In a recent meeting a thoughtful and sincere question arose: Did Renée Nicole Good’s possible designation as a “legal observer” with a Minneapolis “ICE Watch” group— a network of neighbors and activists who observe, document, and share information about ICE activity to protect their communities exacerbate the circumstances of her death? That question — clearly motivated by concern for civil liberties and community safety — deserves a meaningful response. As I reflected on it, I realized that the very framing points to the need for a deeper inquiry as to where the real injury lies and it opens space to consider the role of citizens confronting state power.

The tragedy in Renée’s death did not begin with her presence on January 6, 2026, her conscience, or even her role as someone watching events unfold. It began with the mission and design of a federal enforcement apparatus whose very purpose is to surveil and control communities based on origin, race, and status. The idea that a label — “legal observer” or otherwise — could make her killing worse is not only legally irrelevant, but it also obscures the real cause of this violence.

The system dehumanizes entire communities before anyone even steps outside their front door.

Renée’s death was not the consequence of observation. It was the consequence of a system that dehumanizes entire communities the moment they are deemed expendable.  The offense begins with interior enforcement as policy, with agents tasked to round up, surveil, and criminalize communities based on origin, race, class, or immigration status. That system dehumanizes entire communities before anyone even steps outside their front door. Renée’s death did not hinge on a label; it was a foreseeable consequence of a system built on exclusion, suspicion, and force.

Renée Good was a civilian, a parent, and a human being. She lived as a queer woman in partnership with her wife, Becca Good, with whom she raised her children. In life and even in death, her identity was distorted and used to diminish her humanity by political operatives and conservative outlets seeking to justify state violence. Her loved ones remember her as kind, creative, and committed to community, not a threat to it. That human reality should never be lost in bureaucratic spin or culture‑war misdirection.

The law protects the kinds of actions that Renée and others like her took. The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech, assembly, and the press, and judicial precedent affirms that these protections include the right to observe, record, and share information about government conduct in public spaces. Individuals have this right by virtue of citizenship and humanity, not by virtue of an official permit. Similarly, the Fourth Amendment limits searches and seizures to those supported by judicial warrants and probable cause, and the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees due process and equal protection. Yet ICE’s routine reliance on warrantless street‑level stops, racial and ethnic profiling, and aggressive interior enforcement routinely strays from these constitutional boundaries, especially in mixed‑status communities and neighborhoods already traumatized by policing. Civil rights statutes like 42 U.S.C. §1983 presuppose that ordinary people will witness abuses and hold state actors accountable. When citizens observe and document enforcement, they are not interfering; they are exercising rights that enable democratic oversight and public accountability.

ICE is not an anomaly in American history.

It stands in a long lineage of state power deployed to oppress and control. Long before ICE existed, the United States sanctioned and empowered slave catchers under the Fugitive Slave Acts, giving federal authority to capture and return human beings to bondage. That system explicitly treated people as property and trained agents to see African‑descent lives as less than fully human. At the same time, the dispossession of Native American nations — through broken treaties, forced removals such as the Trail of Tears, and violent repression — exemplified how state authority functioned as a vehicle of subjugation and conquest. Both systems rested on legal frameworks that justified dehumanization, surveillance, and coercion. Later, the Chinese Exclusion Act codified racism into immigration law, banning Chinese laborers from entering the United States and denying Chinese immigrants the right to naturalize. Under Executive Order 9066 during World War II, over 100,000 Japanese Americans — two‑thirds of whom were U.S. citizens — were forcibly removed from their homes and incarcerated in camps because of ancestry and wartime fear, a practice the U.S. Supreme Court initially upheld in Korematsu v. United States before that decision was repudiated decades later.

These episodes — slavery, Native American dispossession, exclusionary immigration laws, and wartime internment — are not disconnected curiosities of history. They are structural patterns of state power that define American governance when fear and prejudice are given legal sanction. In each case, law was used to make certain lives expendable, to otherize entire groups, and to consolidate power through fear of “the other.” Political elites leveraged prejudice as currency, building careers and authority on narratives that dehumanized entire populations while claiming to protect “legitimate” citizens.

At the same time, ordinary people of conscience have always acted to resist. Abolitionists who guided the Underground Railroad did not wait for legal sanction; they challenged the law because it was immoral. Civil rights activists documented police brutality when official channels failed to protect Black communities. The Black Panther Party’s patrols were not provocations; they were community defense. These acts were denounced in their time as dangerous or unlawful, yet history remembers them as necessary moral courage. In that tradition, Renee Good stood. She did not threaten society; she sought to protect it. The social fabric is torn not by observation, but by the normalization of state violence and the militarization of daily life. When conscience is treated as provocation and neighbors as obstacles, tyranny becomes acceptable.

Responsibility for Renée’s death is not diffuse or abstract.

It lies first with the ICE agent who pulled the trigger, and with the institution that trained and empowered him. It lies with the Department of Homeland Security that shields such practices from meaningful oversight. It lies with the political architects and provocateurs who have deliberately militarized immigration enforcement, exploited xenophobia and racism, and fractured communities to consolidate their own power. This is not accidental governance; it is a strategy rooted in the logic of exclusion and fear. ICE is not merely dysfunctional; it is a systemic manifestation of oppression and exclusion, enforced by law, policy, and political will. Reform cannot cure that; abolition and systemic transformation are the only moral responses.

So no, Renée Good’s killing was not made worse by whether she was a “legal observer.” That framing misdirects attention from the true crime: a system that dehumanizes and targets communities, that deploys lethal force with impunity, and that justifies itself through narratives of fear. Her presence, her witness, and her courage were expressions of constitutionally protected rights and human compassion. Her identity as a queer woman, her partnership with Becca, and her devotion as a mother are inseparable from the human reality that her death exposes. She acted as a citizen, a neighbor, and a humanist. Standing up for her memory — legally, politically, and historically — is not optional; it is necessary.

Now is the moment for accountability, for unequivocal political opposition to systems of state violence. We must demand that the agent responsible be held to account under the law, without immunity or political shelter. We must challenge the institution of ICE, not merely for missteps, but because its very existence embodies a lineage of oppression that has repeatedly been rejected by conscience and history. We must mobilize for abolition as a moral imperative, not a rhetorical slogan — abolishing systems that treat people as targets, and building community structures rooted in care, justice, and human dignity.

We cannot accept a society where observation itself is treated as threat. We cannot permit state terror to be normalized. We cannot allow fear to be the measure of human worth. The memory of Renee Good demands that we act — boldly, collectively, and without compromise — to dismantle structures of oppression – Abolish ICE and the entire  Trumpian plutocracy and build a world where all lives are equally protected by law and equally respected by conscience.