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MOST AMERICANS CONDEMN ICE’S MURDER OF RENEE GOOD  
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Carl Beijer
January 14, 2026
Jacobin [[link removed]]

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_ When Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jonathan Ross shot
Renee Good in the head last week, Republicans declared that Americans
would overwhelmingly support the killing. In reality, the vast
majority find the murder unjustified. _

A protester holds up a sign during a protest of Renee Good's murder
at Powderhorn Park in Minneapolis., [Octavio Jones/AFP]

 

When Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jonathan Ross
shot Minnesota resident and mother of three Renee Good in the head
last week, Republicans immediately declared that Americans would
overwhelmingly support the killing. Little of the footage had been
verified at that point, some hadn’t even be released, and no one, of
course, had any way of telling how the public would react. But this
was never a credible prediction so much as a cynical attempt to create
a self-fulfilling prophecy: if Americans were told that Americans
supported the killing, maybe Americans would support it.

Thus we got messages like this [[link removed]] from
Republican pundit Sohrab Ahmari:

Because there are actually lots of good people on the Left with whom I
agree on various things, I feel compelled to say: Guys, this is one of
those instances where you’re going all in on a case that’s 70-30
(at best) against you. (Feel free to dismiss this.)

In the days that immediately followed, various pundits attempted to
extrapolate from some past polling
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(and a tangential snap poll by YouGov) how Americans would actually
react. But now that a week has passed, we know. And it’s not looking
good for ICE:

 
 
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By an average margin of more than 22 points, Americans overwhelmingly
find that ICE’s killing of Renee Good was unjustified (a scenario we
traditionally describe as “murder”). Republicans weren’t just
wrong in predicting a landslide of support for ICE; the landslide went
in the exact opposite direction. Ahmari’s prediction was wrong by a
hilarious margin of 62 points, a failure that should permanently
discredit his media branding as a post-partisan populist who’s in
touch with the American people.

And as bad as these numbers are, the details are even worse. Just look
at the crosstabs:

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Aside from the predictable partisan and ideological splits, pollsters
have yet to find a demographic where this killing has majority
support. Even among white Americans — who are historically much more
likely to defend state violence against civilians
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— a slim but solid majority say that the killing was unjustified.

Some more interesting numbers from Data for Progress’s survey:

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It’s not just that the numbers are bad — they’re likely to get
significantly worse. The more Americans learn about this killing, the
more they disapprove of it; people who have heard “a lot” about it
are 18 points more likely to condemn ICE than those who have heard
nothing at at all.

Though a lot of pundits seemed to come into this controversy thinking
that Renee Good’s killing would be viewed through an exclusively
partisan lens, I don’t think the numbers are bearing this out. One
reason for this, I think, is that the bootlicking, hypercynical voices
that dominate Republican discourse today are somewhat at odds with an
enduring strain of anti-government paranoia on the Right that is
reflexively hostile to any form of government authority. Sohrab Ahmari
may think that most rural white working-class conservatives will
always side with law-and-order policing, but a lot of them are a lot
more like Dale Gribble [[link removed]],
and the sight of a masked government agent shooting an unarmed
civilian on an extremely flimsy pretext has to at least cause some
cognitive dissonance among their kind.

Much has been made of the fact that Americans may be more sympathetic
toward Renee Good, because of their identity, than they might be
toward other victims; she may be a lesbian, but she is also a mother
of three, a Christian, and between the dog in her car and the stuffies
on her passenger seat she was surrounded by cultural signifiers that
almost everyone will find relatable. That said, I don’t think that
too much should be made of this point. George Floyd — a poor black
man who was killed after allegedly using a counterfeit $20 bill at a
convenience store — was the sort of victim that one might predict
Americans would find less sympathetic, and yet polls found that most
Americans found his murder unjustified by an even bigger margin of 71
to 17. In that case, too, the only demographic that came close to
viewing him unsympathetically was Donald Trump voters.

The most dispositive factor, of course, is probably just the footage
of what actually happened. Republican officials and activists can tell
Americans to doubt their lying eyes all they like, but it is very
difficult to watch the clips of Good’s killing and _not _see a
belligerent ICE agent who is in zero danger whatsoever shooting
multiple rounds into an innocent civilian who is just trying to
de-escalate the situation and drive away.

* Renee Nicole Good
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* public opinion
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* ICE protests
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