Renee Nicole Good was known throughout her community as a kind and compassionate person. She was a U.S. citizen, a poet, a mother, a wife and a daughter. On January 7, she was murdered after being shot three times in the head by Jonathan Ross, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent in Minneapolis.
The swift and disappointing response from the Trump administration contained no sympathy for Good or her loved ones, and did not hold Ross even remotely accountable for his actions. In an interview with the New York Times, President Trump said that Good had “behaved horribly.” Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem called Good’s actions “an act of domestic terrorism” before insisting that the woman had attacked the officers, attempting to “run them over and ram them with her vehicle.”
As tends to be the case when tragedy strikes in this era of instant connection, video evidence has been circulating social media platforms and news outlets alike. An ability to see and comprehend media is the only pre-requisite to the understanding that the government is incorrect in this claim – the wheels of Good’s car were pointed away from the officers in an attempt to flee when the agent simply stepped to the side and open-fired through her windshield.
“A reminder,” said Santa Barbara High School (SBHS) freshman Emiliano Cruz. “Our government is okaying this, and funding it with a lot of money – millions of dollars.”
The killing of Renee Nicole Good came just days after nearly 2000 ICE agents were planned to be deployed to Minnesota, described by officials as one of the Department of Homeland Security’s largest deployments to date. Minnesota’s response came in the form of a lawsuit, claiming this mass deployment of ICE agents was a direct violation of state and constitutional rights, according to the New York Times.
Since Trump’s crackdown on immigration control, ICE has been repeatedly accused of operating outside of the law by utilizing excessive violent force, racially profiling civilians, and violating the 1st amendment right to assemble and document the government without fear of retaliation, all under the protection of the government’s claims that ICE’s priorities lie in keeping our communities safe. Current events show that this is not the case. According to The Guardian, 32 people died in ICE custody in 2025, tying with the previous record set in 2004. Once again, the contradiction between objective truths and the messages conveyed by our administration is cause for serious alarm, sparking the reasonable fear that we are tiptoeing dangerously close to the line between democracy and dictatorship.
ICE presence is extremely prevalent in our own town as well, affecting the friends and family of our peers and community members.
“I feel like [ICE] shouldn’t be tearing families apart just for the respect of their so-called awesome country,” said SBHS sophomore Diego Loeza.
In Santa Barbara and our neighboring counties alone, it has been reported by the 805 UndocuFund that more than 1200 people have been abducted by ICE in 2025. Civilians are being taken from sidewalks and grocery stores, gas stations and places of work. Even U.S. citizens have fallen victim to these kidnappings. According to Cesar Vasquez, a 17-year-old activist based in Santa Barbara, around 33% of abductions in Ventura, San Luis Obispo, and Santa Barbara counties have occurred in our neighboring town of Santa Maria, where nearly 150 people were snatched during the 4 days before 2026.
This new era of violent and destructive immigration control has become an issue of basic human rights and extremely questionable morals – it is no longer political, which should never be the case when concerning the actions, policies, and attitudes of the federal government. This brutality raises red flags for people across the country. Why do we have federal law enforcement abusing power that they shouldn’t even possess to begin with?