Renée Nicole Good was a 37-year-old woman, a mother of three, a writer, someone who liked to sing. Her neighbours seemed to like her. She had apparently never been charged with anything beyond a traffic ticket. Her ex-husband described her as a devoted Christian.
Last week she, like many of the tens of thousands of people targeted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents since President Donald Trump returned to office, was ripped from her family.
In ICE’s immigration raids in Minneapolis, there were reports that agents were tearing people from their cars, sometimes not even putting the car in park, sometimes leaving a dog in the car, as their drivers were carted off to a detention centre somewhere. These reports came from Minneapolis police chief Brian O’Hara who on Jan. 6 reminded ICE agents to do their jobs lawfully and residents to keep protests peaceful, because, he said, somebody could get seriously hurt or killed.
On Jan. 7, Renée was murdered by an ICE agent in broad daylight while sitting in her car in the middle of the street. The agent, a man named Jonathan Ross, had placed himself in front of her car and fired three times at the unarmed woman, at close range, as she was trying to pull away from a group of agents. She and her wife had been participating in a peaceful protest action organized to help protect some of their neighbours from immigration raids.
It took no time for Trump and his administration to claim she was a domestic terrorist, that the ICE agent was acting in self defence as Renée had, according to the administration’s account, been trying to run him over. If you’ve seen the video you’ll know this is not true. But it’s quite the sleight of hand for Trump to revise the facts captured on video and assert his own version, evidence of the confidence with which he believes what is captured on video holds little power against his own words when it comes to defining what is real.
There is, for some reason, a debate about whether or not the agent’s use of force was justified. To consider that firing three shots at an unarmed woman in a car could ever be justified is terrifying. But without much evidence, this is the argument Trump and his team are making – that Renée was somehow responsible for her own death. That what Jonathan Ross did was morally permissible.
An investigation by The Wall Street Journal found 13 incidents in which ICE agents fired at civilian vehicles since July. In eight incidents, including in Minneapolis and one more in Portland last week, people were shot. In two incidents people were killed. Renée’s murder, one of these 13, has gotten a lot of attention. Likely because she was white.
But the administration’s insistence on her deserving of this horrific fate is what is unique here, and telling of the problem her murder may be for Trump’s saviour narrative. Trump was voted into office on the promise that he would protect white Americans from ‘the other’. The ‘others’, the illegal aliens, who are taking American jobs, diluting American values and threatening American freedom. Setting aside the question of whether this claim has any validity, Renée Good’s murder challenges this narrative. She, a white Christian woman, was killed trying to protect the so-called ‘other’. So Trump ‘othered’ her too, insisting she was the aggressor and that the act of exercising her right to be in a public space, of showing peaceful allyship with her neighbours, can be punishable by death if it contradicts the narrative Trump depends on. These ICE agents are acting with impunity. It is not clear whether they will face consequences for their actions. It seems they know the Trump administration will stand behind them, whatever they do. And this should not come as a surprise, given Trump’s consistent and intentional rejection of every institution that has been designed to impose and enforce moral order.
On Wednesday, the same day Renée Good was killed, a journalist asked Trump whether there was anything he believed could constrain his power on the world stage. His answer? His own morality, his own mind. Well Trump has been clear about what his mind, his supposed moral code, makes of Renée Good’s killing. ICE officers know they have immunity because the new moral order, according to the U.S. president, is his own, the one that exists in his own mind, the one he chooses to enforce.
The incident is being investigated by the FBI, but given Trump’s comments on the lack of constraints to his power, we should not expect Renée and her family will get the justice they deserve.
Now, that is not our country. Those are not our laws, or lack of them. But at a time when rule of law is increasingly obliterated or ignored; when we’re only a couple hours from the border with the country led by a man who seems adamant to transgress borders according to his own definition of what is right and wrong; at a time when what is written and recorded seems to hold less and less power in truth-telling, it’s important we are outspoken in condemning this murder, in rejecting Trump’s justification of it, in rejecting that there could ever be a worthy justification of it.
How we talk about Renée Good’s death – the framework and language we accept as tools for making sense of it – will no doubt be precedent setting. Because while this may be the first time some are seeing this forceful and violent suppression of opposition from this administration, it will likely not be the last.
Sophie Kuijper Dickson
