Weekend downtown protests encapsulate growing national outrage at recent ICE shootings

Local News

More anti-ICE protests were held Saturday in Boston after multiple recent ICE-involved shootings in Minnesota and Oregon.

By Darin Zullo

January 11, 2026 | 11:14 AM

2 minutes to read

Hundreds of anti-ICE demonstrators gathered downtown Saturday for Boston’s third protest since Renee Nicole Good was fatally shot Wednesday by a federal officer in Minneapolis.

The protest was held by the LUCE Immigrant Justice Network of MA at the JFK Federal Building in Government Center to “mourn the lives lost to ICE and denounce ICE violence in our neighborhoods,” event organizers wrote in a flyer.

Organizers read aloud names of people they said had been killed by federal immigration authorities and called for an end to people in the community being detained and deported, The Boston Globe reported.

“Every day, more and more children are getting ripped out of the hands of their mothers, and grandparents are getting body slammed onto the pavement,” Hector Soares, a speaker at the protest, said to the crowd. “It is becoming increasingly obvious that we can’t sit and wait for this to resolve itself.”

The demonstrators at LUCE’s protest were joined by attendees from an earlier gathering hosted by Massachusetts Peace Action outside the State House, according to the Globe. Along with protesting the recent ICE-involved shootings in Minnesota and Portland, Ore., they denounced the Trump administration’s recent foreign intervention in Venezuela, which included seizing Nicolas Maduro, the country’s president.

Saturday’s protest follows a similar demonstration held Thursday by the Party for Socialism and Liberation, where nearly 1,000 people marched from Boston Common to City Hall Plaza in outrage at Good’s death. Kojo Achaempong, a speaker at that rally, compared the incident to the death of George Floyd, who was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020, about a mile from where Good was shot.

“I remember six years ago when they killed George Floyd. They said he was a danger to the community,” Achaempong said. “Today, they try to claim that Renee Nicole Good was somehow a threat to those ICE officers.”

Since Good’s death, the Trump administration has characterized her as an agitator who committed an “act of domestic terrorism.” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, along with other state officials, condemned that characterization, calling it “garbage.”

“They are already trying to spin this as an action of self-defense,” Frey said. “Having seen the video myself, I wanna tell everybody directly, that is bullshit.”