What happens next will determine whether Good’s killing sets a precedent for more state violence.
Op-Ed |
By Darakshan Raja ,
January 16, 2026
A federal agent grabs a protester outside the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in Saint Paul, Minnesota, on January 8, 2026, following the ICE-perpetrated killing of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis on January 7.
Octavio JONES / AFP via Getty Images
The extrajudicial killing of Renee Nicole Good marks a profound and irreversible escalation against communities committed to justice. A red line has been crossed.
While Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has previously killed immigrants with impunity, including Silverio Villegas González in Chicago, this incident is distinct because it involves the first public extrajudicial killing of a volunteer monitoring ICE’s terror against her neighbors.
In the United States, death, deportation, forced disappearance, and state kidnappings against migrants have been normalized. This killing causes significant concern because it’s a warning to anyone bearing witness to state terror that they too could be killed if they stand in solidarity with targeted communities. That’s the mark of a pending escalation of state repression that necessitates the full participation from the majority to act as bystanders that will either fully support or look the other way as state terror escalates.
This is the hallmark of how mass forms of state violence move from planning phases to full execution. In such instances, everyday acts of resistance like this from neighbors like Renee Good are key to challenging the ongoing state repression and preventing its escalation, especially when the U.S. has deported and forced out over 2 million immigrants in 2025 alone.
In a publicly released video, Good’s last words toward an ICE officer were, “That’s fine, dude, I’m not mad at you.” Her partner later captured the asymmetry of the violence, writing: “We had whistles. They had guns.”
The extrajudicial killing of Renee Nicole Good marks a profound and irreversible escalation against communities committed to justice. A red line has been crossed.
While Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has previously killed immigrants with impunity, including Silverio Villegas González in Chicago, this incident is distinct because it involves the first public extrajudicial killing of a volunteer monitoring ICE’s terror against her neighbors.
In the United States, death, deportation, forced disappearance, and state kidnappings against migrants have been normalized. This killing causes significant concern because it’s a warning to anyone bearing witness to state terror that they too could be killed if they stand in solidarity with targeted communities. That’s the mark of a pending escalation of state repression that necessitates the full participation from the majority to act as bystanders that will either fully support or look the other way as state terror escalates.
This is the hallmark of how mass forms of state violence move from planning phases to full execution. In such instances, everyday acts of resistance like this from neighbors like Renee Good are key to challenging the ongoing state repression and preventing its escalation, especially when the U.S. has deported and forced out over 2 million immigrants in 2025 alone.
In a publicly released video, Good’s last words toward an ICE officer were, “That’s fine, dude, I’m not mad at you.” Her partner later captured the asymmetry of the violence, writing: “We had whistles. They had guns.”
Fed Agent Shoots Second Person, Days After Miller Claims Agents Have “Immunity”
Miller lied to ICE agents, saying, “Anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop you … is committing a felony.”By Sharon Zhang , Truthout January 15, 2026
The officer’s composure as he shot her and walked away revealed his absolute confidence in institutional protection. His actions aren’t an anomaly but the natural progression of what civil rights advocates and community organizers have been monitoring — the implementation of National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7) against neighbors and community rapid responders. Following Good’s killing, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem immediately labeled Good a domestic terrorist, citing NSPM-7 policies.
The NSPM-7 targets individuals, groups, and networks that the federal government identifies as engaging in resisting government authority and considers such violence as “organized political violence,” “domestic terrorism,” and “anti-fascist movements” that resist so-called “foundational American values of supporting law enforcement, ICE, and border patrol” as a threat to U.S. national security.
Vice President JD Vance echoed this narrative, calling Good’s death “a tragedy of her own making” and asserting without evidence that she was part of a “broader left-wing network.” This swift deployment of the memorandum’s “domestic terrorism” framework to retroactively justify the extrajudicial killing of a community rapid responder by a federal agent represents the worst-case scenario long feared by frontline responders.
Renee Nicole Good’s killing now threatens to become the blueprint for how NSPM-7 will be enforced against community members and rapid responders.
Renee Nicole Good’s killing now threatens to become the blueprint for how NSPM-7 will be enforced against community members and rapid responders. A lack of accountability for her death would signal that the extrajudicial killing of community responders can be retroactively justified under NSPM-7, granting federal agents effective immunity while vastly expanding the state’s license to kill.
What Is NSPM-7?
NSPM–7 is the most sweeping reconsolidation of the national security and domestic “war on terror” apparatus that has occurred since 9/11, redefining its targets so expansively that no one is excluded. It was issued by the White House in September 2025 and operationalized through the Department of Justice, the FBI, Joint Terrorism Task Forces, and other federal executive branch agencies that target anyone under the banner of domestic terrorism.
In practice, NSPM-7 targets three spheres.
First, it targets individual community membersthat resist fascism or the government’s abuses of power. Its loose framework allows anyone to be labeled as a domestic terrorist. Whether the government’s labeling sticks will be contingent upon public condemnation, the strength of legal and community defense against such witch hunts, and prosecutorial discretion.
Second, NSPM-7 targets movement organizations, broader civil society groups, and movement infrastructure that the government views as resisting state violence. Groups targeted under NSPM-7 could face federal prosecutions, loss of funding from institutions, frozen bank accounts and assets, deplatforming, regulatory and lawfare attacks, funding cuts, and targeting of institutional leaders.
Third, NSPM-7 targets the resources and funding of both communities and movements resisting state violence and terror. Bail funds, legal defense projects, mutual aid networks, progressive philanthropy, impact investors, banking institutions, and even individual donors can be subjected to surveillance and financial scrutiny.
What makes NSPM-7 uniquely dangerous is not only its breadth and overreach, but also the speed and coherence of its implementation across federal agencies. In December 2025, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a directive ordering full implementation within 14 days. The memo mandates retroactive review of at least five years of activity, and potentially sweeps any form of protest, mutual aid, rapid response, legal observation, and online speech critical of state repression into a single dragnet. Prosecutors are instructed to deploy an expansive suite of charges, including obstruction, conspiracy, RICO, material support for terrorism, and seditious conspiracy, and to deploy harsh sentencing guidelines that include terrorism sentencing enhancements.
From the “War on Terror” to the War on Our Neighbors
Renee Nicole Good’s killing must be understood within this broader reality of immigration enforcement terror, where ICE has shot people, had people die while in its custody, and routinely used force against communities, with 2025 constituting ICE’s deadliest year in two decades.
The “war on terror” taught us a clear lesson about how state violence is institutionalized and legitimized through law, policy, and advocacy by government officials, long before the consequences are clear to the wider public. ICE itself was created out of the post-9/11 war on terror infrastructure, shaped by a racist and dehumanizing national security logic that normalized extraordinary force in the name of national security. The modern immigration policy apparatus of the United States is heavily dominated by this framework.
The murder of Renee Nicole Good is a warning. It reveals how quickly policies written in bureaucratic language can become lethal when combined with impunity.
This violence did not arise in a vacuum. In places like Minnesota, it follows years of federal law enforcement and surveillance with the state serving as a testing ground that helped pave the road for today’s policies. After the extrajudicial killing of George Floyd, protests were depicted as riots, and then-Attorney General William Barr publicly stated that “extremist elements” associated with the uprisings, including those he linked to “antifa,” were being investigated under domestic terrorism frameworks, with Joint Terrorism Task Forces deployed for that purpose.
Surveillance programs such as Operation Safety Net monitored and surveilled protesters and organizers in Minnesota for years after the killing of George Floyd. These policies were also deployed after the implementation of counterterrorism programs, such as Countering Violent Extremism programs against Somali Muslim communities. Minnesota also includes a long-standing history of targeting the state’s Indigenous communities — repression that provoked the founding of American Indian Movement during 1968 in Minneapolis. These deep histories of anti-Black, anti-Indigenous, anti-immigrant, and anti-Muslim targeting (particularly of Somali communities) is key, given that it points to the importance of supporting local communities and their long-standing resistance to state repression. Naming this context also matters, because once repression is normalized through policy, it spreads by turning immigration enforcement into a routine form of state terror embedded in everyday life.
Miller lied to ICE agents, saying, “Anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop you … is committing a felony.”By Sharon Zhang , Truthout January 15, 2026
The officer’s composure as he shot her and walked away revealed his absolute confidence in institutional protection. His actions aren’t an anomaly but the natural progression of what civil rights advocates and community organizers have been monitoring — the implementation of National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7) against neighbors and community rapid responders. Following Good’s killing, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem immediately labeled Good a domestic terrorist, citing NSPM-7 policies.
The NSPM-7 targets individuals, groups, and networks that the federal government identifies as engaging in resisting government authority and considers such violence as “organized political violence,” “domestic terrorism,” and “anti-fascist movements” that resist so-called “foundational American values of supporting law enforcement, ICE, and border patrol” as a threat to U.S. national security.
Vice President JD Vance echoed this narrative, calling Good’s death “a tragedy of her own making” and asserting without evidence that she was part of a “broader left-wing network.” This swift deployment of the memorandum’s “domestic terrorism” framework to retroactively justify the extrajudicial killing of a community rapid responder by a federal agent represents the worst-case scenario long feared by frontline responders.
Renee Nicole Good’s killing now threatens to become the blueprint for how NSPM-7 will be enforced against community members and rapid responders.
Renee Nicole Good’s killing now threatens to become the blueprint for how NSPM-7 will be enforced against community members and rapid responders. A lack of accountability for her death would signal that the extrajudicial killing of community responders can be retroactively justified under NSPM-7, granting federal agents effective immunity while vastly expanding the state’s license to kill.
What Is NSPM-7?
NSPM–7 is the most sweeping reconsolidation of the national security and domestic “war on terror” apparatus that has occurred since 9/11, redefining its targets so expansively that no one is excluded. It was issued by the White House in September 2025 and operationalized through the Department of Justice, the FBI, Joint Terrorism Task Forces, and other federal executive branch agencies that target anyone under the banner of domestic terrorism.
In practice, NSPM-7 targets three spheres.
First, it targets individual community membersthat resist fascism or the government’s abuses of power. Its loose framework allows anyone to be labeled as a domestic terrorist. Whether the government’s labeling sticks will be contingent upon public condemnation, the strength of legal and community defense against such witch hunts, and prosecutorial discretion.
Second, NSPM-7 targets movement organizations, broader civil society groups, and movement infrastructure that the government views as resisting state violence. Groups targeted under NSPM-7 could face federal prosecutions, loss of funding from institutions, frozen bank accounts and assets, deplatforming, regulatory and lawfare attacks, funding cuts, and targeting of institutional leaders.
Third, NSPM-7 targets the resources and funding of both communities and movements resisting state violence and terror. Bail funds, legal defense projects, mutual aid networks, progressive philanthropy, impact investors, banking institutions, and even individual donors can be subjected to surveillance and financial scrutiny.
What makes NSPM-7 uniquely dangerous is not only its breadth and overreach, but also the speed and coherence of its implementation across federal agencies. In December 2025, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a directive ordering full implementation within 14 days. The memo mandates retroactive review of at least five years of activity, and potentially sweeps any form of protest, mutual aid, rapid response, legal observation, and online speech critical of state repression into a single dragnet. Prosecutors are instructed to deploy an expansive suite of charges, including obstruction, conspiracy, RICO, material support for terrorism, and seditious conspiracy, and to deploy harsh sentencing guidelines that include terrorism sentencing enhancements.
From the “War on Terror” to the War on Our Neighbors
Renee Nicole Good’s killing must be understood within this broader reality of immigration enforcement terror, where ICE has shot people, had people die while in its custody, and routinely used force against communities, with 2025 constituting ICE’s deadliest year in two decades.
The “war on terror” taught us a clear lesson about how state violence is institutionalized and legitimized through law, policy, and advocacy by government officials, long before the consequences are clear to the wider public. ICE itself was created out of the post-9/11 war on terror infrastructure, shaped by a racist and dehumanizing national security logic that normalized extraordinary force in the name of national security. The modern immigration policy apparatus of the United States is heavily dominated by this framework.
The murder of Renee Nicole Good is a warning. It reveals how quickly policies written in bureaucratic language can become lethal when combined with impunity.
This violence did not arise in a vacuum. In places like Minnesota, it follows years of federal law enforcement and surveillance with the state serving as a testing ground that helped pave the road for today’s policies. After the extrajudicial killing of George Floyd, protests were depicted as riots, and then-Attorney General William Barr publicly stated that “extremist elements” associated with the uprisings, including those he linked to “antifa,” were being investigated under domestic terrorism frameworks, with Joint Terrorism Task Forces deployed for that purpose.
Surveillance programs such as Operation Safety Net monitored and surveilled protesters and organizers in Minnesota for years after the killing of George Floyd. These policies were also deployed after the implementation of counterterrorism programs, such as Countering Violent Extremism programs against Somali Muslim communities. Minnesota also includes a long-standing history of targeting the state’s Indigenous communities — repression that provoked the founding of American Indian Movement during 1968 in Minneapolis. These deep histories of anti-Black, anti-Indigenous, anti-immigrant, and anti-Muslim targeting (particularly of Somali communities) is key, given that it points to the importance of supporting local communities and their long-standing resistance to state repression. Naming this context also matters, because once repression is normalized through policy, it spreads by turning immigration enforcement into a routine form of state terror embedded in everyday life.
Investing in Local Communities
The front line of resistance will always be held by local communities and movements. Real solidarity means following their leadership and investing in their long-term power. Minnesota has a deep infrastructure of local groups, worker centers, and unions that continue to build collective power, making solidarity with local leadership essential in this moment. Minnesota is also home to powerful Black Muslim–led organizing that has successfully resisted the war on terror and defeated state surveillance programs like “Countering Violent Extremism,” which treat every aspect of a community’s life through the lens of potential national security threats, deputizing community members to monitor and report on one another, deeming racial and religious identities as grounds for suspicion. Local communities have also built power through worker centers like Awood, winning victories that benefit communities nationwide. As Somali, immigrant, and refugee communities in Minnesota face intensifying attacks, investing in local leadership as a site of power-building is not optional — it is essential.
Therefore, investing in local leadership includes supporting calls from local organizations. For example, local organizers in Minnesota have called for a statewide day of mourning and action (a day of “no work, no school, no shopping”) on January 23, backed by labor unions and community organizations. Practicing real solidarity means supporting these calls and observing boycotts to ensure communities are not isolated and undermined, and to demand that they receive long-term investment. As one Minnesota rideshare driver stated at a press conference announcing the boycott, the community is facing “a tsunami of hate from our own federal government,” and they are committed to overcoming it together. In addition to heeding local calls for boycotts, investing in the ecosystem of local organizations, amplifying frontline narratives, and supporting community groups engaged in critical mutual aid and community defense work is crucial.
Local and State Municipal Resistance Is Key
As federal overreach accelerates, governors, mayors, city councils, and state legislatures must act as a front line of defense. Municipal and state governments should immediately end collaboration with ICE and other federal enforcement agencies through binding rulemaking, executive orders, and policies that prohibit data sharing and joint operations. These policies include ending participation in the 287(g) program that deputizes local police and accelerates the militarization of law enforcement, and withdrawing cities and localities from Joint Terrorism Task Forces.
City councils must also answer the demands of local community-based organizations. For instance, in Washington, D.C., Muslims for Just Futures alongside 58 organizations are demanding an on-the-record hearing for accountability and transparency, a forum to document resident concerns regarding local law enforcement’s cooperation with federal agents and ending collaborations with ICE. Similarly, in Chicago, a packed room of hundreds of community members and organizers demanded Chicago police officers immediately end all collaboration with ICE and other immigration enforcement federal agencies.
Breaking isolation and fear through hosting “know your rights” trainings, shared meals, safety networks, and collective care is a material intervention against fascism.
States must also fully use litigation to challenge federal overreach, even when courts appear hostile or captured by MAGA-aligned judges. Lawsuits are not only a legal strategy; they are a narrative strategy, and a method to contest the hijacking of the law itself and to bring the demands of the streets into the courts. At the minimum, state and local governments have a responsibility to pursue the fullest extent of the law in response. As examples, both Minnesota and Illinois have sued the federal government, challenging ICE, the Department of Homeland Security, and Customs and Border Protection for unconstitutional enforcement practices, arguing that the deployment of heavily armed, often unidentified federal agents into neighborhoods violates constitutional protections and state and local authority. These lawsuits are key in demonstrating that local governments won’t capitulate and will resist federal overreach.
States and cities must also expose the cost of these operations and practice real public transparency and accountability.
The work of exposing the financial and human cost of federal law enforcement, ICE, and National Guard deployments to occupy cities is vital for documenting the human and financial cost of state terror. For example, Operation Midway Blitz alone cost taxpayers in Illinois more than $59 million, including approximately $34 million spent on ICE operations. From Minnesota and across the country, fear of ICE is reshaping daily life as families opt out of schools, immigrant economic corridors collapse, essential workers vanish, and community stability breaks down.
The murder of Renee Nicole Good is a warning. It reveals how quickly policies written in bureaucratic language and directives such as NSPM-7 can become lethal when combined with impunity and unchecked force. Across the country, in the wake of her killing, there is an uptick in reports of ICE and federal law enforcement officers violently shooting and targeting community members. Trump is threatening to escalate the situation further by threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act in order to deploy the military against Minneapolis. Justice for Renee Good requires more than mourning; it demands accountability, organizing, and refusal. The front line of community defense has always been neighbors. Breaking isolation and fear through hosting “know your rights” trainings, shared meals, safety networks, and collective care is a material intervention against fascism. Fascism succeeds when the masses of people are transformed into its enforcing arm. Preventing that transformation is one of the most critical fronts of resistance.
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Darakshan Raja
Darakshan Raja is the founding executive director of Muslims for Just Futures, a grassroots organization that builds power in Muslim communities through community organizing, advocacy, and movement building.
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