Seconds before Jonathan Ross killed Renee Nicole Good, the veteran ICE officer turned his camera phone on her wife, recording her, before aiming the lens at Renee. He fired, shooting her in her face. Then he steadied his phone, still pointed in the direction of Renee’s silence, and said, “fucking bitch.”   

For months, more and more women like Renee Nicole Good have been turning out in their neighborhoods to observe and challenge Immigration and Customs Enforcement—defending communities in Chicago, in Washington, D.C., in Los Angeles, in New Orleans. And now, videos have emerged showing ICE officers and CBP agents using Good’s death as a threat against women who challenge them. I was not the only woman, certainly not the only queer woman, for whom watching Good die at the hands of a man with a government-issued gun, watching him degrade her as if to justify himself, felt both shockingly violent and disturbingly commonplace. It underlines how queer women have always been acceptable targets for violence. The difference in this video is how open and undeniable the violence is. The difference is how brazenly the government is now arguing that such violence is inevitable.

What we saw in the ICE officer’s video should be understood alongside the intense attacks on women and LGBTQ people under this administration. Her killing takes place against the backdrop of everyday oppression that, for so many of us, long preceded Trump. Dr. Cynthia Miller-Idriss, author of the recent book Man Up: The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism and a professor at American University, told me she saw the video and surrounding rhetoric as attempts at what she describes as “containment”—a set of strategies that prop up patriarchal power by policing its dissenters, actual or perceived.

Misogynistic rhetoric can be so ordinary as to escape mention; The New York Times did not quote the “fucking bitch” statement in its coverage of the video, nor even describe it, as if the merging of pathetic name-calling with state violence was not notable. Denying the misogyny in the killing also reinforces its effect. “The misogyny delegitimizes, it demobilizes, it normalizes violence,” Miller-Idriss explained when we spoke on Monday. The language in the video, underlining the violence, serves as a warning to any other people who dare follow Good’s example and excuses any violence waged against them. “It’s especially horrifying to see that kind of violence against women and LGBTQ folks be just celebrated,” she said, “as if this woman was put in her place—fucking bitch, right?”

The staggering truth is, this was not even the first time, since ICE’s siege began in 2025, that an immigration........

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