Trump will now try erasing Renee Nicole Good’s humanity

The first thing that should be said about the fatal shooting in Minneapolis by a federal immigration officer is that the victim’s name is Renee Nicole Good. 

She was 37, a mother, wife, poet and fervent Christian. Her own mother, Donna Ganger, told the local newspaper that her daughter and her partner were not involved in protests. 

“She was probably terrified. Renee was one of the kindest people I’ve ever known. 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,” Ganger said.

Good was a widow. Her husband, a veteran, died in 2023. They had a son, 6. Good was with her partner when ICE shot her in the face, then dithered long enough for her to bleed out.

A video taken by a witness moments after the shooting shows Good’s partner sitting on the ground with her dog. There’s blood on the snow. Between sobs she can be heard saying, “they killed my wife. I don’t know what to do,” according to The Advocate. 

"We stopped to videotape, and they shot her in the head." 

“We have a 6-year-old at school.”

Her former teacher, Kent Wascom, posted a memorial to Renee Nicole Good on Twitter. 

“I held her baby,” said Wascom, a professor at Old Dominion University. “She was kind and talented, a working-class mom who put herself through school despite circumstances that would’ve crumpled the pathetic rich boy politicians who sadistically abetted her murder.”

He added: “God damn them all.”

Renee Nicole Good's humanity needs to be the first thing that’s said before anything else, because the regime started erasing it from virtually the moment it murdered her.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Good was an “agitator” who “weaponized” her vehicle in an act of “domestic terrorism.” The ICE officer, she said, acted in self-defense. 

Vice President JD Vance blamed the murder victim.

“Don't illegally interfere in federal law enforcement operations and try to run over our officers with your car,” Vance wrote on Twitter. “It's really that simple." 

On his social media site, the president added his own smears.

“The woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting,” Donald Trump wrote. She “then violently, willfully and viciously ran over the ICE officer. ... It is hard to believe [the ICE officer] is alive but he is now recovering in the hospital." 

Every single word is a lie.

I spent a lot of time yesterday watching and rewatching the video of the shooting (a different one from the video I reference above). And virtually nothing, perhaps literally nothing, that the Trump regime is saying matches up with the reality of what happened. 

Good was not “very disorderly, obstructing and resisting.” She did not “violently, willfully and viciously [run] over the ICE officer.” The officer was not injured in any visible way. 

Indeed, after he shot Good, and after her SUV rammed into a parked car, the ICE officer checked her condition, then walked to his own vehicle and, moments later, drove away. 

I’m not going to do a frame-by-frame. There are pros who do that kind of thing better than me. For instance, here's Eliot Higgins, head of Bellingcat, an investigative reporting group:

“Bellingcat, the New York Times Visual Investigation Team and the Washington Post's Visual Forensic team have all published analysis showing the ICE shooter wasn't in the path of Renee Nicole Good’s vehicle when he shot her, contradicting statements by the president."

Here’s the Times investigation. I will add a small but telling detail. 

The masked ICE officer, who has been identified as Jonathan Ross, was not in any danger. Good was clearly steering around him, and because of that, Ross had time to position himself in front of the car, crouch, take aim, both arms straight out, and fire. Ross shot once through the windshield, then twice more through the driver’s side window as she pulls away.

Hers was an act of self-defense, not terror. 

His was an act of terror, not self-defense.

The difference between what happened to Renee Nicole Good and what administration officials say happened to her is so obvious that Trump is no longer taking any chances. 

Yesterday, the FBI said the investigation would be done jointly by federal agents in coordination with the state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA).

Today, however, the FBI changed its mind.

The BCA “would no longer have access to the case materials, scene evidence or investigative interviews necessary to complete a thorough and independent investigation,” the BCA said.

The FBI is going to try hiding the ugly truth.

ICE claims it can declare anyone “illegal” and that it can act as judge, jury and executioner of any accused "criminal," including a widowed mother of a 6-year-old, who had stuffed animals on the dashboard and whose partner wailed in despair yards from her bloodied corpse.

The truth? This isn't law and order. It's a perversion of it.

But hiding the truth is a partial goal. The regime must also erase Renee Nicole Good in the same way Trump erased what happened five years ago, nearly to the day of her death, when he planned and organized an attempted paramilitary takeover of the US government.

There is a straight line from January 6, 2021, when Trump led an insurrection, to January 7, 2026, when his insurgents not only shot an innocent woman but prevented a physician, who was a bystander, from trying to save her.

As David Lurie noted, if the Republicans lose in November, “they will return to the 1/6 strategy of seeking to remain in power with the use of intimidation and force.”

But this time, he said, “they won't need to enlist an ad hoc group of thugs to serve as enforcers, because they are assembling a massive force of government-funded and armed thugs who are practicing, and honing, their violent repression skills and strategies on the citizens of cities across the country.”

We may think the evidence of our eyes is so damning that surely Renee Nicole Good’s killer will be brought to justice. But we thought the same thing five years ago. Trump and his insurgents mounted a massive disinfo campaign to erase history. They succeeded. 

Like last time, they are going to lie, but most of all, they’re going to make it seem like Good’s humanity never existed, as they made it seem like the J6 insurrection never happened.

Don’t believe me? See this video.

After the shooting, locals set up a makeshift memorial the following evening – sidewalk messages written in chalk and candles in solemn remembrance. In the video, an ICE officer kicks over one of the candles. He then taunts an onlooker visibly enraged by his disrespect. 

‪They:

• murdered her.
• stopped a doctor from helping her.
• fled the scene.
• lied later to protect her killer.

But that wasn’t enough.

They had to desecrate her memory, too. This is why I said at the top that the first thing that needs to be said is Renee Nicole Good’s name. The Trump regime fears her humanity.

It puts flesh and bone on evil.