While Renee Nichole Good appears to be the first person killed by immigration officers while specifically monitoring or protesting their presence, her death was the ninth reported instance of immigration agents opening fire on civilians in their vehicles since September 2025, with four other people in cars having been killed during federal deportation operations in that short timeframe.
2025 was the deadliest year for ICE detainees since 2004 with at least 32 fatalities reported, nearly tripling the number from the previous year. A June 2024 report by the ACLU, Physicians for Human Rights and Amercian Oversight found that 95% of the detainee fatalities between 2017 and 2021 were preventable. They resulted primarily from delayed or substandard medical attention; staff failures in performing necessary checks, particularly for individuals experiencing mental health crises; overcrowding and unsanitary conditions, and a lack of transparency resulting from the shutting down of key internal oversight offices, which, advocates argue, conceals the full gravity of the situation and impedes accountability.
There seems to be little record of people who have been deported to countries (often prisons) that are different from their nationality.
“For Renee Nicole Good Killed by I.C.E. on January 7, 2026.”
by Amanda Gorman
They say she is no more,
That there her absence roars,
Blood-blown like a rose.
Iced wheels flinched & froze.
Now, bare riot of candles,
Dark fury of flowers,
Pure howling of hymns.
If for us she arose,
Somewhere, in the pitched deep of our grief,
Crouches our power,
The howl where we begin,
Straining upon the edge of the crooked crater
Of the worst of what we’ve been.
Change is only possible,
& all the greater,
When the labour
& bitter anger of our neighbors
Is moved by the love
& better angels of our nature.
What they call death & void,
We know is breath & voice;
In the end, gorgeously,
Endures our enormity.
You could believe departed to be the dawn
When the blank night has so long stood.
But our bright-fled angels will never be fully gone,
When they forever are so fiercely Good.
National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman is perhaps best known for writing and delivering her poem “The Hill We Climb” at President Joe Biden’s inauguration. Her words come to us again, with a similar theme — about our stepping constructively into history to repair it…
In Faith and Courage,
Michael
