Renee Good and the cost of being good

Wednesday in Minneapolis, our world lost someone named Good, and the cruel irony is impossible to ignore. Renee Nicole Good was shot and killed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents during an immigration enforcement operation.

She did not die because she was an agitator. She did not die calling for violence. She didn’t die because she was a threat or because she carried a weapon. She died simply for being good, being present, compassionate, and willing to show up for her neighbors. She died trying to do something good.

Related: Who was Renee Nicole Good? Remembering the Minneapolis poet and mother killed by ICE

And in that moment, her goodness did not protect her.

Renee was described by those who loved her as kind, creative, gentle. She was a poet, a mother, a friend, and a wife. She was not known as an activist. She was not a leader of a movement. She was not, as some in power have since claimed, a “domestic terrorist.” She was a woman living her life, moving through her community, doing what so many of us believe is the bare minimum of human decency.

Renee Good refused to look away when others were in danger.

In the aftermath of the shooting, Renee’s wife collapsed at the scene, wailing and blaming herself for having brought Renee there. Her grief was raw, public, and devastating. It is the sound of a life obliterated by unnecessary bullets from a gun drawn too quickly. That moment alone should have given this country and the leadership of ICE pause. Instead, it was quickly overshadowed by a rush to control the narrative.

Related: Distraught woman says ICE killed her wife in video after deadly Minneapolis shooting

Rather than question the use of lethal force, high-ranking Trump officials chose to demean Renee’s memory. They accused her of sparking the incident. They suggested she was violent. They framed her as a threat. These claims are not supported by the accounts of witnesses or any available evidence. Searches about Renee now are all about her life and her children.

What Donald Trump and Kristi Noem blurted out is not about truth. It is about deflecting the truth. They seek to protect their own power and the abject impunity of federal agents by transforming the dead into villains.

Minnesota officials say the federal government is blocking them from investigating the shooting. Trump and his ilk will do all they can to repress the truth.

ICE has come to represent something treacherous in American life. ICE is an unsettling militarized authority. Its agents are aggressive and ready to escalate in a flash, as was evident Wednesday.

Renee Good appeared to embody the opposite. She was, by all accounts, the antithesis of menace. And yet it is precisely people like her, people who intervene, who care, who refuse to be silent, who are increasingly placed in harm’s way.

None of us, really, are safe. And, for queer people, this reality lands with particular weight, and not just because Good was queer.

Queer and trans communities have long understood that visibility is a risk. That showing up, for each other, for our neighbors, and for strangers, can make us targets. Renee’s death comes at a time when queer people are already being cast as threats, scapegoats, and moral contagions by a resurgent Chomehow responsible, complicit, or ideologically to blame. Even if that queer person is only a friend, roommate, or neighbor. Guilt by association, even if it’s at a distance.

Related: New York Post targets trans people with ‘harmful’ reporting on Charlie Kirk murder, critics say

And even when perpetrators have no connection to LGBTQ+ communities, our identities are dragged into the conversation, turned into innuendo, suspicion, or outright accusation.

It is not unreasonable to ask whether Renee Good’s sexuality will soon be folded into this same machinery of blame. The right’s cruelty knows no bounds.

Will her queerness be used to subtly recast her as radical? Will her love be reframed as some sort of antifa ideology? Will her very existence be treated as evidence of deviance rather than humanity?

These aren’t some paranoid questions being bandied about. They are genuine questions shaped by lived experience, by years of watching the right weaponize tragedy to advance false and devious narratives that endanger us all.

Renee was a woman who loved another woman, and that love was visible in her final moments. It should have been met with compassion. Instead, it risks becoming another excuse for dehumanization.

Finally, there is a tragic irony in the symmetry of her name. Renee Good was described as good, a good neighbor, a good friend, a good wife, and a good mother. She was doing good by trying to protect her community. And yet being “good” did not save her. In this moment, it may have made her more vulnerable.

What does it mean when goodness itself becomes dangerous? When empathy is treated as provocative? When standing beside your neighbors is framed as domestic terrorism?

We need more Good in this world, not less. We need a society where compassion is not a fault or a failure, where queer love is not suspect or a reason to excuse, and where the dead are not smeared to shield those who wield weapons without restraint.

Renee Good’s life should not be reduced to lies told after her death. Her name should not be twisted into irony. If her killing teaches us anything, it is this: that showing up still matters, even when it costs too much, and that our response must not be retreat, but resolve.

Devastatingly, goodness did not protect Renee. But callously abandoning it would dishonor her.