We are Not OK
A Minneapolis Evaluator's Response to the ICE Infiltration
We are not OK.
I live in Minneapolis, and my neighbors are being taken. Federal agents in masks patrol our streets in unmarked vehicles. They circle schools waiting for parents. They surround restaurants. When community members blow whistles to alert each other, agents follow them home.
On January 7, an ICE agent shot Renee Good three times while she sat in her car observing an enforcement operation in South Minneapolis. After he shot her the agent muttered “fucking bitch.” Good was a poet, a mother, a resident doing what residents do when armed masked agents flood their neighborhood: she was watching. She could have been me.
The agent who killed her has been called a hero by the Secretary of Homeland Security. Good has been called a domestic terrorist. The federal government sent hundreds more agents in response. When state investigators tried to examine the shooting, the FBI blocked them. When members of Congress tried to visit ICE facilities, they were turned away.
This is what it feels like to live inside the normalization of state violence.
We are afraid to speak. We are afraid to observe. We are afraid to be seen as the wrong kind of person in the wrong place at the wrong time. The fear is the point.
The Evaluator’s Paradox in Real Time
Evaluators are trained in a particular kind of attention. We observe without interfering. We document without judgment. We maintain professional distance so our findings are credible, so our presence doesn’t distort what we’re measuring, so we can see clearly.
Renee Good was practicing that same attention when she was shot. She was observing an ICE operation in her neighborhood. She had a whistle. She was documenting what was happening. She was bearing witness.
The Secretary of Homeland Security called her a domestic terrorist. The agent who killed her has been defended as a hero acting in self-defense. The federal government sent hundreds more agents in response.
This is the evaluator’s paradox made literal: the act of observation has been criminalized. Bearing witness has become grounds for execution. The professional stance we’re trained to maintain—neutral observer, detached documenter—is now defined as obstruction, as terrorism, as justification for lethal force.
What do evaluators do when the system we’re supposed to assess declares that watching is a crime?
When Neutrality Becomes Complicity
Evaluation ethics emphasize “do no harm.” We design studies that protect participant confidentiality. We obtain informed consent. We avoid methods that burden vulnerable populations. We maintain independence from funders so our findings aren’t compromised. We position ourselves as neutral observers whose job is to see clearly, not to take sides.
Buddhist practice teaches a similar discipline. Right Mindfulness means observing without immediate reaction or judgment. Nonjudgmental awareness creates the conditions for seeing what is actually there rather than what we expect or fear. The practice is to notice without rushing to fix, to be present to what is without imposing our frameworks too quickly.
Both traditions rest on the assumption that neutrality serves truth. That distance creates clarity. That the observer who does not intervene can see more accurately than one who is implicated.
But what happens when the system being observed is hunting people? When federal agents circle schools and restaurants, when they follow observers home, when they shoot a woman for watching and call it self-defense?
Neutrality in that context is not clarity. It is consent.
The Zen Peacemakers, a contemporary Buddhist order, teach three tenets: Not Knowing, Bearing Witness, Taking Action. The sequence matters. We approach with openness, we stay present to what we see, and then we respond from that presence. Bearing Witness is not an end in itself. It leads to Taking Action. To witness harm and do nothing is not bearing witness at all.
This is the question facing evaluators in Minneapolis right now. We have been trained to observe, to document, to produce findings for others to act on. We have been taught that our value lies in professional distance, in credibility that comes from not being personally invested in outcomes.
But when the act of observation becomes fatal, when the systems designed to create accountability are systematically dismantled, when staying silent means accepting that armed agents can kill observers and face no consequences, professional distance becomes professional cowardice.
We are being asked to choose order over justice. To prefer the absence of tension over the presence of accountability. To maintain our neutral stance while our neighbors are hunted.
That is not neutrality. That is complicity.
What Bearing Witness Demands
The Zen Peacemakers developed their three tenets through direct engagement with suffering: street retreats with homeless populations, bearing witness at Auschwitz, working in contexts where observation without response would be obscene. Not Knowing, Bearing Witness, Taking Action. The framework emerged from situations where neutrality was not available.
Minneapolis is that situation.
Not Knowing means we do not know what comes next. We do not know whether the federal surge will end or escalate. We do not know whether state and Congressional oversight will be restored or permanently blocked. We do not know whether the community observer networks will be criminalized, whether more people will be shot for watching, whether the apparatus being built here will spread to other cities. We approach this moment without certainty about what it becomes.
Bearing Witness means we see what is happening now. Over 2,000 federal agents deployed to a major American city. Masked officers in unmarked vehicles circling neighborhoods. A woman shot three times for observing. State investigation blocked. Congressional oversight denied. The killer defended as a hero. Hundreds more agents sent in response to protests. Community members afraid to leave their homes, afraid to speak, afraid to be seen.
This is not immigration enforcement. This is the infrastructure of authoritarian control being normalized in real time.
Taking Action is the question. What does action look like when official channels have been captured or blocked? When the mechanisms designed to create accountability—state investigation, Congressional oversight, independent evaluation—are systematically dismantled?
The community observers with whistles are taking action. They are bearing witness in ways that make enforcement visible and contested. They are creating distributed accountability when centralized accountability has failed. They are risking arrest, pepper spray, being followed home, being shot. They are documenting what is happening so it cannot be denied.
The question is whether those of us with professional credentials, institutional positions, and those with the privilege of being less likely to be targeted will join them. Or whether we will maintain our professional distance, produce careful analyses after the crisis has passed, and tell ourselves we were being rigorous.
Bearing Witness demands response. The evaluation community can document what is happening. We can refuse contracts with agencies engaged in this work. We can redirect our capacity toward supporting the communities being targeted. We can name what we see in professional spaces where silence is mistaken for objectivity. We can make it harder for this to be normalized by treating it as normal.
These are not neutral acts. They are choices about what we are willing to be complicit in.
The Evaluator’s Body as Data
I have not been sleeping well. My mind does not shut down. I fall asleep fast, then snap awake at three in the morning thinking about the routes federal agents patrol, about which neighbors might be targeted, about what I would do if I saw an arrest happening on my block.
This is not incidental. It is data.
Evaluation training teaches us to filter out our own reactions. We are supposed to observe without letting our feelings distort what we see. Our exhaustion, our fear, our anger, these are noise to be managed, bias to be controlled, threats to validity.
But when the system you are evaluating is designed to create fear, when the goal is to make people afraid to observe, afraid to speak, afraid to exist in public space, your fear is not noise. It is signal. It is information about how the system operates and what it is designed to produce.
Tricia Hersey’s work on rest as resistance reframes exhaustion not as personal failure but as evidence of how power operates on bodies. Systems that deny rest are systems of extraction. The inability to rest is not a problem to solve through better self-care. It is data about whether the system is viable.
The same logic applies to fear. I am afraid because federal agents with guns are patrolling my city, because they shot a woman for observing, because the government defends that shooting and sends more agents. My neighbors are afraid because they look like people being targeted, because agents circle their schools and workplaces, because observation has been criminalized.
That fear is not bias to correct. It is the central finding. Systems that make evaluators afraid to evaluate, that make observers afraid to observe, that make residents afraid to exist in their own neighborhoods, are telling us exactly what they are.
The evaluator’s body is not separate from the evaluation. Our rest, our attention, our capacity for presence, these shape the work we produce. And when we cannot rest, cannot think clearly, cannot sustain our own well-being, that is information about the systems we operate within.
Right now, in Minneapolis, evaluators are living inside the system we would normally claim to assess from outside. We are not detached observers. We are residents afraid of being pulled from our homes. We are professionals wondering whether documenting what we see will make us targets. We are people whose bodies are registering what it feels like when democratic accountability is replaced by armed occupation.
This is the data that matters most. Not the statistics on arrests or the analysis of enforcement patterns or the assessment of constitutional violations, though all of that matters too. The data that matters is what it feels like to live inside the normalization of state violence. What it does to a community when watching becomes a crime. What fear as governance produces.
We are trained to report findings objectively, to separate observation from emotion, to maintain professional distance. But there is no distance here. We are inside it. And our fear, our exhaustion, our inability to look away, this is what the evaluation needs to document.
The system is working exactly as designed. It is producing terror. We are feeling it. That is the finding.
Conclusion
In “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King Jr. wrote about the white moderate “who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”
This is what is being asked of us now. Stay quiet. Maintain neutrality. Don’t make it worse by speaking out. Let the professionals handle it. Wait for the investigation. Trust the process.
But the process has been captured. The investigation has been blocked. The professionals with guns are the ones creating the terror.
We are evaluators. We are trained to observe, to document, to bear witness. Renee Good was bearing witness when she was killed. The community observers blowing whistles are bearing witness. The question is whether the rest of us will.
Bearing witness is not neutral. It never has been. It is presence that registers harm, that refuses to look away, that lets the reality of what we observe actually land. And presence of that kind demands response.
We refuse to be silent. We refuse to pretend this is normal. We refuse to let professional neutrality become complicity.
Anthralytic is a Minneapolis-based strategy and evaluation studio. We believe bearing witness is not neutral work.
