The fatal shooting of Renée Nicole Good by an ICE agent has made terrifying family memories feel too close to reality
Last fall, I visited a train platform in Zbaszyn, Poland, where my father saw his parents for the last time.
There, he and his brother boarded a
Kindertransport to seek refuge in England in 1940. They survived the Holocaust; my grandparents and my aunt were murdered by Nazis. The years before that separation were marked by profound betrayals by the German government, which lied to them, their neighbors and the rest of the world about the violence being enacted against them, and what their future held.
I recalled that visit early Thursday morning, as I stood in front of the Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis, less than a mile from
Bdote — the unceded land, sacred to Minnesota’s Dakota people, where the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers meet.
That land is where Minnesota’s earliest white settlers displaced, brutalized and killed the Dakota before building Fort Snelling, one of the first United States military outposts in the American West. Later, in 1862, the federal government set up a concentration camp in the same area. Some 1,600 Dakota were sent there, and hundreds died from disease and the harsh conditions.
Now, the thousands of ICE and Border Patrol agents sent by our federal government to terrorize Minneapolis gather and stage at the Whipple Building. And yesterday, an ICE agent named Jonathan Ross left that building, traveled a couple of miles west to South Minneapolis, and murdered Renée Nicole Good.
Good, 37, was a beloved community member. I didn’t know her, but I have friends who did. Their grief is devastating.
Renée was a treasured wife, they tell me. A mom to three children. A poet, an artist, and a community caretaker.
Her unjust death is horrific. And the resonances between federal government’s bad faith response to it, and the kinds of stories I grew up hearing about the authoritarian government under which my father was raised, are terrifying.
Within hours of Good’s killing, President Donald Trump was spreading false claims about how it happened, claiming that Good ran over the ICE agent who shot her. ...................
The fatal shooting of Renée Good in Minneapolis by an ICE agent has made the daughter of a Holocaust survivor see the U.S. differently.
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