Renee Nicole Good — a young white, conventionally attractive woman and mother — was shot to death by an ICE agent in her car on a street in Minneapolis, a major U.S. city with a majority white population. The tragedy is too common, but the optics are much different than what the public is accustomed to when they think of ICE or police victims.
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More importantly, the victim here was a member of America’s most protected demographic; the one that it has historically strived to keep safe — often to the detriment of Black folks. So is Wednesday’s shooting the turning point in which even ICE apologists start turning their collective back on President Donald Trump’s tireless tirade on undocumented immigrants?
What happened to Good is shocking, horrific and utterly maddening. But it’s also telling that all the other big headlines of the week — particularly the raid to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and everything Trump has up his sleeve following that — have been swept aside as focus turned to Good. Her tragic death has been viewed now from countless angles and discussed by breathless TV talking heads endlessly.
It doesn’t take heightened senses to feel the nation’s collective shock and outrage. It always happens whenever a young white woman is killed — or even disappears for a while.
Take Natalee Holloway: Her disappearance in 2005 sparked ‘round-the-clock coverage and even a Netflix movie. The saturation coverage of Gabby Petito’s murder by her fiancé in 2021 was another moment of collective shock and revulsion. And, of course, there was Elizabeth Smart, who at 14 was kidnapped and survived nine months in captivity in 2002. In a pre-social media zeitgeist, Smart’s disappearance dominated the news cycle.
We could spend pages rattling off the Black and brown deaths and disappearances that garnered nowhere near the same degree of attention as any of these women have.
ICE agents were dispatched to Minnesota, despite pleas from Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey that the deployment was unnecessary and dangerous. That brings us to Wednesday, when an ICE agent shot Good to death in her own vehicle. Good is not the first person to die during an ICE deployment: New York Times reported that Good’s death is the ninth shooting by ICE just since September.
Not one of those shootings has generated the attention and outrage that has accompanied Good’s killing. Several of the others shot by ICE were Hispanic.
Trump administration officials have said each of the shootings were justified. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem accused Good of domestic terrorism even as video of her trying to drive away from ICE agents hit the national airwaves.
This is the type of blame-shifting that the government — and society at large — typically reserves for Black folks. Even if we are the “perfect victim,” they’ll find some wiggle room to blame us for our demise.
But Good’s death feels different. ICE is ostensibly designed for the “protection” of American citizens. But it just claimed the life of the most precious of that demographic — at least in perception. Now, the veil is lifted and the paradigm has shifted.
Good was not undocumented. She was not an immigrant. She was not Black or brown. There will be those who ask themselves — perhaps for the first time — a simple question: If it could happen to her, could it happen to me?
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