Murder in Minneapolis
Renee Nicole Good was a devoted wife, loving mother, a poet—and an American citizen who did nothing to deserve being murdered by a thug with a badge.
Renee Good awoke yesterday, unlikely to have contemplated the thought of death. Like most parents of a young child, she was almost certainly preoccupied with getting him ready for school and then going about her day. She was driving with her wife in a Honda Pilot, glove compartment brimming with stuffed animals for her young son, thermoses in the cupholders between them, and their dog in the backseat when they came across an ICE operation near their home.
Early reports said that Ms. Good was a trained legal observer and it appeared to be the case that she was recording the ICE agents on the videos taken by witnesses. In this video that has been widely disseminated publicly, her vehicle was perpendicular to the lead ICE pickup truck. The wheels are angled as if to indicate she was going to turn around. The first vehicle pulls around her and leaves. She doesn’t ram it, she doesn’t try to prevent it—she is waving it past, and attempts to wave the Titan pickup truck past as well, except those agents get out and march at her vehicle. They bellow at her “to get out of the fucking car.”
Good’s wife becomes panicked, according to bystanders. Good’s deceased husband, father of her yong son, must’ve been on her mind. She couldn’t protect him. She can protect her wife. ICE has violated numerous laws and locked citizens and immigrants alike in inhumane conditions. Police and ICE both shoot dogs at astronomical rates during arrests and raids. For anyone trained in legal observation, for anyone who has studied police violence, all of this will be in the back of their minds. She puts the vehicle in gear to flee. She is protecting her wife and her dog.
The agent who was in front of her vehicle pulls his weapon before she’s moved more than a foot or two. His name is Jonathan Ross. Last year, he was dragged by a vehicle driven by a violent felon, requiring three dozen stitches. In that incident, he only deployed his Tazer. This time, he went straight for his gun and fired through the windshield even though she was turning away from him and then he fired twice more through her open driver’s window. The car crashed into another. The witnesses are screaming in horror. Meanwhile, Ross (who ICE Barbie Noem claimed was hospitalized) casually walks towards the Honda Pilot. His fellow agents went back to their own vehicles. There was no concern for Good, or even for Ross, really, because they didn’t even try to check on him right away or stop him from approaching the vehicle of a woman he had just shot without any plausible threat to his life.
They were nonchalant, and then the nonchalance turned to callousness.
There is an abundance of video evidence from the past 353 days that shows the hair-trigger violence of ICE agents and other DHS officers towards the American public. There is an abundance of findings by judges that ICE and DHS lie about the violence they deploy, who they deploy it against, the reasons they use violence, so on and so forth. In the immediate aftermath, one ICE agent levied his “nonlethal” weapon and shot a man point blank in the face with some sort of chemical agent.
Renee Good isn’t the first person shot without cause by ICE in the last year. She’s not the second, nor the third, nor the fourth and fifth and so on. She’s the fourth person to be shot in their car by ICE in the last 60 days. There’s a uncomfortably long list of these incidents that keeps growing. This is the inevitable outcome of an unaccountable, well-funded, poorly-trained, unprofessional secret police force. History shows us how these forces attract the sociopathic, the thuggish, the undisciplined, and just plain violent people in society. In a stampede to try and prevent another 9/11 terrorist event, to save America from disaster, we created the means in which to destroy it from the inside.
Tonight, a six-year-old child has no father and no mother. He is not the first, nor will he be the last, but one day, he will grow up and learn that his mother was murdered in broad daylight by an agent of the government on video for the world to witness. It is as undignified a way to have one’s life ended as is possible, and her child will suffer unimaginable trauma for years, if not decades. We owe it to that child, and every other family torn apart by this un-American neo-Gestapo to not only abolish ICE, but dismantle the Department of Homeland Security. They utterly failed in their mission. They not only didn’t keep us safe, they became the biggest threat against the rule of law, the citizenry, and the fabric of the nation we face.
We will never be able to live in peace if we don’t.