Renee Good's Wife Admits They Were There to Protest

As we learned earlier today, Renee Good was a member of an anti-ICE group called ICE Watch. That group described its mission as "documenting, archiving and resisting against ICE, police and all colonial militarized regimes."

But before that story came out, the Washington Post was doing its best to paint her as someone in the wrong place at the wrong time. This morning at 5 am the Post published a story making that claim.

In multiple interviews this week, friends and family members painted a picture of a woman who lived a quiet life not shaped by overt activism — a sharp contrast to the allegations made by Vice President JD Vance, who blamed Good for her own death and accused her of perpetrating “an attack on federal law enforcement.”

Her family members have said they do not believe Good was an aggressive activist tailing ICE officers. She had just dropped her son at school, they said. Her father, Tim Ganger, in a brief interview Wednesday, said she got “caught up in a bad situation. I think she was just caught in the crossfire.”

This afternoon the story was changed pretty dramatically after Good's wfie, Rebecca Good, posted a statement effectively admitting they were there to protest. The headline was changed from "Woman shot by ICE moved to Minneapolis for sense of ‘community'" to "Renee Good’s wife says she was supporting neighbors when killed by ICE." The new version opens:

Renee Nicole Good and her wife had “stopped to support our neighbors” when she was fatally shot by an ICE officer in a confrontation on a residential street Wednesday, her wife said in a statement...

“On Wednesday, January 7th, we stopped to support our neighbors. We had whistles. They had guns,” Rebecca Good said in a statement Friday.

“We were raising our son to believe that no matter where you come from or what you look like, all of us deserve compassion and kindness,” the statement said. “Renee lived this belief every day. She is pure love. She is pure joy. She is pure sunshine.”

The paragraphs claiming she wasn't an aggressive activist are still part of the story if you keep reading, but they seem somewhat at odds with the admission that she was being an activist that morning. The latest version of the same story, update an hour ago as I write this, includes a new paragraph trying to make sense of that disconnect between what people said about her and what Good did.

Rebecca Good’s statement on Friday amounts to the first acknowledgment by her family that on Wednesday the couple were among the Minneapolis residents who have organized to monitor and protest immigration enforcement activity in their neighborhoods.

For reasons that aren't clear, the Post is ignoring the scoop from this morning by the NY Post which shows that several fellow moms at the school her son attended knew she was part of Minnesota ICE Watch. One mom described her as a "warrior." So, yes, Rebecca Good's statement is the first family acknowledgement that the couple were activists but it was not the first source outside the family to say so.

All of this seems to confirm what I wrote here two days ago, that the media was getting ahead of itself in coverage of this story and making mistakes which all seem to trend in one direction. Good was an activist. It shouldn't take three revisions of a story with four reporters in the byline to get this right.