Renee Good isn’t first US citizen caught up in Trump immigration crackdown | Opinion
Editor’s note: See opinion columnist Toriano Porter’s take on the story here.
Until recently our Kansas City neighbor Renee Nicole Macklin Good is dead after being shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in her new home, Minneapolis. As protests spring up, her death is likely to become a flashpoint in reaction to Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.
I’ve watched the videos from multiple angles, as slowed down, frame by frame and narrated by expert video analysts. I don’t know whether the officer could have reasonably feared for his life. I wouldn’t want to be responsible for such split-second decisions.
I do know a few things.
Good was unwise to try to drive her SUV while in such proximity to armed federal officers. Police officers who even feel slightly threatened are prone to overreact with the tools they have at hand.
By wearing masks, ICE officers can expect people to react to them as a threat more than as an authority figure. People who are scared do unwise things. More so when thousands of such masked agents descend on a city in a show of force designed to intimidate.
Good was a U.S. citizen born in Colorado. ICE had no business bugging her. ICE’s use of overwhelming numbers and scattershot tactics make such U.S. citizen-ICE interactions inevitable.
While there is plenty of blame to go around for both Good and the officers in her death, she is not the first or the last U.S. citizen casualty of Trump’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants.
Just yesterday, ICE released a woman born in Maryland, a U.S. citizen, after holding her in a cell for 25 days. That is a shocking abuse that will leave the young woman traumatized.
The number of U.S. citizens killed or detained by ICE has to be closing in on 200. Back in October, ProPublica reported that 170 had been detained. While in ICE custody many faced treatment that ranged from shoddy to abusive. The number of voters who care about them is swelling as well.
Of course, Joe Biden shares blame for his failures in letting millions of undocumented immigrants flow into our country when he lost control of the border. But Biden is a quickly-shrinking presence in the public mind.
Trump looms large. He is the president. He is the one who ordered this surge of immigration enforcement into cities across the country. He is responsible for the fact that a U.S. citizen is dead at the hands of an ICE agent. He is responsible for the fact that U.S. citizens are being swept up and detained in his national dragnet.
I know that Americans voted for a tough immigration crackdown in the last election. Trump was perfectly clear in what he wanted to do.
While Trump didn’t tell us that he would run the crackdown in such a slipshod fashion, the president’s notable lack of management skill was on display throughout his first term in office. Any reasonable analyst would have predicted just this situation.
Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas has spoken out, saying that “we all will hope Congress actually works to prevent more tragedies like this one.” That’s naive. If Trump’s first term showed his depth of incompetence, it also showed congressional Republicans’ moral cowardice in holding Trump accountable for his mistakes.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, without significant homeland security experience, and Vice President JD Vance, without significant moral conscience, have already tarred Good as a “deranged leftist” responsible for her own death before an investigation has had time to start.
That story might suffice for now, but eventually even Trump supporters are going to notice that U.S. citizens keep getting caught up in this administration’s wheels of immigration “justice.” I have a hunch that they’re not going to like it.
David Mastio is national columnist for The Kansas City Star and McClatchy.
This story was originally published January 8, 2026 at 2:44 PM with the headline "Renee Good isn’t first US citizen caught up in Trump immigration crackdown | Opinion."
