauer claimed the reporter had agreed in advance to give activists final say over the article, which he said was read aloud to them line by line, revised at their request, and would have been pulled entirely on request. Members later debated whether the piece amounted to “good propaganda or bad propaganda,” warning that “propaganda will win or lose the fight and support for it.”
“We stand by our story. We absolutely dispute the characterization,” Reformer Editor-in-Chief J. Patrick Coolican told City Journal. “We offered to call and read their quotes and the context prior to publication to check for accuracy and their personal safety, which is standard practice on a story like this. We assured the sources their participation was entirely up to them. We explicitly told them we would not send them a draft of the story.” Neubauer did not respond to a request for comment.
In other Signal groups, members discuss how best to disrupt federal immigration enforcement. Members encouraged other participants to memorize the hotline of the National Lawyers Guild—“the nation’s oldest and largest progressive bar association”—for free legal services. One participant described getting arrested as a tool to divert agents from “vulnerable community members,” and encouraged other participants “to be super annoying and waste” law enforcement’s “time and resources.”
Members repeatedly referenced the “Simple Sabotage Field Manual,” an activist handbook that members used to generate ways to impede ICE. Members discussed throwing urine at agents, praising one such incident as “mvp” behavior. A daily update account called “The Report Card” encouraged participants to “annoy” agents with constant noise. They view “noise making and interrupting their meals and bathroom breaks” as essential, noting these tactics “serve a critical role in draining their morale.”
These Signal networks have also functioned as an organizing hub for an aggressive counterprotest. In the days leading up to a demonstration by right-wing influencer Jake Lang in Minneapolis earlier this month, members in Defend the 612’s “Phillips and Powderhorn” chat circulated a post about a “defensive counteraction.” They posted an image of a hanging Klansman and tactical guidelines instructing members to mask up, wear goggles, and not film attendees. One accompanying graphic marked as “false” the statement, “Nonviolence is the only strategy.”
(City Journal’s pseudonymous account made the suggestion that the demonstrators take a nonviolent approach. An administrator removed our account from the group.)
Other members defended the inclusion of militant advocates by citing “St. Paul’s Principles”—a framework that forbids the denunciation of fellow activists’ tactics. Following a violent clash that Saturday, group members circulated videos of Lang being dragged into a mob and struck over the head, gloating over the images as evidence that their counterprotest had been effective.
Such aggressive protest tactics can have lethal consequences. Defend the 612 members witnessed as much when Renee Good—whose name and likeness appeared on a profile in one of its Signal chats—was killed by an ICE officer after driving her car in his vicinity and refusing to heed his instructions.
For Defend the 612 organizers, Good’s death was a recruiting opportunity. The evening Good died, Defend the 612 held an “emergency vigil,” during which flyers were distributed directing attendees to join the group. At Defend the 612’s training session the following day, Fahlstrom reported about 1,000 new signups.
At that training, organizers described federal immigration enforcement in charged terms, characterizing the legal detentions of illegal immigrants as “kidnappings” and “abductions,” and portraying Minneapolis as being under federal “occupation” and facing “[r]ising authoritarianism.”
In another training on Defend the 612’s website, Garvey insisted that federal immigration enforcement has nothing to do with crime or “an invasion.” Instead, she suggested, the White House was simply “scapegoat[ing] vulnerable people” as part of an “escalation of authoritarianism.” This framing effectively provides a rationale for ignoring officers’ commands during field encounters.
Fahlstrom described Good’s death as an “assassination.” Another organizer noted that Good was on “driving patrol” at the time she died. Footage from various angles shows Good in her car blocking traffic and honking her horn. Her partner, Becca Good, was outside the vehicle filming and speaking with ICE agent Jonathan Ross. In the footage, Renee appears to be smiling and ignoring orders from approaching agents. She then attempted to drive the vehicle before she was shot. Afterwards, Becca—who told Renee to drive—can be heard screaming, “Why did you have real bullets?”
Defense lawyer Kira Kelley spoke during the Defend the 612 training and downplayed the danger associated with “driving patrols.” “We saw with Renee’s tragic assassination that driving patrols do carry some physical risk,” she said, but “The biggest risk of all is to do nothing.”
Kelley, who did not respond to a comment request, advised participants to roll up their windows, remain silent, and refuse to open doors if agents approach. She did not clearly explain, however, that refusal to comply with lawful commands during an enforcement action can constitute interference. Rather than telling participants to refrain from all illegal activity, she advised them not to discuss illegal activity in Signal chats.
Absent from the Defend the 612 training was any instruction to put one’s personal safety first. Instead, Lex Horan asked volunteers to “stretch” their willingness to take risks.
Such risk-taking contributed to Good’s death. Had she complied with officers’ commands—regardless of their merits—she would almost certainly still be alive.
The death of Alex Pretti last weekend is only the latest tragedy to emerge from a model that places untrained civilians in the middle of high-stakes federal operations. While official accounts and bystander videos of the Saturday shooting at 26th Street and Nicollet Avenue offer conflicting narratives about the split-second escalation, the outcome highlights the extreme physical risk of inserting oneself into the immediate perimeter of armed agents.
Following the shooting, the Defend the 612 network has not slowed down. Instead, organizers are leveraging the fatality to fuel a new wave of activity, urging more people to enter the same dangerous settings that claimed Pretti’s life.
Rather than pausing to reassess the safety of these tactics, Defend the 612 launched a series of 90-minute trainings. On Sunday, less than 24 hours after the shooting, an organizer sent an emergency message to the group’s Signal chats. “The only way these senseless murders, detentions and acts of violence will stop,” the message read, “is if tens and thousands [sic] of us are on the streets protecting each other.”
This cycle reveals the core strategy of Defend the 612’s leadership: using casualties as a catalyst for further escalation. Organizers continue to push volunteers into unpredictable scenes, ensuring continued confrontations between residents and federal agents, while the professional architects of the chaos remain shielded from the consequences.
