Author: Mike Z
On Wednesday in Minnesota an innocent poet, journalist, and mother of three children was murdered in cold blood by a masked ICE thug. Renee Nicole Good was acting as a legal observer to the ICE raid in question, taking on an extremely important role in documenting the abuses our government inflicts upon us. This woman was just like you or me — an average person who is doing their part to try and help their neighbors in these dark and tumultuous times as our rights and liberties are stripped away and infringed upon daily.
There was a doctor on the scene who was denied access to Renee Good and held at gunpoint. Had the doctor been allowed to reach her, potential life saving care could have been performed. When the paramedics arrived, much like how Israel does when they brutalize a population in the West Bank or Gaza, they were denied access to Renee. They were then forced to walk on foot to retrieve her limp body to transfer to a location where she could be given treatment on the way to the hospital. She was pronounced dead upon arrival, succumbing to her wounds.
Renee Good’s life was stolen. Make no mistake with how the media is trying to spin this narrative, there was no justifiable reason to brutalize this woman, much less murder her in cold blood. There is no conceivable way to interpret the evidence we have in any other way than willful execution of a civilian by the state.
It is a tragedy that three children, ages 6, 12, and 15, will now grow up without their mother. A six year old child has been made an orphan as a result of this sick transgression. This is someone who could have been the person in front of you in line as you wait in the grocery store checkout with your food for dinner. This family and the communities they inhabit will feel this loss for the rest of their lives. It is an abject tragedy that we cannot come together in the wake of such senseless violence to condemn an action that never should have happened in the first place. Her absence will be felt by many.
Renee Good is not the first person to have been brutalized or slaughtered by ICE and will assuredly and unfortunately not be the last. While other instances of violence lack the damning video documentation that Good’s execution had, that does not diminish the impact of them in any way. Just one day after her murder ICE agents opened fire on 2 civilians in Portland and wounded them – luckily as of now both victims have survived. On New Year’s Eve an off duty ICE agent murdered a man in Los Angeles for firing off gunshots in celebration. All of this and more happened just in the first two weeks of 2026!
2025 was the deadliest year in the history of ICE – no less than 32 innocent people were murdered by their hands. And that doesn’t even begin to touch on the other various heinous crimes committed on the civilian population from sexual assault to unlawful and brutal incarceration. No doubt more incidents such as these are happening right now. I wish I could tell you things were going to get better, but I think the hard reality is we are in for things to get much worse. The state will be ever emboldened by this development as large swaths of the nation seemingly have been propagandized into not believing their own eyes. As the media manufactures consent for further acts of brutality on the civilian population we enter a new and frightening chapter of the fascist takeover of the United States of America.
With the imperial boomerang quickly finding its way back home, now more than ever we need to be standing with one another as community members with intertwined destinies. It should be clear to us with these startling developments in our country that no single individual will be able to stop these masked thugs from going neighborhood to neighborhood, door to door, acting with unaccountable impunity against our friends and family. The only way we can demand justice for these heinous crimes is collectively. Our government does not care about our outcry as individuals, but together we can make our voices heard in ways that none of us could ever hope to do on our own.
The most important thing for us to be doing at this moment is bolstering the human connections that bind our communities together. If our government will not defend us from an armed Gestapo, we must work to build those defenses together. Find local protests in your area to make your righteous anger known, join in on pressure campaigns to demand condemnation of ICE from our elected officials, help with rapid response networks tracking ICE’s actions in your area, engage in mutual aid to help the families of victims in your neighborhoods, or join an organization working to change the political character of this nation like the Democratic Socialists of America. Together we must stand as one in our quest for justice and rebuke this blatant assault on our base freedoms. We must refuse to allow the tragic martyring of those victims of ICE like Renee Good to be for nothing and ensure that it not be allowed to happen again.