When the Future Isn’t Somewhere Else

Minneapolis, immigrant terror, and the moral responsibility of futures work

Photo by Leo_Visions on Unsplash

On January 7, 2026, a federal agent from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement killed Renee Nicole Good in south Minneapolis, just blocks from her home. She was a mother. A poet. A neighbor. A woman whose life ended in broad daylight, in a city that already knows what it means to witness state violence up close.

The Administration is filtering her death through official language—threat assessments, procedural justifications, claims of self-defense. But stripped of this framing, the truth remains: a woman is dead, a family is shattered, and a community is grieving.

And yet, to look only at this one death is to misunderstand the moment.

What happened to Renee Nicole Good is not an anomaly. It is not a rupture in an otherwise stable system. It is a flashpoint, one moment that forces into view a much larger pattern of fear, force, and abandonment that immigrant communities have been living inside for a long time.

This is where the future meets the present, not in scenarios or projections, but in punctured windows, burning questions, and bodies that press us to care now.

The present is already a crisis

For weeks, federal immigration agents have surged through neighborhoods across the Twin Cities—appearing at gyms and hardware stores, conducting raids with little warning, and detaining people as part of an unprecedented DHS enforcement action. Minneapolis, a city still carrying the trauma of George Floyd’s murder, is once again watching the state enter neighborhoods with force.

Pundits will argue endlessly about protocol and jurisdiction, about vehicle movements and training manuals. But the visceral truth is this: federal power was deployed in a residential neighborhood. A woman was killed. And the language used afterward, terms like domestic terrorism and threat neutralization, reads less like accountability and more like damage control.

At the same time, immigrant communities across the region are living inside a daily regime of terror.

Family members are kidnapped on their way to work or during routine errands. Parents vanish. Children wait. Entire households reorganize their lives around avoidance and silence.

Students have watched their schools close, not because education has failed, but because administrators cannot guarantee safety from ICE presence. Classrooms empty not from disinterest, but from fear.

This is not the future we are preparing for.

This is the present we are living in.

Immigrant communities have been naming the erosion of rights in this country for years—-plainly, repeatedly, and at great personal risk. They have described conditional safety, uneven enforcement, and the quiet collapse of due process. These were not subtle warnings. They were clear accounts of lived reality.

What failed was not our ability to see the future.

It was our willingness to listen to those already living inside it.

In futures work, we talk about weak signals—early indicators that point to larger systemic shifts. Immigrant communities have not been offering weak signals. They have been offering strong, persistent evidence of a system under strain.

The failure here was not a lack of foresight.

It was the decision to treat lived experience as anecdotal rather than authoritative.

The killing of Renee Nicole Good does not stand apart from this context—it lands squarely inside it. It is one more data point in a pattern where state power enters neighborhoods with force, fear becomes ambient, and official narratives strain to account for lived reality.

What we are witnessing is not chaos.

It is coordination.

Not accident, but design.

I do not have personal knowledge of ICE’s internal planning processes. I do not know what is written in briefing books or modeled behind closed doors. But I know strategy when I see it.

When you pull back the lens, the contours are familiar: Horizons have been scanned. Bellwether states identified. Probabilities assessed. Scenarios developed, tested, and refined. Resources deployed with precision. Resistance anticipated. Narratives prepared in advance.

The dark arts of foresight are present.

And some among us—people trained in these methods, fluent in these tools—are practicing it.

Not always with malice. Not always with full visibility into the consequences. But with enough distance to call it neutral, strategic, or simply “the work.”

Federal agencies are exercising methodological foresight every day—deploying resources strategically, anticipating response, shaping outcomes. Meanwhile, the nonprofit organizations defending immigrant families are stretched beyond capacity, forced into constant response mode rather than resourced to shape the conditions that produce harm.

This asymmetry matters.

It is not incidental.

It is structural.

I am not writing from a distance

I was raised in the Twin Cities. Minnesota is not abstract to me. It is where I grew up, went to college and law school, and got married. It’s where my family still lives. The streets, the neighborhoods, the lakes shaped how I understand power, belonging, and responsibility.

Minneapolis is not a case study.

It is home.

I know how much foresight is already being practiced in Minnesota’s immigrant communities—not as theory, but as survival. Not as scenarios, but as daily calculation. I have seen how people anticipate risk, reroute routines, and share collective knowledge about where danger might surface next.

What is missing is not imagination.

It is protection.

It is power.

It is the collective capacity to shape what comes next.

---

Act II: What is a futurist when the present is deciding everything?

Strategic foresight, as it has traditionally been taught, trained practitioners to look ahead. We learned to map trends, surface weak signals, build scenarios, and help institutions prepare for multiple possible futures rather than fixate on a single forecast. We were taught to think in systems, anticipate disruption, and strengthen resilience and adaptability.

And for a long time, this approach worked—clearly.

These tools have been refined and widely adopted. They are embedded in military strategy, national security planning, corporate boardrooms, and federal agencies. Scenario planning, horizon scanning, and anticipatory governance are no longer niche practices. They shape budgets, deployments, supply chains, and enforcement strategies.

The State uses foresight.

Corporations use foresight.

Power plans ahead.

But this is precisely the problem.

Foresight has matured as a technical discipline faster than it has matured as a moral one. The tools have scaled. The ethics have not. The capacity to anticipate has grown, while the capacity to care has lagged behind.

What this moment makes painfully clear is that we no longer need only better methods for seeing what might happen. We need a futures practice capable of taking responsibility for what is already happening—one that builds the moral capacity of practitioners alongside their analytical skill, and strengthens the collective muscle of communities to shape their own futures rather than merely endure decisions made elsewhere.

So the question is no longer whether foresight works.

The question is: who is it for, and who bears the cost when it is practiced without accountability?

What is a futurist when the present—not some distant horizon—is where futures are being decided, enforced, and foreclosed every day?

We are not exempt from the world we study

Futurists often describe ourselves as navigators—not fortune-tellers, but people who help others prepare for uncertainty. We analyze trends, study systems, and support organizations in shaping preferable futures.

But what does that mean when the future is already collapsing into the present?

What is our responsibility when communities we work with are under active threat?

When policies we analyze are producing terror in real time?

When State power moves with speed and coordination that grassroots defenders can only struggle to match?

We cannot claim neutrality here.

If we can map scenarios, we can name harm.

If we can design workshops, we can stand with communities under attack.

If we can speak fluently about systems, we can speak plainly about power.

At moments like this, foresight is not about distant horizons.

It is about witnessing, clarifying, and refusing silence.

This is not data.

This is violence.

So what is being asked of futurists now?

If we take this moment seriously, futures work cannot proceed as usual. It requires us to confront questions that are professional, ethical, and unavoidable.

First:

What does it mean to practice foresight when the communities most impacted by policy are systematically excluded from shaping the futures being modeled?

If our scenarios do not include those living with the consequences, whose futures are we actually preparing for?

Second:

How do we reckon with the fact that foresight tools are already being used—effectively—by institutions exercising harm?

If horizon scanning, scenario testing, and anticipatory governance are in play on one side, what does ethical counter-foresight look like on the other?

Third:

What obligations do futurists have when policy becomes terror in real time, not a hypothetical risk?

At what point does silence become complicity, and neutrality become alignment?

Fourth:

What would it mean to redirect our skills—sensemaking, narrative power, systems mapping—toward defense, not just design?

Toward communities under threat, not only organizations with resources?

These are not abstract questions.

They are professional ones.

And they are being answered every day—by action or by avoidance.

A first step

I do not believe any single action resolves the questions this moment raises. But I do believe responsibility begins with placement—where we choose to stand, and who we choose to resource.

For me, a first step is supporting COPAL.

Donating to COPAL is not charity.

It is solidarity.

It is choosing to stand with the people whose lives are already carrying the weight of decisions made elsewhere.

The future is not somewhere else.

It is being decided now—through who is protected, who is harmed, and who is heard.

The question is not whether we can imagine better futures.

It is whether we will bring our skills—and our resources—to bear when they are most needed.

What will we choose to do with what we can see so clearly?