On Renee Good & Minneapolis
First, Justice for Migrant Families would like to thank you all for your patience as we worked to formulate our feelings over the past week. Our staff needed time to sit with our emotions, thoughts, and grief before we felt ready to share with our whole community.
Our communities are holding a lot of feelings following the killing of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis on January 7th. Our hearts break for her family, her children, and her communities in Minnesota and Colorado. We rage at her highly visible and violent death being called “self-defense” by our federal administration. We feel the heavy load of grief that compounds on our shoulders day after day as we do this work with families being ripped apart by ICE and the DOJ. We feel exhausted and exasperated knowing that Renee Good isn’t the first, and won’t be the last, person to be killed at the hands of the violent ICE machine.
The grief and rage we see across our communities nationwide feels loud, and it should be. ICE executed a woman, a mother, a poet, and an activist, for no justifiable reason, in broad daylight, in a major American city. They killed a citizen and did not allow her to receive medical care on site. The sitting American president, the head of the Department of Homeland Security, and many other politicians and pundits have blamed her for her own death, when our eyes show us the truth of what led to her execution. The murder of Renee Nicole Good is maddening, terrifying, tragic, and rage-inducing. It is loud. It is violent. It is visible. And it is gut-wrenching.
The cacophony of grief that we hear and feel only adds to the quieter, persistent grief our communities carry every day. The grief of the 32 people killed by ICE in 2025; the four people killed by ICE so far in 2026. The day-in and day-out grief of those held in ICE detention in Batavia—people living without their families and support systems inside a cage that has been over capacity for years. The anger toward an immigration detention system that routinely abuses people and denies them their inherent dignity. The rage of knowing migrant children have been held in detention at ICE’s New York headquarters on 250 Delaware Avenue; families held for days at the Peace Bridge for making a wrong turn off a roundabout. The quiet, slow, and steady grief of bureaucratic violence within the immigration court system—a system that denies due process to expedite deportations, sometimes to countries people have never lived in. The constant dehumanization of our families, friends, and neighbors that never seems to end.
We are also frustrated. Frustrated knowing that the murder of Renee Good has received more attention and shock because she was a white American citizen. Frustrated knowing that backlash from ICE in response to this week’s protests will be felt most heavily by Black and Brown migrant communities. Frustrated that many of our community members cannot attend protests for fear of their own safety—especially those who have been homebound since January 2025 due to increasingly aggressive ICE and CBP tactics. Frustrated that the Department of Homeland Security will continue to be granted more authority to kidnap, kill, and terrorize families across the U.S., despite uprisings in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis. Frustrated with lawmakers’ ambivalence toward the ongoing tragedies impacting migrant communities. Frustrated and angry at how imperialist, profit-driven U.S. foreign policy creates the conditions that force people to flee their homes, only to be met with closed gates and the barrels of guns. Angry that the killing of migrants by ICE and the killings of Black people by law enforcement will continue; that they are a different side of the same state-sanctioned white supremacist terror coin.
And still, we feel the hope and strength of our communities. We want to welcome those who may be newly activated to join us in the streets and in the spreadsheets. We need everyone to play the role that is right for them to strengthen our movements and protect our people. We must care for ourselves as we do this work—taking breaks and asking for help when needed—so we can sustain ourselves for the long haul. We must remember: the way out is through, and the way forward is together.
In this moment, we refuse silence and we refuse forgetting. We honor Renee Nicole Good by continuing to tell the truth about state violence and by standing in unwavering solidarity with migrant communities who have been subjected to this brutality for decades. Our grief must be met with action, our rage with resolve, and our love for our people with sustained commitment. We call on our community to stay engaged, to protect one another, and to demand an end to the systems that criminalize, cage, and kill. Together, we will continue to organize, resist, and build a future rooted in dignity, safety, and justice for all.
With solidarity and love,
Justice for Migrant Families