The God Who Knows Blood: ICE and the Murder of Renee Nicole Good
The Execution of Renee Nicole Good
Thus, saith the Lord: “I have seen the blood you have spilled. I have heard the cries of those you have terrorized. I have witnessed the bullet enter the head of my daughter on a Minneapolis street. And I am coming for an accounting.”
This morning, ICE agents executed Renee Nicole Good.
Let that sentence sit in your gut like a stone.
ICE agents. Executed. An American mother. On an American street. In broad daylight. While her partner watched. While her six-year-old son waited at home for her to walk through the door.
She was 37 years old. She was a U.S. citizen. She was unarmed. She was not the target of any investigation. She was shot dead in the head…in the head…by a masked ICE agent who then walked away from her bleeding body while his colleagues drew their weapons on a doctor who tried to help her.
“Back the fuck up!” they screamed at a physician trying to save her life.
They shot her in the head and then they wouldn’t let anyone help her.
Her son is now an orphan. His father died in 2023. His mother was murdered by ICE agents in 2026. He is six years old and there is nobody left. His grandfather, learning what happened, said: “There’s nobody else in his life.”
A six-year-old boy. Orphaned by ICE.
This was not self-defense. This was not a tragedy. This was not an accident.
This was murder.
And I refuse to speak calmly about it.
The Witness: Renee Nicole Good’s Wife
Renee’s wife stumbled out into the snow, their dog beside her and sobbed to anyone who would listen: “They killed my wife. I don’t know what to do. We stopped to videotape, and they shot her in the head.”
Read that again.
“We stopped to videotape, and they shot her in the head.”
She wasn’t attacking anyone. She wasn’t threatening anyone. She was witnessing. She was documenting. And for that…for the crime of watching…they put three bullets in her skull.
Members of the Minneapolis City Council said Renee “was out caring for her neighbors this morning and her life was taken today at the hands of the federal government.” Her mother, Donna Ganger, learned about her daughter’s death from a reporter. Not from the government that killed her. From a reporter.
When told the circumstances, her mother said: “That’s so stupid. She was probably terrified.”
Terrified. A woman terrified in her final moments as masked federal agents surrounded her car. A woman terrified as strange men in tactical gear yanked at her door. A woman terrified as she tried to do what any human being would do…flee from armed men who were attacking her vehicle. A woman terrified as the bullets entered her skull while her partner screamed beside her.
They terrified her. And then they killed her. And then they called her a terrorist.
Who Renee Nicole Good Was
“Renee was one of the kindest people I’ve ever known,” her mother said. “She was extremely compassionate. She’s taken care of people all her life. She was loving, forgiving and affectionate. She was an amazing human being.”
Loving. Forgiving. Compassionate. A caretaker. A mother. A partner.
Shot three times in the head. While caring for her neighbors. While her partner watched. While her six-year-old son waited for her to come home.
And within hours, the Department of Homeland Security labeled this dead mother a “violent rioter” engaged in “domestic terrorism.” Secretary Kristi Noem called it an “act of domestic terrorism.” What a collection of dumbasses.
Do you understand what kind of government murders a mother caring for her neighbors and then slanders her corpse?
This is what empires do. They kill, and then they build lies around the killing.
ICE Lies
The state is never at a loss for justification. The condemned is always dangerous. The shooting is always necessary. The dead woman was always a terrorist. The orphaned child is always collateral damage in the noble work of keeping America safe.
The state always has a story that makes the blood disappear.
But the blood does not disappear.
The blood of Renee Nicole Good cries out from the pavement of south Minneapolis…blocks from where George Floyd cried “I can’t breathe” beneath the knee of the state. The blood joins the chorus of the countless dead…those shot by police, those executed in prison chambers, those bombed in foreign lands, those drowned at borders, those suffocated in detention centers, those “found hanging” in cells.
The blood testifies.
And the testimony is this: ICE must be abolished. Every agent at the scene of this murder should be charged with murder.
ICE = The Death Squad
There are those who will object. They will say ICE is necessary. They will say we need borders. They will say enforcement requires force. They will say she should have complied. They will say all the things that collaborators always say when the state kills someone.
I reject this theology of death. I reject it in the name of every person I have watched the state kill.
ICE is not a law enforcement agency. ICE is a death squad with paperwork…state terror administered through bureaucracy. It is thousands of armed agents deployed into a city against the explicit objections of the mayor, the police chief, the governor and the people. Deployed not to protect but to terrorize, not to serve but to dominate, not to enforce law but to demonstrate that the federal government can kill anyone, anywhere, anytime and face no consequences.
They came to Minneapolis looking for blood. They came with tactical gear and the blessing of an administration that has called Somali residents “garbage.” They came one day after the surge began and shot an unarmed white woman in the head…a woman who was not even the target of their operation, a woman whose only crime was witnessing their violence.
This is not law enforcement. This is occupation. This is warfare against the civilian population conducted under color of law.
When Mayor Frey said “Get the fuck out of Minneapolis,” he was speaking prophetically.
He was saying what the prophet Amos said to the corrupt powers of his day: I hate, I despise your festivals. I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Take away from me the noise of your songs. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.
ICE has made itself an enemy of the living God. ICE has become Pharaoh’s army. ICE has become Babylon. ICE has become Rome.
And God is coming for an accounting.
The Theology of Death
Every family ripped apart is evil. Every child traumatized is evil. Every community terrorized is evil.
And now, every bullet fired into the head of an unarmed mother…while her partner sits beside her, while her son waits for her to come home, while a doctor tries to help and is screamed at to back the fuck up…is an evil that cries out to heaven.
But here is what I know that the death squads do not seem to know: killing does not solve anything. It never has. It cannot. Killing is a confession of spiritual bankruptcy…a declaration that we have run out of imagination, that we have abandoned the hard work of restoration, that we have chosen the shortcut of annihilation because we are too weak or too cruel or too lazy to do anything else.
The agent who pulled the trigger did not make himself safer. He made himself a killer. He will carry Renee Nicole Good’s face for the rest of his life. He will see her in his dreams. He will know, in the hours before his own death, that he ended a mother’s life and orphaned a child. The mask he wore will not hide him from that knowledge. Her face will haunt him as long as he has breath. The badge will not absolve him.
This is what the theology of death does: it destroys everyone it touches. The executed and the executioner. The shot and the shooter. The condemned and the ones who do the condemning.
Melting ICE
The masked agent who killed Renee Nicole Good must be arrested, charged with murder and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
I am a death penalty abolitionist. I do not want this agent executed. I do not want him tortured. I do not want him subjected to the same violence he inflicted.
I am calling for real accountability. I am calling for the basic application of law that any citizen would face if they shot an unarmed mother in the head while she tried to drive away from them.
If you or I pulled a gun and shot someone through their windshield as they tried to flee…shot them in front of their partner, shot them in the head, orphaned their child…we would be in handcuffs before the body was cold.
But this ICE agent? He walked away. He is free. He is probably being told right now that he is a hero.
The badge is not a license to murder. The mask does not grant absolution. The press release does not wash the blood from his hands.
But prosecution of this one masked killer is not enough. Every ICE agent who has used excessive force must be investigated. Every death in ICE custody must be reopened.
They brag about it. They shoot people and they brag about it.
The entire apparatus must be dismantled.
ICE must be melted.
The Prophetic Words of Scripture
The prophets of Israel did not speak politely to power. They did not issue measured statements expressing concern. They did not wait for the proper channels.
They named evil as evil. They named murder as murder. They stood in the temple courts and declared that God would bring the whole rotten structure down if the people did not change their ways.
Micah asked what the Lord requires: “To do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.”
There is no justice in shooting an unarmed mother in the head while her partner watches. There is no mercy in orphaning a six-year-old boy. There is no humility in deploying 2,000 agents against a city that doesn’t want you and then lying about the bodies you leave behind.
ICE has failed every measure of divine requirement. ICE has become an instrument of injustice, a machine of cruelty, a monument to imperial arrogance.
We see them. We remember. We will not move on.
Renee Nicole Good’s Wife’s Testimony
“They killed my wife. I don’t know what to do.”
These words, sobbed in the snow of a Minneapolis street, are the only testimony that matters. Not the press releases. Not the tweets from the President calling a dead mother a “professional agitator.” Not the carefully crafted narratives of self-defense from agencies that refuse to wear body cameras because they know body cameras would show the truth.
A woman in the snow, watching her wife’s body slumped in the car, blood pooling, life gone.
“We stopped to videotape, and they shot her in the head.”
And somewhere, a six-year-old boy waits for a mother who will never come home.
His grandfather will come to get his grandchild, because there’s nobody else in his life. Because ICE made sure of that.
The DEMAND
I call on every person of faith to say clearly: ICE must be abolished.
I call on every prosecutor with jurisdiction to say clearly: this ICE agent must be charged with murder.
I call on every citizen to say clearly: we refuse to be governed by ICE death squads.
The same government that shoots unarmed mothers in Minneapolis cages children at the border, starves the poor through policy and wages endless war in the name of order. The same logic that justified the bullets in Renee Nicole Good’s head justifies the needle in the arm of the condemned, the bomb dropped from a drone, the cell door slammed shut, the benefit denied, the neighborhood flooded with guns and patrols but stripped of care. This is not a series of accidents…it is a single, coherent theology of state violence. It blesses executions, deportations, mass incarceration, police killings and slow death by neglect as “necessary,” “legal,” and “clean.” Whether on a residential street, in a courtroom, at a border fence or in a sanitized death chamber, the message is the same: some lives are disposable, and the state reserves the right to decide which. I hate all of it.
But today, I am focused on Minneapolis. Today, I am focused on Renee Nicole Good. Today, I am focused on a partner sobbing in the snow and a six-year-old boy who will grow up knowing that the government of the United States of America murdered his mother and called her a terrorist.
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