Renée Good’s Mom Wanted Trump to Protect Her Family. Her Daughter Was Killed by ICE.

The killing of Renée Good, who was gunned down on a Minneapolis street in January by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer, was a tragedy.

The fact that Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who killed her, has not faced any accountability for his actions—firing his gun wildly through the window of Good’s vehicle as she tried to flee a confrontation that ICE officers had initiated and escalated—remains shameful.

This week, that story gained a new, heartbreaking angle when Good’s mother, Donna Ganger, testified before a Senate committee that is investigating fatal shootings by ICE agents.

“My daughter should still be alive,” Ganger said, holding back tears. More than nine months after Good was killed, Ganger said the family is still struggling with “the total insanity of it all.”

Then, Ganger offered a detail that manages to both reinforce and complicate the established narratives around Good’s killing. She admitted that she is a registered Republican who voted for President Donald Trump:

“I voted for President Trump, under the impression that these agents were here to protect the citizens of the United States—innocents like our family and the others here—against terrorists, certainly not to accuse those here of being terrorists and take precious lives.”

That last bit is a reference to the smear campaign that federal officials began in the hours after Good was killed. Then–Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said Good had engaged in “an act of domestic terrorism” prior to being shot and killed. Days later, despite video evidence that undermined the claim that Good had tried to run over ICE officers, Vice President J.D. Vance doubled down on the “terrorism” claim.

As moving as Ganger’s testimony this week was, I’ve spent the past few days thinking more about what was left unspoken. Her situation is a compelling, brutal microcosm of what many Americans are likely feeling after seeing the chaos and the violence of Trump’s immigration enforcement tactics. Just last week, an ICE agent shot a Venezuelan man in Texas—at least the 21st shooting by a federal immigration agent during Trump’s second term.

Each of those incidents leaves a mark on a family and a community, but Ganger’s situation is more raw, more vicious—as if the “I never thought leopards would eat MY face” meme had sprung to life and sat down in front of a Senate committee. Surely, Ganger never thought the leopards would kill her daughter.

Mocking Ganger is the wrong response, however. It misses the bigger point. Her vote didn’t directly cause her daughter to be killed—indeed, her vote for Trump had no bearing on the outcome of the 2024 election at all, since Kamala Harris won Minnesota’s electoral votes.

The person responsible for Good’s death is Ross, who recklessly pulled the trigger. The culpability also lies with Noem and others in the Trump administration who favored an aggressive, confrontational approach to immigration enforcement and who sent hastily recruited, poorly trained officers into cities where clashes with protesters were highly likely and violence was all but inevitable.

I hope Ganger doesn’t blame herself for what happened to her daughter. She’s right when she says that Good should be alive today—and that fact doesn’t change because of how Ganger voted.

Even so, the rest of America can take some things away from this awfulness. First, those in power should heed her call for accountability when federal agents commit crimes. The federal Department of Justice has blocked state investigations into Ross and other ICE agents who have harmed people. That’s unacceptable. More broadly, laws should be changed to allow victims of all police shootings to obtain justice.

For everyone else, some reflection is necessary. The awful circumstances that Ganger’s family has lived through are a reminder that voting for the state to do violence to others is always risky. When the leopard is out of the cage, you never know whose face it will eat—all you can do is hope the targets aren’t you or your loved ones.

Politics often seems like a reality show, something that happens somewhere else and to other people. Ganger’s testimony this week was cutting evidence of how authoritarianism can get deeply personal in ways no one wants to experience.