The controlled opposition reveals itself through terroristic means. 

As millions of others do around the country and the world, we mourn the loss of Renee Nicole Good. Good was murdered yesterday while responding to an ongoing deportation effort. This violence is part of a larger State terror campaign in Minneapolis, which constitutes over 1,500 Enforcement and Removal Officers (EROs) and a total force of around 2,100 federal agents.¹ She will forever be a martyr in the ongoing movement against ICE and the State. 

This Event represented a radical rupture in the ongoing movement. It was previously unthinkable, or at least unheard of, that an activist would be killed simply for documenting ongoing federal raids. Of course, we had seen brutalizations, violent arrests, and court procedures for activists following ICE in their cars. We had also seen demonstrators routinely pummeled by tear gas, plastic bullets and batons before being dragged into shadowy detention centers. Yet this represented something altogether new, especially as mediations emerged between the activist core and migrants (the subjects of prior Events) themselves. For the opportune constructors of movement language, the murder of Silverio Villegas González last September could at least be chalked up to DHS’s claim he is not a legal resident, an “Other”. Further reports justified his murder by alleging he had cocaine in his system.² Separate from the sensible American citizen, it was levied that his resistance warranted lethal force in which the Americans supposedly did not. In the murders of 32 others in detention, this same language was used to force the public to forget them all as aliens, criminals, and so on.³ Faceless humans without causes. These carefully knitted boundaries quickly patched up what otherwise may have been explosive.

The sheer panic that ensued this time was evidenced by the scrambling of the bourgeoisie  an hour after Good’s State execution, as detractors sprung out of the woodwork to ascribe sensible language to what had transpired. We are sure many reading this have already seen Trump’s response, where he declared that Good had attempted to run an agent over with her car.⁴ Many liberals clung to this narrative, wishing, hoping Good had been a bad actor, before several videos sprang up which immediately contradicted Trump’s claim. Good then, for the vast majority of people, could not be described as a criminal, migrant, or outside agitator. Thus it made the public further spiral.

In all, the nature of this Event, its accessibility to the public, and context of the recent siege in Minneapolis sent shockwaves around the country in immediacy. This was nothing ordinary, one could feel it in their bones. Thousands of activists and workers around our city piled on top of each other, snowballing into open-ended questions that had no answer. This was State violence that had no solution in the truth of this world. Here, even compliant, peaceful activism prescribed by liberal NGOs was weaponized by the State. 

The decision of the liberal bourgeoisie represented here became that of the grave robber. If they let Renee Nicole Good rest in the entire truth of what occurred, of State violence in its entirety, they risked fanning the flames of insurrectionary multitudes. Sensing the parallels between this Event and that of police violence in the past, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey quickly spoke out, emboldening his language enough to sedate the masses. The respectable career Centrist of Capital who typically has nothing to say at all times, Frey suavely demanded in an impassioned response that ICE “Get the fuck” out of his city.⁵ Despite his very Minneapolis Police cordoning off an angry crowd to help murderous federal agents break from the scene, he managed to appear as the very difference between a strong, righteous locality and the overbearing, burdensome State apparatus. It didn’t matter that Frey would do nothing of substance; He simply needed to reinforce this narrative.

Likewise, the controlled opposition of the anti-ICE movement simply had to reinforce its own narrative. Last night, at least 3 large vigils were held around the city of Chicago. As typical with these events, they capitalize on the violence of the Event itself, the murder of Renee Nicole Good, while offering the working class no possible option forward. Good herself was rather an afterthought for the partisans of these events, and one could be mistaken that this was just another movement march, one of dozens that the Leninist-NGO marriage had concocted since Trump took office or even October 7th. Speakers all offered the same solution for the critical mass: “To get organized”. What this entails did not matter, as the purpose was the abstraction.

At least 7 or 8 Socialist newspapers were hawked around as Leninists, Dengists, Maoists, Hoxhaists, and Democratic Socialists vied for mass attention. Each special interest organization carried their own personable gimmick to the facade. Cameras flashed, reporters accosted their camera crews. All of this was supported by a large convoy of the Chicago Police Department, the same representatives of State violence that had killed Renee Nicole Good, the same ones that barricaded the angry crowd from the culprit who pulled the trigger. The emphasis from the Socialists, as ever, was on abstract local “People Power”, “Getting Organized”, and ultimately, just as Jacob Frey implied, giving the masses rhetoric while assuring the absence of anything at all.

We can only do Renee Nicole Good justice if we pinpoint the precise cause of her execution. It was not abstract evil or a merely federal overreach, but a concoction of State violence predicated on Capital’s own contradictions. Currently, that is the emphasis of the national labor supply, surplus labor, and corrective measures to divide the proletariat as the rate of profit continues to fall. We must recognize all of these things, or else Renee, Silverio, and all of the martyrs have been murdered with no Sun on the horizon. In a literal sense, the controlled opposition joins with the local State forces to offer us an absence of outcomes. We reject this for our survival and liberation, in life and in death.

The task of communists at this moment is to offer an alternative pole of possibilities, to raise the contradictions which both the federal campaign and the controlled opposition rests on. This has been done in our city in the past year, but ultimately it has not been enough. As we continue to push onward, we reflect on our structures and decision-making in order to parse out new syntheses. Here’s to a better world than this one. 

Glory to All of the Martyrs

Nicole Renee Good

Silverio Villegas González

Genry Ruiz Guillén

Serawit Gezahegn Dejene

Maksym Chernyak

Juan Alexis Tineo-Martinez

Brayan Garzón-Rayo

Nhon Ngoc Nguyen

Marie Ange Blaise

Abelardo Avellaneda Delgado

Jesus Molina-Veya

Johnny Noviello

Isidro Pérez

Tien Xuan Phan

Chaofeng Ge

Lorenzo Antonio Batrez Vargas

Oscar Rascon Duarte

Santos Banegas Reyes

Ismael Ayala-Uribe

Norlan Guzman-Fuentes

Miguel Ángel García Medina

Huabing Xie

Leo Cruz-Silva

Hasan Ali Moh’D Saleh

Josué Castro Rivera

Gabriel Garcia Aviles

Kai Yin Wong

Francisco Gaspar-Andrés

Pete Sumalo Montejo

Shiraz Fatehali Sachwani

Jean Wilson Brutus

Fouad Saeed Abdulkadir

Delvin Francisco Rodriguez

Nenko Stanev Gantchev

And all those others facing State brutality.

Long Live Revolution.

1. Kelly, B., & Uren, A. (2026, January 6). Where Has ICE Been Operating in Twin Cities Since Escalation by Trump Administration?. Bring Me the News. https://bringmethenews.com/minnesota-news/where-has-ice-been-operating-in-twin-cities-since-escalation-against-immigrants-by-trump-administration  ↩︎
2. Schuba, T., & Sherry, S. (2025, November 17). Silverio Villegas González, Killed By ICE Agent in Suburban Chicago, Had Cocaine in System, Autopsy Shows. Chicago Sun-Times. https://chicago.suntimes.com/the-watchdogs/2025/11/17/silverio-villegas-gonzalez-ice-dhs-trump-midway-blitz-shooting-homicide-franklin-park-chicago  ↩︎
3. Singh, M., Marcos, M., & Simmonds, C. (2026, January 4). 2025 Was Ice’s Deadliest Year in Two Decades. Here Are the 32 People Who Died in Custody. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/usimmigration  ↩︎
4. Henderson, E. (2026, January 7). Trump Claims Woman “Ran Over” ICE Agent in Minneapolis Before He Fatally Shot Her; Video Contradicts Claim. CBS News. https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/trump-claims-woman-ran-over-ice-agent-minneapolis/  ↩︎
5. Clifford, A. (2026, January 8). Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey tears into DHS and ICE after woman is fatally shot by agent. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/07/us/video/acfreymn ↩︎