I.C.E. and Dump Murdered an Award-Winning Poet.

Old Dominion University English and creative writing graduate Renée Nicole Good had moved to Minneapolis from Colorado. Now Kash Patel's FBI is blocking the local investigation into her murder.

Renée Nicole Good. The 37-year-old mother and poet was murdered by I.C.E. yesterday, Photo courtesy of the Old Dominion University English Department

Her name was Renée — a mother, a daughter, a friend and a literary artist. While an undergraduate creative writing and English major at Old Dominion University, her poem “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs” “won the prestigious Academy of American Poets Prize.

She was also a white U.S. citizen who practiced Christianity and once served on a youth mission to Northern Ireland.

No one is safe. Not even a poet.

If white Americans are not awake yet to this brutal U.S. authoritarian state, this should be your alarm bell.

Yesterday I.C.E. agents murdered Renée Nicole Macklin Good in cold blood. Her children—the youngest aged six—now will grow up without her. The I.C.E. agent shot her through her car’s dashboard driver-side window. By the below photo’s appearance, the agent shot her directly in the face.

Photo by Tim Evans for REUTERS

The most heart-rending part of this story is that Good's second husband, the father to her six-year-old, had died in 2023. Her youngest child is now an orphan.

Keith Olbermann called Good's murder “our Kent State.” According to Olbermann’s January 7 episode of his Countdown podcast, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz “issued a . . . warning order to the Minnesota National Guard.” Walz, a former high school social studies teacher, knows and understands the U.S. and Minnesota Constitutions and what he can legally do to protect Minnesotans.

Unlike Walz, Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey offered a blue reaction to the public. He said the D.H.S.-I.C.E. propaganda about Good is “bullshit” and directly told I.C.E. in his press conference to “get the fuck out of Minneapolis. We do not want you here. Your stated reason for being in this city is to create some kind of safety, and you are doing exactly the opposite.”

Good was only a mile away from where the now imprisoned Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd.

The Guardian spoke with Good's ex-husband who wished to remain anonymous to protect his children. He said Good had just dropped off her youngest child at school when I.C.E . killed her.

Silverio Villegas González with his two sons. Photo courtesy of GoFundMe.

This is not the first time I.C.E. has murdered a parent and slandered the dead parent it killed. Last year, I.C.E. killed Silverio Villegas González in Franklin Park, Illinois after the single father, who like Good, had just dropped off his children at school.

Like Good's youngest child, I.C.E. made Villegas González’s children orphans. Just as they are doing with Good, I.C.E. and D.H.S. claimed Villegas González went after I.C.E., forcing its agent to shoot Villegas González in self-defense. Body-camera footage though told a different story.

Not surprisingly, that claim like the D.H.S.-I.C.E. claim about Good, turned out to be a lie. Body-camera footage and citizens recording I.C.E. on their phones provide video evidence to the contrary.

Now with Kash Patel’s F.B.I. preventing Minneapolis law enforcement to investigate Good's murder, we can expect more cover-ups, propaganda and lies from the Dump’s MAGA-Nazi Reich.

The people though will not stay silent. Unlike in decades and centuries past, we now have portable cameras to record and document atrocities and human rights abuses. Last night Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood that has been ground zero for I.C.E. in Chicago held a vigil for Good.

Expect more of the same unlawful actions and killings from ICE followed by more local and national protests and vigils.

On its Poets.org web page, the Academy of American Poets published Good’s award-winning 2020 poem. I’d like to end today’s post with her art, life and legacy. ICE, DHS and the Dump MAGA-Nazi Reich can never take that away from her or us. Renee Nicole Good’s voice lives forever.

“On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs”

by Renée Nicole Macklin Good

i want back my rocking chairs,

solipsist sunsets,

& coastal jungle sounds that are tercets from cicadas and pentameter from the hairy legs of cockroaches.

i’ve donated bibles to thrift stores

(mashed them in plastic trash bags with an acidic himalayan salt lamp—

the post-baptism bibles, the ones plucked from street corners from the meaty hands of zealots, the dumbed-down, easy-to-read, parasitic kind):

remember more the slick rubber smell of high gloss biology textbook pictures; they burned the hairs inside my nostrils,

& salt & ink that rubbed off on my palms.

under clippings of the moon at two forty five AM I study&repeat

ribosome

endoplasmic—

lactic acid

stamen

at the IHOP on the corner of powers and stetson hills—

i repeated & scribbled until it picked its way & stagnated somewhere i can’t point to anymore, maybe my gut—

maybe there in-between my pancreas & large intestine is the piddly brook of my soul.

it’s the ruler by which i reduce all things now; hard-edged & splintering from knowledge that used to sit, a cloth against fevered forehead.

can i let them both be? this fickle faith and this college science that heckles from the back of the classroom

now i can’t believe—

that the bible and qur’an and bhagavad gita are sliding long hairs behind my ear like mom used to & exhaling from their mouths “make room for wonder”—

all my understanding dribbles down the chin onto the chest & is summarized as:

life is merely

to ovum and sperm

and where those two meet

and how often and how well

and what dies there.