How Renee Nicole Good Became a Martyr
Renee Nicole Good had just dropped off her 6-year-old son at school in Minneapolis on Wednesday when an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent fatally shot her through the windshield of her car and in front of her wife and a crowd of legal observers. Good’s horrific killing, which eyewitnesses captured on video from multiple angles, traveled remarkably fast on social media as Trump-administration officials and local leaders disputed whether the driver or the agent was at fault. Within hours, thousands of protesters joined vigils at the scene where she was shot, as well as in other cities across the country, and Good had become one of the first martyrs of the second Trump era.
Her name and face are now inescapable, and so is the footage capturing the last moments of her life. The videos appear to show an unjustified, extrajudicial killing, on the heels of the administration dispatching more than 2,000 ICE agents and officers to the Minneapolis–St. Paul area. From one angle, several officers can be seen approaching Good’s maroon Honda Pilot. As she slowly reverses the car, one of them attempts to yank open her door. Another officer can be seen standing in front of the car, then slightly moving away from the SUV’s path and raising his gun, shooting through the windshield when the Honda begins to drive forward. Good then crashes the car. Other bystander videos show that ICE agents refused to let a physician through so they could try to assist Good. When emergency services showed up at the scene, agents blocked the ambulance, forcing paramedics to make their way to Good on foot. She died at the scene.
Yet another viral video that, fair warning, is painful to watch and listen to shows Good’s wife sobbing a few feet away from the SUV in the aftermath of the shooting. (She has yet to speak publicly.) “They killed my wife. I don’t know what to do,” the woman cries in the video. “We stopped to videotape, and they shot her in the head. We have a 6-year-old at school.” Her grief and distress are devastating to witness. When the person recording the video for Facebook asks whether she has called anyone yet, the woman sobs, “We’re new here. We don’t have people.” Presumably, she’s referencing the fact that Good and her family had recently relocated to Minnesota from Kansas; a former neighbor in Kansas City told a local TV news station the couple had left the state owing to politics.
Good’s name has quickly become a hashtag. People have been posting tributes to her, and there’s a GoFundMe, which has raised nearly $900,000 in donations as of Thursday afternoon, to support her surviving family members. But she’s not the first person to be shot at by ICE agents in recent months. Since September, immigration agents have opened fire on at least nine drivers in five states and in Washington, D.C., according to a New York Times analysis. One of them was Marimar Martinez, a Chicago resident who was shot five times by federal immigration agents in September. Homeland Security alleged the officer shot in self-defense because Martinez had “aggressively” pursued an ICE agent and hit his car; two months later, a judge dismissed criminal charges against Martinez after the prosecutors’ narrative fell apart. Good is not even the first person ICE officers have shot and killed since Donald Trump returned to power; that would be Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez, a 38-year-old Mexican immigrant. In September, Villegas-Gonzalez had just dropped his child off at day care in a Chicago suburb when immigration officers stopped his car. He was fatally shot less than a minute later. The Trump administration claims Villegas-Gonzalez dragged an agent with his car and severely injured him, which would make the shooting an act of self-defense; however, just like in Good’s case, analysis of video footage contradicted the government’s account. The agent’s own body camera captured him telling police that his injuries were “nothing major.”
Good’s story has traveled further than these other incidents, in large part because there’s ample video footage of the shooting available that spread in real time. In contrast to the previous victims, she also was a white suburban mom, and initial reports placed her at the scene as a legal observer, someone who was quietly doing what she could to protect a neighborhood against ICE’s brutality. Family members have told the press that Good was neither an activist nor a protester. She did not deserve to die — and if she were not white, not a parent, and not present at an ICE operation as a mere observer, she still wouldn’t deserve to be shot dead through her windshield.
Of course, that’s not the position of the Trump administration, which has spent the past 24 hours making false claims about Good. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has repeatedly called her a “domestic terrorist” and claimed that she intentionally tried to “weaponize her vehicle” to injure ICE agents. On Truth Social, President Trump alleged that Good was “disorderly” and “viciously ran over” the ICE agent, which is why he killed her in self-defense. The administration has also tried to cast her as a “violent rioter.” Vice-President J.D. Vance repeated these talking points on Thursday, alleging Good was “radicalized in a sad way” and had thrown her vehicle “in front of legitimate law-enforcement officers.” Conservative commentators have rushed to downplay the events, too. Fox News’ Jesse Watters emphasized during a segment on Wednesday that Good was a “disrupter” who had “pronouns in her bio” and that she “leaves behind a lesbian partner and a child from a previous marriage,” as if these factors in some way justified her killing. The far-right outlet Townhall went further, publishing a social-media roundup with the headline “The Memes About the Woman Who Tried to Kill an ICE Agent in Minneapolis Are Magnificent.” “We all saw how the Left reacted when Charlie Kirk got assassinated, so excuse me as I couldn’t give less of a #$%^ about your indignation right now, liberal America,” the post reads.
But Good has become such a powerful symbol of the overreach of Trump’s mass-deportation machine because these allegations so baldly contradict witness accounts of what happened as well as what anyone can see with their own eyes when they look at the footage of her gruesome death. A shooting like this was bound to take place given that the administration has been actively recruiting gun-rights supporters and military enthusiasts for immigration enforcement, lowering the barrier of entry for hiring and disregarding vetting processes, and allowing armed ICE and CBP agents to terrorize communities with little training and near-total impunity. The same indiscriminate force felled both Villegas-Gonzalez and Good, further proving that U.S. citizenship does not protect anyone from state-sanctioned violence. That the Trump administration persists in attempting to rewrite the history of what happened on that frozen Minneapolis street is just par for the course.
Movements have rallied around other white women in recent years of political upheaval. Ashli Babbitt became a MAGA martyr after police shot and killed her during the January 6, 2021, insurrection; legions of rioters seized on her death to argue they were unjustly targeted with criminal charges after they attacked the U.S. Capitol. On the opposite end of the spectrum is Heather Heyer, who was fatally struck by a driver who intentionally plowed through a crowd protesting a white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville in 2017. Her killing energized the left to continue to fight newly emboldened hate groups under Trump 1.0. As Trump 2.0 violently expands its immigration crackdown and meets its opposition with deadly force, Good’s memory should fuel communities as they fight back and pressure their elected officials to do the same. May her death not be in vain.
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