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Viola Luzzo, Heather Heyer and Renee Good: Three Ordinary Women Killed Because They Were Like Us

ByToby Sackton

An ICE agent in Minneapolis today shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, a defenseless 37-year-old mother of a six-year-old, who lived with her partner in Minneapolis. Good was a legal observer who, based on videos, stopped her car when ICE vehicles blocked the street she was driving on. Then, another ICE vehicle, a truck with flashing lights, came up behind her car. Agents swarmed out and tried to open her door. Terrified, Good tried to leave when one agent pulled a gun and shot her in the face multiple times, killing her. Her wife was left sobbing in on the sidewalk.

ICE agents did not allow a doctor who was on the scene to try to treat Good, and when the paramedics came they would not allow them drive to her but forced them to carry her out to the ambulance. She was dead.

This brutal, deadly violence was directed against an innocent woman who in many ways was just like many of us. She attended anti-ICE rallies. She felt keenly the injustice of masked federal agents terrorizing immigrants for political gain, and so she volunteered as a witness, just as many of us have become trained LUCE verifiers.

I am stunned and torn apart tonight because this is a wound not just to Minneapolis, but to the nation. How have we allowed such corrupt hunger for power, such hatred and entitled cruelty to metastasize into an evil that allows a masked federal thug to causally kill an ordinary American on her familiar city street. An evil that allows Kristi Noem to justify hunting of such victims by calling them terrorists? I would like to see Nuremberg trials for Krisi Noem, Stephen Miller and Donald Trump.

They are conscience-free perpetrators of violence, as inhuman as the leaders who could conceive of the death camps in Germany, or the genocide in Rwanda, or the massacres of Bosnians in Serbia.

But that is not going to happen soon. Renee Good is a martyr every bit as much as Viola Luzzo, the Detroit mother killed by white supremacists in Alabama after giving rides to some of the marchers from Selma to Montgomery. She is as much a martyr as Heather Daneille Heyer, killed in Charlotte n 2017 when an angry rightwing thug drove into a crowd of non-violent protestors.

Each of these women believed in helping others, they believed in non-violence, and they believed, as Heather Heyer said in her last Facebook post before her death, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention”. These women paid attention.

And so do we. There will be a Justice for All Bearing Witness weekly Thursday demonstration outside of ICE in Burlington tomorrow 11:00 a.m to 12:30 p.m. There is also a call for a rally in memory of Renee Good tomorrow at 4:30 p.m. at the Waltham Common. Leaders of Indivisible are also discussing a response.

Our movement to protect our communities is non-violent, and the more state terror and violence is used against us, the more those perpetrating it are losing. Our strength is our community and sticking with each other, even in the face of deep fear. We need to know, like the leaders of Bearing Witness and the Selma to Montgomery Civil Rights leaders, that we will overcome our fear together and grow stronger. ICE agents may look tough and threatening; but one day justice will come, and those who crossed the line into supporting state terror and violence will be prosecuted, just as Illinois Governor Pritzker has said.

We don’t want a martyr in Massachusetts, and our legislature and leadership must recognize the serious threat that ill-trained ICE agents recruited via violent war movies and videogames represent. They must take steps to protect us.

 

[ed. note:  our headline for this story does not mean to downplay the shootings of people who face risk everyday because of racism.  Instead we wanted to convey the universality of the hatred and danger ICE poses to everyone, citizen and non-citizen alike, regardless of race. If you oppose them they think of you as less than human, someone they can kill without compunction.  This is the classic fascist framing of all enemies as sub-human who get what they deserve.  The headline was an attempt to convey this truth.]

 

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