Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.
I don’t know exactly what I should be doing right now, as a person who lives in the United States in 2026 and cares about others. But I know I’m falling short. I think about this often: When I’m sobbing over a news report about a toddler orphaned after his parents are swept up in an ICE raid, asking myself, “How are you helping, other than donating money here and there and sharing Instagram stories?” When I’m imagining what I’ll one day tell my children I did for the people who were scared and suffering back in 2026, when I’m reading a post that commands me to reject hopelessness and get involved in my community, I immediately start to hear my own excuses about work and kids and energy and time.
It feels awful to disappoint myself. What feels worse is my feeling that Renee Good, who was killed by a U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis during a raid on Wednesday, was the kind of person I want to be, and as a result, she’s dead.
When I say she was the kind of person I want to be, I’m talking specifically about her presence at the scene of the immigration raid. The New York Post reported that she was involved with an “ICE Watch” group; though the tabloid claims that such groups “can turn confrontational,” their purpose is to help prevent immigrants from being suddenly swept into detention centers. It is exceedingly clear that Good was not threatening agents when she was shot. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison told NPR that Good was “anything but” a domestic terrorist, despite the claims of Trump administration officials who say she was interfering with the ICE agent’s work. Instead, he said, she was a “compassionate neighbor trying to be a legal observer on behalf of her immigrant neighbors.”
If that’s the case, it means she must have felt the same horror I feel when I see how so many people in this country are living through pain I can’t imagine—and then she did something. Instead of taking a break from the news, or fantasizing about leaving the county, or despairing over the world her kids will inherit (or who knows, maybe she did these things too!), maybe she thought, How can I help?
She didn’t have the power to change the outcome of the election, or change the minds of all the people who voted for this horrifying reality, or even to stop ICE from chasing down the people in her community, or to reunite kids with their parents. But she still showed up, to be the kind of person we all hope will be there if we’re having the worst day of our life. I imagine that, before she was killed, her presence was a comfort that showed that someone was watching and that someone cared.
“Renee was one of the kindest people I’ve ever known,” her mom told the Minnesota Star Tribune (she also disputed the idea that her daughter was involved in any kind of protest against ICE). “She was extremely compassionate. She’s taken care of people all her life. She was loving, forgiving and affectionate. She was an amazing human being.” It is very easy to leave to others the job of showing up when people are in danger—the job of documenting and witnessing. Memes about how the world is terrible but being a mother is enough (evolutionary, even!) appear often in my Instagram feed. I understand why I’m seeing them. My algorithm is undoubtedly shaped by two kinds of content. The first: Reels about things like the way 3-year-olds yell at their parents for singing, and how 1-year-olds do gymnastics while breastfeeding. The second: Footage documenting the unspeakable suffering of kids in Gaza, stats about the number of people around the world who will face hunger or die as a result of this administration’s policies, and reporting on people in Latino neighborhoods in Chicago who form a walking school bus for kids whose parents are too afraid of ICE to leave the house. So I’m served content perfectly tailored to someone peeking out from the working-mom-with-two-little-kids trenches, looking around, and despairing over the world—until someone needs a snack or the potty or the kind of comfort I wish I could give to all the kids in the headlines.
These messages about how I’m doing my part by raising kind humans are always beautifully illustrated with whimsical drawings and pleasant fonts. I really do appreciate them and the comfort they bring to others. But these “You’re enough when you feed your child breakfast” messages just don’t resonate with me. Maybe it’s because my kids, while very sweet, are still young enough that they’d walk through an active crime scene to get to a veggie straw, so it’s just hard to picture them fixing the world. Maybe it’s because I think of myself as a decent person, but I wonder if I am really contributing if I raise people who are every bit as empathetic as I am, but I fail to give them the example of what to do with that empathy. Or maybe it’s because I know that plenty of women throughout history have had just as much on their plates as I do—and the same clichéd struggle to work and parent and shower—and still managed to try to make the world outside their homes better.
Women like Renee Good. She was the mother of three, including of a 6-year-old whom she dropped off at school Wednesday morning. Afterward, she could have filled her time with countless other things: laundry, a summer camp lottery, taking down holiday decorations, finding a lost glove. Or maybe she could have done something for herself: calling a friend, getting a haircut, or finally doing that 10 minute daily meditation or 25 minutes of weight-bearing exercise that are supposed to solve so many of our problems if we can squeeze them in. Instead, something brought her to a residential street in south Minneapolis where some of her neighbors were living through a nightmare and others were trying to help.
What I keep thinking about isn’t that she was killed even though she was a good person (many good people have been killed, and ICE isn’t supposed to kill bad people either!). I believe she was killed because she was a good person. Because she decided to be there. She’s gone now, her kids have lost a mom, and the world is missing the kind of woman who found the time to go stand in the street and let her neighbors know they weren’t alone. She should still be alive. But because she’s not and I am, I hope I can honor her memory by being more like her.
