What Occurred in Minneapolis | The New Yorker

Renée Good’s biography defied simple political categorizations: she was raised Christian in one of the conservative cities within the nation and had began a brand new chapter of her life in considered one of its most liberal. She grew up in Colorado Springs, in a group that Becca Hainsworth, who was mates with Good as a teen-ager, recalled as “very military-heavy, very religious-heavy.” Each have been enthusiastic members of a Presbyterian Church in America youth group known as Village Seven; Good was an occasional soloist on the worship group. “She had one of the stunning singing voices I’ve ever heard in my life,” Hainsworth stated.

Good married her high-school boyfriend, Justin Sheppard, in 2009; he joined the Air Pressure, and so they had two children earlier than divorcing in 2015. In her thirties, whereas pregnant together with her third little one, Good studied English as an undergraduate at Previous Dominion College. Her second husband and the kid’s father, an Air Pressure veteran named Timmy Ray Macklin, Jr., died in 2023, just a few months after the 2 broke up.

Renée and Becca Good began their relationship that yr, and, in line with public data, Renée took Becca’s final identify within the fall. The couple moved to Minneapolis from Kansas Metropolis in 2025. “I assume they made the choice that if Trump received the election, they have been going to get out earlier than the inauguration,” a former neighbor instructed the Kansas Metropolis Star. They settled in a neighborhood with a supportive community of queer households. In one of many solely public statements she has made since Renée’s killing, Becca Good spoke of “a powerful shared sense right here in Minneapolis that we have been searching for one another.” She continued, “Right here, I had lastly discovered peace and protected harbor. That has been taken from me eternally.”

The agent who killed Good, Jonathan Ross, had labored for ICE since 2015, after earlier stints within the Nationwide Guard and Border Patrol. In June, 2025, Ross was dragged by a automobile pushed by a Cuban immigrant whom he was trying to arrest. (The motive force, Roberto Munoz-Guatemala, was later convicted of a felony cost for assaulting a federal officer.) By noon on January seventh, members of the Trump Administration have been arguing that Ross had acted in self-defense. Posting on Reality Social, the President stated that Good “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE officer”; Vice-President J. D. Vance known as her a “deranged leftist”; and Stephen Miller, the White Home deputy chief of workers for coverage and Trump’s homeland-security adviser, described Good’s interplay with Ross earlier than her demise as “home terrorism.” (D.H.S. has continued to assert that Good “weaponized her automobile” and tried to hit Ross.)

Cartoon by Roz Chast

“That is actually one of the docile, type, candy, empathetic, shy folks I do know,” Hainsworth stated. She instructed me that, after she’d came upon that Good nonetheless had a pulse when the paramedics arrived, she watched the video of the taking pictures “5 thousand occasions over.” “I do know Renée,” she stated. “I do know her facial expressions. I do know what her face seems like when she’s scared, and he or she’s scared.” I requested her why she had watched the video so many occasions, and he or she began to cry. “I simply didn’t need her to be alone, you already know?” she stated.

In Minneapolis—which had exploded into damaging mass protests following the homicide of George Floyd by a police officer named Derek Chauvin in 2020—officers scrambled to arrange for a doubtlessly comparable response to Good’s killing. Joe Thompson, then a senior official within the Minnesota U.S. Legal professional’s workplace and one of many metropolis’s few intermediaries between the native and federal governments, requested that immigration brokers pause enforcement actions whereas the taking pictures was investigated. For a number of hours, it appeared that they’d. Then, within the early afternoon, Jacob Frey, the mayor of the town, gave a press convention throughout which he instructed ICE brokers to “get the fuck out of Minneapolis.” Not lengthy afterward, two dozen Border Patrol brokers descended on Roosevelt Excessive College as class was getting out, prompting a confrontation through which the brokers deployed pepper spray and arrested 4 folks, together with a trainer. (A D.H.S. spokesperson stated that the brokers had been pursuing a U.S. citizen who was “actively making an attempt to impede operations.”) Minneapolis public faculties cancelled courses for the remainder of the week.