Renee Nicole Good, Killed by an ICE Agent, Was a Poet — Here's What She Wrote

In the cold hush of a Minneapolis evening, neighbors gathered on Portland Avenue, chanting a name as candles flickered and grief settled over the block.

What drew them together was not yet fully explained. Details were still emerging. Those who came said they were there to honor a woman they knew simply as a caring and compassionate neighbor.

Only later would authorities confirm the circumstances of her death. Later still, many would learn that the woman being mourned had left behind something else, too: poetry that traced faith, doubt, science, and wonder with uncommon intimacy.

What Happened on Portland Avenue

The woman was shot and killed on Wednesday, January 7, 2026, just a few blocks from her Minneapolis home during a confrontation involving Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) authorities.

The fatal shooting reportedly involved an ICE agent, and the woman was later identified as Renee Nicole Good.

Her family was notified late Wednesday morning, her mother said, after learning of the death through authorities and reporters.

Who She Was to Those Around Her

"That's so stupid. She was probably terrified," her mother, Donna Ganger, said after hearing some of the circumstances. Ganger rejected suggestions that her daughter had been involved in violence and instisted she was "not part of anything like that at all."

"Renee was one of the kindest people I've ever known," she said. "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."

Neighbors echoed that description. Mary Radford, who lived next door, said she often saw the woman outside with her young son while walking her Australian shepherd, Hazelnut.

"It's a beautiful family. They have a son. He's very sweet. He loves our dog. He always has to go run up and pet and play with her," Radford said. "They're always outside playing." Through tears, Radford added, "We're gonna miss seeing them — forever […] I wish I could have known her more."

What Loved Ones Shared About Her Life

Good lived in the Twin Cities with her partner and children, according to her mother. She had previously been married to Timmy Ray Macklin Jr., who died in 2023 at age 36. His father, Timmy Ray Macklin Sr., said the couple shared a child who is now 6 years old.

"There's nobody else in his life," Macklin said. "I'll drive. I'll fly. To come and get my grandchild." Good also had two additional children from a previous marriage. Macklin added that he believed those children lived with her extended family.

An Instagram account believed to belong to the deceased woman reportedly described her as a "poet and writer and wife and mom and shitty guitar strummer from Colorado; experiencing Minneapolis, MN."

How the Community Responded

At an evening vigil, speakers revealed few new details about Good’s death, choosing instead to focus on how she lived. "She was peaceful, she did the right thing," said Jaylani Hussein, executive director of CAIR-MN. "She died because she loved her neighbors."

Another speaker, identifying himself only as Noah, rejected statements by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem that described Renee as a domestic terrorist. Instead, he said she had been present on Portland Avenue "to watch the terrorists."

As the crowd moved through the neighborhood, hundreds of people chanted her name.

Why Her Name May Sound Familiar

Years before moving to Minnesota, Good studied creative writing at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. In 2020, she won the university's undergraduate poetry prize for a piece titled "On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs."

At the time, she was known as Renee Macklin, a name connected to her previous marriage, which explains the difference between her byline and her legal name later in life.

A short biography shared on the English Department's Facebook page described her as someone who loved "movie marathons and makes messy art with her daughter and two sons." The page also described her as someone who co-hosted a podcast with her husband, comedian Tim Macklin.

What She Wrote

Good’s award-winning poem, published by the Academy of American Poets, offers the most transparent window into how she made sense of the world. It blends anatomy, belief, memory, and disillusionment.

Below are a few lines from her poem "On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs." She wrote:

"I want back my rocking chairs, solipsist sunsets, & coastal jungle sounds that are tercets from cicadas and pentameter from the hairy legs of cockroaches."

"I've donated Bibles to thrift stores (mashed them in plastic trash bags with an acidic Himalayan salt lamp — the post-baptism Bibles, the ones plucked from street corners from the meaty hands of zealots, the dumbed-down, easy-to-read, parasitic kind)," it continues.

"Remember more the slick rubber smell of high gloss biology textbook pictures; they burned the hairs inside my nostrils, & salt & ink that rubbed off on my palms," the poem goes on.

"I repeated & scribbled until it picked its way & stagnated somewhere I can’t point to anymore, maybe my gut — maybe there in-between my pancreas & large intestine is the piddly brook of my soul," she added.

The deceased poet went on, "It's the ruler by which I reduce all things now; hard-edged & splintering from knowledge that used to sit, a cloth against fevered forehead. Can I let them both be?"

"Now I can't believe — that the Bible and Qur'an and Bhagavad gita are sliding long hairs behind my ear like mom used to & exhaling from their mouths 'make room for wonder' — all my understanding dribbles down the chin onto the chest & is summarized as: life is merely to ovum and sperm and where those two meet and how often and how well and what dies there," she concluded.

Good was not only a neighbor, a mother, or a friend. She was a poet whose words wrestled openly with belief, science, fear, and awe. Long after the investigation concludes, those lines, written years earlier, under a different last name, now stand as part of what she leaves behind.