Abolish ICE is just the beginning
For Renee Nicole Good, we need a revolution.
ICE killed a mother on Wednesday, and orphaned a child. Not for the first time, and not for the last. Renee Nicole Good was executed by a federal agent for no reason other than that a Gestapo agent decided to murder her. Renee’s murder, the ripple effect through her community and throughout the country, and the continued destruction of the lives of countless immigrant families are the inevitable result of creating a Gestapo made up of racists and sociopaths, arming and funding them to the teeth, and unleashing them on communities across the United States.
Renee Nicole Good was a legal observer, poet, writer, wife, mom, and, according to her Instagram bio, a shitty guitar strummer. As one of the speakers said during the first vigil honoring her in Minneapolis, Renee “died because she loved her neighbors.” Renee was simply trying to do what was right, and she died because she cared, she died because ICE is a wrecking ball of terror in our communities, she died because the Gestapo denied her medical care, she died because the fascist state has unleashed wanton violence across this country.
Renee had a young son, whose father died in 2003. ICE orphaned this child Wednesday, just as they have orphaned numerous immigrant children and ripped families apart since the inception of the agency. Renee also had two other children, who all had their mom ripped away from them, just as so many families have now been torn apart by ICE.
None of the facts of this tragedy have stopped the far-right from running to defend the murderous ICE agent. As one of Renee’s former teachers says, “She was kind and talented, a working class mom who put herself through school despite circumstances that would’ve crumpled the pathetic rich boy politicians who sadistically abetted her murder.” The abetting began with super-charging ICE funding and giving them a mandate to attack our neighbors across America. It continued into justifying a murder caught on video, with a huge swath of the far right from the President to his internet goons excusing and even celebrating this execution.
As always, Donald Trump led the charge in lying about Renee’s murder, in justifying the cold blooded execution. On Truth Social he called her a “professional agitator,” said she attempted to run over the federal agent, and said it’s hard to believe the murderer lived through the event. Of course, anyone who watched the video knows that this is all completely dishonest. The story here is largely about the fascist willingness to lie about an execution caught on video. Their increasing brazenness has now reached a fever pitch where lying about the recorded murder of an American citizen doesn’t faze them in the slightest.
In many ways, none of this is new. The right was more than comfortable lying about the murder of George Floyd, slain by a Minneapolis cop a few miles from where Renee Nicole Good was executed. They lauded Floyd’s murder, attempting to turn him into a symbolic punching bag in death. They lied about him again and again, easily disprovable lies in each and every case. The right was doing what they always do, attempting to exceptionalize state violence. That’s what they’re doing here once again, trying to debate the merits of a woman being shot multiple times through her car window as she tried to drive away from ICE. As with George Floyd, fascists want to pick apart the individual, isolate this particular event, claim that one factor or another means that this state murder is okay. What they don’t want, what they fear, is people waking up and realizing that this execution, like so many before it, indicts the entire system.
Renee’s murder isn’t the exception, it’s the rule. Yes, when ICE kills people it doesn’t usually look this brutal, this gory, this public. Usually, ICE kills behind the walls of a detention center. 32 people died in ICE custody last year. As The Guardian recently published, “They died of seizure and heart failure, stroke, respiratory failure, tuberculosis or suicide.” And, in all likelihood, more died when they were forcibly shipped back to countries where their lives were in danger, or when they were kidnapped and sent to random countries where they have no connections. Then there is also the immense violence of ripping families apart, a practice that is fundamental to ICE’s day-to-day operations.
The violence of ICE is baked in, systemic, intentional. That violence has been turbocharged over the past year, by the Trump administration but also by the bipartisan passage of the Laken Riley Act, which exploited one, exceptional tragedy to broaden ICE’s power and reach. 2025 also saw Trump’s “Big Beautiful bill” allocate more than $170 billion over four years for border and interior enforcement with a stated goal of deporting 1 million immigrants each year, as Margy O’Herron writes. In short, an agency whose mandate was already inherently violent was given the money and the man-power to become an immensely powerful and lawless Gestapo force, and that’s exactly what they’ve become.
In these circumstances, the murder of a U.S. citizen and legal observer is not surprising — it’s inevitable. Anyone who seeks to check, observe, or pushback against the Gestapo is in danger. State agents instructed to wield immense violence, particularly those who know that the force of the government stands behind even their most heinous actions, are an immensely dangerous group. That’s why, over five years after the murder of George Floyd, U.S. police again killed over 1,000 people last year.
We’re due for a reckoning. Better training for ICE agents won’t cut it. “Reigning in” the Gestapo won’t cut it. We’re due for a total reckoning with state violence. The people pouring into the streets of Minneapolis to protest Renee’s murder aren’t asking for a more humane kidnapping force. The thousands and thousands of protesters across America aren’t demanding minor reforms to fascism. What all of us see now, more clearly than ever, is that it’s time for a systemic confrontation of the institutions that underpin fascism. It’s time to abolish them, to fully uproot them, to demolish the agencies and policies that laid the foundation for fascism in this country.
The Department of Homeland Security, for example, wasn’t created until 2003. Ostensibly created to present terrorism, it has instead followed a trajectory that should look all too familiar to us now. Rather than focusing on external threats, DHS, and ICE within it, have become core components of the fascist turn inward. The violence they mete out hurts immigrants, entire communities, and increasingly U.S. citizens as well. Right now we have to see the imperial boomerang clearly. Whether it’s the implications of the attack on Venezuela or the consequences of the relentless violence against immigrants, we’re all suffering from the tools and institutions that were sold to us under the guise of targeting “other” people around the globe.
This moment calls on us to understand the full implications of the First They Came poem. First they came for immigrants, first they came for trans people, first they came for Black folks, first they came for Muslims, first they came for anti-Zionist protesters — there are far too many examples of our government going after various groups over the past few years. In each case many of us voiced our solidarity, but we haven’t fought back with everything we have. And so the fascist onslaught has grown. Now, no matter who you are, the beast is knocking at the door. Renee Nicole Good was a white American citizen. And not only did ICE murder her in cold blood, every apparatus of the regime immediately leapt out to lie about her and justify her execution.
The message of the First They Came poem isn’t just to reject scapegoating and reject attacks on your neighbors of every stripe. We should carry that lesson with us, but the full message is that an injury to one is an injury to all. We must understand that when fascists attack your neighbor, they attack you. We have to internalize that lesson, and respond accordingly. Only true, deep solidarity will see us through this moment, and solidarity means fighting back.
We have been conditioned to isolate, to individualize, to see ourselves as separate from one another. But the sociopaths in the regime don’t see us like that. They see a big, scary left, and all of us are in their crosshairs. They know that what they do is wrong, and in their nightmares they see us coming to punish them for their sins. So, let’s be the boogeyman they fear so deeply. Let’s be the radical, united left that the fascists are terrified of. Let’s tear up their systems of violence and oppression by the very roots, abolish agencies of death and kidnapping, rip apart the structures of murder and oppression so that we may build something better. Today, let’s settle for nothing less than a total reckoning. - JP
I would like to note that while her child does have a deceased father, there is no mention of her widowed wife. Not trying to be divisive but it is important to note that we cannot erase the actual life that a martyr lived.
When we, as a nation, elected the orange fascist to the presidency, not just once but twice, we sealed our own fate. And the fate of billions of other people all around the world who didn’t deserve the evil we inflicted on them.