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It is, even by the standards of modern political campaigning, stunning in just how much it distorts and disregards the truth and totality of a delicate and inflammatory situation.
On the morning of Jan. 7, 37-year-old Renee Good was shot and was killed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Minneapolis. Almost immediately, a wrestling match began over the narrative.
The Democratic side — and I don’t just mean leftists in general, for reasons I’ll make clear in a second — decided that it was going to push a simplistic version of events: Good was a soccer mom who’d just dropped her 6-year-old off when she was caught up in ICE operations. One thing led to another, and she was shot for no reason. As for the ICE officer she’d run over with her car, all sorts of excuses were offered — but the primary one was, since she was dead, we’d never know, would we?
The Democrats’ official X account took this a step further, however. They decided that they’d publicize Good’s last known words, followed by what ICE reportedly said after she was shot, as proof that this was nothing short of George Floyd 2.0, if not worse:
WARNING: The following posts and videos contain vulgar language and graphic content that some viewers will find offensive.
Newly-released footage reveals Renee Nicole Good’s last words. pic.twitter.com/Q0NsuUrpDR
— Democrats (@TheDemocrats) January 9, 2026
As if it just happened like that. In reality, the events that led to Renee Good’s death began years ago, but the hours and moments beforehand were authored almost solely by her.
To start off with, we must note why ICE operations like the one in Minneapolis are happening. Democrats, when they are in charge, conveniently ignore immigration and border controls for reasons we are all too familiar with. Then, when Republicans take control of the White House, the opposition asks, effectively, Well, what’re you going to do about it? I mean, they’re here; it’d take a huge logistical effort to reverse even a tenth of the illegality we countenanced on our watch.
The bet, of course, was that the GOP would never undertake this, even though both George W. Bush and Donald Trump were elected twice as border hawks. And, until Trump’s second term, that bet had paid off. Trump has undertaken that logistical effort to reverse the damage that’s been done, in part because that’s what he was elected to do and in part because the scale of the illegality countenanced under Joe Biden’s administration was so staggering that something had to be done.
The place where it was being done at present is Minneapolis, which is currently much in the news due to a massive welfare fraud scandal involving the immigrant community there. A few days earlier, operations had begun being ramped up in the city. This led to what The Wall Street Journal described as “Minneapolis’ sprawling network of ICE watchers” to spring into action.
Residents said thousands across Minneapolis and surrounding suburbs belong to networks that spring into action when ICE officers appear. One south-side Signal group has nearly 1,000 members who share photos and videos of suspected ICE vehicles almost constantly as they try to identify operations in progress, according to chats viewed by The Wall Street Journal.
“Hearing an unconfirmed report of an attempted abduction at 4th and Lake, observers requested,” said one message on Saturday. Another followed: “Whistles are going off, ICE out of vehicles.”
Some are more formally organized, while others appear to be activating on the fly. In the Signal group, one poster asked anyone “west of 35W and north of 36th” to join a separate chat. “Widespread activity in our area right now.” Some of the posters use only initials or pseudonyms, like “Pumpkin Spice” or “Banana Slug.”
Good, authorities say, was one of these individuals. Even Democrats in officialdom admit this much.
“She was a compassionate neighbor trying to be a legal observer on behalf of her immigrant neighbors,” said Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison in an interview. “That’s what she was doing at the moment of her death.”
Well, not quite just that. But this gives you a bit of background into the what and why of how Renee Good ended up getting shot by an ICE officer.
On Wednesday, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said at a media briefing that officials were “doing an enforcement operation” when one of their vehicles got stuck in the snow. As they tried to get unstuck, a number of protesters arrived, “preventing them from leaving the scene.”
This seemed to particularly involve Good herself, who had dropped her child off at school with her partner before they encountered the ICE agents. Whether or not she was tipped off by one of these ad hoc observer groups is unclear, but what is clear from video that has emerged is that she was the primary impediment to ICE officials, parking her Honda Pilot diagonally across the street and beeping her car horn rhythmically. (Numerous users on social media said she was “dancing” to the horn, but this allegation seemed unclear from what we can discern.)
🚨 BREAKING: Was just sent a video showing the moments before the shooting.
In it, you can clearly see Renee Good’s vehicle blocking ICE agents for over 3 minutes as she’s dancing to her own car horn.
Kinda ruins some narratives, doesn’t it? pic.twitter.com/aXtiTjAtF9
— Dustin Grage (@GrageDustin) January 10, 2026
At this point, body cam video shows her saying the “I’m not mad at you” line, although that’s been taken wildly out of context. At this point, federal agents had moved in on the Honda Pilot while Good’s partner was recording them from outside the vehicle.
“You want to come at us? You want to come at us?” Rebecca Good said as she waved her iPhone camera in the officer’s face. “I say you go get yourself some lunch, big boy.”
At this point, from the other side of the vehicle, an agent can clearly be heard ordering Renee Good to “get out of the car. Get out of the car. Get out of the f***ing car.”
Stills from the video show that, at or about the point where she’s ordered from the vehicle, she puts it into reverse.
— stubborn mule (@WesleyBohna) January 9, 2026
After this, she steps on the accelerator and hits the federal agent in front of the vehicle, who was the individual her partner was confronting.
Why aren’t you showing the video?
Oh. Because it interferes with your fake narrative. Got it. pic.twitter.com/rC1f0TJSJz
— Coco 🇺🇸 (@CoClarified) January 9, 2026
CNN would subsequently air another enhanced version of the video, which clearly shows that the shots were fired after the vehicle hit the agent.
CNN admits Renee Good hit the
ICE officer first, before he shot her. pic.twitter.com/hWpJvxdV74— Farm Girl Carrie 👩🌾 (@FarmGirlCarrie) January 10, 2026
Three gunshots were fired, after which Good’s Honda Pilot crashed into a parked car. According to ABC News, there was chaos from other protesting observers, with one yelling “shame.” EMS personnel arrived six minutes later. Good was transported to Hennepin County Medical Center, where she was pronounced dead.
Democratic officials continued the spin from there, with Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey saying that the ICE agent acted “recklessly” and that the self-defense claim was “bulls***” shortly after noon local time on the day of the shooting. It is worth noting that this was before most of these videos came out; it is unclear whether he was privy to them.
One’s heart breaks any time something like this happens, especially to a young mother. But she was a young mother who made a deadly decision and did everything wrong.
Assume she found the orders she was given conflicting, not that she acted because she disagreed with them; that does not mean that she was free to pursue a third option — especially, in particular, moving the car. What the law enforcement officers are telling you is that, due to their view of how the situation has escalated, you now pose an imminent threat, your vehicle is to be considered a deadly weapon, and what you do next can and will determine whether you live or die.
Whatever the case may have been, Good did not feel as if she needed to follow these orders, or found herself in a state where she was unable to follow them. She briefly reversed her vehicle, then shifted out of reverse, then she appears to have stepped on the gas with enough force as to spin the front tires of her car. She did this, moreover, with a law enforcement officer in front of the car.
Whether she did this intentionally or not, which will be debated, is irrelevant. Whether or not she was turning away from the officer, as some have claimed, is irrelevant. Whether or not the orders could be construed as conflicting is irrelevant. Good and her partner had escalated the situation to the point where commands were given which indicated officers had reason to believe that not only was she deliberately disobeying direct and lawful orders, she was doing so in a way that posed an immediate danger, due to the fact that she was piloting what could be, in a situation where direct orders were being disobeyed, a deadly weapon capable of mass casualties. Moreover, she had stepped on the accelerator with a law enforcement officer in front of the car, which would have indicated to a reasonable LEO that this was someone with intent to commit grave bodily harm and to harm or kill more people.
But no: This is reduced to “Good: ‘That’s fine. I have no problem with you.’ *gunshots* ICE officer: ‘F***in’ b****!’”
Did she set out to hit an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent? We’ll never know. What we do know is that, after being given a clear command — and, contrary to initial reports that the orders being given to Good were “unclear,” she’s been given a lawful order by a federal agent to get out of her car, which can be clearly heard some distance away — she disobeys that command as if it were a suggestion, and puts her car into drive instead. She hits a federal agent with a vehicle that is now being used as a deadly weapon. He responds with lethal force, as he is trained to do and as he is supposed to do.
Everything here unfolded as, unfortunately, it should have. A woman made a decision that cost her life, cost a child his mother. We do not celebrate this. We should not say that she “found out,” as is popular in online discourse. We mourn, as we mourn all senseless death.
But the senselessness here is obvious: Renee Good thought she could commit crimes and endanger the lives of others because she was Right and they were Wrong. She is dead because of not just one, but a sequence of decisions she made. And moreover, those decisions were being made because the Democrats have neglected to enforce the laws for years and now count on their own to act lawlessly to protect their lack of care.
Then, to top it all off, they release — on their official X account — what amounts to an advertisement which states Good got shot by a federal agent who called her a “f***in’ b****” after she said she was all right with him, denuded of all context. The desperation is bad enough. The shamelessness in the face of a dead mother’s decisions, egged on by a political party that views her as being more valuable dead than she ever was alive, is reprehensible, particularly when the sequence of events that led to her demise is now all too well documented.
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