Renee Good: ICE, Misogyny, and State Violence

On January 7th, 2026, an ICE agent killed Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Good’s murder, and the subsequent violence and dangerous speech from ICE agents and other supremacist actors, represents an intersection of misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, and racism as these forces are deployed to create and uphold an authoritarian state. In our soon-to-be-released white paper, “Restructuring Thought Around Male Supremacism and Violence Prevention,” IRMS identifies the “justification of violence” as core to male supremacism:

“Male supremacism is linked to the justification of all kinds of violence, from domestic violence and rape, to hate crimes against women and LGBTQ+ communities, to mass violence - whether explicitly motivated by misogyny or associated with another ideology. A vital element of the study of violence is the basic fact that cisgender men are the primary perpetrators of all types of violence, including the vast majority of acts of mass violence. The majority of perpetrators of mass violence also have preexisting histories of harassment or violence toward women. Cisgender men also historically have been the decision-makers behind state-sanctioned violence and genocide, and continue to be behind the majority of those decisions, including the use of military power to undermine democracy and control other countries’ populations.”

In her article for The New Republic, IRMS Fellow Melissa Gira Grant writes that the shooting “felt both shockingly violent and disturbingly commonplace.” Grant writes, “The staggering truth is, this was not even the first time, since ICE’s siege began in 2025, that an immigration enforcement officer shot a woman in her car and called her a bitch,” referring to the October shooting of Marimar Martinez, who survived.

Nekima Levy Armstrong, civil rights attorney and founder of the Minnesota-based Racial Justice Network, pointed out to Democracy Now that “the way in which [the shooter] treated Renee Good, from my perspective, demonstrated hate towards women.”

Media literacy educator Jennifer L. Pozner elaborates on this, stating: “January 7, queer poet, wife, and mom Renee Nicole Good was executed point blank by a state-sanctioned paramilitary terrorist motivated by violent misogyny: he shot her for her ultimate sin of being unafraid and saying in a normal, de-escalating voice that she wasn't mad at him. After he murdered her, he called her a ‘fucking bitch.’ A crucial reminder that, as I've written about for many years, men in these enforcer roles very often have histories of allegations of or convictions for domestic violence, sexual assault, sexual harassment or other forms of recorded declarations of misogynistic hate and violent ideology - yet media insist on actively ignoring that story. Because systemic sexism is not seen as a problem or as a priority within media, nor even on the left in general.” 

Likewise, scholar Kate Manne, author of Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women, writes, “The particular rage women elicit when they undermine male authority figures, and the way they are then read as bitches who deserve to be shot, is an archetypical example of a distinctively gendered dynamic that we ignore to our peril. As we mourn Renee Nicole Good, and protest her murder, we must not forget that the fascism that killed her is misogynistic to its core.”

“I notice overall a lack of references to ‘hate speech’ or a ‘hate crime’ in searching media coverage on the shooting of Renee Nicole Good, which I think goes to a problem we identify in our forthcoming white paper, the ‘invisibility of the universal,’” says IRMS executive director Alex DiBranco, “in which gender-based violence and harassment is so ubiquitous it becomes unseen as an ideological and dehumanizing force. How many times have I been called a ‘fucking bitch’ because I kept walking past a man harassing me on the street from the time I was a teenager? Yet this is rarely acknowledged as hate speech, a slur, or dangerous speech; it’s normalized discourse.”

The forthcoming IRMS white paper also describes the “use of disinformation and other strategies [by supremacists] to mobilize their own constituents and provide cover for violent actions and attacks against marginalized communities’ rights,” as occurred rapidly with smears of Good following the shooting. Melissa Gira Grant’s article covers these “brazenly misogynistic attempts to defend ICE’s actions” and to blame Good, and her convictions, for her own death.

While they attempt to use Good’s memory as a “lesson” to threaten other anti-authoritarian resisters, we and so many more defenders of human rights and democracy remain committed.