Those of us who see ourselves in Renee Good can take this moment to deepen our solidarities with all who are policed.
By Holly Krig ,
January 13, 2026
Thousands participate in a "No Wars, No Kings, No ICE" protest and march down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan against the policies of the Trump administration in New York City, New York, on January 11, 2026.
Jason Alpert-Wisnia / Hans Lucas / AFP via Getty Images
She could have been me. That was my first thought when I learned that Renee Nicole Good — a 37-year-old mother, poet, and community advocate — had been shot and killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent. As a mother, an abolitionist organizer, and an artist, I felt that familiar twitching and burning, the despairing rage pooling under my skin, looking for an outlet.
Certainly, this is not the first time ICE has committed a tragic, outrageous murder in plain view. Last September, Silverio Villegas González, a 38-year-old father, was shot and killed by an ICE agent in a suburb of Chicago. Like Good, he had just dropped his kids off at school. Thirty-two people died in ICE custody last year alone, the highest number on record since ICE’s 2004 debut. Each stolen life is a universe of loss.
He could have been me.
So maybe I felt it all more personally — that subsonic sound of uncomfortable silence. Or, the comments that start, “Why didn’t they just…” I guess they think they can submerge the existential threat of unease under layers of themselves.
I get it. I do the opposite for the same effect. I lean in. As a white mother, I leverage privilege in solidarity like a shield, though I know I must be careful not to submit to the false promise of whiteness, to not believe I am impenetrable and disconnect from the very co-strugglers I love most dearly.
She could have been me. That was my first thought when I learned that Renee Nicole Good — a 37-year-old mother, poet, and community advocate — had been shot and killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent. As a mother, an abolitionist organizer, and an artist, I felt that familiar twitching and burning, the despairing rage pooling under my skin, looking for an outlet.
Certainly, this is not the first time ICE has committed a tragic, outrageous murder in plain view. Last September, Silverio Villegas González, a 38-year-old father, was shot and killed by an ICE agent in a suburb of Chicago. Like Good, he had just dropped his kids off at school. Thirty-two people died in ICE custody last year alone, the highest number on record since ICE’s 2004 debut. Each stolen life is a universe of loss.
He could have been me.
So maybe I felt it all more personally — that subsonic sound of uncomfortable silence. Or, the comments that start, “Why didn’t they just…” I guess they think they can submerge the existential threat of unease under layers of themselves.
I get it. I do the opposite for the same effect. I lean in. As a white mother, I leverage privilege in solidarity like a shield, though I know I must be careful not to submit to the false promise of whiteness, to not believe I am impenetrable and disconnect from the very co-strugglers I love most dearly.
ICE’s Murder of Renee Nicole Good Was Not an Aberration — It Is the New Normal
US immigration agents have now shot 11 civilians in cars in four months. By Mike Ludwig , Truthout January 9, 2026
I got my start organizing with my co-workers in Minneapolis. We unionized the Uptown Borders bookstore, joining the United Food & Commercial Workers. Most of their members were food service and meat-processing workers, many of whom are immigrants. Sometimes the union would transport a badly injured worker to the hospital because the slaughterhouse didn’t want the state to find out if they were undocumented.
During my years in Minnesota, I also protested outside the Republican National Convention (RNC) in 2008. Thousands of us — unions, veterans’ groups, community organizations, families with kids — joined a decentralized “RNC Welcoming Committee,” demanding living wages, housing, health care, and an end to the never-ending “war for peace.” I marched while giving a piggyback ride to my fellow union member’s child. I watched military vehicles outfitted for combat line our route, and police in riot gear drag journalists along the pavement. Not so “Minnesota nice.”
I was reminded of all of this recently while protesting at the ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois. Masked agents pointed guns and released tear gas on protesters, journalists, and legal observers alike. They hit people with their cars. The public sidewalk became a monochrome mural painted with pepper balls aimed at our bodies, stinging in our throats. It became clear that none of us may ever appear human to them, or be compliant enough.
But you cannot comply enough with those who’ve decided it’s OK to kill you. I think of the survivors I work alongside everyday — survivors of gender violence charged for acts of self-defense or accountability to the violence of their abusers. ICE may have the same standard for perfect compliance as the prosecutors in those cases: to quietly disappear or politely die.
Since 2016, I’ve worked directly with over a dozen such survivors in Chicago alone, nearly all of whom are mothers of color. Currently, I am working in support of a mother who was eight months pregnant when her partner attacked her in her own home, slamming her head into the kitchen counter and hitting her in the face as he dragged her. She reached for something to defend herself — a knife — struck him in the leg with it, and soon after, he died. The state has charged her with first-degree murder.
I do this work as an abolitionist organizer and a survivor of intimate partner violence. She could have been me too, only I hadn’t really believed that either.
Driving to Lincoln, Illinois, in July 2024, I was picking up a friend, a fellow mother and survivor who’d served a full sentence of separation from her child, total loss of body autonomy, and poor care at the Logan Correctional Center. I prepared for what we believed would be a very remote chance of ICE presence. They had not been picking people up outside Illinois Department of Corrections facilities. Corrections staff, like police, were given orders not to assist ICE.
From the sidewalk near the main gate, I watched her approach and then cross the threshold into the “free world,” carrying a copy printer box, a corrections officer still holding her arm. I was already reaching out to her when three black SUVs squealed into the curb, and three men in unmarked black uniforms rushed out. They shouted something at her bewildered face. They grabbed her and forced her into one of their vehicles and drove off. It happened in under 20 seconds. I heard myself screaming at the turned back of the corrections officer, at the already long-gone SUVs.
All that was left was that box, spilling out family photos, portraits she’d painted, legal documents, and letters between loved ones. I gathered it all up. I braced myself to tell her family. When I did, my friend’s mother crumpled into her own lap and cried. I could feel her daughter plead with me to be wrong, still looking for her mother.
When I remember that day, I also now imagine the faces of Renee Nicole Good’s children when they were told of her death, and the faces of Silverio Villegas González’s children when they were told of his death,their own bodies struck by the sense that this never should have been possible. Even in my mind’s eye, I want to look away.
It was days before we found my friend in a Kansas detention center. We organized a freedom campaign with amazing attorneys. We sent each other expensive messages of hope and solidarity. Then one day, seven months later, the steady push against an iron wall gave way. There were 642 miles and a deportation order between us, and then she was at my front door. The clenched fist that is all of me is still not fully open.
But as painful as it is, I am grateful to have even started to breach the hard border of myself, into the soft places where my body meets the bodies of my co-strugglers. I feel how precious we all are, and I know that we cannot and should not concede another life to this. We don’t need martyrs, and Renee Nicole Good and Silverio Villegas González were not offering. Nor has anyone asked us to suffer more as the way we show up in solidarity.
Abolitionist co-strugglers have been pleading with us to see what’s been there all along, in between explosive episodes of more public violence, funding cycles, and alleged reforms. They have always known that it’s not about guilt or innocence, dangerousness, or all the other claims systems make. Militarized borders and heavily gated pathways to citizenship ensure a permanently exploitable class, much like felony convictions.
So, it makes perfect sense that our solidarity reads as a threat to the ruling class, and they are reading that right. We are attacking the fundamental principle of their design, which rests on the claim that the value of my life is inversely proportional to the life of whatever enemy they present. They want us to believe premature death-making is a predetermined moral good.
But we refuse to believe that. Our well-being is bound together and we know it; we feel it when we let ourselves feel fear and grief. We know in our whole bodies that they and she and he are me. We feel one another most in our daring hope.
And that brings me back to all this loss. I was afraid to even try and speak or write anything to hold the weight of this. But I don’t want a moment of silence right now, quietly naming the dead. I can’t name each human life stolen by police or ICE or those acting in the interests of white supremacist patriarchy.
We cannot let them convince us that these systems can be “reformed,” because they are doing what they were designed to do.
In honor of those whose lives were stolen, and as a promise to their children, to their parents, and to our own futures, we cannot let them convince us that these systems can be “reformed,” because they are doing what they were designed to do. We are supposed to feel fear and disgust at those whom Donald Trump deems “garbage people.” If you are the “garbage people,” you are supposed to slip quietly away, and certainly not protest. We are supposed to accept, even begrudgingly, that incarceration, deportation, marginalization, and paywalls to basic needs are necessary. We are asked to ignore the obvious and inescapable fact of our shared humanity, to refuse care, and deny grief.
As Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz publicly decry the violence of ICE, we should remember that they have opposed any actual policy changes that would defund police. They’ve called instead for “reforms.” These might result in temporary improvements for some, but largely reforms defend the expansion of systems, creating shinier cages that soon lose their luster.
Instead, we must look to groups like the Black Visions collective in Minnesota, a Black queer-and-trans-led organization that has long been committed to the abolition of systems of state violence. The collective has been central to campaigns to defund police and the broader criminalization apparatus that includes ICE, in the wake of George Floyd’s 2020 murder by police.
Detractors will claim that those campaigns failed, but I am seeing the fruit of their labor spilling into the streets. The community education and collective demands that were developed then bring us to this powerful moment. Not only in Minnesota, but in Illinois, New York, California, and more, where organizers are drawing from the abolitionist principles embodied in groups like Survived & Punished that have been fighting to free survivors of gender violence from the overlapping systems of immigration and criminal legal courts.
“None of us are free unless all of us are free.” I heard Gov. JB Pritzker quoting Fannie Lou Hamer in response to ICE violence, after he allocated nearly a billion dollars to build two new prisons in Illinois. But the No New Prisons Coalition in Illinois knows these systems are entangled at the root. They have brilliantly prefigured, along with survivors inside, the absurd claim of “trauma-informed” prisons and they have developed harm reduction strategies to move us toward the demand to close these cages forever.
As Silky Shah of Detention Watch Network has written about in her incredible book, Unbuild Walls, all of these systems of forcible family separation, incarceration, and capitalism rely on the same logic of dangerousness and scarcity. Our struggles are inseparable, and when we fail to work together, we fall together too.
Shah reminds us that back in 2020, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by police, there was support for reducing detention centers to 10,000 beds. Currently, the administration is pushing for an increase to 50,000. And, as we have learned from the entire U.S. history of jails and prisons, we build it to fill it.
Some call this a flashpoint, but I hope it’s more like an earthquake, in which tectonic plates are overcome by stress, slipping and releasing wave after wave of energy. We don’t need this moment, ignited as it is by tragic deaths and record kidnappings, to fizzle into reforms that make minor improvements for a few, while sucking even more lives under.
The demands we are converging on now are visionary and urgent, and they are also necessary, practical, and winnable: to defund ICE and police, and to close detention centers and prisons, redirecting our resources toward housing, health care, child care, schools. Preventative caregiving and restorative justice are urgent, and this is the moment we can move them over the line. We can win.
I don’t want “justice” from the shooters — they have none to give. I’d rather make a demand of the death-making institutions: die, dissolve, decay.
I hope folks in Minnesota, who are feeling that burning under their skin, or the pressure of their own silence bursting, will connect with groups doing important work. Groups like Monarca are training rapid responders in communities across the Twin Cities and also in the predominantly white and conservative region of Western Wisconsin, where I grew up.
Renee Nicole Good was a writer. Had ICE not murdered her last Wednesday, I wonder what she would have written on Thursday, and every day after. I wonder how closely she would have hugged her wife and kids. What urgent, timely demands or call to action might she have made in the eternity of poetry?
If I could speak one thing, from “the priddly brook of my soul,” as Good wrote, to someplace sacred in us, it’s that I want us each to claim a space in this moment, affirm our cellular-level solidarity. I don’t want to make meaning out of death. I don’t want “justice” from the shooters — they have none to give. I’d rather make a demand of the death-making institutions: die, dissolve, decay.
Renee Nicole Good and Silverio Villegas González and so many more should be alive. We must defame, defund, and abolish these systems. We must empty all the cages, kick dirt over made-up borders, and fund the things that help us thrive, imagine, create. Free us all.
This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.
Holly Krig
Holly Krig is the director of Organizing for Moms United Against Violence and Incarceration and a cofounder of the Chicago Community Bond Fund.
US immigration agents have now shot 11 civilians in cars in four months. By Mike Ludwig , Truthout January 9, 2026
I got my start organizing with my co-workers in Minneapolis. We unionized the Uptown Borders bookstore, joining the United Food & Commercial Workers. Most of their members were food service and meat-processing workers, many of whom are immigrants. Sometimes the union would transport a badly injured worker to the hospital because the slaughterhouse didn’t want the state to find out if they were undocumented.
During my years in Minnesota, I also protested outside the Republican National Convention (RNC) in 2008. Thousands of us — unions, veterans’ groups, community organizations, families with kids — joined a decentralized “RNC Welcoming Committee,” demanding living wages, housing, health care, and an end to the never-ending “war for peace.” I marched while giving a piggyback ride to my fellow union member’s child. I watched military vehicles outfitted for combat line our route, and police in riot gear drag journalists along the pavement. Not so “Minnesota nice.”
I was reminded of all of this recently while protesting at the ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois. Masked agents pointed guns and released tear gas on protesters, journalists, and legal observers alike. They hit people with their cars. The public sidewalk became a monochrome mural painted with pepper balls aimed at our bodies, stinging in our throats. It became clear that none of us may ever appear human to them, or be compliant enough.
But you cannot comply enough with those who’ve decided it’s OK to kill you. I think of the survivors I work alongside everyday — survivors of gender violence charged for acts of self-defense or accountability to the violence of their abusers. ICE may have the same standard for perfect compliance as the prosecutors in those cases: to quietly disappear or politely die.
Since 2016, I’ve worked directly with over a dozen such survivors in Chicago alone, nearly all of whom are mothers of color. Currently, I am working in support of a mother who was eight months pregnant when her partner attacked her in her own home, slamming her head into the kitchen counter and hitting her in the face as he dragged her. She reached for something to defend herself — a knife — struck him in the leg with it, and soon after, he died. The state has charged her with first-degree murder.
I do this work as an abolitionist organizer and a survivor of intimate partner violence. She could have been me too, only I hadn’t really believed that either.
Driving to Lincoln, Illinois, in July 2024, I was picking up a friend, a fellow mother and survivor who’d served a full sentence of separation from her child, total loss of body autonomy, and poor care at the Logan Correctional Center. I prepared for what we believed would be a very remote chance of ICE presence. They had not been picking people up outside Illinois Department of Corrections facilities. Corrections staff, like police, were given orders not to assist ICE.
From the sidewalk near the main gate, I watched her approach and then cross the threshold into the “free world,” carrying a copy printer box, a corrections officer still holding her arm. I was already reaching out to her when three black SUVs squealed into the curb, and three men in unmarked black uniforms rushed out. They shouted something at her bewildered face. They grabbed her and forced her into one of their vehicles and drove off. It happened in under 20 seconds. I heard myself screaming at the turned back of the corrections officer, at the already long-gone SUVs.
All that was left was that box, spilling out family photos, portraits she’d painted, legal documents, and letters between loved ones. I gathered it all up. I braced myself to tell her family. When I did, my friend’s mother crumpled into her own lap and cried. I could feel her daughter plead with me to be wrong, still looking for her mother.
When I remember that day, I also now imagine the faces of Renee Nicole Good’s children when they were told of her death, and the faces of Silverio Villegas González’s children when they were told of his death,their own bodies struck by the sense that this never should have been possible. Even in my mind’s eye, I want to look away.
It was days before we found my friend in a Kansas detention center. We organized a freedom campaign with amazing attorneys. We sent each other expensive messages of hope and solidarity. Then one day, seven months later, the steady push against an iron wall gave way. There were 642 miles and a deportation order between us, and then she was at my front door. The clenched fist that is all of me is still not fully open.
But as painful as it is, I am grateful to have even started to breach the hard border of myself, into the soft places where my body meets the bodies of my co-strugglers. I feel how precious we all are, and I know that we cannot and should not concede another life to this. We don’t need martyrs, and Renee Nicole Good and Silverio Villegas González were not offering. Nor has anyone asked us to suffer more as the way we show up in solidarity.
Abolitionist co-strugglers have been pleading with us to see what’s been there all along, in between explosive episodes of more public violence, funding cycles, and alleged reforms. They have always known that it’s not about guilt or innocence, dangerousness, or all the other claims systems make. Militarized borders and heavily gated pathways to citizenship ensure a permanently exploitable class, much like felony convictions.
So, it makes perfect sense that our solidarity reads as a threat to the ruling class, and they are reading that right. We are attacking the fundamental principle of their design, which rests on the claim that the value of my life is inversely proportional to the life of whatever enemy they present. They want us to believe premature death-making is a predetermined moral good.
But we refuse to believe that. Our well-being is bound together and we know it; we feel it when we let ourselves feel fear and grief. We know in our whole bodies that they and she and he are me. We feel one another most in our daring hope.
And that brings me back to all this loss. I was afraid to even try and speak or write anything to hold the weight of this. But I don’t want a moment of silence right now, quietly naming the dead. I can’t name each human life stolen by police or ICE or those acting in the interests of white supremacist patriarchy.
We cannot let them convince us that these systems can be “reformed,” because they are doing what they were designed to do.
In honor of those whose lives were stolen, and as a promise to their children, to their parents, and to our own futures, we cannot let them convince us that these systems can be “reformed,” because they are doing what they were designed to do. We are supposed to feel fear and disgust at those whom Donald Trump deems “garbage people.” If you are the “garbage people,” you are supposed to slip quietly away, and certainly not protest. We are supposed to accept, even begrudgingly, that incarceration, deportation, marginalization, and paywalls to basic needs are necessary. We are asked to ignore the obvious and inescapable fact of our shared humanity, to refuse care, and deny grief.
As Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz publicly decry the violence of ICE, we should remember that they have opposed any actual policy changes that would defund police. They’ve called instead for “reforms.” These might result in temporary improvements for some, but largely reforms defend the expansion of systems, creating shinier cages that soon lose their luster.
Instead, we must look to groups like the Black Visions collective in Minnesota, a Black queer-and-trans-led organization that has long been committed to the abolition of systems of state violence. The collective has been central to campaigns to defund police and the broader criminalization apparatus that includes ICE, in the wake of George Floyd’s 2020 murder by police.
Detractors will claim that those campaigns failed, but I am seeing the fruit of their labor spilling into the streets. The community education and collective demands that were developed then bring us to this powerful moment. Not only in Minnesota, but in Illinois, New York, California, and more, where organizers are drawing from the abolitionist principles embodied in groups like Survived & Punished that have been fighting to free survivors of gender violence from the overlapping systems of immigration and criminal legal courts.
“None of us are free unless all of us are free.” I heard Gov. JB Pritzker quoting Fannie Lou Hamer in response to ICE violence, after he allocated nearly a billion dollars to build two new prisons in Illinois. But the No New Prisons Coalition in Illinois knows these systems are entangled at the root. They have brilliantly prefigured, along with survivors inside, the absurd claim of “trauma-informed” prisons and they have developed harm reduction strategies to move us toward the demand to close these cages forever.
As Silky Shah of Detention Watch Network has written about in her incredible book, Unbuild Walls, all of these systems of forcible family separation, incarceration, and capitalism rely on the same logic of dangerousness and scarcity. Our struggles are inseparable, and when we fail to work together, we fall together too.
Shah reminds us that back in 2020, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by police, there was support for reducing detention centers to 10,000 beds. Currently, the administration is pushing for an increase to 50,000. And, as we have learned from the entire U.S. history of jails and prisons, we build it to fill it.
Some call this a flashpoint, but I hope it’s more like an earthquake, in which tectonic plates are overcome by stress, slipping and releasing wave after wave of energy. We don’t need this moment, ignited as it is by tragic deaths and record kidnappings, to fizzle into reforms that make minor improvements for a few, while sucking even more lives under.
The demands we are converging on now are visionary and urgent, and they are also necessary, practical, and winnable: to defund ICE and police, and to close detention centers and prisons, redirecting our resources toward housing, health care, child care, schools. Preventative caregiving and restorative justice are urgent, and this is the moment we can move them over the line. We can win.
I don’t want “justice” from the shooters — they have none to give. I’d rather make a demand of the death-making institutions: die, dissolve, decay.
I hope folks in Minnesota, who are feeling that burning under their skin, or the pressure of their own silence bursting, will connect with groups doing important work. Groups like Monarca are training rapid responders in communities across the Twin Cities and also in the predominantly white and conservative region of Western Wisconsin, where I grew up.
Renee Nicole Good was a writer. Had ICE not murdered her last Wednesday, I wonder what she would have written on Thursday, and every day after. I wonder how closely she would have hugged her wife and kids. What urgent, timely demands or call to action might she have made in the eternity of poetry?
If I could speak one thing, from “the priddly brook of my soul,” as Good wrote, to someplace sacred in us, it’s that I want us each to claim a space in this moment, affirm our cellular-level solidarity. I don’t want to make meaning out of death. I don’t want “justice” from the shooters — they have none to give. I’d rather make a demand of the death-making institutions: die, dissolve, decay.
Renee Nicole Good and Silverio Villegas González and so many more should be alive. We must defame, defund, and abolish these systems. We must empty all the cages, kick dirt over made-up borders, and fund the things that help us thrive, imagine, create. Free us all.
This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.
Holly Krig
Holly Krig is the director of Organizing for Moms United Against Violence and Incarceration and a cofounder of the Chicago Community Bond Fund.
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