Screams From Minneapolis
The screams didn’t echo; they lingered, exposing a government that shoots first, lies second, and leaves a grieving country to absorb the silence afterward.
Guest article by Michael Cohen
There are moments when the country feels like it exhales; and what comes out is grief.
Not the loud, performative grief politicians use when cameras are rolling, but the quiet kind that sneaks up on you in the middle of the night. The kind that makes your chest tighten without warning. The kind that reminds you that something sacred has been broken, again, and no one in power seems interested in fixing it.
That was the feeling that hit me watching the Minneapolis footage. Not anger first. Not politics. Sadness. Bone-deep, immobilizing sadness. The kind that doesn’t need words because it already knows how the story ends.
A 37-year-old woman. An American. Renee Nicole Good. Dead in the street with a bullet to the head, fired by an ICE agent during yet another reckless immigration operation that had no business happening in a residential neighborhood to begin with.
I’ve lived with sadness before. I carried it through the gates of Otisville. I slept next to it. Ate meals with it. It’s the sadness of separation; of knowing your children are growing without you, that your spouse is hurting while you’re helpless to fix it, that the world keeps moving while you’re frozen in place. Prison teaches you what powerlessness really feels like.
That same hollow weight came rushing back yesterday as I listened to the screams in Minneapolis. The shrieks from bystanders. The panic. The disbelief. Those sounds don’t fade. They embed. They follow you into silence and then ambush you when you least expect it.
And I can’t stop asking the question no one in this administration wants to answer: Why was ICE there at all?
Why are immigration agents flooding American cities like an occupying force? Why unmarked vehicles? Why heavily armed officers pushing stalled cars in the snow while residents whistle warnings like it’s an authoritarian regime, not the United States of America?
Videos show Renee Good sitting in her burgundy Honda Pilot, window down, surrounded. Witnesses say officers grabbed her door handle. She reversed. She tried to leave. In seconds, three shots rang out. One entered her head. She slumped forward. Lifeless.
That’s not chaos. That’s escalation.
And then came the performance.
Kristi Noem stepped to the podium and delivered a script so disconnected from reality it bordered on obscene. She spoke of “mobs.” Of “agitators.” Of Renee “stalking” ICE officers all day. Of “defensive shots.” President Trump followed with a social media post blaming the “Radical Left,” calling Renee an assailant, demanding unquestioned loyalty to law enforcement.
JD Vance went further, calling her death “a tragedy of her own making.”
That sentence should haunt every American.
Because what it really says is this: if the government kills you during one of its stunts, it’s your fault for being in the way.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said what too few officials are willing to say out loud. He called the administration’s narrative “bullshit.” He told ICE to get the hell out of his city. Governor Tim Walz called it reckless. Representative Ilhan Omar called it deadly. Hundreds of people held a vigil because communities understand what Washington pretends not to: fear-based policing produces exactly this outcome.
Witnesses say officers blocked a neighbor, a doctor, from checking Renee’s pulse. “I don’t care,” an officer reportedly replied. Paramedics were delayed as ICE vehicles clogged the street. When they finally reached her, they carried her body by her limbs to an ambulance.
This is what happens when force replaces judgment. When ego replaces training. When spectacle replaces safety. When America watched her die.
Renee Good wasn’t a threat. She was a woman with a life that included loss, resilience, and love. She had a son. Parents now forced to process the unprocessable. A family that will spend the rest of their lives replaying a moment that should never have existed.
Mayor Frey warned weeks earlier that this would end in blood. He was ignored. Because this administration doesn’t govern; it provokes. It doesn’t protect; it dares. It floods Democratic cities with agents, targets immigrant communities Trump has already dehumanized, and waits for friction to spark.
Then, when someone dies, it blames the dead.
I know what it feels like to be swallowed by a system that doesn’t care who you are once it’s decided you’re expendable. Prison strips you of humanity slowly. This administration does it instantly, with a bullet, a lie, and a press conference.
The screams from Minneapolis weren’t just the sound of a woman dying.
They were the sound of a country realizing, too late, that cruelty has become policy, and truth has become optional.
And the sadness that followed?
That’s the sound of America grieving itself.
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Well put, Michael, as you always do.
I am getting tired of writing this today...but here goes: The reasons underlying the French Revolution are becoming increasingly clear and increasingly attractive.
Ms Good’s face with words describing her as an American Hero should be PLASTERED all over the country! She stood up to the goons - unarmed except for the love in her heart and the decency in her soul - and paid the ultimate price. Let HER be thanked and shown “a debt of gratitude” by all Americans who still have love and decency as their guiding light.