Cold As ICE

Reflections on the Death of Renee Good

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A Special Edition of Becoming Mainline

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I’ve been trying to write about what happened to Renee Good for a week now. I’ve started this essay half a dozen times and deleted it just as many. The truth is, I needed time to process. I’m the kind of person who wants to take it all in, get the facts straight, sit with something for a while before I say anything. And this whole thing has really bothered me. It’s been sitting heavy in my chest since January 7th.

And for some reason, that Foreigner song keeps running through my head on repeat. Cold as ice. Willing to sacrifice. Maybe it’s because the coldness is what strikes me most about all of this. The temperature of it. The way human beings are being treated like inventory rather than people made in the image of God.

She Stopped to Help

Renee Good was a poet. A mother of three. A Christian. The kind of person her neighbors described as pure love and pure sunshine.¹ On January 7th, she had just dropped her six year old son off at school when she saw ICE agents in her South Minneapolis neighborhood. She and her wife stopped to support their neighbors.

Her wife said it plainly in a statement released days later: “We had whistles. They had guns.”²

Cell phone video footage shows what happened next. Federal agents approached Renee’s SUV. They tried her door handle. She started to drive away, turning her steering wheel to the right, away from where the agents stood.³ An ICE officer named Jonathan Ross fired three shots through her windshield. Renee died there on Portland Avenue, just a few blocks from her home.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey watched the video and rejected the Department of Homeland Security’s claims that Renee tried to run over the agent. “Having seen the video myself, I want to tell everybody directly: that is bullshit,” Frey said at a news conference. “This was an agent recklessly using power that resulted in somebody dying.”⁴ Multiple analyses of the video footage confirm that Renee was turning her steering wheel to the right, away from the agent, just over one second before the first shot was fired.⁵

What Happened to Due Process?

Before we talk about anything else, we need to talk about what’s being lost here. And it’s more than we might realize at first.

Due process is a constitutional protection (guaranteed by the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments) that applies to everyone on American soil, not just citizens. It’s the basic principle that says before the government can deprive you of life, liberty, or property, you have a right to know what you’re accused of, to defend yourself, and to have your case heard fairly. Here’s what due process looks like in practice:

• If law enforcement wants to arrest someone, they need probable cause.

• If they want to search your home, they need a warrant signed by a judge.

• If you’re accused of a crime, you have the right to an attorney and a fair hearing.

These are the guardrails that keep government power from becoming tyranny.

But what’s happening is immigration enforcement continues to operate outside of those guardrails. People are being detained without warrants. Families are being separated without hearings. Individuals are being held without access to attorneys or information about when or if they’ll see their loved ones again. The normal checks and balances that protect human rights are being ignored completely.

It’s crazy.

When Renee was killed, the FBI initially agreed to a joint investigation with Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Then the U.S. Attorney’s Office reversed course. The FBI informed the BCA that “the investigation would now be led solely by the FBI, and the BCA would no longer have access to the case materials, scene evidence or investigative interviews necessary to complete a thorough and independent investigation.”⁶ Think about that for a second. The people who are supposed to provide accountability for what happened are being blocked from investigating. There’s no independent oversight. No transparency. No mechanism for justice.

This is so much bigger than whether someone crossed a border legally or illegally. This is about whether we believe human beings created in the image of God deserve basic protections under the law.

The Image of God in Every Person

Genesis tells us that every human being is made in the image of God. Not just Americans. Not just citizens. Not just people who followed the right procedures or filled out the right forms.

Every. Person.

That image doesn’t get voided by immigration status. It doesn’t disappear when someone crosses a border without documentation. It remains sacred regardless of where someone was born or how they got here. When we watch federal agents operate without warrants, without due process, without basic accountability for their actions, we’re watching the image of God being treated as expendable. We’re watching human beings reduced to problems to be solved, threats to be eliminated, numbers to be processed. We’re watching people made by God for relationship and dignity being hunted in neighborhoods and killed in the streets.

Renee Good bore the image of God. So did the neighbors she stopped to support. So do the families hiding in their homes right now, afraid to send their children to school or go to the grocery store because they might be grabbed and placed into a detention system with no clear path to justice. So do the people being detained without attorneys, without hearings, without anyone even telling their families where they are.

The question Christians need to wrestle with isn’t about border security or immigration policy.

The question is whether we believe what we say we believe about the image of God. If we do, then we have to care about what’s happening to people created in that image, regardless of their paperwork.

Welcome the Stranger

And not to mention, Scripture doesn’t leave much room for ambiguity on this one. The Hebrew Bible commands care for the stranger over and over again. “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you. You shall love the stranger as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” That’s Leviticus 19. It’s not a suggestion. It’s a command, grounded in Israel’s own story of displacement and survival.

Jesus identifies himself with the stranger.

“I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” Not “I was a stranger and you verified my documentation.” Not “I was a stranger and you made sure I’d followed proper legal channels.” Just welcomed. When the disciples ask who counts as a stranger worth welcoming, Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan. The answer is everyone. Especially the ones we’d rather walk past.

The early church built its entire identity around breaking down the walls between people. Paul writes in Galatians that in Christ there is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free. The barriers that divided people, the categories that determined who was in and who was out, the legal and social structures that kept certain humans on the margins were all dismantled in the community Jesus created. Not because borders and boundaries don’t matter, but because the image of God in every person matters more.

Renee Good understood this. She was raising her son to believe that no matter where you come from or what you look like, everyone deserves compassion and kindness. She lived that belief. She stopped when she saw federal agents in her neighborhood because she believed love required her to show up.

That’s what welcoming the stranger looks like in practice. Sometimes it means putting yourself between power and vulnerability.

The Temperature of Our Faith

What’s happening in our cities right now is testing what we actually believe. Not what we say we believe in worship on Sunday mornings, but what we believe enough to act on. Do we believe every person bears the image of God, or do we only believe that about people who share our citizenship status? Do we believe in welcoming the stranger, or do we believe in welcoming the stranger only after we’ve run a background check and verified their papers?

I mean, good grief.

The cold efficiency of these operations is striking. People being grabbed off the streets. Families separated without information or recourse. Children watching their parents dragged away. All of it executed with the emotional temperature of data entry. No recognition that these are human beings with stories and families and dignity. Just problems being solved, quotas being met, operations being completed. It wrecks me.

No one deserves to be treated that way.

But followers of Jesus aren’t called to cold efficiency. We’re called to the kind of love that burns hot enough to melt indifference. The kind of love that stops the car when we see injustice. The kind of love that shows up with whistles when our neighbors are being hunted. The kind of love that risks something to protect the image of God in another person.

This isn’t about taking a political position on immigration reform. It’s so much more than that. This is about taking a theological position on human dignity. This is about insisting that every person created in God’s image deserves due process, fair treatment, and basic human rights regardless of how they got here or what their documentation looks like.

What Does Love Cost?

Renee Good was killed for showing up. For caring about her neighbors. For believing that love meant putting herself between power and the vulnerable. Her wife said they were raising their son to believe everyone deserves compassion and kindness, and that’s the faith she died living out.

The question for those of us who claim to follow Jesus is whether we’re willing to live out that same faith. Whether we’re willing to recognize the image of God in every person, including the ones our government is hunting. Whether we’re willing to insist on due process and human dignity even when it’s politically complicated. Whether we’re willing to welcome the stranger even when it costs us something.

Cold as ICE. What are you willing to sacrifice?

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1. Minnesota Reformer, "Renee Good, poet and mother of 3, was supporting neighbors when ICE shot her, wife says," January 9, 2026

2. Minnesota Public Radio, "Renee Macklin Good's wife releases statement about ICE shooting," January 9, 2026

3. ABC News, "Minneapolis ICE shooting: A minute-by-minute timeline of how Renee Nicole Good died," January 11, 2026; NBC News, "Cellphone video from ICE officer shows fatal Minneapolis shooting," January 9, 2026

4. CBS News, "Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey rips ICE after officer shot and killed woman," January 7, 2026

5. ABC News timeline analysis, January 11, 2026

6. Minnesota Department of Public Safety, BCA statement regarding investigation of ICE fatal shooting in Minneapolis, January 8, 2026