ICE have murdered a woman on the streets of Minneapolis, and now they’re trying to lie to you about it. By now, you’ve almost certainly seen the footage. Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old woman driving a purple SUV, is sitting in the street, idling her car. She was a legal observer, there to keep an eye on ICE as they wage yet another series of immigration raids in Minneapolis, and report any misconduct she saw. The masked, heavily-armed troops approach her, reportedly shouting contradictory instructions: one agent tells her to drive away, another to get out of the car. One of them grabs her SUV’s door handle and yanks on it. Confused and scared, she tries to turn and drive off. So one of the agents draws a pistol, and he shoots and kills her. 

As soon as they killed Renee Good, they began lying about it. In a statement on Truth Social, President Trump said that Good was “obviously, a professional agitator” who had “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense.” He then claimed the ICE agent was “recovering in the hospital” and lucky to be alive. But none of that is true. She hadn’t run over anyone. The murderer, who has since been identified by the Minneapolis Star Tribune as Jonathan Ross, was fine; the footage shows him “walking away apparently uninjured.” Confronted (for once) with video evidence he was lying, Trump mumbled and changed the subject. 

It’s clear from the video that (1) She’s not trying to run over the officer, she’s trying to get away from them (she turns right, away from the officer) (2) The officer did not become any safer by killing her, since nothing would have been different if he’d just moved out of the way of the car without shooting her, except that she would be alive, and (3) He kept firing even when he was next to the car, out of its path. Don’t take our word for it, watch the clip yourself. 

 

Whenever police of any kind make a public statement, the presumption should be that they may be lying, because lying is something police often do. But even by the usual standards of cops, immigration agents, and their defenders, the statements the Department of Homeland Security has put out about Good’s killing have been brazenly, insultingly false. On its social media feeds, the DHS has claimed Good was a “violent rioter” who had “weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism.” This, they say, led the ICE agent to shoot in self-defense, “fearing for his life.” But again, this is not true. Simply watching the footage is enough to disprove it. These men were wearing body armor and carrying guns. They were approaching an unarmed woman in a Honda, which was barely moving—certainly not fast enough to be much of a “weapon.” She was not “rioting.” If they “feared for their lives” under those circumstances, they had only their own cowardice to blame. 

This was bound to happen sooner or later. ICE agents are swarming our cities, given heavy weaponry, anonymity, and impunity. They are the largest law enforcement agency in the country, thanks to the monster budget Congress has given them. Virtually anybody can become an ICE agent with minimal training or background checks, including teenagers as young as 18, and there have been multiple cases of ICE officials with ties to neo-Nazi and other white supremacist groups that were only discovered after years on the job. Good isn’t the first person they’ve shot; there have already been nine others since last September. Earlier in Minneapolis, ICE agents stormed into a school, “began tackling people, handcuffed two staff members and released chemical weapons on bystanders.” In Louisiana, a detention officer recently pleaded guilty to sexually abusing prisoners at an ICE facility. And those are the crimes we know about.  

One fact that defenders of ICE’s actions are reluctant to discuss is that they didn’t just shoot an unarmed mother; they also refused to let a doctor treat her. There’s video of this, too. The man in question asks if he can “go check a pulse”; he identifies himself, politely, as a “physician.” The responses he gets from ICE are, respectively, “no” and “I don’t care.” They wanted her to die. They made sure she died. Even those who ludicrously argue self-defense do not mention this fact, because it’s totally unconscionable. They actively prevented her from getting assistance. This is what truly turns it into a murder. Afterward, a DHS officer desecrated the memorial members of the community put up for Good, kicking over the candles while telling mourners to “Back up! Back up!” (Cops love telling people to back up. It’s one of the few full sentences they can muster.) And the White House has the nerve to call its hired killers “brave men and women”!

There are all kinds of sick ironies here. Just in the last few days, Donald Trump has been condemning Iran for “shooting protesters,” threatening to intervene if the government in Tehran doesn’t stop it, only to turn around and justify his own troops killing a legal observer in cold blood. Then there’s the case of Ashli Babbitt, the January 6 rioter who was shot and killed by a Capitol police officer; she became a martyr in MAGA-world, and Trump recently offered her full military funeral honors, only for the entire MAGA movement to justify the same kind of lethal police violence when it’s directed against someone they dislike. And of course, there’s the use of the term “domestic terrorism,” which has been deployed by everyone from Representative Nancy Mace to Stephen Miller to slander Good. The word “terrorism” used to have a coherent meaning, roughly “violence directed against civilians for political reasons.” Now, it appears to mean “anything the Trump administration doesn’t like.” But if anything is “domestic terrorism,” it’s sending an army of stormtroopers into U.S. cities to purge them of immigrants, and shooting anyone who gets in your way. ICE and its supporters want to cry “terrorism,” but they’re the ones committing it. 

But Trump and ICE wouldn’t be able to carry out this violence if it weren’t for the uselessness and complicity of the Democratic Party. Today, as Good lies dead, it’s impossible not to remember Kamala Harris’ statements from 2018, where she pushed back against calls to abolish ICE by saying that “ICE has a purpose, ICE has a role, ICE should exist.” On the campaign trail in 2024, she took a similar line, boasting in campaign ads that she would “hire thousands more border agents.” If you were against violent, militarized immigration enforcement in that election, you were fresh out of options, because both Trump and Harris supported it. Earlier, it was Barack Obama who first appointed Tom Homan as an associate director of ICE and even gave him an award. And as recently as June 2025, 75 Democrats in the House voted for a resolution to show “gratitude[… for protecting the homeland” to ICE. Are they still grateful now?

Even in Minnesota, the response from top Democrats has been weak. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey has been doing a lot of swearing, saying the ICE narrative about Good’s killing is “bullshit” and the agency should “get the fuck out of Minneapolis.” But at the time of writing, he has made no attempt to arrest Good’s killer, nor will he even call the incident what it was: a murder. This shouldn’t be a complete surprise, since Frey previously pushed back against calls to defund the Minneapolis police after George Floyd’s murder. Like a lot of Democrats, he’s reflexively pro-law enforcement, no matter how violent they become. Governor Tim Walz has been even more pathetic, promising only a “full, fair, and expeditious investigation to ensure accountability.” (Perhaps there’ll be a strongly worded letter, too.) Neither politician, crucially, has called to abolish ICE as a federal agency. 

But we can abolish ICE, and we must. By now, it should be clear that the agency does not make Americans safer. In fact, everywhere it goes, we get chaos in the streets, families ripped apart, businesses raided and forced to close, and increasingly, death. It’s worth remembering, too, that ICE is a relatively new agency. It was only created in 2003, as part of George W. Bush’s paranoid security crackdown on America during the “War on Terror.” Prior to 2003, there was no ICE, and for that matter, no Department of Homeland Security. We got along just fine without them. We can, and should, do without them again—and Trump has set a precedent for abruptly dismantling federal agencies. For Democrats running in upcoming elections, a clear call to abolish ICE should be the bare minimum voters demand. Not more funding for training; not vague “reforms.” It has to go, period. 

In case after case, we’ve seen that Donald Trump, JD Vance, Kristi Noem, and their allies have no morality. They will simply do whatever they can get away with. If they’re allowed to get away with kidnapping the president of another country, as they’ve just done in Venezuela, they will probably do something similar again. Likewise, if they can get away with shooting an American in cold blood on the street, they’ll probably shoot another one tomorrow. That’s the chilling thing about all these lies: it would be easy enough to tell the truth. Trump would really lose nothing if he simply admitted that one of his ICE agents had done something wrong, and held that agent accountable. Troops are easily replaceable. But he clearly wants to find out if he can get away with it. If Democrats let him, the consequences will be horrific for everyone. Now is the time to put an end to ICE, before anyone else has to die.