Unless we abolish ICE, Good won’t be the last to die in vain
By SAGE KAMOCSAY— skamocsay@ucdavis.edu
On Jan. 7, 2026, Renee Good was shot and murdered by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent near her home in Minneapolis.
Video footage shows several agents stepping out from an unmarked car in ski masks and approaching Good’s vehicle. One ICE agent reached inside her car and shook the door handle aggressively, likely in an attempt to open her car door. Fearing for her life, Good sped off. But as she did so, an ICE agent shot three times into her car windshield.
She may have already been dead by the time emergency medical technicians (EMTs) rushed out of their ambulance and onto the scene. Witnesses watched in despair as the ambulance drove away quietly and unhurriedly — there was no life to save. There was no reason to speed to the hospital, or to count down the seconds in desperate hope that they could get Good to a doctor in time. She had just dropped off her 6-year-old son at school.
Good did not deserve to die. She was no murderer, no terrorist, no extremist — she was a beloved community member, friend, daughter, wife and mother. She had three children from two marriages: a 15-year-old, a 12-year-old and a 6-year-old, the youngest of whom had already lost his father in 2023. She and her wife, Becca Good, had just moved to Minneapolis and were raising her youngest child together as a family. Now, Becca Good is left alone to care for her stepson.
“I am now left to raise our son and to continue teaching him, as Renee believed, that there are people building a better world for him,” Becca Good said in a statement to Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) News. “The people who did this had fear and anger in their hearts, and we need to show them a better way.”
Much like Good’s family, America has also suffered a tragedy. This is not the first time ICE agents have shot or killed American citizens — in just the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, ICE has shot 16 people.
This fact should be a shock to all who hear it. The rapid militarization and escalation of violence within ICE has been ramping up since Trump began his second term more than a year ago. However, for the first time, we have seen the system kill an innocent citizen so publicly and brutally, garnering greater national unrest than before. This is not to detract from the deaths of innocent non-citizens at the hands of ICE, but rather to show an escalation of force against the very people ICE is allegedly supposed to protect in order to advance the interests of the federal government.
ICE is an agent of fascism. When we see the deaths of people like Good, we should understand them to be the same as any murder by Benito Mussolini’s Italian police state. Just like Italy in World War II, the Trump administration has formulated a brutal regime to systematically destroy all those it deems as the lowest class (along with some collateral damage), using the power of what is essentially a homeland military. Without completely dismantling ICE and preventing further militarization and mobilization of state police and federal agents, we seek to suffer the same tragic fate that any other fascist state has: complete oppression of the civilian population and years of brutal violence.
Good’s murder will not be the last perpetrated by ICE, nor was it the first. Already, we’ve seen more instances of ICE brutality: Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse in Minneapolis, was shot on Jan. 24 — and he’s not the only victim that has suffered at the hands of ICE in the past week. Marginalized communities have been violently oppressed by ICE and its predecessors for decades in much the same way. As the public finally wakes up to the reality of state violence, we should seek to avenge all those whose lives were cut short by it. The sooner we realize this fact, and the sooner we begin to fight back, the fewer innocent lives will be lost at the hands of a violent and belligerent regime. We must rise up against Trump’s white supremacist agenda in order to save ourselves from our own devastation.
Written by: Sage Kamocsay— skamocsay@ucdavis.edu
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