The video is almost inescapable on social media. Initially, it looks like a suburban scene, until you realise men are confronting the driver of an SUV. The car attempts to drive away, turning away from the two men – until one pulls out his gun and fires multiple shots.
The video shows American ICE agents shooting and killing 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good, an award-winning poet and writer, who was slain as her wife sat in the passenger seat just a few feet away from her.
Good died in Minneapolis, the same city in which George Floyd was killed by a police officer pressing his knee to Floyd’s neck in 2020, a shocking moment that sparked – for a time – a racial reckoning that spread across the US and beyond.
Then, as now, video footage emerged almost immediately for anyone to see. But, as happened with Floyd, there are millions of Americans determined not to believe the evidence of their eyes.
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Within minutes, the Department of Homeland Security had issued a statement claiming Good had tried to kill ICE agents with her car, by driving it at them. Donald Trump himself backed this version of events, first on Truth Social and then in an interview with New York Times reporters.
Trump was so apparently convinced of his narrative that he demanded the video be played for the Times reporters, there and then in front of the room. Trump had apparently so convinced himself black was white, he was convinced that the reporters would see the same.
Anyone watching the video – which is not itself graphic, but many may reasonably wish to avoid it all the same – can see the facts. Good was not driving at speed. She was turning away from the ICE agents. No one’s life was in danger except her own.
But Trump supporters can only see this truth if they’re willing to see it, and history suggests that most of them will choose to trust the Trump narrative over their own lyin’ eyes. Neither Trump, nor the Department of Homeland Security, nor ICE is going to reflect on how their polarising rhetoric has led to yet another innocent American citizen being killed.
That makes it all the more important for the rest of us to know how and why Renee Good was killed, and how deeply implicated Trump and the White House are in the chain of events that led to it – which goes deeper than it might first appear.
Minnesota has, for around a decade, had a series of interlinked scandals concerning the fraudulent use of federal and state benefits – particularly those around childcare, disability care, and anti-poverty measures.
In recent weeks, a scandal around childcare fraud made national headlines after being re-inflamed by online right-wing influencers. Several Somali-Americans had been at the forefront of this fraud, with some already convicted and jailed for their role in a scam that involved them claiming to operate non-existent daycare centres.
The DHS, police, and state authorities have been investigating the scandal for at least seven years. But far-right influencers claimed to have “discovered” it, tied it to Minnesota’s governor (and Kamala Harris’s VP pick) Tim Walz, and started visiting daycare centres in Minneapolis, demanding to be let in.
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Unsurprisingly, daycare centres in America – where school shootings are a grimly routine occurrence – do not let in random strangers from the street, especially if they are filming. Influencers declared this to be suspicious, put out their videos which received millions of views, and claimed to have uncovered some major new scandal.
The whole debacle is reminiscent of Pizzagate, when radicalised users raided pizza parlours expecting to find Satanic child abuse after seeing online hoaxes from hacked emails from the Clinton campaign in 2016. But what is different now is that the occupant of the White House is willing to feed into the delusion and the false narrative.
Instead of debunking the false and sensationalist “reporting”, or else simply ignoring it, Donald Trump and his team first boosted it and then acted on it. Looking for a new way to inflame the culture war and own the libs – and having pulled back National Guard and federal deployments from LA and Chicago – Trump’s DHS was looking for a new target.
They settled on Minneapolis. Late in December, Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem announced her department was investigating fraud in Minneapolis (as they had been doing since at least 2021, under Joe Biden).
On Jan 6th 2026 – five years since Trump led an insurrection against the Capitol – this was extended into a deployment of 2,000 federal agents into the city, to carry out what ICE itself called the “largest immigration operation ever”. The agents, deployed against the wishes of Minnesota’s governor and Minneapolis’s mayor – who told ICE agents to “get the fuck out” of the city in the wake of Good’s killing – immediately began conducting traffic stops and raiding businesses.
In the first 48 hours of that deployment, one of those agents shot Renee Good dead. Her death has not just become fodder for the culture war the White House is determined to fight at any point – she is a direct consequence of it.
We don’t yet know the name of the ICE agent who pulled the trigger and killed Good. But we already know enough to say that Donald Trump, Kristi Noem, and the bullshit conspiratorial ecosystem they’ve built around themselves – and which they use to sustain their rule – are complicit in her death.
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