A pizza joint in Minneapolis started slinging sunshine when their city turned ice-cold.

As of Jan. 7, Wrecktangle Pizza — a restaurant serving sandwiches, burgers and rectangle pies — has focused its operations toward feeding vulnerable neighbors. They say the catalyst was the killing of Minneapolis resident Renee Nicole Good by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jonathan Ross.

Good was shot while driving her car during an encounter between agents and local residents. The agency says Ross fired out of self-defense.

Breanna Evans, co-owner of Wrecktangle, was given the role of “sunshine director” when her partner, co-owner and chef Jeff Rogers, opened the restaurant — now, she’s putting it to use once again.

Wrecktangle Pizza owners Breanna Evans and Jeff Rogers.
Wrecktangle Pizza owners Breanna Evans and Jeff Rogers. Jeff Rogers

The job comes with the “responsibility of maintaining sunshine throughout the community,” Rogers tells TODAY.com, and it was built around a pattern.

“Unfortunately, Minneapolis has been through similar things like this before,” Evans says, referencing the 2020 killing of George Floyd. “When we started out, we were pretty small … But, I mean, every time something has hit the community, we’ve responded.”

This time, they had already been bracing themselves.

“When we heard there was gonna be an influx of ICE agents, we were spitballing what we were gonna do,” Rogers says. They started by reaching out to other restaurants.

“Our staff was feeling it, so we knew that other restaurants’ staff would be feeling it and would be scared to leave their homes,” he adds. Their plan: Deliver food to other establishments for it to be distributed to staff.

From that came more fundraising and collaboration.

Rogers says they worked with neighboring businesses including Smitten Kitten, Lito’s Burritos and Twin Cities Leather to create a network of fundraising, dry-goods donations, meal drops and more.

“This is a no-brainer,” the chef says of taking action. “We’re no strangers to this. We’re just trying to help out, and the only way that we really know how is to make food.”

Jeff Rogers stands in front of the doorway to Wrecktangle Pizza
Jeff Rogers stands in front of the doorway to Wrecktangle Pizza, where federal officers are denied entry, in Minneapolis, Minn., on Jan. 22, 2026.Suzanne Gamboa / NBC News

“It was always an ‘if’ thing,” Evans tells TODAY.com. “And all of a sudden it went from an ‘if’ to a ‘when.’”

But once Good was killed, she said her staff “went from nervous to terrified.”

The team that did come in started making frozen pizzas for those who couldn’t leave their homes. They initially enlisted volunteers from other restaurants to help batch 600 frozen pizzas to give away.

But that comes at a cost.

Evans says they faced the question of “How do you provide food to people and get it over to people that need it, but also keep your business going?” Their answer: pizza matching.

The buy-one-give-one model took hold. It got “butts in seats” — important for the security of safety in numbers, having people around in case ICE came by — and food on the table for hundreds of neighbors so far.

While Wrecktangle was seeing an overwhelming amount of support, Rogers wanted to spread that to other hurting restaurants. So, the team later launched a receipt matching effort, where they donated a pizza for any meal purchased at any local eatery on a specific day.

After frozen-pizza production became overwhelming, Wrecktangle and its neighbors started collecting dry goods donations.

“There’s like U-Hauls worth of stuff going in and out every day,” Rogers says, with Evans adding they filled up the storage spaces “from floor to ceiling” and then emptied it again “almost every day.”

As of Wednesday, the pizza shop is no longer accepting physical donations, instead directing donors to drop locations at Twin Cities Leather and Up-Down.

Evans described Wrecktangle’s distribution strategy — whether that be frozen pizzas, cooked meals for families of four or physical goods — as “pre-internet stuff with internet marketing.”

As of Wednesday, they’ve raised $200,000, made 1,100 frozen pizzas (500 of which have gone out so far), given away 200 pizzas from in-store donations and provided 300 four-person family meals (with plans to package 400 to 500 more before the weekend).

“We’ve seen donations come in from all over the world; we’ve seen words of encouragement come in from all over the world,” Rogers says. “It’s a glimmer of hope.”

After fundraising for four days, and posting a video showing how much they raised, ICE agents showed up.

Rogers said two agents arrived 30 minutes after Wrecktangle’s scheduled opening time.

He says one of them attempted to enter through the front door, but it was locked as Wrecktangle happened to close for a reset after running out of food Sunday night. Neighbors rushed to the scene and chased the agents away. In a video viewed by TODAY.com, an agent can be seen pulling the pin on what Rogers says was a can of some kind of gas agent before getting into the car and driving away.

TODAY.com reached out to ICE for an explanation as to why an officer attempted to gain access to Wrecktangle, but has not heard back at the time of publication.

In addition to the physical risk, Evans says the “scariest thing” about collective efforts like theirs is knowing that not everyone who needs it will know that it exists. Mainly run through social media, they’re relying heavily on word of mouth to help reach those with a different algorithm.

They also worry about the toll this widespread fear will take on restaurants.

“It will cripple the restaurant industry, it’ll ruin so many things that are already very fragile in January and February,” Evans says of the known slow season for cold-weather eateries.

“You can’t afford to be closing days, you can’t afford to be having shifts covered and then paying the people who can’t come to work, you can’t afford this,” Rogers adds. “There’s not enough time in the day to go over why this is f—ing bulls—.”