On Jan. 7, 2026, Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old United States citizen and mother, was fatally shot during a federal immigration operation on a residential street in south Minneapolis. ABC News reconstructed the encounter minute-by-minute using video and law-enforcement sources, and what it shows is deeply disturbing.
A death like that should have slowed everything down. Instead, the rush to control the story began almost immediately.
Before the public received a full accounting of the shooting, it received a fully formed narrative. Federal officials claimed Good tried to run over agents. Minneapolis leaders rejected that description, saying the available video at the time did not support it. Two realities appeared at once, one coming from Washington and one from the city where a mother had just been killed.
In a functioning democracy, the order matters. We investigate first. We label later. We grieve before we justify. When the government speaks before the evidence is laid bare, it does not calm the public. It is preloading the verdict.
There is a video. There are witnesses. There is also a serious question about tactics. Shooting into a moving vehicle is widely discouraged in modern policing because it increases risk to everyone involved. The Associated Press recently summarized why many departments restrict this practice.
Use-of-force experts quoted by People have raised the same concern here, warning that stepping into the path of a vehicle and then firing can violate basic safety principles.
Then came another blow to public trust. MPR News reported that the FBI’s control of the investigation has limited Minnesota’s access to key evidence, raising questions about independent oversight.
When a killing happens on a city street and state investigators are sidelined, accountability stops being a right and becomes a negotiation.
Is Lethal Force Becoming Routine?
There is another reason this cannot be treated as an isolated tragedy. There is no single, publicly accessible federal tally of people killed by ICE officers. Independent reporting, however, has begun to document what the government has not made easy to track: a growing number of shootings tied to immigration enforcement in recent months. The Guardian, citing data compiled by The Trace, reports that immigration agents have been linked to 16 shootings since July 2025, with at least four people killed and seven injured.
The Trace has also built a running tracker of shootings connected to the enforcement crackdown, including incidents where agents fired their weapons during operations and traffic stops. That tracker makes clear what the public is being asked to accept without complete transparency: that lethal force is becoming part of the routine posture of immigration enforcement. The Marshall Project reviewed news reports and found that the Minneapolis killing came after at least three other fatal shootings by federal immigration officers in the last five months, along with other cases in which people were wounded or threatened at gunpoint. That matters because patterns change the question. It is no longer only what happened to Renee Good. It becomes what is happening to the country.
The fallout did not stay confined to one block. Federal agents clashed with community members near Roosevelt High School during dismissal, and Minneapolis Public Schools canceled classes for safety, MPR News and CBS Minnesota reported.
A mother was killed. A community erupted. Schools closed. Children were caught in the middle. That is not public safety. That is public trauma.
Renee Good was a United States citizen. Citizenship did not protect her from the machinery of federal enforcement. That should unsettle anyone who believes rights are fundamental.
People report that those who loved her describe her as gentle and nonviolent, a writer and poet, and a devoted mother.
If we are serious about public safety, then accountability must no longer be optional. It must be written into law, enforced in practice, and visible to the people. Congress must require independent state and civilian oversight whenever a federal agent uses deadly force. The Department of Justice must prohibit shooting into moving vehicles except in the rarest of circumstances. Furthermore, federal agencies must be barred from conducting armed operations near schools and residential neighborhoods without strict public safety safeguards.
This is not reform. This is the minimum standard of a nation that claims to value life.
I was raised in Mississippi, where we learned early that the law can exist without justice, and where power has too often protected itself before it protected the people. It is the same soil that produced Medgar Evers, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Dr. King’s deepest warnings about a nation drifting away from its soul. When a mother can be killed and the first instinct of the government is to justify itself instead of telling the truth, those warnings are no longer history. They are our present.
Make no mistake. This moment is not just about Renee Good. It is about whether America is becoming a country where the government can take a life and immediately write the story of why it was necessary.
That is not democracy. That is a danger.
So I am calling on the nation to do what it has done at every moral turning point. Speak. March. Vote. Demand. Refuse to accept secrecy where there should be sunlight, and silence where there should be accountability.
Renee Good’s children should not grow up in a country where their mother’s death is treated as an inconvenience to power rather than a wound to the nation.
History is watching us now. Furthermore, the question before America is not complicated.
Will we be a nation that explains away the killing of a mother, or a people who rise and say, with one voice, not in our name?