Two Stories, One Body in the Snow

The killing of Rene Nicole Good, the federal lie that followed, and the violence used to enforce it

By nightfall in Minneapolis, the federal government already had its story straight. An ICE officer, we were told, fired in self-defense. A “violent rioter” tried to run agents down, and shots were fired. A tragic outcome, but justified. The familiar language rolled out with the comforting efficiency of a template: danger, fear, officers recovering, case closed.

But ICE in Minneapolis has a problem. The mayor saw the video. Jacob Frey didn’t hedge. He didn’t promise a review or ask for patience. He looked into a camera and said the government’s account was “bullshit.” Complete bullshit. He said the woman was not ramming anyone. He said the video contradicted the administration’s narrative. Suddenly, the tidy federal press release began to wobble.

The woman the government was already trying to erase had a name. Her name was Rene Nicole Good. She was a wife, mother, and a poet. A U.S. citizen, she was not the target of an immigration operation. She was sitting in her car on Minneapolis’s South Side on the first day of a federal enforcement surge she never asked for and never consented to.

What filled the gap between DHS spin and reality wasn’t speculation. It was footage and witnesses. It was the sound of people screaming in the cold while CPR was performed in the snow.

On-the-ground reporting from Status Coup News tells a radically different story, one messy with panic, grief, and rage. In that footage, you see federal agents firing into a car. You hear bystanders yelling “No car! No car!” as shots ring out. You watch Rene pulled from her vehicle and laid near a snowbank while medics work on her body. You hear neighbors note the ambulance leaving without sirens, the quiet, devastating detail first responders recognize immediately.

Then, instead of de-escalation, there is force. Journalists, clergy, and residents, unarmed, furious, documenting, are met by masked agents in gas masks. Tear gas is fired into crowds at close range. People trying to record what just happened are screamed at, shoved back, told to “get the fuck out.” A minister identifies himself and is treated like an enemy. Someone yells, “Why are you protecting the murderer?” and the answer comes in chemical form sprayed directly into faces.

This was not an immigration operation gone wrong. Rene Nicole Good was not a suspect, and she was not being arrested. According to the city police chief, her vehicle was blocking traffic when a federal officer approached on foot. She began to drive away. At least two shots were fired, and her car crashed. That is the full chain of events, no ramming, no riot, no justification proportionate to death.

Rene was killed on day one of a planned month-long surge that will bring roughly 2,000 federal immigration agents into the Twin Cities. A surge preceded by racist rhetoric about Somali communities, by welfare-fraud dog whistles aimed at Minnesota politics, by a president who has repeatedly framed Democratic cities as hostile territory to be subdued rather than governed.

Activists warned this would end in blood. Chicago already showed us how this works. Vehicles become “weapons” after the fact. “Self-defense” becomes a magic incantation. Video complicates the narrative and is quietly buried in “ongoing investigations.” Witnesses are treated as threats. Journalists are gassed for doing their jobs. And the dead are reduced to grammar: was hit, is deceased, incident occurred.

The difference between the two reports, the federal press release and the one from the street, is truth.

One version is written in advance, waiting only for a body to justify it. The other is chaotic, profane, grieving, furious, and impossible to control. One asks you to trust authority. The other shows you authority panicking when it can’t dominate the story.

Minneapolis did not erupt because people misunderstood what happened. It erupted because they understood it perfectly. Rene Nicole Good was killed by federal agents who should not have been there in the first place. When the community demands answers, the response is not transparency; it’s tear gas.

And then, almost on cue, came the scolding. Within hours of Rene Nicole Good’s death, before her family had answers and while her neighbors were still coughing through tear gas, Fox News rolled out its cleanup crew. Former acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf appeared on television to explain that the real problem here wasn’t a woman shot dead in her car by federal agents, it was the mayor who dared to call it what it was.

According to Wolf, Jacob Frey’s response wasn’t factual, or grounded, or informed by video evidence the mayor personally reviewed. No, it was “unhinged.” “Unintelligible.” The kind of rhetoric, Wolf suggested, that forces ICE to behave this way. The kind of rhetoric that makes killing someone in the snow an unfortunate but understandable outcome.

In this version of events, Rene Nicole Good disappears entirely and is replaced by a familiar villain: the sanctuary city. Minneapolis’s crime, Wolf explained, was not cooperating enough with federal immigration authorities. Because local officials dared to limit ICE’s reach, agents were now “having to comb the streets,” weapons drawn, approaching cars on foot, fingers on triggers. If that ended with a dead woman who wasn’t even the target of an operation, well, that’s just what happens when cities don’t fall in line.

It’s a remarkable inversion of responsibility. ICE shows up uninvited with 2,000 agents, shoots a U.S. citizen on day one, gases journalists and clergy, and the takeaway, delivered calmly from a television studio, is that the mayor talking too loudly about it is the real danger.

Fox even helpfully brought in a retired NYPD inspector to underline the point: if only local authorities had cooperated more fully, this never would have happened. Rene’s death, in this telling, is not the result of federal overreach or reckless enforcement tactics, it is the price of dissent.

What’s missing is any mention of the video Frey described. There is no mention of witnesses yelling “No car!” as shots were fired. Certainly, no mention of CPR in the snow or an ambulance leaving without sirens. No mention that Rene was a wife, a mother, a poet, a citizen, or that she wasn’t being arrested.

Instead, we get the performance: Frey is “playing the tough guy.” He’s “cursing.” He’s “stoking anger.” Never mind that his anger is directed at the killing of one of his constituents by a federal agency operating beyond his control. Never mind that he also called for calm. The offense, apparently, is that he refused to sanitize the truth.

First, the killing is framed as self-defense. When that narrative cracks under video and eyewitnesses, the focus shifts to tone policing. When that fails, blame is reassigned upward and outward, onto city policy, onto immigrants, onto anyone who doesn’t submit. By the time the cycle is complete, the dead are gone, the agents are justified, and the only remaining scandal is that someone said “get the fuck out” instead of whispering politely while a body cooled in the street.

Rene Nicole Good deserves so much more than this. Her family deserves more than to see her becoming a rhetorical prop in a cable news segment about “chaos.”

Her name breaks the spell, and it forces the question Fox News is desperate to avoid: Minneapolis wasn’t chaos until ICE arrived, if this is what immigration enforcement looks like when cities resist,if this is the cost of sanctuary, how many more bodies are they prepared to explain away?