Less than a mile from where Minneapolis police lynched George Floyd in 2020, the U.S. government has claimed another life in the same streets. On a quiet residential block, in the middle of protests against Donald Trump’s expanding immigration dragnet, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent shot 37-year-old legal observer Renee Nicole Good in the head as she sat behind the wheel.
Good was not a “suspect” in any crime. She was a legal observer who chose to stand with her neighbors and document federal agents terrorizing the community. Her car was blocking the street only because armed ICE and other federal agents had turned that neighborhood into a militarized zone, just as they have in cities across the country under Trump’s raids.
When she tried to leave, enraged agents moved on her vehicle. One stepped forward, raised his gun, and fired into her head. Bystander video shows no weapon, no visible threat—only the cold efficiency of an execution carried out in broad daylight.
The “garbage” narrative of the state
Trump’s administration rushed out a familiar script: the ICE agent was “in fear for his life,” the car was a “weapon,” and killing Renee Good was “necessary.” Trump himself publicly defended the shooting, doubling down on a lie that depends on people distrusting their own eyes more than the word of a racist, law-and-order regime.
But the people of Minneapolis know this playbook. The same state that told the world George Floyd “resisted arrest” now expects working-class communities to believe that an unarmed woman behind a windshield had to die for an agent to go home safe. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey called the federal story a “garbage narrative,” and Police Chief Brian O’Hara has admitted there is no evidence that Good was even the target of any investigation.
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz revealed that Good was killed in front of a family member and then urged the community to “remain calm.” Calm—for whom? For a system that sends masked agents into neighborhoods and then blames the people when they refuse to accept another state killing?
State violence, racism and Trump’s deportation war
The shooting took place in the district of Representative Ilhan Omar, a Black Muslim woman and frequent target of Trump’s racist attacks. Omar called the killing exactly what it is: “state violence.” That phrase matters. This was not a “tragic misunderstanding” or the act of one “bad apple.” It is the direct product of a racist, anti-immigrant offensive from the top of the U.S. state.
Trump’s mass deportation campaign, like the police occupation of Black neighborhoods, is a weapon of class rule. It is designed to terrorize migrants and communities of color, to keep workers divided and fearful, and to normalize the use of military-style force on U.S. streets. ICE raids, Border Patrol tactical teams in cities, and local police SWAT units all blend into one repressive apparatus whose real target is the working class — especially Black, Latine, Arab, Muslim, and other oppressed communities.
When Trump and his officials defend an ICE execution and call it “law and order,” they are sending a message to every cop, every ICE agent, every border guard: You will be protected when you pull the trigger. That is how fascist forces inside the state are encouraged and emboldened.
From Minneapolis to the world: the same struggle
The people of Minneapolis have already shown the world how to fight back. In 2020, a multinational, working-class uprising against the police murder of George Floyd exposed the violence at the core of the U.S. system. The killing of Renee Nicole Good is not a break from that history but a continuation of it. The same state that arms ICE to terrorize neighborhoods and execute observers enforces borders, wages deportation wars, and sends the Pentagon across the globe to secure profits for billionaires and bankers. This is one system, one war on the working class—and it can only be confronted through unified working-class resistance.
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