Alex Pretti and Renée Good died needlessly on the streets of Minneapolis. They had been poorly trained in “ICE watching,” the name that activists have given to the practice of blocking, impeding, harassing, and otherwise interfering with the execution of raids and other law enforcement actions by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
ICE watching involves using tactics such as “tracking ICE agents, filming arrests, and alerting other activists of enforcement actions,” writes Christina Buttons in City Journal.
What is also apparent from the groups engaged in recruiting and training protesters in “ICE watching” is that the activists are considered lambs being led to the slaughter. The tactics the activists are trained in are guaranteed to elicit a response by ICE and other law enforcement personnel. The fact that much of the ‘training” these activists undergo walks right up to the line of obstruction and even threatening law enforcement shows that the last thing the civilians are trained for is in recognizing boundaries and being cognizant of their personal safety.
Knowing when and how one’s actions cross the line and threaten law enforcement was not a lesson taught to Pretti or Good. That doesn’t excuse any potential misbehavior by law enforcement (I’ll wait for the investigation before passing judgment), but it shows how little the protest organizers cared about the lives of the activists who eagerly followed their directions through the dozens of signal chat channels the organizers used to communicate. Stephen Green and Matt Margolis have written extensively about the networking activities facilitated by the communications app.
City Journal investigated the group behind many of the signal chats in Minneapolis and found one group, created on Dec. 1, 2025, that manages a “massive network” of signal chats dedicated to monitoring and protesting ICE. “Defend 612” is the beating heart of the city’s resistance to federal immigration enforcement,” reports the Journal. (The group’s name refers to the Minneapolis area code.)
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.”
“Defend 612” used other outside groups, such as States at the Core (STAC) and Project R, to help with training activists in street tactics. STAC “trains community members to amplify local disputes into national stories,” according to the Journal. They once spun a real estate story in Tennessee into a fight against “white supremacy.” They are critical to the all-important task of controlling the narrative.
Project RP is another shadowy group that is a little more explicit in its obstruction tactics. Gabe Gonzalez, a Project RP organizer, said in 2017 that the organization was “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.”
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.”
The funding for “Defend 612.” STAC and Project RP come from the number-one black-money outfit in the U.S. The Arabella Advisors raised more than $1.5 billion to give to far-left candidates and causes in 2024. Arabella has since “rebranded” and is now going by “a different, sunnier, less threatening-sounding name,” according to the Vermont Community Newspaper Group (VCNG). Now known as “Sunflower Services,” they’re still raising hundreds of millions of dollars for liberal causes.
“Sunflower will be keeping Arabella’s same employees, same nonprofits, and same donors,” according to Executive Director of Americans for Public Trust Caitlin Sutherland. This “will not impact how much the individual nonprofits raise and spend.”
One of the major non-profits in Sunflower’s network is the Hopewell Fund. It’s Hopewell that is bankrolling the major signal chat groups and organizations that are sending untrained activists to confront armed agents in volatile situations.
After Good’s death, Defend 612 conducted a membership drive and had more than 1,000 signups. A similar effort after Pretti’s death had excellent results as well.
More protesters on the streets confronting ICE agents, interfering with their operations, and even threatening law enforcement will result in more tragedies. It’s inevitable. This, in turn, will result in more recruits leading to more dangerous confrontations.
This doesn’t seem to worry Defend 612 and other activist groups, who continue to urge protesters to confront ICE in the most provocative and dangerous way imaginable.
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