One of those latecomers was a 46-year-old documentary filmmaker named Chad Knutson. On the morning after Good was killed, he was at home with his two hound dogs, watching a live feed from the Whipple Building, where ICE is based, a five-minute drive from his house. A protester had laid a rose on a makeshift memorial to Good. As Knutson watched, an ICE agent took the rose, put it in his lapel, and then mockingly gave it to a female ICE agent. They both laughed.
Knutson told me he had never been a protester. It seemed pointless, or just a way for people to expiate their sense of guilt. But when he saw those ICE agents laughing, something broke inside him.
“I grab my keys, I grab a coat, and drive over,” Knutson told me. “I barely park my car and I’m running out screaming and crying, ‘You stole a fucking flower from a dead woman. Like, are any of you human anymore?’”
His voice was so thick with emotion that it felt almost as if he were telling a story of religious conversion. It reminded me again of the Tahrir Square protests in 2011, when so many people seemed to have reached a moral and political turning point.
Knutson now goes to the Whipple Building almost daily, bringing thermoses of hot coffee for the people who hold up signs and bellow at the ICE agents and convoys as they drive in and out. He has been tear-gassed so many times, he said, his voice has gone hoarse. When I met him at his house in St. Paul, a row of megaphones was on the counter. He hands them out along with the coffee. He once brought an ice-fishing clam, a portable shelter, to the Whipple to help the protesters withstand the subzero temperatures.
