Trump and ICE Want You to Think Renee Nicole Good Deserved It

Seconds before Jonathan Ross killed Renee Nicole Good, the veteran ICE officer turned his camera phone on her wife, recording her, before aiming the lens at Renee. He fired, shooting her in her face. Then he steadied his phone, still pointed in the direction of Renee’s silence, and said, “fucking bitch.”   

For months, more and more women like Renee Nicole Good have been turning out in their neighborhoods to observe and challenge Immigration and Customs Enforcement—defending communities in Chicago, in Washington, D.C., in Los Angeles, in New Orleans. And now, videos have emerged showing ICE officers and CBP agents using Good’s death as a threat against women who challenge them. I was not the only woman, certainly not the only queer woman, for whom watching Good die at the hands of a man with a government-issued gun, watching him degrade her as if to justify himself, felt both shockingly violent and disturbingly commonplace. It underlines how queer women have always been acceptable targets for violence. The difference in this video is how open and undeniable the violence is. The difference is how brazenly the government is now arguing that such violence is inevitable.

What we saw in the ICE officer’s video should be understood alongside the intense attacks on women and LGBTQ people under this administration. Her killing takes place against the backdrop of everyday oppression that, for so many of us, long preceded Trump. Dr. Cynthia Miller-Idriss, author of the recent book Man Up: The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism and a professor at American University, told me she saw the video and surrounding rhetoric as attempts at what she describes as “containment”—a set of strategies that prop up patriarchal power by policing its dissenters, actual or perceived.

Misogynistic rhetoric can be so ordinary as to escape mention; The New York Times did not quote the “fucking bitch” statement in its coverage of the video, nor even describe it, as if the merging of pathetic name-calling with state violence was not notable. Denying the misogyny in the killing also reinforces its effect. “The misogyny delegitimizes, it demobilizes, it normalizes violence,” Miller-Idriss explained when we spoke on Monday. The language in the video, underlining the violence, serves as a warning to any other people who dare follow Good’s example and excuses any violence waged against them. “It’s especially horrifying to see that kind of violence against women and LGBTQ folks be just celebrated,” she said, “as if this woman was put in her place—fucking bitch, right?”

The staggering truth is, this was not even the first time, since ICE’s siege began in 2025, that an immigration enforcemen officer shot a woman in her car and called her a bitch. In October, a Border Patrol agent named Charles Exum shot five times at a woman who had been following ICE just as Good had. (This was, according to The Trace, one of 16 incidents in which immigration enforcement officers opened fire since these sieges began in 2025, along with another 15 incidents in which they held someone at gunpoint. A Wall Street Journal investigation has found 13 incidents where ICE shot at someone in their vehicle.) The victim in October, Marimar Martinez, lived. The Department of Justice charged her with attempted murder. It claimed she had rammed her car into the immigration officers’ car. In court, however, the woman’s attorney said that the agent’s own bodycam video showed him telling her, before opening fire, “Do something, bitch.” Later, he texted a group chat involving other agents something that may have led to the charges being dropped. The Border Patrol agent boasted, “I fired 5 rounds, and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys.”

Jonathan Ross’s video of him killing Good was publicized two days after the shooting, in what seemed like a hapless attempt to exonerate him, as if his actions could be justified as self-defense. Other videos with other angles of the shooting show that Good’s wheels were pointed away from him, and Ross’s video likewise provides no clear evidence he was in danger—unless the danger was two queer women, one in her car, mocking and watching him. But that’s probably the point: The video is being shared not as proof, but as reinforcement of this administration’s view of who is “other,” and therefore an acceptable target. The video also offers those who support the ICE officer something to see themselves in, to cheer on. 

Well before they began promoting the video, the Trump administration and his defenders were using the same misogynistic lines to justify the government taking Good’s life. Their argument is not complicated: This woman was dangerous, and her life was worthless. When asked on Sunday whether “deadly force” was justified, Trump told reporters, “The woman and her friend were highly disrespectful of law enforcement.” Trump again dismissed Renee’s wife as a “friend” in the same press gaggle. Trump complained about screaming he heard in one video—it’s not clear if he thought it was Renee screaming, or what video he saw—claiming he heard “an agitator, a very high-level agitator, so professional, she wouldn’t stop screaming.” The president said the woman he thought he heard was “so loud, and so crazy, and just not normal.” He could just say dyke.

The White House press secretary has also adopted this line of attack, deeming Good “a leftist insurrectionist.” Vance added victim blaming, saying at a White House briefing that ICE killing Good was “absolutely a tragedy of her own making,” while also calling Good “a victim of left-wing ideology.” The rhetorical dance is familiar: When it’s convenient, a bad woman can be dismissed as a formerly good woman seduced into badness. And it’s often convenient to void such woman of any convictions they held. (This does not apply if their apparent motives align with the regime; as historian Thomas Zimmer noted, the same week ICE killed Good, the administration was lionizing the January 6 “martyr” Ashli Babbit.) Such messages were channeled efficiently by the shooter’s other defenders. On Fox, one host seemed to handwave Good’s death by referring to her having had “pronouns in her bio,” apparently a capital offense since January 20, 2025. A GoFundMe for the officer was promoted by its creator as, “The stupid cunts wanna make a go fund me for the stupod [sic] bitch that got what she deserved i made one for the ice officer that did his job lets get this man some money.” As of publication, the fundraiser is still online.

On the social media site turned on-demand nonconsensual-nudes site X.com, The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh added a white supremacy note to the right-wing narrative: “This lesbian agitator gave her life to protect 68 IQ Somali scammers who couldn’t give less of a shit about her.” The right-wing influencer and alleged Russian asset Lauren Chen posted a screed claiming Renee’s actions were “the result of liberal brainrot that convinces progressive women they have more of a duty to nurture and protect poor, brown (criminal!) strangers than their own country, and hell, even their own children.” Right-wing Christian radio host Erick Erickson called Renee “AWFUL (Affluent White Female Urban Liberal).” All this has coalesced into a bizarre narrative that, as one Fox opinion writer put it, we are at risk from “Deluded Wine Moms Committing Deadly Crimes.”

Among those reinforcing the narrative—that a dangerous, left-wing lesbian got what she deserved; that more are out there—were the ICE officers still terrorizing neighborhoods in Minneapolis. According to a Minneapolitan who gave her name only as Patty in a video interview with independent progressive outlet Status Coup News, on Sunday, an agent who arrested her for following ICE officials told her, “You guys need to stop obstructing us. That’s why that lesbian bitch is dead.” Another ICE watcher, who gave her name as Skye, said she was detained, and an agent told her, “I bet you fucking like that, don’t you,” as they pressed her face into the ground, referring to her as “it” and other derogatory names. “They’re enjoying it,” Skye said. “They literally said in there, Have you not learned, this is why we killed that lesbian bitch.”

These are threats. They are tossed off so casually. “That kind of ‘fucking bitch’ rage,” Miller-Idriss told me, “when there was no threat of imminent harm, and ‘Didn’t you learn your lesson?’ It’s the same kind of ‘Your body, my choice’ glee, right?” ICE officers are also reinforcing their allies in Washington pursuing male supremacist policies by telling women, as she put it: “We’re gonna claim we can have ownership over your body. We can demand that male standards be the norm. We can take control back.” All that, she said, “is also a classic authoritarian tactic.” The administration, its foot soldiers, and its apologists need to deny responsibility for Renee’s death and take enjoyment in it, to put things back in order.

Renee’s wife, Becca, was close enough to have heard Renee’s last words, and shortly after, to hear the ICE officer call Renee a fucking bitch. Some of her neighbors may have heard him say that too. They were already gathered around the SUV where Renee took her last breaths, only a few blocks away from her home. Those who had first come out to observe and chase ICE out of their Minneapolis neighborhood witnessed what may never be charged as a murder. Now Ross’s video has made millions of people witnesses. ICE and their allies clearly think they have turned people against her. They think they have put Renee Nicole Good in her place. Now they are explicitly telling us: They are not stopping there. But that should not stop us.