Renee Good, ICE and the politics of selective outrage
Renee Good has become a Rorschach test.
Like the rest of the country, I have strong opinions about what happened last week. And like everyone else, I am finding that expressing those opinions does very little beyond confirming existing biases or costing people readers and friends.
We tend to see what we want to see. All of us. We are deeply vulnerable to the temptation to believe we alone have a monopoly on objectivity and clear-headedness. And we are almost always wrong about that.
For many of my feminist friends, Renee Good is a martyr. A victim of femicide. A woman trying to make a difference in her community, who paid the ultimate price when a hot-headed man with a gun decided to punish her for defying him.
For many of my MAGA friends, she is a cautionary tale about the woke mind virus. A woman so poisoned by hysterical ideology that she felt justified in obstructing law enforcement and endangering the lives of the men tasked with removing criminal sex offenders from her community. “She tried to kill a law enforcement officer,” they say. “It is sad, but she brought it on herself.”
I fall somewhere center right on this, not that it ultimately matters. For what it is worth, I do not think Renee Good woke up that day intending to kill a law enforcement officer. I think she made bad choices, tried to flee, and made a catastrophic decision that cost her her life. When someone is in the middle of committing multiple felonies, the likelihood of something going terribly wrong increases dramatically. Wisdom encourages de-escalation and risk mitigation, not escalation.
Reality does not unfold in freeze-frame or from the calm vantage point of hindsight. In the real world, if a 4,000-pound piece of metal is being driven toward your body, you have a split second to decide how to respond. Self-defense is not murder.
But armchair litigating this single tragic incident is not especially useful. Mostly, it just hardens existing camps. And it misses the larger point.
There is a strong correlation between where people land on the Renee Good case and what they already believe about who should not have been on that street in the first place. If you believe ICE had no business operating there at all, you are likely to side with Renee. If you believe Renee had no business obstructing a law enforcement operation, you are likely to side with the shooter. That divide is doing most of the work here.
Which brings us to the real issue: the way we talk about immigration, enforcement, and ICE itself.
Republicans, frankly, do not help themselves with the way they often talk about immigrants. Sloppy rhetoric that treats immigrants as a monolith or treats migrants themselves as the problem makes serious policy discussion nearly impossible. It also allows us to scapegoat isolated groups while avoiding harder conversations about failures within our own systems.
Border chaos is real. Drug trafficking is real. Human smuggling is real. But it is foolish to pretend these problems would magically disappear the moment Trump’s long-promised wall finally materialized. Cartels do not vanish because of concrete. They adapt, reroute, and exploit weaknesses elsewhere, including within our own institutions.
At the same time, the histrionics coming from the other direction are not helping anything either. If this were really about policy, the public reaction to enforcement would look very different from what it does.
When Barack Obama deported over five million people (more than any president in modern history), he earned the nickname “Deporter in Chief” from activists on his own side. The numbers were staggering. The policies were firm and unapologetic. And yet there were no mass protests clogging the streets. No viral Christmas threads about Jesus being an illegal immigrant. No insistence that enforcing borders was inherently white supremacist or fascist. The left mostly shrugged.
Then Trump ran on strong borders and enforcing existing law, prioritizing criminal removals. Suddenly, it was a moral apocalypse. Families torn apart. Children in cages (cages that, ironically, were built under Obama.) It becomes very difficult to believe the outrage is really about the policy. Very often, it appears to be about the messenger.
If robust enforcement was tolerable when the man in charge was calm, polished, and had a (D) next to his name, why does the same principle become evil now? Has the border crisis vanished? Have the laws stopped mattering? Or have we trained ourselves to only see cruelty when it is wearing a MAGA hat?
Some of this is clearly about messaging and trust. Democrats trusted Obama’s motives. He was articulate and careful in his communication. They did not think he was racist, so they assumed his actions were motivated by reason. Trump is loud and unpolished, and widely perceived as malicious, so his motives are distrusted by default. His trademark impulsivity and brashness do not foster trust.
But that explanation only goes so far.
You will often hear people say that, at least under Obama, ICE was not randomly picking people up off the street or dodging due process. That distinction does not hold up. Under Obama, ICE conducted workplace raids, home arrests, traffic stop detentions, and collateral arrests of non-targets. Administrative warrants were used extensively across administrations, despite courts' long holding that they are insufficient for home entry without consent. Claims that racial profiling or constitutionally dubious practices are “new” phenomena simply are not borne out by the record.
None of this is to say that criticism is illegitimate. Conversations about due process, constitutionality, training, oversight, and consistency are important. We should be having them. But we are not going to have them productively in an environment saturated with moral panic.
I have people on my timeline comparing ICE to ISIS. That is not just wrong. It is dangerous. ICE officers are not abstract villains. They are human beings tasked, often imperfectly, with removing convicted rapists, child predators, murderers, and gang members from American communities. Demonizing them as Nazis or terrorists does not protect anyone. It emboldens violence, puts families at risk, and turns public servants into acceptable targets.
Inflammatory comparisons to Nazis, Gestapo, or terrorists have fueled real consequences. DHS reports show assaults on ICE officers skyrocketing (over 1,000–1,300% increases in some periods), death threats exploding (up to 8,000% in reported spikes), vehicular attacks, doxxing, and harassment against agents and their families.
The Renee Good case did not happen in a vacuum. It is being filtered through a culture already warped by selective outrage and ideological escalation. We will not get clarity by pretending one side is uniquely virtuous and the other uniquely evil.
We can name real problems without lying about their causes. We can criticize policy without demonizing people. And if we’re actually serious about saving lives (instead of just scoring points), it’s past time to grow up. Quit the moral spectacles, quit turning public servants into targets with Nazi/ISIS smears, and start debating immigration and enforcement like grown adults who value truth over tribal rage.
Originally published at Honest to Goodness.
Kaeley Harms, co-founder of Hands Across the Aisle Women’s Coalition, is a Christian feminist who rarely fits into boxes. She is a truth teller, envelope pusher, Jesus follower, abuse survivor, writer, wife, mom, and lover of words aptly spoken.
