Renee Good Was Not a Terrorist. She Was a Poet

In the days after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Macklin Nicole Good in Minneapolis, her final words clung to me.

“I’m not mad at you,” she said. Her eyes were earnest.

“Shame, shame,” a bystander who filmed the incident cried out. A man asked if he could check for a pulse or administer CPR. He was denied with flippant apathy by another agent. Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who has been identified as the one to fire his gun through Good’s windshield, said that he did so because he feared for his life. The Trump administration has tried to label Good a terrorist who “weaponized her vehicle” and attempted to commit “rampant assaults on law enforcement.”

“[F]or like a hair in the throat, so are they,” Proverbs 23:7 says. “‘Eat and drink!’ they say to you, but they do not mean it.” In other words, their biting speeches about protecting citizens from harm are impossible to swallow. Their attempt at slander is nauseating.

Good was not a terrorist. She was a poet.

She was also a woman who took seriously what the Bible says about caring for your neighbors. Good was also a wife and mother, and her car, now stained with blood, had stuffed animals piled up in the glove compartment when she was shot.

Good believed that good triumphs over evil. “Renee lived by an overarching belief: there is kindness in the world and we need to do everything we can to find it where it resides and nurture it where it needs to grow,” her wife Becca Good told Minnesota Public Radio. “Renee was a Christian who knew that all religions teach the same essential truth: we are here to love each other, care for each other, and keep each other safe and whole.”

2026-01-10T000000Z_2079060490_MT1ABCPR00024CBKW_RTRMADP_3_ABACA-PRESS.JPG

According to some who knew her, Good was not an activist. Instead, she was simply a new neighbor in Minneapolis, looking out for those around her after dropping her son off at school. Good, who state leaders say was at the scene to be a legal observer of ICE, brought her soul and a whistle. “On Wednesday, January 7th, we stopped to support our neighbors. We had whistles. They had guns,” Becca Good told MPR.

She was there as a beacon of support. She had a heart for showing up however she could, with whatever words she had.

In 2020, while pursuing an English degree at Old Dominion University, she earned a prize from the Academy of American Poets for her poem, “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs.” In the days following her death, her poem has been held up to the light. Her work is a reflection on science and religion, the makeup of life. In it, I’ve found lines that speak directly to the kind of human she was.

READ MORE: ‘Abolish ICE’ Is the Cry of the Prophets

What strikes me about her work is its generosity. She had a way of gathering up the most beautiful and seemingly mundane elements of life and then turning these elements into poetry. Thrift store Bibles, salt lamps, and cicadas, rocking chairs, and brief sunsets. Together, they are a catalog of humanity.

“i’ve donated bibles to thrift stores / (mashed them in plastic trash bags with an acidic himalayan salt lamp— / the post-baptism bibles, the ones plucked from street corners from the meaty hands of zealots, the dumbed-down, easy-to-read, parasitic kind):”

She then turns toward a memory of cramming for a biology exam at an IHOP restaurant.

“can i let them both be? this fickle faith and this college science that heckles from the back of the classroom”.

I think what it boils down to is a search for truth, what it means to have faith, and how faith differs from the solace of certainty.

Also central to this search for truth is the matter of life and death. The precipice of her poem reveals what Good makes of living and dying.

“all my understanding dribbles down the chin onto the chest & is summarized as: / life is merely / to ovum and sperm / and where those two meet / and how often and how well / and what dies there.”

Her poem is deeply physical and a bit visceral. Each line has its own sinews and organs. Her poem lays bare the truths about mortality.

At its center, her poem turns toward the “somewhere i can’t point to anymore, maybe my gut—” and wonders if “maybe there in-between my pancreas & large intestine is the piddly brook of my soul.”

I think what Good was getting at is that when we dissect, strip down, and gun down in the name of truth, we will fail to find it. The ones doing the dissecting reveal themselves to be brutal and malicious, harming anyone who stands in their path.

I think what Good was getting at is that when we dissect, strip down, and gun down in the name of truth, we will fail to find it.

ICE agents and the Trump administration have attempted to strip away Good’s humanity by portraying her actions as a false exterior. But the more people dig and the more her friends and family share with the public, the more evidence emerges of Good’s gentleness. For those who attempt to portray her as a “domestic terrorist,” they reveal their own haggard appearances.

Renee Macklin Nicole Good’s life, like her poem, was brief with verses and virtues. At the bottom of it all, we’ve discovered Good with her words and her humanity.