Amanda Moore is a journalist who has been covering the rise of ICE across the US for months, writing news articles and posting clips of confrontations to her social media feeds and, in the process, becoming one of the most prominent chroniclers of Trump’s immigration crackdown from the front lines. Amanda will be filing stories for Mother Jones over the coming weeks and months about ICE and its operations, and I spoke to her as she arrived on the ground in the immediate aftermath of the shooting of Renee Nicole Good, the 37-year-old mother who was killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis on Wednesday, sparking mass protests.
Below is our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity.
James West: Tell me exactly where you are, what you’re seeing, and what the mood is like on the ground.
Amanda Moore: I’m here outside of the Whipple Building. It’s a federal building. It’s where ICE has been staging since they got here. As you can see, there are now a bunch of federal Border Patrol agents. This morning, there were some protests that were larger than the previous ones that have been at the building, and protesters actually worked to block the driveway. So now we can see all of the Border Patrol agents are here because they came out to guard the facility.
Amanda, you’ve been around the country for months covering escalating tactics used by ICE at these types of facilities, and you’re drawing comparisons between what you’re seeing there and other facilities like Broadview in Chicago.
“Once again, I was getting tear-gassed at 7 o’clock in the morning.”
The first month at Broadview was extremely violent. People were being tear-gassed by 7 o’clock in the morning. They were picking up protesters and flinging them to the ground like rag dolls. And today, here at the Whipple Building, reminded me of Broadview. Once again, I was getting tear-gassed at 7 o’clock in the morning. You know, protesters were not really prepared for what was coming in the same way. They don’t expect it so early in the morning. And eventually, in Broadview, that kind of petered off because local police took over, and they no longer had Border Patrol out front. So as long as Border Patrol is guarding the facility, it seems to be a pretty similar pattern.
One of the accelerants on the ground where you’ve been previously, Amanda, seems to be whenever the Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino rocks up. What vibe does he bring into a scene anytime you’re on the ground?
Well, Bovino is the show, right? So when he comes into town, all the cameras are on him, and all the protesters know who he is—or if they don’t know, they learn very, very fast. And so he’s kind of in charge, and it’s the culture of Border Patrol under his direction that leads to some of that violence that we experience.
With Bovino himself, there’s obviously now a court record in place where even the courts aren’t believing the types of stories that federal law enforcement is bringing about some of these protesters.
“If a rock is kicked…in Bovino’s direction, then Tricia McLaughlin will tweet that video and say a rock was thrown.”
Yeah. In Chicago, in federal court, the judges began to just completely discredit everything that Border Patrol had to say. And so it’s this escalation that’s based on a reality that does not exist—one that’s not reflected in any of the video, photos, or the eyewitness experiences. If a rock is kicked on the ground in Bovino’s direction, then [DHS spokesperson] Tricia McLaughlin will tweet that video and say a rock was thrown—and that’s clearly not the case.
This scene is one that attracts counter-protesters as well as pretty hardcore protesters against ICE. When these two forces meet, what do you typically see, and what should people be prepared to see as this type of confrontation unfolds over the next couple of days?
We actually had some pro-ICE protesters here this morning. They came. One had an American flag. I believe one of them is still standing around in front of Border Patrol somewhere. And he was very direct. He said, we’ve already executed one of you, and basically, we’ll do it again.
A lot of the pro-ICE protesters, they seem to be here to antagonize, not necessarily to really show support. It’s a lot of instigation, and many times it’s being done under the veneer of journalism, which, of course, that’s not.
Tell me how you prepare for these types of excursions into the fray when you’ve been covering this. What are some of the challenges? What should our viewers expect to see from you in the coming days as you are on the ground in Minneapolis?
A primary challenge would be tear gas. There’s a lot of it—they really go through it—and pepper balls. So you have to have safety gear. You have to have goggles and masks and helmets and all that stuff. But a real issue, I think, is going to be when you’re at these events, every agent in front of you has a gun, and you can guess that several people behind you have guns as well—especially when they’re in the neighborhoods, when protests pop up during a raid, not necessarily at the facility.
And [Minnesota] is an open-carry state, so that comes into play here in a way it didn’t necessarily in most of Chicago. But there’s really only so much you can do. The agents can be very friendly to the press. They can be very willing to talk, or they can shoot you with a pepper ball when you try to ask them a question—you can never predict. So it’s a little bit of a guessing game.
