As we are all now painfully and polaristically aware, Renee Nicole Good, a thirty-seven-year-old mother of three who had dropped her six-year-old off at school last Wednesday morning, was shot three times point-blank in a residential neighborhood by ICE officer Jonathan Ross. This occurred as she attempted to drive away from a second officer approaching her vehicle, reaching inside her open window and grabbing at her, without cause or legal authority.

As community members gathered around the blood-stained snow where Good’s car crashed into a pole and another vehicle, Trump had already claimed she “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE officer.” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem went further, saying she engaged in an act of “domestic terrorism” by “weaponizing” her vehicle. Later that day, Vice President JD Vance continued to blame and demonize Good in a deplorable attempt to garner sympathy for Ross, who had been dragged by a car and injured in a previous ICE incident. 

In the immediate aftermath of Good’s horrific murder in the streets of his city by Trump’s unnecessary deployment of ICE officers, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey spoke impassioned words of righteous anger: “To ICE: Get the f**k out of Minneapolis! We do not want you here.” 

Frey followed with this urgent plea: “People are being hurt. Families are being ripped apart. Long-term Minneapolis residents that have contributed so greatly to our city, to our culture, to our economy are being terrorized. And now, somebody is dead. That’s on you. And it’s also on you to leave. It’s on you to make sure that further damage, further loss of life and injury, is not done.”

Echoes of a Salvadoran Saint

While he may have done it with less pastoral elegance, the urgency of Frey’s words is reminiscent of Archbishop Oscar Romero’s plea to the Salvadoran military and police in his last sermon, delivered on March 23, 1980, the day before he was assassinated while celebrating Mass: 

“Brothers, you come from our own people. You are killing your own brother peasants when any human order to kill must be subordinate to the law of God, which says, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ No soldier is obliged to obey an order contrary to the law of God. No one has to obey an immoral law. It is high time you recovered your consciences and obeyed your consciences rather than a sinful order…In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose cries rise to heaven more loudly each day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you in the name of God: stop the repression.”

Some might take offense at Frey’s word choice. But like Romero, his direct message to ICE agents was a moral appeal. For whatever sense of humanity might still resonate within them, Mayor Frey was begging ICE agents to recover their consciences and stop the repression of his neighbors: “It’s on you.”

On Friday, Renee Good’s wife, who was outside the vehicle when Renee was shot, spoke to reporters. She shared that the two of them “stopped to support our neighbors…We had whistles. They [ICE agents] had guns.” She described Renee as, above all else, “kind.”

While it might be easy to attribute that description to the biased affection of a grieving spouse, a new video released the same day from Ross’s cell phone shows Renee calmly saying to him, “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you. I’m not mad at you.” After he circles her vehicle, shoots her three times in the face, and her car veers off toward the curb, he responds with, “F**king, b**ch.” 

It’s tough to imagine Frey’s moral appeal plumbing the depths necessary to affect the lost souls of officers like Ross and his partner, who reached through Good’s window. I don’t know if it will affect the other officers working with them who refused to allow a doctor on-site to perform immediate CPR.

Appeals to Justice

But I do know that, like Romero, those of us who profess to be followers of Christ in these times of rising authoritarianism, fear, and the threat of death for those who oppose it, must continue to make such appeals.

Even if, like Romero and Good, it costs us our lives. 

To be clear, I believe such appeals come in many forms. They take shape in the small group of neighbors whistling and confronting ICE at the time of Good’s murder. They can be seen in the thousands who gathered across the U.S. this weekend to protest these acts of violence carried out by our government at the hands of ICE agents.

The appeals are made by pastors who tirelessly preach prophetic sermons from their pulpits, despite pushback from some of their congregants. They look like neighbors doing exactly what Renee and Becca Good did last Wednesday: showing up and supporting their neighbors.

They take the form of city and state officials like Mayor Frey, who bluntly state what needs to be said, and then follow up with all in their power to prevent ICE from causing more harm or murdering their people with immunity.

All of it matters.

And all if it is necessary to defeat the forces of evil invading streets, workplaces and homes throughout our nation.

Words matter. How and when they are used matter. Some may be offended at Frey’s use of profanity in his moral appeal to ICE. I humbly submit that he spoke a word of righteous anger, holy resistance, and prophetic truth to power. 

When Jonathan Ross used the same profanity to insult a woman he had just murdered, his words reflected the racist, xenophobic, homophobic, ableist, misogynistic sickness that drives the Trump regime’s particular brand of authoritarianism.

Certainly, his words reflected his own personal biases. But they also carried the weight of this festering sickness that compels people like Ross to join the ranks of ICE in the first place. They reflect the reasons Ross and his crew were deployed to Good’s neighborhood at all.  

On Friday, Ross’s father also spoke to reporters. He described his son as “a committed, conservative Christian, a tremendous father, a tremendous husband.” Ross’ choice to join ICE and his actions on January 7 indicate that he is actually a White Christian Nationalist.

But for the sake of whatever sliver of genuine Christ-follower, or just decent human being, might be buried deep within the recesses of his and every other ICE agent’s soul, we must continue to make the moral appeals.

Even when the appeal is, “I implore you, I beg you, I order you in the name of God: ICE, get the f**k out of here!”