One of the most remarkable and disturbing aspects of the ICE confrontation videos coming out is the prevalence of women physically engaging law enforcement, especially given their clear belief that they will not come to harm by obstructing and outright attacking heavily armed state agents. Renee Good lost her life in such a confrontation, and footage from four different angles documented the chillingly playful manner in which she and her wife taunted the ICE officers whose vehicle they were blocking. Right up until the moment of her fatal shooting, Good clearly believed herself to be completely untouchable by federal agents armed with deadly weapons. To look at her face mere seconds from death is to see a woman engaged in playfighting, someone incapable of imagining that stalking men with guns, blocking their vehicles, ignoring their orders to desist, to leave her car, could possibly get her hurt. Whatever you think of the legality of Good’s shooting, the fact that she seemed to sleepwalk into it, blithely oblivious to the extreme peril in which she placed herself, should disturb you. It disturbs me.
But the truly disturbing part is that Good’s behavior is far from an outlier. German blogger eugyppius recently echoed my own shock at how quickly activist tactics have escalated in his essay Courting death to own the Nazis. In the excerpt below he’s describing not Renee Good’s fatal encounter with immigration police, but another white woman in Minnesota successfully employing the exact same tactic Good used, blocking a public road to prevent an ICE vehicle from moving, and proudly posting the entire episode to TikTok. You don’t know her name because she survived the incident she incited without injury, but she’s one of thousands of newly radicalized activists playing a dangerous game of interference with federal law enforcement. Click through to watch the video, it’s very illustrative.
The most instructive moment in this clip (again, one of dozens) comes right at the beginning, when our heroine tells the ICE agents whose car she is blocking that “We can play” because “my car’s bigger than yours.” This random woman who probably has kids in school and a mortgage and a miserable ex-husband on the hook for god knows how much in child support thus openly contemplates weaponising her vehicle against multiple armed law enforcement officers. That level of middle-class political radicalisation is pretty amazing if you ask me.
Objectively speaking, these ICE-watching women engage federal law enforcement officers in repeated rounds of chicken. Their aim is to edge beyond being a mere nuisance and cause meaningful disruptions, while hoping always to stop short of becoming a serious, actionable threat. This is a very hard balance to maintain because of course threats are perceived subjectively. Where exactly the line falls will vary from officer to officer and from situation to situation, according to a multitude of imponderables. Anyone who plays like this is trying to get shot, whether she realises it or not.
“We can play,” the soccer mom monologues to TikTok while maneuvering her car to prevent an SUV of heavily armed men from driving down a public street. Like Good, the fact that her actions are incredibly dangerous, that her situation could unpredictably spiral out of control and result in her death or someone else’s, seems to never cross her mind. Why are so many middle-class people, and especially women, behaving with such reckless disregard for their own safety, seemingly without realizing it? Yes, they oppose immigration enforcement, they consider ICE’s mission illegitimate. But most people who hold these views do not engage in direct action with armed law enforcement, and even fewer would put themselves in a position to be beaten or shot by physically obstructing or interfering with officers. Yet a critical minority of mostly white, mostly middle-class activists, disproportionately women, have been radicalized into this extreme form of activist protest in large numbers. How did this happen?
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