Michelle Goldberg
By Killing Renee
Good, ICE Sent a Message to Us All
Jan. 8, 2026
Credit...Tim
Evans/Reuters
Opinion
Columnist
Throughout Donald
Trump’s second term, when he’s sent armed, masked ICE agents into cities,
locals have tried to resist by organizing neighborhood watches, both to warn
people that agents are coming and to document the arrests they make.
Minneapolis, where this week ICE launched what its acting director called the
“largest immigration operation ever,” was no different.
Keith Ellison,
Minnesota’s attorney general, told me that since ICE ramped up its operations
in Minneapolis, it’s felt “like we are being inundated with a hostile
paramilitary group that is mistreating, insulting, terrorizing our neighbors.”
And the residents of Minneapolis have responded: “People have got their
whistles, and they’ve got their little alert system to tell people ICE is in
the neighborhood. They’ve been protesting. They’ve been out there trying to
protect their neighbors.”
Many of these people
probably believed that even in Trump’s America, citizens still have inviolable
liberties that allow them to stand up to the jacked-up irregulars who’ve
descended on their communities. The civil rights of immigrants have been
profoundly curtailed; even green card holders are on notice that this
government may detain and deport them simply for protesting. But Americans —
particularly, let’s be honest, white Americans — might have thought themselves
immune from ICE abuses.
The killing of Renee Nicole Good, a
mother of three and widow of a military veteran, tests that assumption. ICE,
said Ellison, is all but telling people, “‘You want to defend your neighbors,
you’re going to do it at the risk of your own life.’ I think that’s the
unmistakable message. Just looking at the tape, they could have said, ‘You get
out of here,’ right? And then she gets out of there. They didn’t want her to
get out of there. They wanted to either drag her out of that car or do what
they did. And it was all about teaching lessons.”
The lesson didn’t end
with Good’s killing — the administration had to smear her afterward. As The New
York Times reported, bystander footage filmed from several
different angles shows that the agent who shot Good wasn’t in the path of her
S.U.V. when he fired on her. That did not stop Homeland Security Secretary
Kristi Noem from accusing Good of trying to run agents over in “an act of
domestic terrorism.” Vice President JD Vance called her a “deranged leftist.”
In the imagination of
some on the right, Good quickly came to stand in for all the grating Resistance
moms they’d like to see crushed. Fox News sneered that Good was a
“self-proclaimed poet” — she’s the winner of a prestigious poetry award — “with
pronouns in her bio.” The conservative radio host Erick Erickson described her
as an “AWFUL,” or “Affluent White Female Urban Liberal.”
It’s entirely possible
that had Good lived, the Trump administration might have tried to prosecute
her. That’s essentially what happened to Marimar Martinez, a U.S. citizen in
Chicago, in October. Martinez was in her car trying to warn people about ICE when
she collided with a Border Patrol vehicle. Federal officials claimed she
“rammed” a car driven by the agent Charles Exum, while her lawyers say he
sideswiped her. Exum then got out of his car and shot her five times.
Martinez survived, only
for the Justice Department to charge her with assaulting a federal officer. Her lawyers soon
discovered that Exum had been boasting about the shooting in text messages. In
one, he wrote, “I fired 5 rounds, and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book
boys.” In another, he said, “Sweet. My fifteen mins of fame. Lmao.” The Justice
Department ended up dropping the case before even more messages could be
revealed.
Exum’s giddy sadism shouldn’t have
been surprising; it reflects the culture the administration is encouraging
among its immigration enforcers. In one ICE recruiting ad, an agent mans a
mounted gun atop some sort of militarized vehicle, with the words, “Destroy the
flood.” It was a reference to the video game Halo, where players must kill
hostile space aliens. Another shows sword-wielding knights with the words, “The
enemies are at the gates.”
Homeland Security’s
social media feed is an unending stream of demented propaganda and bellicose
Christian nationalism. An image posted on New Year’s Eve shows a classic car on an
idyllic beach with the slogan, “America after 100 million deportations.”
Homeland Security has added the words, “The peace of a nation no longer
besieged by the third world.” One hundred million, it’s important to note, is
almost twice America’s entire immigrant population. They are telegraphing the
creation of a far-reaching police state.
In such a system, the
relationship between citizens and their government is transformed by the
constant demand for submission. Since Good’s death, Republicans have been
lining up to threaten those who don’t immediately comply with ICE’s orders.
“The bottom line is this: When a federal officer gives you instructions, you
abide by them and then you get to keep your life,” Representative Wesley Hunt
of Texas said on Newsmax.
All of us, citizens and immigrants
alike, are being ruled by people who think life is a privilege bestowed by
authority, and death is a fair penalty for disobedience.
