On a bitter Minneapolis morning in January, beneath skies the colour of old steel, Renee Nicole Good was killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in circumstances that have cleaved open, once more, the wound of state violence in America.
A poster showing a photograph of Renee Nicole Good, 37, hangs on a lamppost at the site where she was shot and killed by a federal agent while she was in her vehicle in Minneapolis on Wednesday, Jan. 7. (David Guttenfelder/The New York Times)You can simply scroll past—but please don't overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
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You can simply scroll past — but please don’t overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
You can simply scroll past—but please don't overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
Time is now or never.
Queer voices disappear without independent journalism to amplify them.
We document what others won't touch.
We hold power to account when it threatens our communities.
This work exists only because you choose to fund it directly.
Donate over €25/month and receive our limited-edition tote bag — a badge of resistance, a statement that you stand for fearless journalism.
We are grateful!
Can't donate? Sharing our work helps more than you think
Renee Nicole Good was thirty-seven years old, a poet, a mother of three. The official account—self-defence, an agent endangered—has collided with video footage and witness testimony to produce not clarity but its opposite: a deepening sense that what happened on that frozen street cannot be reconciled with the story power tells about itself.
The Department of Homeland Security has maintained that Good attempted to run down federal agents during a raid on the 7th of January. The New York Times, in a meticulous analysis examining footage from three separate vantage points, demonstrated that this account was demonstrably false. Good had been attempting to leave the scene; the ICE agent was never struck, never even touched by the vehicle. In grainy footage shared thousands of times, unmarked vehicles close in on a Honda saloon. An agent clutches the door handle as the car begins to reverse. Another, positioned near the front wing, fires at least twice as the vehicle moves forward, its wheels turned sharply to the right, away from the officers. The car then veers off the road and crashes at the kerb—presumably from the force of Good’s injuries.
Emily Heller, who witnessed the shooting from nearby, offered testimony that troubles the official narrative still further. She told local reporters that an ICE agent had been standing directly in front of the vehicle. “He pulled out a gun, leaned across the bonnet and shot her in the face three or four times,” she said—a posture difficult to reconcile with imminent danger, the geometry of violence suggesting not defence but execution.
The official narrative has found few believers in Minneapolis. Jacob Frey, the city’s mayor, issued a statement notable for its profane directness, calling the federal government’s claim “bullshit”. “This was an agent recklessly using power that resulted in somebody dying,” he said, before delivering an instruction stripped of diplomatic niceties: he told ICE to “get the fuck out”. It was the kind of language that acknowledges what decorum often obscures—that some acts of violence cannot be laundered through bureaucratic euphemism.
At the scene itself, another kind of testimony unfolded. In footage that has circulated widely, a woman identifying Good as her wife is heard screaming near the vehicle, her voice raw with fresh catastrophe: “That’s my wife, I don’t know what to do!” Her identity has not been made public, but her grief requires no introduction. Bystanders converged, including one man identifying himself as a doctor and offering help. “I don’t care,” one agent replied—a phrase that captures, in three syllables, the calculus of power in America. Another agent added, “We have our own medics,” as though competence rather than compassion were the question at hand. By the time Good reached hospital, she was beyond any medic’s reach.
The FBI has assumed control of the investigation, though Minnesota authorities report that their access to evidence has been curtailed—a detail that has only intensified public suspicion about what, precisely, federal agents are protecting.
Those who knew Good have spent the days since her death trying to square the woman they loved with the circumstances of her ending.
Good left behind a six-year-old son, along with two older children from a previous marriage. Her mother, Donna Ganger, speaking to the Minnesota Star Tribune, said her daughter was “probably terrified” in those final moments—a mother’s terrible knowledge of her child’s fear. She described Renee as “one of the kindest people I’ve ever known,” the sort of tribute that gains weight from its simplicity.
Friends describe her as a devoted mother and a woman who understood that parenthood is its own form of authorship, a daily composition of care. She had studied creative writing at Old Dominion University, where in 2020 she won an Academy of American Poets prize for “On Learning to Dissect Foetal Pigs”—a poem whose title alone suggests her willingness to confront the violent education the world provides.
In the evenings after her death, thousands gathered for a candlelit vigil in her neighbourhood, their breath visible in the winter air, chanting her name and honouring her as a caring neighbour who looked out for others. The gathering had the quality of both mourning and insistence—a refusal to let her death be absorbed into the statistical background noise of American violence.
In this developing story, the FBI’s seizure of the investigation and its simultaneous restriction of Minnesota authorities’ access to evidence has revealed something perhaps more troubling than bureaucratic protocol: the Trump administration’s apparent willingness to obscure rather than illuminate. The pattern suggests a federal apparatus prepared to protect its agents even when video evidence contradicts their sworn accounts.
A day after Good’s killing, the violence metastasised. Federal agents shot two people in Portland during a traffic stop—another chapter in what has become a serial narrative of the administration’s immigration crackdown, each incident bleeding into the next until it becomes difficult to speak of discrete events rather than a continuous state of emergency.
These are terrible incidents in terrible days, in a country that seems increasingly willing to deploy lethal force against its own residents in the name of enforcement. And there remain three more years of Donald Trump’s administration—three more years in which such incidents may multiply, in which the distance between the state’s stated purpose and its actual practice may widen still further, until the gap becomes not merely a space of democratic contestation but a chasm into which lives like Renee Nicole Good’s simply disappear, mourned by thousands who gather with candles against the dark, but forgotten by a federal government that has already moved on to its next operation, its next justification, its next kill
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