The federal government’s reported investigation into Minneapolis resident Renee Good’s activist ties suggests the Trump administration is headed in a direction that’s as unconstitutional as it is unsurprising. Although the First Amendment protects our freedom of association, there’s an awful history of federal and state governments using a person’s associations to prosecute them — or merely smear them in public.
Trump called Good and her wife “professional agitators” and said his administration would “find out who’s paying for” such protests.
Sometimes the government insists a protester must be associated with an activist organization, implying the person couldn’t have independently arrived at their position and become motivated enough to protest. And if there is, in fact, evidence that a particular protester is associated with an activist organization, then the government often pivots its argument to suggest the person’s protest is neither authentic nor heartfelt, but compelled — and perhaps even mercenary.
Federal government officials, including President Donald Trump, immediately labeled Good, a 37-year-old wife and mother, a “violent rioter” and a “domestic terrorist” after Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer Jonathan Ross shot her dead on Wednesday, Jan. 7. Then, on Sunday, Trump called Good and her wife, Becca Good, “professional agitators.” He said his administration would “find out who’s paying for” such protests. On Monday, The New York Times, citing people familiar with the situation, reported that federal officials are looking into the Goods’ ties to activist groups.
On Tuesday, the Times reported that six federal prosecutors in Minnesota had resigned “over the Justice Department’s push to investigate the widow of a woman killed by an ICE agent and the department’s reluctance to investigate the shooter,” citing people with knowledge of the prosecutors’ decisions.
It shouldn’t have to be said, but activism — including the kind that opposes certain laws of the United States or the agenda of the U.S. president — is not a crime. And any federal investigation snooping into politically inclined groups the Goods may have communicated with should be seen as an attempt to chill Americans’ right to organize politically.
Positive political change doesn’t emerge from disconnected, unorganized people. It has always involved, among other things, organization, strategy, effective communication and, yes, money.
Dombrowski v. Pfister, a Supreme Court case that followed the 1963 arrests of Louisianans affiliated with the pro-integration Southern Conference Educational Fund, is one of multiple cases that resulted in the high court decrying the chilling effect of government officials criminalizing people’s political associations. Ben Smith, an attorney who was arrested and had his files seized in the raid that set off the case, was also a co-founder of the ACLU of Louisiana.
“People need to quit demonstrating, quit yelling at law enforcement, challenging law enforcement, and begin to get civil.”
Rep. Roger Williams, R-Texas
Louisiana ACLU President Alanah Odoms told me on Wednesday that just as we’re seeing now with the Goods, the smear campaign against Smith focused on “his lawful organizing activity,” adding that federal authorities attempted “to cast lawful activism as suspicion and reframe political engagement as a threat.” The goal, Odoms said, “was really about deterrence, to kill this kind of activism.”
Such is the goal now that Americans are organizing against ICE. “People need to quit demonstrating, quit yelling at law enforcement, challenging law enforcement, and begin to get civil,” Rep. Roger Williams, R-Texas, told NewsNation two days after Ross killed Good.
Now the administration is reportedly looking into what organizations the Goods may have communicated with.
There are many precedents to such surveillance. You’d be hard pressed to name a historical organization or leader associated with any kind of freedom or labor movement that wasn’t monitored or even infiltrated by government agents — or at least openly denounced by government officials as un-American.
Alabama, which wrongly accused the NAACP of organizing the Montgomery bus boycott and rightly linked the NAACP to a Black woman integrating the University of Alabama, demanded a list of all of the organization’s dues-paying members. The NAACP refused, and soon found itself banned in the state for almost a decade before the Supreme Court allowed it to resume its activities.
Suspicion of political activists and the belief that their protests are inauthentic is probably why Rosa Parks, whose civil disobedience kicked off the bus boycott, tends to be mythically described as a tired old woman and not the 42-year-old political activist she was. She’d been an organizer for years, and the summer before she refused to move for a white man, she spent two weeks at the Highlander Folk School, a training ground for labor and civil rights activists.
Parks’ connections to activist groups — and her preparation for the moment she was wrongly ordered to move — didn’t make her refusal to move insincere; those connections and her preparation made her refusal effective. But a full acknowledgment of her previous political involvement would shatter the comforting myth that justice is ushered in by well-intended individuals and force us to admit that it happens through the power of organization.
CNN reported this week that Renee Good served on the board of her son’s school, which had provided links to documents that encouraged people to monitor ICE and directed them to places where they could train to do so.
Timothy Zick, author of “Managed Dissent: The Law of Public Protest,” was one of four legal experts who told CNN that the linked documents describe nonviolent tactics used by generations of U.S. protesters. Zick called it “Authoritarianism 101” to “blame the dissenters and the activists for causing their own death.”
It’s not enough, apparently, for the Trump administration to blame Good for being killed that day. It’s now moved into the role of thought police.
