“Renee Good Is No George Floyd”

Why the Minneapolis ICE shooting won’t replay the 2020 script — and why the legal aftermath will be very different.

RENEE NICOLE GOOD. HER CARD SAYS IT ALL

“Renee Good Is No George Floyd”

Why the Minneapolis ICE shooting won’t replay the 2020 script — and why the legal aftermath will be very different.

By any normal measure of media cycles, political incentives, or civil litigation pathways, the killing of Renee Nicole Good in south Minneapolis should have followed the well-worn 2020 George Floyd pattern: a dramatic video of law enforcement using lethal force, a major American city primed for outrage, and a sympathetic victim whose story could mobilize activists and litigation alike.

That is not what happened — and understanding why has everything to do with who Good was, what she was doing in Minneapolis, and how federal immigration enforcement functions inside a “sanctuary” political environment. Renee Good is no George Floyd, and the legal system will treat her case accordingly.

A COMPLICATED PERSON, NOT A PURE CIVILIAN

Good’s biography does not fit the martyr template that corporate media prefers. A mother of three originally from Colorado Springs, she had worked in dental offices and credit unions before graduating from Old Dominion University in 2020 with a degree in creative writing. After her husband, an Air Force veteran, died in 2023, Good’s life entered a period of ideological and geographic realignment.

From Colorado to Kansas City and finally to Minneapolis, Good’s moves were not merely domestic. By the time she arrived in Minnesota with her partner and youngest child, she was inside a dense network of progressive community organizations and anti-ICE activism familiar to Minneapolis residents since 2020.

This matters because Renee Good did not encounter ICE as a random bystander. She encountered them as a participant in a movement that explicitly seeks to monitor, disrupt, resist, and delegitimize federal immigration enforcement.

MINNEAPOLIS AS ACTIVIST TERRITORY

Minneapolis is one of the most aggressive sanctuary jurisdictions in the United States. Since George Floyd, the municipal political class — from Mayor Jacob Frey to the remnants of the Minneapolis Police Department — has adopted a posture of official non-cooperation with federal immigration authorities, leaving ICE to operate without crowd control, without coordination, and without local police buffering.

Into this vacuum stepped activist ecosystems. Among them: phone trees, text-alert networks, “Know Your Rights” trainings, school-based community organizers, and, most relevant to Good, the loosely organized ICE Watch networks that shadow federal enforcement operations and broadcast their movements in real time.

The purpose, stated plainly even on the activists’ own materials, is to defend the community against ICE — not through legal argument, but through counter-surveillance and spatial interference.

This distinction is crucial: counter-surveillance is not civilian behavior. It is operational behavior. It is how adversarial actors behave toward enforcement agencies.

THE STALKING OF ICE: A COMBATANT, NOT A CIVILIAN

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem stated publicly that Good was part of a group that had been “stalking and impeding” ICE operations throughout the day of the shooting. If this is true — and DHS would not use those verbs casually — then Good was not a passive observer. She was engaged in a multi-node tracking operation, tailing federal agents from site to site.

This behavior is not unique to Minneapolis. Sanctuary cities from Oakland to Portland have normalized the tactic. But it transforms the legal and moral posture of the encounter. A civilian killed in the course of a police action carries one kind of legal weight. A civilian-turned-participant in an adversarial operational environment carries another.

At the moment of the shooting, Good’s vehicle was not an innocent conveyance. It was, in ICE’s interpretation, an instrument of harassment or obstruction, capable of inflicting lethal force. The federal agent did not shoot a prone suspect; he fired at a moving vehicle in close proximity — a classic use-of-force question for any enforcement setting, federal or local.

THE SHOOTING ITSELF

The video that emerged from multiple angles shows a chaotic, unbuffered encounter: no MPD perimeter, no crowd control, no local police to separate activists from agents. ICE was operating alone inside a hostile urban environment — a direct product of Minneapolis’s political choice to abandon coordination.

Good’s partner, who appears to have exited the vehicle prior to the final escalation, can be heard narrating and interacting with ICE. This is not the behavior of a terrified civilian fleeing danger. It is the behavior of an activist witnessing a confrontation she expected to unfold.

When the SUV advanced, the ICE agent fired at close range. Good later died of gunshot wounds.

THE CIVIL LEGAL QUESTION: WHO IS GUILTY OF WHAT?

The family and its lawyers will not get a Derek Chauvin scenario. They will not get a state willing to criminally prosecute a federal agent. They will not get a Justice Department eager to pursue civil rights charges. They will not get a national protest movement, a global media narrative, or Fortune 500 corporate solidarity campaigns.

Instead, they will get the cold reality of a federal wrongful-death and negligence pathway, and in that arena the question is not moral purity — it is comparative fault.

If a civil wrongful-death action were filed tomorrow, the likely fault map would look something like this:

Federal Government (ICE/DHS): for lethal use of force and operational design.City of Minneapolis / MPD: for political non-cooperation and refusal to provide enforcement support.Activist Networks: for training, inducement, and tactical escalation.Political Class: for rhetoric that encouraged civilians to oppose federal sovereignty.Good Herself: for participation in an adversarial surveillance and obstruction operation against federal officers.

In plain terms, Good is not purely victim — she is partially agent. Not in the sense of federal employment, but in the sense of sovereignty contest: activist nullification vs. federal enforcement.

And the courts know how to handle sovereignty collisions. They call them torts with distributed fault.

A RUNNING JOKE. THE GOFUNDME IS TO SUPPORT GOOD'S WIFE AND ONE CHILD, THE OTHER CHILDREN NOW SSTAYING WITH RELATIVES MUST BE OUT OF LUCK ON THE $$ FRONT. (UNDER MATTIE WEISS ON GOFUNDME)

THE AFTERMATH: WHY THERE WILL BE NO SECOND FLOYD

The George Floyd case succeeded as a political morality play because every institution — city, state, federal, media, and corporate — aligned in the same direction.

The Good case aligns nowhere. The feds defend their agent. The city defends its sanctuary stance. Activists defend their sovereignty fantasy. And the family will be left to litigate in a fractured ecosystem where nobody wants to pay and nobody wants to confess fault.

This alone makes Good fundamentally unlike Floyd.

And if we are being brutally honest: nobody in power benefits from turning Good into a martyr. Not the left. Not the Trump administration. Not Minneapolis. Not DHS. Not DOJ. Not corporate America. Not activists. Not the media.

THE VERDICT OF REALITY

Renee Good was not a passive civilian crushed by an indifferent state. She was a combatant in a low-grade, extra-legal sovereignty struggle between sanctuary municipalities and federal immigration enforcement.

She entered that arena willingly — or at least knowingly. And in that arena, there are no saints, no clean victims, and no perfect villains.

If there is a civil suit, the headline question will not be:

“Who murdered Renee Good?”

It will be:

“Who shares fault for the escalation that killed her?”

And in that calculus, Good is no George Floyd — and Minneapolis is no longer the city that pretended it was.