ICE: Very American violence

The fatal killing of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent forces a reckoning with state violence. Alexander Billet traces ICE’s escalating violence and the politics that legitimises it.

The first video was, and is, chilling. A frigid mid-winter morning, typical for Minneapolis this time of year. Snow everywhere, a thin layer of ice on parts of the road. An Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer walks up to an SUV, its driver trying to wave him past. He tries to open the driver’s door while another officer walks in front. The car is motionless, except for its wheels turning away from both of them. With both officers now at the car’s side and the car very clearly moving away, the second one draws his pistol and fires three shots at face level into the vehicle. The car then rolls half a block down the street before slamming into a light pole.

This was on 7 January, two days after ICE and other federal agencies descended on Minneapolis – under the pretext of bogus fraud allegations targeted at the city’s large Somali population – to conduct what Department of Homeland Security officials call the ‘largest DHS operation ever.’ As the world now knows, the woman in the vehicle was named Renee Nicole Good. She was a mother of three. Good and her wife Becca lived in the neighbourhood, and were acting as legal observers when ICE accosted them. Becca was not in the vehicle. She was filming when Renee was shot. Renee died at the scene. 

It was always headed in this direction. How could it not under the present administration? We have become bizarrely accustomed to Donald Trump’s bluster, his love for the spectacle of violence. The big, beautiful wall. Casual jokes about firing squads. His lurid request that cops shoot protesters in the legs. Charlie Kirk. 20 January. The list is long.

It is, nonetheless, shortsighted to lay this naked brutality at Trump’s door alone. You could say that this is the violent flailing of a tottering imperial power and you would be right. The US’ place at the top of the global capitalist pile has always been supported by a combination of soft coercion and organised violence, the ratios varying with its stability. If the coup in Venezuela and the insufferable ‘Donroe Doctrine’ it inaugurates are a futile lurch in favour of violence, then events at home are going to match. Neither will do much to maintain US supremacy, or the order it requires at home.

Some are asking why this, of all the cruelties of the second Trump administration, is garnering the level of attention, provoking this much outrage. It’s a valid question. Part of it is surely that, much like the police murder of George Floyd five years ago – less than a mile from where Good was killed – it was recorded on video. Very little doubt can be left about what happened. Not that this has stopped Trump, JD Vance, Kristi Noem and the other venal ghouls around the White House from defending ICE agents’ actions, painting Good as a cartoon villain domestic terrorist, and armed ICE agents acting with impunity as defenceless victims.

This isn’t all that makes the video shocking. It is for sure an artefact of real-life horror. But it also proves that, so far, the mentality of fascism, of putting your head down to let others get crushed by the state’s iron heel, hasn’t been fully accepted yet. A nearby elementary school had put the word out that ICE was in the area, and the school was concerned about students’ parents being abducted. Renee and Becca Good saw their neighbours at risk and went to do what they could. They acted on a basic instinct of solidarity. That is why ICE shot Renee.

The second video is a brief postscript. Trump, Vance and Noem all jumped on the story of Renee Good hitting the ICE agent – now identified as Jonathan Ross – with her car, of the agent being hospitalised. The second video doesn’t show us a man who requires hospital care. It shows the agent who shot Renee Nicole Good striding away from her crashed car, no apparent injury whatsoever. There’s even a bit of pep in his step. ‘Call 911’, he casually says, then gets into another SUV and drives off. Simultaneous to this, other residents and witnesses attempted to rush to Good’s aid. Other federal agents prevented them from reaching her. 

In a string of press conferences and statements, Vance and Noem have doubled and tripled down, telling the public that they saw something other than what they saw. That Good was coming for Ross when he fired, putting the pedal to the metal and aiming right at him. Both Renee and Becca were deliberately obstructing ICE. Lies, lies and more lies. 

It would be one thing if this was a truly isolated incident. It isn’t. Renee Good is not the first person shot by ICE. How could she be? In several months of ICE deployed to city after city – often with other federal agencies and sometimes contingents of the National Guard in tow? Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland, Boston, Washington DC and more. We have seen ICE sweep through neighbourhoods, workplaces, kitchens, Home Depot parking lots, arresting anyone unlucky enough to catch officers’ glance, regardless of residency status or citizenship. We have heard the stories of being shepherded onto planes and carted off to facilities like Alligator Alcatraz or El Salvador’s CECOT, where they will be tortured and brutalised. This is a ruthless series of operations, violent and indiscriminate. 

So no, Renee Nicole Good isn’t the first one to be shot. The day after her death, border protection officers in Portland shot two in their car, trotting out flimsy excuses about affiliations to the Tren de Aragua gang. Neither is Good, even the first one killed in this wave of immigrant operations. This past September, while conducting sweeps in Chicago, agents shot and killed Silvio Villegas-Gonzales, an undocumented migrant from Mexico with no criminal record. Just this past New Year’s Eve, an off-duty ICE agent killed Keith Porter, a Black father of two, in the Northridge area of Los Angeles (Porter was firing a gun into the air to celebrate the New Year, which is illegal, but by no account ever aimed it at anyone). No fewer than 30 died in 2025 while in ICE custody. 

The third video shows a different perspective. It isn’t bodycam footage, but from Ross’ phone. We see Renee in the driver’s seat of the car, trying to diffuse the tension as Ross and the officer approach her – ‘That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.’ The officer then turns to Becca, filming him back, chiding him, questioning the bravado and toughness he and other officers try to project. He then turns back to the SUV before the phone erratically loses focus, flipping up and down before it refocuses on the car careening into the light pole. ‘Fucking bitch’ he says.

That this video was procured and released by right-wing independent news outlet Alpha News says a lot. It was also retweeted by the White House Twitter account. But really, it shows nothing new. Ross’s phone swings around not because he is trying to avoid being hit, but because he is reaching for his gun. The White House, and most of those siding with ICE, know this. 

There is another, far more insidious reason this video is being touted by the right, and it has more to do with the bourgeois familial gaze. That much of the commentary around it refers to Becca not as Renee’s wife but as her ‘lesbian partner’ says a lot. How dare these two butch lesbians chide us? the video signals. How dare they question the manhood of people protecting the US? How dare they smile and speak with confidence? How dare they exist?

The authoritarian method flattens whatever it can reach, demands that everything and everyone march in ever-straighter lines. Anything or anyone that steps out of this tightly-maintained hierarchy, that refuses its role, loses the right to exist. You may be white, but if you question the need to subjugate the Black, brown, or un-American, you easily become just another queer. Therefore, you deserve what you get. The point is not that racialised people are not subject to much of the worst of what the state is capable of, that the dispossession is somehow equally distributed. The point is that, on a long enough timeline, all of us become disposable. That timeline is getting shorter.

Images of collective response

Spontaneous vigils and protests have already taken place in Minneapolis. Participants have pelted ICE vehicles with snowballs and, in a few instances, chased agents out of their neighbourhoods. Organisations that train rapid response networks report a significant spike in volunteers. 

Protests have also stepped up in Portland, where six have been arrested at the time of writing. In DC, demonstrators shut down busy intersections. Thousands marched in Los Angeles, in Philadelphia, and in about 1,000 other towns, cities and campuses across the country. This is good. Particularly given that Trump, Vance, Noem and all the rest are seizing the opportunity to ramp up the raids. Next up is ‘Operation Salvo,’ the deployment of ICE to New York City, where the recently sworn-in socialist wunderkind Mayor Zohran Mamdani has pledged the city’s non-cooperation. More confrontations are certainly in the works. 

In this context, the response from establishment liberals at first appears encouraging. As if they have finally discovered a spine after a year of dithering in the face of Trump’s impunity. It is difficult to disagree with Democratic Minnesota governor Tim Walz as he seethes and denounces the ICE operations. Likewise for Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, who during a press conference called the DHS narrative ‘bullshit’ and told ICE to ‘get the fuck out of Minneapolis.’ 

Frey is good with press confrontations and flashy gestures, but gives little in the way of substance. After the murder of George Floyd, he showed up at the initial Black Lives Matter protests to take a well-publicised knee. When asked whether he would work to defund the same police department that crushed Floyd’s windpipe, he demurred. More recently, Frey worked hand in glove with the city’s Democratic Party establishment to rob Omar Fateh – a democratic socialist and son of Somali immigrants – of its endorsement in last year’s mayoral election; an endorsement that Fateh had rightly and fairly won. As for Walz, the former vice-presidential candidate who has recently buckled to right-wing pressure and bowed out of his bid for re-election as Minnesota governor, he has put the state’s National Guard on call, to be deployed at any moment. Not to confront ICE, but to contain protests. 

The final image is built from words

Those are the opening stanzas of Renee Nicole Good’s award-winning 2020 poem ‘On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs’. According to her mother, Good was a Christian, though clearly an open-minded one, honest about how the harder, unyielding truths of life could challenge her faith. 

That is the poem’s starting point, though it quickly becomes clear that something more is at play. The author is navigating a confusing, ineffable tension: between belief in the sublime and the way everything in life is measured and standardised, sucked of its complexity and vibrancy to fit it into systems that have no regard for the divisions between life and death. 

Good, and her wife Becca, grasped, on some level, that protecting this multifaceted life meant showing up, however they could, when others were at risk. It is not just life’s intricacy or beauty that is at risk when a vicious order is enforced. It’s life itself, and there comes a time when our preference for peace buckles under reality. At this point, moving beyond and outside this order is no longer a choice. It’s a necessity.

Alexander Billet is a writer and critic based in Los Angeles. He is the author of Shake the City: Experiments in Space and Time, Music and Crisis published by 1968 Press and has contributed to Los Angeles Review of Books, Salvage, Jacobin, Protean and other outlets. Read more of his work at alexanderbillet.com.