On Wednesday, ICE agents in Minneapolis shot and killed Renee Nicole Good.
Witnesses said she was trying to be a legal observer for her neighbors. Vice President JD Vance claims the woman aimed her car at the agent and accelerated.
That night, protests and vigils popped up all across the U.S., including here in Milwaukee.
WUWM’s Jimmy Gutierrez shares this audio postcard from the Milwaukee protest, with comments from one of the local legal observers, Nat Godley.
Editor's note: We recommend listening to this story.
Transcript:
My name is Nat Godley and I work for Milwaukee Turners. One of my roles there is to coordinate the legal observer program. So what we do is go out, particularly to protests, news conferences, those kinds of things as a neutral party. And our role is to ensure that people's rights are guaranteed and protected.
In particular, the right to freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and the freedom to petition the government for the redress of grievances, which is kind of funky and old sounding, but that's because it's taken directly from the First Amendment.
I saw almost 300 people this past Wednesday night [at the protest]. Coming out to affirm their right to protest against something absolutely awful that they had witnessed, and to say that they're not going to stand for that kind of thing in their city or elsewhere in the country.
People like those 300 people in the street [that] night are bringing the United States closer to the ideal that was articulated in 1776. No matter how imperfect it might have been at the time, no matter all the flaws that we've had along the way — we know about civil rights, we know about slavery, as this glaring omission, we know about the mistreatment of Indigenous peoples.
I think as Americans, and speaking as an American who became an American deliberately, we should commit to trying to bring America closer to those ideals. And I think that that's what was going on [Wednesday] night – people were shocked at something that they saw as being counter to what they thought America should be, and wanted to bring America closer to what they thought it should be. And further from the version of it that was demonstrated in Minneapolis [Wednesday].
