Renee Good is dead because we tolerate a domestic army with $170 billion and no accountability

Renee Good was driving away from armed men who had no legal authority over her, no warrant with her name on it, no legitimate reason to be banging on her car window in the middle of a residential street in Minneapolis on a Wednesday morning after she’d just dropped her six year old son at school. She did what any reasonable person would do when confronted by strangers with guns shouting at you through glass, she tried to leave, tried to get back to her life, tried to remove herself from whatever was unfolding on that block because it had absolutely nothing to do with her.

One of those armed men decided she wasn’t allowed to leave, so he fired three shots through her car window as she drove away, and she made it about a hundred feet before crashing into a light pole with her partner in the passenger seat. Then she was dead, slumped forward with blood everywhere, and those same ICE agents who had just killed her formed a perimeter around the crash site and spent the next fifteen minutes preventing anyone from reaching her to provide medical care.

The delay after Renee Good was deliberate because you don’t prevent ambulances and bystanders from reaching a dying woman because you’re uncertain about procedure. You prevent medical care from reaching a dying woman because you want to ensure she dies, because a dead woman can’t testify about what happened, can’t contradict whatever story you’re about to tell, can’t survive to become a problem for you later.

This happened on January 7, 2026, in south Minneapolis, less than a mile from the spot where Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd while other officers stood by and watched and prevented anyone from intervening. Renee Good was 37 years old, an American citizen, a mother of three including that six year old who will now grow up without her, a poet and writer and legal observer who died because she cared about her neighbors and tried to witness what ICE was doing in her community. And within hours of her execution, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was already calling Renee Good the “terrorist”.

If this language sounds familiar, if the framing feels like something you’ve heard before in a different context, that’s because it’s the exact same script Israel deploys every single time they kill a Palestinian. I would not go so far as to say ICE is America’s IDF, because that oversimplifies the Palestinian struggle and erases the genocidal power that the IDF possesses. But, the premise stands that both forces make the victim becomes the aggressor, the person trying to survive becomes the threat, the dead become retroactively guilty of whatever justifies their killing. And the ambulances are always blocked, always delayed, always prevented from reaching the dying because the point is never just to injure but to ensure death, to eliminate any possibility of survival or testimony or accountability.

Renee Good is not the first person ICE has killed this year. At least thirty people have died in ICE custody as of mid-December 2025.

Those thirty people died of seizures and heart failure and strokes and respiratory failure and tuberculosis and suicide, died because ICE detention facilities are overcrowded by nearly fifty percent since Trump took office, died because medical care in these facilities is so inadequate that a 2024 ACLU report found 95 percent of deaths in ICE custody were preventable or possibly preventable if ICE had provided clinically appropriate medical care.

Renee Good died differently because she died in public, on a residential street, with witnesses and video cameras capturing the whole thing. She died in a way that ICE couldn’t hide or spin or bury in a press release three weeks later. But the fact that her killing was public doesn’t make it exceptional. The violence that killed her is the same violence that has been killing people in ICE custody all year, the same violence that is baked into the agency’s structure and function and entire reason for existing.

And now Kristi Noem is calling her a domestic terrorist, is claiming the ICE agent acted in self-defense against a woman who was trying to run him over, is deploying the exact linguistic inversion that Israel uses every time they murder someone at a checkpoint or blockade medical care or shoot journalists wearing press vests. The murdered become the murderers and the victims become the threats. The state violence that kills becomes self-defense, becomes necessary force, becomes anything other than what it actually is.

This isn’t metaphor and it isn’t coincidental overlap between tactics that happen to look similar. This is the same infrastructure, the same companies, the same technology, the same ideological project of racialized population control being refined in one location and deployed in another in an endless feedback loop. Palantir runs case management systems for ICE that track and monitor immigrants to enable what the company calls fast-track deportations. That same company, Palantir, has developed AI targeting platforms for the Israeli military that make life-or-death decisions about which Palestinians to bomb using data that includes private communications between Palestinian Americans and their relatives in Gaza. Same company, same surveillance architecture, same technology exported from occupied Palestine to American cities and back again.

Israeli companies like Elbit provide radar and surveillance systems at American ports of entry. Paragon sells spyware to ICE. The Department of Homeland Security has been funding joint development programs with Israel for years to create threat detection systems and drone technologies. Law enforcement exchange programs bring American police and ICE agents to Israel to learn what get branded as best practices in checkpoint management, in suppression tactics, in turning entire populations into security threats requiring constant armed supervision. The Anti-Defamation League sponsors these exchanges and none of it is hidden or secret.

And you can see the results now playing out in Minneapolis, where ICE has effectively established checkpoints throughout residential neighborhoods, where armed agents go door to door through entire communities, where a woman gets executed for trying to drive away and medical care is blocked to ensure she dies. The mayor can demand that ICE leave his city but they’re not going anywhere, because occupied populations don’t get to tell occupying forces when to leave. That’s what occupation means, has always meant. You don’t have sovereignty over your own streets. You don’t have the power to stop armed agents from operating in your neighborhoods. You don’t have the ability to protect your residents from being killed.

Governor Walz can promise a full and fair investigation but we know exactly how that goes because we’ve been through this before. The investigation will take months, maybe years. There will be findings that amount to nothing because the agent will claim he feared for his life, will say Renee Good was using her vehicle as a weapon, will invoke the magic words that always make police violence disappear into the bureaucratic void. And he’ll never face consequences because the entire system is designed to ensure he doesn’t.

THE “LAW”

This is called qualified immunity, and it’s worth understanding exactly what it is and where it comes from because the doctrine explains why ICE agents can kill people with near-total impunity. Qualified immunity is a judicial invention that appears nowhere in the Constitution, nowhere in federal statute, nowhere in state law. It’s pure judicial activism masquerading as legal principle, created by courts to protect government officials from civil liability for constitutional violations.

The doctrine has its origins in the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, legislation that was passed specifically to protect Black people from white supremacist violence by allowing them to sue government officials who violated their civil rights. The Supreme Court looked at that law and decided, without any textual basis whatsoever, that actually government officials should have immunity from such lawsuits unless they violated “clearly established law.” In practice, this means you can’t hold a government official liable for violating your rights unless you can point to a prior case with nearly identical facts where a court already ruled that specific conduct unconstitutional.

So to hold the ICE agent who killed Renee Good civilly liable, her family would need to find a prior case where an ICE agent shot in almost exactly these circumstances and was found to have violated clearly established constitutional rights. If they can’t find that precise precedent, qualified immunity shields the killer from a lawsuit. It’s circular logic designed to make accountability impossible, you can’t establish that conduct is unconstitutional without winning a case, but you can’t win a case without already having established that the conduct is unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court built this entire doctrine out of nothing to protect government officials from civil rights lawsuits, and it has its roots in the same white supremacist legal mechanisms that it was supposedly designed to dismantle. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund describes qualified immunity as having evolved through judicial reasoning that protects “the structures of white supremacy” by imposing an “unreasonable and deeply stringent standard that requires victims to point to a nearly identical case of unconstitutional conduct in their attempts to obtain justice.”

But here’s what qualified immunity doesn’t do, what it has never done and cannot do under any interpretation of federal law. It doesn’t prevent criminal prosecution. States have full authority to prosecute anyone for violations of state law regardless of whether that person is a federal official, and murder is a crime in every state including Minnesota. The Supremacy Clause provides federal officials with some protections from state prosecution, but those protections only apply when federal officials are “reasonably acting within the bounds of their lawful federal duties.”

Shooting an unarmed woman who is driving away from you is not within the bounds of any lawful federal duty. It’s murder under Minnesota state law, and Minnesota has every legal right to prosecute it as such.

In Colorado v. Symes in 1932, the Court held that “federal officers and employees are not, merely because they are such, granted immunity from prosecution in state courts for crimes against state law.” More recently, states have successfully prosecuted federal officials for various crimes including murder. Santa Clara County in California prosecuted a federal postal worker who killed a bicyclist. Virginia prosecuted a U.S. Park Police officer who shot someone to death, though a newly elected prosecutor later dropped the charges.

Trump is already punishing Minnesota, has been punishing the state since before Renee Good was killed. The entire reason ICE deployed over two thousand agents to Minneapolis in what they described as the largest DHS operation ever was because Trump decided to retaliate against Minnesota for being home to a large Somali immigrant population. A right-wing activist named Nick Shirley released a video alleging widespread fraud in Somali daycare centers, a video that relied entirely on anonymous sources and sweeping generalizations and claims that were quickly debunked by local media with actual reporting and actual evidence.

The violence is not incidental to ICE’s mission. The violence is the mission. The agency exists to terrorize, to control through fear, to remind everyone who falls outside the constantly narrowing boundaries of who counts as fully human that they can be detained or deported or killed at any moment. And those boundaries keep expanding to swallow more and more people. American citizens are now inside the kill zone. A white woman from Colorado, a mother and poet and legal observer, someone who by every traditional measure should have been safe from this kind of state violence, is dead because she happened to be in the wrong neighborhood when ICE decided to occupy her city.

Where Do We Go From Here?

If you’re waiting for this to be the breaking point, if you’re hoping this will finally be the atrocity that’s too much and forces some kind of reckoning, I need you to understand that there is no automatic threshold where brutality becomes unacceptable. There is no level of violence that spontaneously generates accountability. The moral arc of the universe bends toward nothing unless WE bend it ourselves, and right now most people are still operating under the delusion that progress happens on its own if we just wait long enough and believe hard enough.

That’s not how any of this works. The moral arc doesn’t have inherent momentum toward justice. It doesn’t move because history has some predetermined direction or because righteousness eventually wins. It moves only when people organize and fight and refuse to accept the world as it is, when they make the cost of oppression higher than the system can sustain, when they force change through collective action rather than waiting for institutions to reform themselves.

Right now the system is absorbing everything we throw at it without any real consequences. Protests happen and vigils are held and people express outrage on social media, and ICE keeps operating exactly as before.

America is occupied territory. Not in some metaphorical sense that makes for dramatic rhetoric, not in some future scenario where things might get bad if we’re not careful. Right now, today, in Minneapolis and in every other city where ICE operates with the same impunity as an invading military force. Local governments have no power to stop them. Citizens have no rights that ICE is bound to respect. That’s what occupation means and has always meant.

So the question becomes what we actually do about it, not what we wish would happen or what we’d like someone else to do or what minor reforms might make the system slightly less murderous while leaving its fundamental structure intact. What do we do right now to stop this?

First, we demand prosecution. The ICE agent who killed Renee Good must be charged with murder under Minnesota state law. Keith Ellison and local prosecutors have the full legal authority to do this, and if they don’t, if they allow the standard process of internal investigation and qualified immunity doctrine to shield this killer from accountability, then they become complicit in every death that follows. ICE is watching and learning what they can get away with, and right now the answer is everything. Right now they can kill anyone and walk away clean unless prosecutors use the power they actually possess.

Second, we abolish qualified immunity. It requires only political will, and if your representatives won’t support ending qualified immunity, if they’re more committed to protecting killer cops and killer ICE agents than protecting the people those agents keep killing, then you vote them out and primary them and make their political survival contingent on accountability.

Third, we defund and abolish ICE. Full stop.

And if that sounds radical or unreasonable or politically impossible, then explain to me what the reasonable position is when federal agents are killing citizens in broad daylight and calling it self-defense. What’s the moderate compromise here?

We must bend the moral arc ourselves through organizing and resistance and refusal to accept this as normal, or the arc doesn’t bend at all. We prosecute killers, we abolish agencies of terror, we dismantle legal fictions that grant impunity to state violence. We do this or we accept that we live under occupation where armed federal agents can kill anyone at any time for any reason and face no consequences whatsoever.

Renee Good’s three children are growing up without their mother because we have collectively tolerated the construction of a domestic military force pointed at our own communities.

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