A woman is dead in Minneapolis. Her name was Renee Nicole Good. She was thirty seven years old. She was sitting in her car on a Wednesday morning and now she is not alive anymore.
The federal government says she was a terrorist. The federal government says she weaponised her vehicle. The federal government says their agent fired in self defence.
Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com
Mayor Jacob Frey: “They are already trying to spin this as an action of self defense. Having seen the video myself, I want to tell everybody directly that is bullshit.”
Wed, 07 Jan 2026 18:39:52 GMT
A witness says the agent ripped at her car door, stepped in front of the vehicle, shouted “stop” and fired three times within a second of giving that command. Video appears to confirm this account. The woman was turning away, not driving towards. The shots came as she moved past, not at.
None of this matters to the people who killed her. Before her body was cold, before any investigation, before anyone could establish what actually happened on that residential street in south Minneapolis, Kristi Noem was calling it domestic terrorism and Stephen Miller was amplifying the line. This is not law enforcement. This is narrative construction. The story was written before the shots were fired.
ICE Violence
Immigration and Customs Enforcement is not a police force. It does not operate like a police force. It does not answer to the communities it occupies. It does not coordinate with local authorities. It does not face the constraints that come from having to look your neighbours in the eye after you kill one of them. It is a federal paramilitary organisation with weapons and immunity and no accountability to anyone who lives in the places it operates.
This is what occupation looks like. This is what it has always looked like. Armed men from elsewhere, answerable to distant power, treating local populations as enemy territory. The language changes. The mechanism does not.
In the last four months alone, immigration officers have fired on at least nine people in five states and Washington D.C. Every single one of them was in a vehicle when the shots came. Every single time, officials claimed the agent fired in self defence, fearing they would be struck by the car. Every single time, the same story. At least one other person died. The pattern is not subtle. Step in front of a vehicle, claim fear for your life, open fire. It is a technique now. It is a method. The car becomes the weapon retroactively, the driver becomes the terrorist posthumously, and the agent becomes the victim despite holding the gun.
This is what they have learned works. This is what they will keep doing.
The agency was created in 2003, born from the wreckage of the September 11th attacks, another child of the security state that metastasised in the paranoid years. It absorbed the Immigration and Naturalisation Service and parts of Customs. It was granted powers that previous immigration enforcement never had. It was designed from the start to be a hammer, and now it has found a president who wants to swing it at everything that moves.
Detentions centres profit
Consider what ICE does. It raids workplaces, supermarkets, homes, waits outside schools. It separates families. It detains people in facilities that have been documented as sites of abuse, medical neglect, and death. It operates a network of detention centres that hold tens of thousands at any given time, many of them run by private prison companies extracting profit from human bodies. It conducts enforcement actions designed for maximum sDpectacle and maximum terror. It treats due process as an obstacle rather than a requirement.
Now it shoots people on residential streets in broad daylight and calls them terrorists before anyone can establish what happened.
The Minneapolis police chief said there was nothing to indicate that Renee Nicole Good was the target of any law enforcement investigation. She was not fleeing deportation. She was not resisting arrest. She appears to have been blocking a street, perhaps in solidarity with her neighbours, perhaps simply in the way. It did not matter. The agents descended. The shots were fired. The narrative machine activated.
Governor Walz understood immediately what was happening. “Do not take the bait,” he said. “Do not allow them to deploy federal troops into here. Do not allow them to invoke the Insurrection Act. Do not allow them to declare martial law.” He knows. The administration wants the confrontation. It wants the images of burning buildings and broken windows. It wants the pretext for further escalation. It wants to occupy cities governed by Democrats and call it law enforcement.
The shooting happened less than a mile from where George Floyd was killed. This is not coincidence. This is the same neighbourhood, the same dynamics, the same confrontation between federal power and community resistance. The same playbook. Provoke, respond, escalate, occupy.
There is a word for organisations that operate outside local accountability, that answer only to central authority, that treat civilian populations as threats to be managed through force. We do not usually apply that word to American agencies. We should.
Abolish ICE
ICE cannot be reformed. You cannot reform a hammer into a scalpel. You cannot reform an agency designed for enforcement into an agency capable of humanity. The culture is set. The incentives are set. The recruitment pipeline selects for people who want to do this work, who thrive in environments of maximum authority and minimum oversight. The agency exists to brutalise and it does what it exists to do.
Abolition is not a radical position. It is the only coherent response to an institution that kills people and calls them terrorists, that separates children from parents and calls it deterrence, that operates detention facilities where people die of neglected illness and calls it border security. You do not reform such things. You end them.
Renee Nicole Good is dead. She was thirty seven years old. She was in her car on a Wednesday morning in a neighbourhood where people blow whistles to warn each other when the agents arrive. She did not move fast enough for armed men who answer to no one local, and so they killed her, and before her body reached the hospital they were already calling her a terrorist.
Remember her name. Renee Nicole Good. Remember what killed her. Remember that this is what ICE does, what it was built to do, what it will continue to do until someone stops it.
The only question now is whether anyone will.
This article is also available at Anti-Capitalist Musings | Substack