‘This Is Fascism—We’re Going to Fight It!’ NYers Protest ICE Murder in Minnesota
New Yorkers took to the streets on Jan. 7 after masked ICE agents gunned down 37-year-old mom Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis earlier in the day. Photos/Steve Wishnia
By Steve Wishnia
Compelled by a snuff-video clip that went viral on social media on the afternoon of January 7, several hundred people converged on Foley Square that evening for an emergency rally to protest the killing depicted in said video: An Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shooting 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis that morning.
“I’m outraged. I didn’t know what to do. I came after work,”said John Grauwiler, a teacher from Astoria.
“I’m just outraged at how immigrants are treated in this country,” Sam, a 23-year-old woman from Washington Heights who was holding a white rose, told Work-Bites. “My neighbors are living in fear. It’s just escalating more and more.”
Carlos, a 34-year-old Dominican immigrant, said he came because he felt frustrated and “para apoyar”—to support the cause.
“First, this is fascism. Second, we’re going to fight it,” City Councilmember Tiffany Caban (D-Queens) told the crowd. “Masked officers murdered a woman in her car, and the Department of Homeland Security is lying about it.”
“They are trying to normalize the devil’s work,” Public Advocate Jumaane Williams told the crowd. “This is what it was always going to end up being.”
The video is part of a genre excruciatingly familiar to anyone who watched the clips of George Floyd being asphyxiated by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020—on a street about 10 blocksfrom where Good was shot—or Eric Garner moaning “I can’t breathe” on a Staten Island sidewalk in 2014. More recently, clips of ICE agents smashing suspected immigrants’ carwindows have proliferated on social media.
In it, Good’s maroon Honda SUV is stopped at an angle in the right lane of a snowy street where anti-ICE protesters were shouting. Two masked ICE agents get out of a pickup truck and approach from behind, one of them barking “get out of the fucking car” and one grabbing at the driver’s-side door handle. Good backs up a bit, and then drives forward, trying to get away. An agent in front and off to the side quickly fires three shots, the first at the windshield and the last point-blank through the open driver’s-side window. Good’s car crashes into a parked vehicle down the block.
Good, shot in the head, was pronounced dead when brought to a hospital. Witnesses told various news outlets that the ICE agents had refused to let a man who said he was a doctor check her pulse, and then wouldn’t let an ambulance through.
She was the mother of a six-year-old son, relatives told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem told reporters that the agent killing Good was justified, because she had “proceeded to weaponize her vehicle, and she attempted to run a law-enforcement officer over.” She called it “an act of domestic terrorism.”
Angry protesters mobilize in Foley Square on Wednesday night in response to ICE agents shooting 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good to death in Minneapolis, leaving behind a six-year-old son.
“We saw the video, and we know what we saw,” said Councilmember Shahana Hanif (D-Brooklyn). “There was no self-defense.”
Protester Michael Lewis, 60, of Manhattan, said the agent who killed Good “should be arrested.”
“I saw the video,” he told Work-Bites. “Those trying to defend him either didn’t see it, or they’re lying.”
The crowd contained contingents from various Trotskyist and Maoist groups, but seemed to be mostly people who were simply outraged by the shooting and “everything ICE is doing now,” as a woman holding a “Kristi No More” sign put it.
“I feel like I have to do something,” Lori, 55, of Manhattan, said tearfully.
“It was just so egregious,” said a thirtyish Brooklyn man, the son of Chinese immigrants. “The casualness of it. Just one more in a long line of unforgivable actions.” He said he’d come after hearing about the killing on social media.
John Grauwiler said that before the protest, he’d felt “overwhelmed by the abuse,” but after he got there, “I felt I was not alone.”
“I don’t feel hopeless. I feel empowered,” he added.
The labor presence appeared relatively small, although CUNY Professional Staff Congress leader James Davis was one of the speakers.
“The fascists are counting on us to be silent,” he said. “We know that we are being called on by history in this moment.”
“The health-care workers of 1199SEIU are outraged and heartbroken,” union President Yvonne Armstrong said in a statement. “For months, it has been clear that escalating ICE actions in neighborhoods across the country would result in tragedies exactly like this one. The Trump administration’s attempt to justify this violence by its masked agents is appalling. We stand with the people of Minneapolis, with immigrant families, and in defense of the Constitution. We demand: ICE out of our communities!”
One 1199SEIU member, health-care worker Maeve Campbell, handed out brochures for the Labor Conference to Defend Immigrants.
“We’re trying to organize in defense of our patients and our coworkers, mobilize different sectors of labor,” she said.
As the rally ended, the protesters marched west to Broadway, chanting “Justice for Renee” in front of 26 Federal Plaza. The building is where ICE has been holding dozens of immigrants in overcrowded detention cells, after seizing them when they came in for immigration-court hearings or check-ins at its offices there. Some protesters placed white roses in the chain-link fence that cordoned off the plaza.
In Minneapolis, protesters had placed white roses in the bloodstained snow.