In Honor of Renee Nicole Good
Two stories emerge from her horrific murder: what happened that day, and what is happening now everywhere
Note: This piece is too long to view in most email apps due to the size of video files within it but can be viewed in full at the site.
To honor Renee Nicole Good, we need to tell two stories.
First, there’s the horror of what happened on the streets of Minneapolis at the hands of ICE goons. To tell that story, and to reject the vile, baseless claims asserted by both Kristi Noem and Donald Trump, we need to go into the weeds and examine what the evidence shows so far. I’ll be including images and video clips that may be disturbing to watch, so discretion is advised.
Second, there’s the overstory about ICE raids and violence against immigrant communities and the fascist police state that the Trump regime seeks to impose. The White House chose Minneapolis to target this time, and as a newly arrived resident of that city and volunteer legal observer, Good was already performing a valiant civic duty by witnessing and documenting abuses by federal agents. It was a cause she gave up her life for, and we need to uplift it.
Many of us did not sleep easy last night. Across this nation, opponents of the regime are filled with shock, disgust and anger at Good’s slaying. It is our responsibility to not let her death be in vain. And that begins with some truth-telling.
Distortions and conflicting orders
Before delving into what the evidence shows in the moments around the killing, there is the initial question of what Good was doing in her car and what she then was instructed to do.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem asserted that after agents’ vehicles got stuck in the snow, Good attempted to ram them with her vehicle and run them over. She labeled the incident an act of “domestic terrorism.”
Noem gave a press conference where she asserted that people need to “stop using their vehicles as weapons” and that it was “clear that it was being coordinated. People are being trained.”
Those bald assertions are directly contradicted by the available video evidence. One shows Good waving cars past her vehicle, not attempting to ram them. That includes the ICE vehicle in which the agents who accosted Good were riding.
The ICE vehicle did not simply drive past her. Instead, agents emerged. Eyewitnesses reported that federal agents then gave conflicting orders: for Good to move along, but also to get out of her car. Minnesota Public Radio published one account confirming that one officer ordered Good to drive away from the scene where an ICE vehicle was stuck in a snowbank, while another yelled for her to get out of the car as he reached for her door handle.
It is important to understand that there was no legal basis for the officer to instruct Good to “get out of the fucking car” or to attempt to open the door himself. These immigration agents are not police. They have no authority to arrest or detain anyone who is not suspected of illegal immigration status.
Which order should Good have obeyed, the one telling her to drive away, or the illegal one telling her to get out of her car? A likely frightened Good reasonably chose the former.
Kristi Noem also made grossly false claims that the agent feared for his life and fired in self-defense—a claim she initially made without having been at the scene, but which she has since reiterated.
In his initial statement about the killing, Donald Trump also blamed Good rather than the officer. He posted on Truth Social that Good had “violently, willfully and viciously” run over the agent, a jaw-dropping lie even for this president.
Multiple videos contradict the White House’s version of events. For starters, as the New York Times’s analysis of the footage concluded, they show Good was driving away from the agents, not toward them.
Notes the Times,
On Wednesday in Minneapolis, a federal agent fatally shot a motorist, 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good. Trump administration officials said these were “defensive shots” fired because the officer was being run over. But our analysis of bystander footage, filmed from different angles, appears to show the agent was not in the path of the victim’s SUV when he fired three shots at close range.
Film producer Brenna Perez created a frame-by-frame analysis of that moment, which circulated widely on social media, and it draws the same conclusion as the New York Times. You can view it below—but again, discretion advised.
A screenshot of the video reveals that the killer was already well to the vehicle’s side when he fired (notice the smoke from the blast), including through the driver’s side window, hitting Good in the face.
Only one bullet hole appears in the lower driver’s side windshield, which itself indicates that the shot came at a strong angle, not directly head-on. The other two shots were fired through the open driver’s side window.
Trump claimed it was “hard to believe” the agent is alive, but this is a wild statement given footage showing he walked away from the scene of the killing, then sped off in his vehicle.
There is growing pressure to identify and prosecute the killer on state murder charges. This remains a possibility, even given his federal agent status and the protections of qualified immunity, but it is one full of challenges. We’ll cross that road later.
A deeper forensic investigation will reveal more about those final deadly moments, and I await more to form a final opinion. The evidence so far strongly indicates that the “official” White House version of events is B.S. What we can already say is that it was absolutely reprehensible for DHS and the White House to tar Good with a false narrative, including an incredible one of “domestic terrorism,” before any real facts were known. But this is a regime that doesn’t care about the truth and may even be itching for civil unrest over ICE actions so it can respond disproportionately once again, just as it has in Los Angeles and Chicago.
Meanwhile, there is a larger story—one Good died resisting—that we must acknowledge, not only to honor her sacrifice but to understand how this killing is part of a much broader pattern and agenda.
Deadly violence was a near certainty given what the White House and DHS did
To understand the context of the slaying, we need to rewind the clock a bit.
In December, a White House propagandist named Nick Shirley spread bogus “fraud” claims to vilify the Somali community in Minneapolis. The White House, sensing an opportunity, jumped aboard and surged 2,000 federal agents to Minneapolis to harass local residents, Somalis in particular, in the city.
Pushing that many federal agents into a single city, where there were already organized protests against immigration enforcement abuse, created a tinderbox. And the White House knew it, based on its earlier experiences in Chicago.
There, as legal writer Chris Geidner noted, federal district judge Sara Ellis had already warned in a lengthy opinion that DHS agents habitually drew guns on peaceful protestors who were merely documenting their activities:
CBP agents made open threats on the lives of peaceful observers.
Judge Ellis found that the excessive force bled into violations of free speech under the First Amendment claims: “agents have used excessive force in response to protesters’ and journalists’ exercise of their First Amendment rights, without justification, often without warning, and even at those who had begun to comply with agents’ orders.”
The government’s own policies on the use of deadly force are clear. It’s only acceptable if the officer “has a reasonable belief that the subject of such force poses an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury.” Further, officers should “avoid intentionally and unreasonably placing themselves in positions in which they have no alternative to using deadly force.”
But these rules are not being followed at all. The New York Times published a piece yesterday noting that DHS agents, over the past four months, have now fired on nine people inside their vehicles resulting in at least one other death. In short, given this record and the lack of training given new DHS recruits, the killing of someone like Renee Good was just a matter of time.
In many cases, the official government account does not match up with video evidence at all. As the Times notes,
In September, immigration officers pulled over a man driving a Subaru on a busy street outside of Chicago. The man, a Mexican immigrant named Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez, was shot and killed less than a minute later. Homeland security officials said that Mr. Villegas-Gonzalez had hit and dragged one of the officers with his car and that the officer who shot him was acting in self-defense. But a Times analysis of video calls into question key aspects of the government’s account.
In another incident,
[A]n American citizen was shot in the shoulder by an immigration agent near a bus stop in a suburb east of Los Angeles. Lawyers for the man, Carlos Jimenez, said he had asked federal agents to move away from the area, where schoolchildren would soon be gathering. Mr. Jimenez’s lawyers said he was later shot as he was driving away. But federal prosecutors accused him of pulling forward and accelerating toward an officer.
Given the propensity of DHS officials to lie first and drop cases later, they are owed zero benefit of the doubt. If Kristi Noem and Donald Trump can so cruelly and callously label Renee Good as a violent, trained “domestic terrorist,” even in the complete absence of evidence, then nothing DHS claims about its interactions with the public should be taken at face value.
The way forward
Renee Nicole Good was a mother of a small child and a member of the LGBTQ+ community. As the Advocate reported yesterday in a heartbreaking piece,
A Minnesota woman sitting in the snow with her dog told a person filming her that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had just shot and killed her wife — now identified as Renee Nicole Good, 37 — according to newly circulating video that has intensified scrutiny of a fatal federal shooting during a sweeping immigration enforcement operation in south Minneapolis on Wednesday.
“They killed my wife. I don’t know what to do,” the woman says through sobs in the footage, with a damaged SUV visible in the distance behind her. “We stopped to videotape, and they shot her in the head,” the woman cries.
“We have a 6-year-old at school,” she says, almost unable to breathe, as a chaotic scene in which federal officers prevented at least one doctor who was on the scene from assisting the shot victim unfolds. “We’re new here,” the distraught woman says in despair.
Good’s mother described her in loving terms. “Renee was one of the kindest people I’ve ever known. She was extremely compassionate,” Donna Ganger, told the Minnesota Star Tribune. “She’s taken care of people all her life … She was loving, forgiving and affectionate.”
That a U.S. citizen—a white woman legal observer—was executed by federal agents in cold blood could be a wake-up call and rallying cry for many. Importantly, it demonstrates that this is not, and has never been, only about immigration. It’s about the assertion of a fascist police state, and no one is safe from its reach.
A collapse in public support is the ultimate way to end federal abuses and deadly violence. The murder of bystanders like Good at the hands of ICE could prove a decisive turning point, but only if the public becomes informed and mobilizes in its wake.
There are strong signs this is happening. Impromptu crowds of thousands filled the streets of Minneapolis and around the country.
And civil resistance groups are organizing. As Robert Hubbell highlighted in his piece this morning, the grassroots political organization Indivisible will hold a national call tonight at 8 p.m. ET / 5 p.m. PT. The organizers write,
Violence is nothing new for Trump’s secret police force. But this killing is a tragic escalation in the racist campaign of terror being carried out against communities across our nation. It’s proof of what happens when armed thugs are unleashed into our neighborhoods without oversight or accountability.
And it needs to be a galvanizing moment for every American to join the activists who’ve been fighting this brutality day in and day out for years in saying: ENOUGH.
Our call will feature concrete actions you can take to address abuses by ICE and demand accountability.
The way we honor Renee Nicole Good is to carry on her fight, and to take up her watch after her life was brutally cut short. Our shock and anger must now turn to cold resolve, and we must not relent until Noem is out, ICE is abolished, and there is justice for Good.
Her name was Renee Good. History is repeating. January 6 was the worst insurrection against our democracy in history. Now January 7 is a day of fascists killing civiliians. Keep protesting for Minnesota and Somalis. We must defund ICE: https://democracydefender2025.substack.com/p/defund-ice-and-border-patrol
They've been waiting for a chance to shoot someone. But they fucked up, and the video evidence clearly shows that the IC - Oops - I mean the Gestapo executed Renee Good.
Say. Her. Name.