Why ICE Fatally Shooting a White Woman Makes All the Difference In the World

Is Wednesday’s fatal shooting by ICE the moment when opposition to the agency’s aggressive round-’em-up and ship-’em-out tactics moves beyond the Black and brown people who have been on the receiving end of mistreatment?

A young white woman — a mother — was shot to death by an ICE agent in her car on a Minneapolis street. Everything — the raid to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, the Trump administration’s hint that Cuba could be next and even its stated intention to pursue a NATO-fracturing acquisition of Greenland — has been swept aside as focus turned to the death of Renee Nicole Good.

Her horrific death has been viewed now from countless angles and discussed by breathless TV talking heads endlessly. It doesn’t take heightened senses to feel the nation’s collective shock and outrage. It’s the same shock and outrage that takes hold whenever a young white woman is killed.

For the this-isn’t-about-race crowd, here are a couple names: Natalee Holloway and Gabby Petito. Americans sometimes die on vacation as Holloway did, but her disappearance in 2005 sparked ‘round-the-clock coverage and even a Netflix movie. Women are beaten or killed by their romantic partners far too often in this country, but the saturation coverage of Petito’s murder by her fiance in 2021 was another moment of collective shock and revulsion.

No one explicitly said “this isn’t supposed to happen to attractive white women,” but that’s because the coverage meant that notion was simply…understood.

Race was part of the reason ICE agents were poured into the Twin Cities in the first place. Some Somali immigrants in Minnesota were implicated in a far-reaching Medicaid fraud. That case presented the Trump administration with an irresistible two-fer: an opportunity to embarrass the state’s governor, Tim Walz, who had deigned to join Kamala Harris in running against Trump in 2024, and a “reason” to harass Black immigrants.

So, ICE agents were dispatched to Minnesota, despite pleas from Walz and Minneapolis’ mayor, Jacob Frey, that the deployment was both unnecessary and dangerous.

And that brings us to Monday, when an ICE agent shot Good to death in her own vehicle. Good is not the first person to die during an ICE deployment: New York Times reported that Good’s death is the ninth shooting by ICE just since September. Not one of those shootings has generated the attention and outrage that has accompanied Good’s killing. Several of the others shot by ICE were Hispanic.

Trump administration officials have said each of the shootings were justified. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem accused Good of domestic terrorism even as video of her trying to drive away from ICE agents hit the national airwaves.

But that off-the-cuff, instant rationale might not stick this time. Good was not undocumented. She was not an immigrant. She was not Black or brown. There will be those who ask themselves, perhaps for the first time, a simple question: If it could happen to her, could it happen to me?