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Opinion
The Killing of Renee Good Should Change How We Talk About ICE
Renee Good deserved to live. Her death should not be explained away or absorbed into process language. It requires accountability.
Jan 08, 2026
I want to be clear about what happened in Minneapolis.
This was not an “ICE shooting.”
This was not a “law enforcement incident.”
This was the killing of Renee Good.
Renee Good was killed under a Trump administration that expanded ICE’s authority and encouraged aggressive enforcement nationwide.
Words matter. When we soften them, we make it easier to look away.
Renee Good was killed during an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operation in Minneapolis, not far from where George Floyd was murdered on May 25, 2020. Many people in this city recognize what happens after state violence occurs. We have seen how language is used to slow things down and move attention elsewhere.
As I write this, ICE activity continues across Minneapolis. American citizens were picked up and detained at a local Target. Less than two miles from where Renee Good was killed, ICE agents detained two staff members at Roosevelt High School in South Minneapolis, where I went to school. Shortly after, the school went into lockdown. The library across the street closed. Schools across the city were closed for the rest of the week.
These actions affect far more than the individuals detained. They interrupt schools, workplaces, and daily life. They place entire neighborhoods in a state of fear.
Wednesday night, we went to the vigil for Renee Good. We stood on ice and snow where she had been killed only hours earlier. People came quietly. Many did not know what to say. The weight of what had happened was still there.
The response from authorities has raised serious concerns. Federal agencies have taken control of the investigation and have not allowed the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, the Minneapolis Police Department, or the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office to conduct their own independent investigations.
We continue to urge state and local authorities to investigate and to document what happened in pursuit of the (T)ruth. The (T)ruth does not lie. We know what we saw, just as we knew what we saw on May 25, 2020. Communities do not forget what they experience firsthand.
At CAIR-Minnesota, we work with families who adjust their lives to avoid harm. Parents change routines. Workers stay silent about exploitation. Survivors hesitate before calling for help because they are unsure who will respond. This is the reality many people live with when ICE operates without accountability.
Renee Good was killed under a Trump administration that expanded ICE’s authority and encouraged aggressive enforcement nationwide. Across the country, ICE has been doing the unimaginable, often without transparency and with serious consequences for communities.
Renee Good deserved to live. Her death should not be explained away or absorbed into process language. It requires accountability.
We have been here before.
We know what unchecked power looks like.
We will overcome.
We will see to it. As God is our witness.
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Sick of Illegal Wars and Staggering Healthcare Costs? Blame Congress
Members of Congress passed a $1 trillion war budget at the same time that congressional Republicans voted to refuse help for millions of Americans struggling to afford health insurance.
Jan 08, 2026
At a time when nearly half of Americans say they’re struggling to afford basic necessities, President Donald Trump has turned his attention to invading and ruling Venezuela.
One in two Americans are having trouble affording groceries, utilities, healthcare, housing, and transportation, according to a recent poll. Healthcare costs are rising—and in many cases doubling—for millions of Americans because Republicans in Congress refuse to help. And while grocery prices remain high, those same GOP lawmakers chose to cut food stamps for millions of struggling people.
Our government should be helping working people and families. Instead, the president chose to use our tax dollars to invade a foreign country. And while Trump said plenty about how the US will now rule over the people of Venezuela, he hasn’t explained why the same tax dollars that paid for this invasion can’t be used to make healthcare, food, or housing more affordable for people here.
The president added he’s “not afraid of boots on the ground” in Venezuela. But the last times the US attempted to take over other countries—in Iraq and Afghanistan—it cost trillions of dollars, thousands of American lives, and potentially millions of lives in the Middle East. It’s way too soon to make this mistake again—and Trump had previously promised he wouldn’t, calling those wars “foolish” and “stupid.”
But it’s not too late to improve this situation. Members of Congress can stop another unjustifiable war—and help Americans pay their bills instead.
To be sure, someone will benefit from this invasion—just not ordinary Americans. The president has offered oil companies taxpayer dollars to take Venezuela’s oil. They hardly need the help, though they did contribute handsomely to his campaign.
Despite previous claims by the administration, this move is far more about oil than drugs, since Venezuela isn’t a supplier of the fentanyl that still causes so many deaths—and even the cocaine trafficked through Venezuela tends to head to Europe, not the United States. Either way, the US shouldn’t be in the business of deposing every questionable leader in the world by military force.
Congress is to blame here, too. It’s their job to declare war, not the president’s—and they didn’t do their job to stop this. The president sent plenty of signs that this invasion might be coming. But in recent weeks, despite bipartisan efforts in both the House and Senate, narrow majorities in Congress refused to pass measures that would have halted it. Both measures failed by just a handful of votes.
And in December, members of both parties passed a $1 trillion war budget with zero safeguards to stop something like the Venezuela invasion—which, again, was easy to see coming. Members of Congress passed the $1 trillion war budget at the same time that congressional Republicans voted to refuse help for millions of Americans struggling to afford health insurance. So the invasion went forward even while millions of Americans did the math on just surviving until the next paycheck.
But it’s not too late to improve this situation. Members of Congress can stop another unjustifiable war—and help Americans pay their bills instead. Congress can refuse to allow the president to send troops back into Venezuela with a simple vote. And while they’re at it, Congress should extend some real help to Americans struggling to get by.
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Trump's Attack on Venezuela Would Be Wrong Even If It Were Legal
Making a a war “legal” doesn’t make it just or moral. Legal wars still kill and maim innocent people, still destroy communities, still create intense hatred that guarantees future wars.
Jan 08, 2026
Oh good. Now we have a war to focus on. Everyone’s tired of Epstein by now, and tired of the possibility that the bad guy may be, ho hum, our own national leader, aka, the commander in chief.
So the commander in chief has stepped in for the sake of the public good, bestowing on America a far more traditional enemy to hate and fear and let dominate the headlines: narco-terrorists.
I’m still trying to grasp the fact that President Donald Trump has actually invaded Venezuela. He’s no longer simply bombing boats in the ocean. The US military bombed Caracas on January 3 and broke into the home of the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife Cilia Flores. They were kidnapped and extradited to the United States, where they are now on trial for drug trafficking—as though that was the moral purpose of the invasion.
Obviously it wasn’t. As The Intercept notes:
This is a clear-cut act of military aggression, a brazen violation of international law, and a textbook example of unreconstructed 19th-century colonialism.
Donald Trump now says that the US will "run" Venezuela and "take" the country’s vast oil reserves.
I’m in sync with the enormous outrage over this invasion, both here in the US and around the world. Where I back away slightly, however, is when a critic points out that Trump’s military action was “illegal,” because he invaded Venezuela without congressional approval. When I read this kind of criticism, I feel an inner alarm go off. Making a a war “legal” doesn’t make it just or moral. Legal wars still kill and maim innocent people, still destroy communities, still create intense hatred that guarantees future wars. In other words, war itself is always the core of the wrong.
In no way am I saying I oppose self-defense, or even retaliation. I’m saying, instead, that I believe we need to rethink what self-defense actually means.
What, oh what, is power? We live in a world that is armed against itself with preposterous enormity—nuclear armed against itself, for God’s sake. Violent response is embedded in the way we think, regarded as the nature of protection. Where’s my gun? And it’s likely to be the first response to a perceived threat, especially at the national level. And anyone who dares to question this is easily belittled as crying: “Gosh, can’t we all just get along?”
I took aim, so to speak, at this cynicism in a poem I wrote some years ago, called “Can’t We All Just... Oh Forget It,” which begins:
The cynics
play with their sticks
and knives, mocking
the merciful, the naïve,
the cheek turners.
Can’t we all just . . .
oh, forget it.
But maybe the answer
is yes,
if we undo the language,
the easy smirkwords
that belittle
our evolving...
Belittle our evolving! Disagreement—conflict—is often incredibly complex. Simply “eliminating” it, shooting it out of existence, may be a tempting course of action, but it solves nothing. Instead, we have to understand it. And every time we understand the reasons for a conflict—and figure out how to rectify and transcend those reasons—we evolve.
Consider these words about the Venezuela invasion by Jordan Liz:
Ultimately, whether it’s removing Maduro or invading Cuba, Mexico, or Colombia, none of these actions will solve the drug crisis because they fail to tackle the root cause: public suffering. While there are many reasons people turn to drugs, the lack of adequate healthcare, poverty, homelessness, social stigmas about drug use, and criminalization are the leading factors. People turn to drugs when their governments and communities turn their back on them. Drug cartels, like any other capitalist enterprise, exploit these people’s hopes and desires for their own gain.
...If Trump really cared about the drug crisis, he would be working tirelessly to solve the affordability crisis—not denying its existence or spending billions on battleships.
War is not the answer, even if it’s legal.
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Trump Sees Women as the Enemy
The president’s deep and abiding contempt for females has taken a giant leap forward (or do I mean backward?) in policy terms in the Trump 2.0 years.
Jan 08, 2026
“Quiet, Piggy.” The president was intent on silencing Catherine Lucey. The Bloomberg reporter had provoked him with a question about the release of the Epstein files. His insult caught the public’s attention. But Donald Trump’s tongue-lashing lexicon against women has a long history. Other female journalists have been dubbed “obnoxious,” “terrible,” “third-rate,” and “ugly.” Vice President Kamala Harris, opposing him in the 2024 presidential election, was labeled “retarded” and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “crazy as a bedbug.” The list goes on (and on and on). And who knows what was redacted from the Epstein files along those very lines?
Mind you, those Trumpian insults hurled at women (and regularly offered about them) are anything but performative throwaways. They reveal Donald Trump’s deep and abiding contempt for females, an attitude that has taken a giant leap forward (or do I mean backward?) in policy terms in the Trump 2.0 years. Well beyond a simple cascade of insulting words, the commander-in-chief and his allies have deemed women the enemy. And not surprisingly, under the circumstances, they are now distinctly under attack.
The Purges
From day one of his second term as president, Trump has made his intention to rid the government of women crystal clear—with some window-dressing exceptions. Without mentioning women per se, he nonetheless targeted them on his very first day in office. Executive Order 14151 vowed to end the “forced illegal and immoral discrimination programs” of the Biden era. (On his first day in office, Biden had issued an executive order opening the door for “underserved communities” via a “whole of government equity agenda.”). Trump’s EO, however, decreed an end to DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) and to any appointments that were meant to reflect diversity hiring, claiming that such policies “demonstrated immense public waste and shameful discrimination.”
Immediately, women began to be flung from their government perches. Those holding high positions were the first to go. US Archivist Colleen Shogan was removed, as were the three top women at the National Labor Relations Board. Head of the Federal Trade Commission Rebecca Slaughter was promptly fired, a case still under review by the Supreme Court (though it’s hard to expect good news from SCOTUS these days). The Pentagon cleaned house early and fast, removing women from positions of leadership, including the head of the US Naval Academy in Annapolis; the commandant of the Coast Guard, the chief of naval operations, and the only woman flag officer on NATO’s Military Committee. All had been the first females to occupy those posts. Also sent packing was the woman serving as the senior military assistant to the secretary of defense.
Better, it seems, to overtax a man than allow a woman to lead anything whatsoever.
Black women in particular found themselves under attack. Early removals of Black women included Carla Hayden, the librarian of Congress; Gwynne Wilcox, the first Black woman to serve on the National Labor Relations Board; and Lisa Cook, the first Black woman to serve on the board of governors of the Federal Reserve Board. Meanwhile, Peggy Carr, the first Black person and the first woman to be commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, was cruelly and unexpectedly escorted out of the building in front of her staff.
The circumstances surrounding the ouster of the first female to lead the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), acting administrator Janet Petro, highlighted the conviction that emptying offices of women occupants took precedence over quality, efficiency, or overall professionalism. Petro was replaced by an interim appointee, Sean Duffy, who continued to serve in the demanding job of secretary of transportation even as he assumed the leadership of NASA. Better, it seems, to overtax a man than allow a woman to lead anything whatsoever.
The Pentagon
The Pentagon took an early lead in the crusade against women. Even before he was confirmed as secretary of defense (now the Department of War), nominee Pete Hegseth signaled the changes to come under his leadership. Former President Barack Obama’s Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta had opened up combat roles to women in 2015. Hegseth promised to change that. “I’m straight up just saying that we should not have women in combat roles,” he told podcaster Shawn Ryan. “It hasn’t made us more effective, hasn’t made us more lethal, has made fighting more complicated.” The Hill summed it up well in late July this way: “All women have now been purged from the military’s top jobs, with no female four-star officers on active duty and none in pending appointments for four- or three-star roles.”
Hegseth’s anti-female campaign focused on substance as well as numbers. Women, he suggested, just didn’t have the skills to conduct business with sufficient lethality. According to him, the Pentagon’s Women, Peace, and Security program, signed into law during Trump’s first term in office, only served to weaken the Pentagon. Women would merely distract the department from its “core task—FIGHTING,” he tweeted (as Politico reported). Hegseth summarily ended the program. As a United Nations spokeswoman suggested, the removal of women’s voices from the realm of peacekeeping would impede the protection of women and children worldwide.
Healthcare
Back at home, removing protections for females has amounted to a full-scale attack, consistent with warfare, on their bodies. A restructuring of the Department of Health and Human Services has crippled reproductive health programs. In April, HuffPost reported that “the majority” of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) Division of Reproductive Health was laid off and two of the three main programs of the Maternal and Infant Health division were eradicated. While the Trump administration has consistently tried to hide data about such purges and policies, journalists have kept at it, unearthing some of the facts. Citing “piecemeal and crowd-sourced information,” the Guardian, for example, was able to report that “the entire staff of a gold-standard maternal mortality survey… was also put on leave.”
As it happens, the Republican Congress has joined the assault. Trump’s much-ballyhooed Big Beautiful Bill (BBB), which passed in July, included reductions in funding to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, programs that are projected to hit adult women the hardest. Of note, the BBB included a prohibition on federal Medicaid payments to Planned Parenthood. Even before the passage of the bill, the administration had withheld Title X funding from 20 states and 144 Planned Parenthood clinics that, since 1970, had received grants for family planning and reproductive health services. Expectations are that more drastic cuts will follow. In May, the Commonwealth Fund summarized the devastating consequences of the president’s first 100 days in office for women’s reproductive health, detailing a drastic decline in access to medical abortions. And if such reproductive issues weren’t enough to alarm us, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has removed its recommendation for Covid-19 vaccines for pregnant women and children.
The Record
To add insult to injury, the administration has made it clear that it’s not just women’s positions in government or their healthcare that are subject to eradication. The historical record of women and their accomplishments is also under attack. Across government databases, museum displays, and archival holdings, information about women has been systematically deleted. As I wrote in an earlier TomDispatch post, the erasure of information, historical and statistical, has been a signature weapon of this administration. The websites of the Army and Navy have dutifully removed information about the history of women in the military, while Arlington Cemetery took down its webpage on women buried there, including First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy. And in a similar fashion, NASA opted to remove any mention of women as part of the DEI purge of its website.
The Deception
No essay on the plight of women in the era of Trump 2.0 would be sufficient without commentary on the seeming contradiction between the multipronged attack on women and the presence of women in a striking number of cabinet roles. Seven of Trump’s cabinet appointments are held by women, and his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, is the first woman to hold that cabinet-level post.
And yet, that doesn’t seem to have changed the narrative of Trump 2.0 or the impulse to assault women’s rights nationwide. If anything, it has at times enabled it, only further amplifying the administration’s anti-female screed. At the Department of Justice, for instance, Attorney General Pam Bondi, who a decade earlier had voted against the Violence Against Women Act, has reportedly intervened in a number of asylum cases, banning entry to the US for women fleeing domestic violence. At the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), under the directorship of Secretary Kristi Noem, the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties has been shuttered, while “at least 25 sexual abuse complaints” have been dismissed. And when it comes to immigration detention, reports of the sexual and physical abuse of women abound. In the words of Human Rights Watch researcher Clara Long, the conditions are “jaw-dropping.” As Long puts it, “Grievous abuses—assaults, sexual abuse, and discriminatory treatment by US agents—are an open secret within DHS.”
For those who continue to embrace the exclusion of women from positions of power and consequence, what better proof do they need than Lindsey Halligan—or, for that matter, other women who are being patched into roles they can’t possibly fulfill at a high standard?
In short, the performances of the women in this administration have undermined the cause of women even more. Chosen for their loyalty to Trump rather than their expertise, their incompetence has been laid out for all to see, scoring high marks when it comes to furthering the perception of women as insufficient to the important tasks at hand. Exhibit One is certainly Lindsey Halligan. A former insurance lawyer who had previously been on Trump’s legal team, she was appointed by Attorney General Pam Bondi to serve as the US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. Halligan subsequently headed up the prosecutions of former FBI Director James Comey and Attorney General of New York Letitia James, who had been at the helm of lawsuits against the president before he entered office a second time. Both of Halligan’s cases were thrown out after a federal judge ruled her appointment to be an unlawful use of the attorney general’s appointment power. The Department of Justice is appealing both cases.
But even before that judge had a chance to issue his ruling, Halligan had harmed the cause of women. Having never led a prosecution before, she faced the grand jury seeking an indictment of Comey without the presence of her own team at the Justice Department to back her up. (After all, her predecessor, Trump-nominated and Trump-fired Erik Siebert had resigned in part because he had determined that there were insufficient grounds for bringing just such a prosecution.) Due to her lack of expertise, she displayed a profound lack of knowledge about trial procedure and courtroom norms. As former prosecutor Elie Honig reported in New York Magazine’s Intelligencer, “the bumbling novice prosecutor” botched many things, including making incorrect statements to the jury and failing to present the final version of the indictment to jury members for their sign-off. Though the case was ultimately thrown out, criticism of Halligan has continued relentlessly.
For those who continue to embrace the exclusion of women from positions of power and consequence, what better proof do they need than Lindsey Halligan—or, for that matter, other women who are being patched into roles they can’t possibly fulfill at a high standard? As French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir long ago commented when it came to women seeking to advance in the world, “Her wings are cut and then she is blamed for not knowing how to fly.”
In sum, women are in trouble in Donald Trump’s second presidency. And yet, there are signs of hope, promising both sustenance and strength for women in the days to come. While the Center for American Women and Politics reports that the number of women in elected office is down overall for 2025, 26 of the 100 senators are now women, the highest percentage ever. (And who knows what the congressional elections in 2026 are likely to bring, given the strong showing of Democrats in elections in 2025?)
Moreover, outside of government, women are far from absent. They currently sit atop the country’s largest philanthropic foundations—Heather Gerken at the Ford Foundation, Amber Miller at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and Louise Richardson at the Carnegie Corporation of New York. They are presidents of some of the country’s most prestigious universities, including Brown, Columbia, New York University, and Yale. At Microsoft, Google, Anthropic, and other tech companies, women are distinctly on the rise, offering expertise, guidance, and leadership, while undoubtedly preparing for a future in which their expertise will be sought.
About-Face?
In recent weeks, inside the Trump administration, there have been signs, however minor, that some of the president’s most devout female allies are starting to dissent. Congressional Rep. and Trump loyalist Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) has taken the lead in that female about-face, announcing that she is going to leave Congress before her term is up and going so far as to suggest that she is more in touch with the president’s MAGA base than he is. Like Greene, longtime Trump ally Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) has chosen to “call it quits” and leave public office behind. Trump had failed to support her bid to run for governor of New York, just as he had pulled her nomination to the UN earlier in the year. And then there’s Chief of Staff Susie Wiles who, however much she subsequently reneged on remarks she made over the course of 11 interviews with Vanity Fair’s Chris Whipple, clearly indicated that she had moved away from the president’s stances on Venezuela, the January 6th pardons, and the Epstein files.
Maybe, just maybe, the undermining of decades of progress stands a chance of reversal.
No wonder he’s so afraid of women!
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