On Thursday, Minnesota faith leaders from various traditions gathered at the site where an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good on the streets of Minneapolis, amid a surge of ICE raids. They called for peace and urged the agency to leave the state.
JaNaé Imari Bates, co-executive director of Faith in Minnesota, opened the press conference by saying Minnesotans have “come together, yet again, to mourn, to grieve, to express righteous anger and rage, but [also] to demand justice and to demand peace.”
“Yesterday, on January 7,” she said, “Kristi Noem’s Department of Homeland Security, using ICE, shot and killed Renee Good. Renee was 37 years old, a mother, a U.S. citizen, a Minnesotan, a legal observer, [and] a woman who believed her neighbors deserved dignity and safety. She was not armed. She was not a threat. She was standing for freedom, and the federal government answered her courage with a bullet. Let the record be clear: That was not an accident. It was murder. … This was also a very predictable outcome.”
Martha Bardwell, pastor of Our Savior Lutheran Church in Minneapolis, said she was “heartbroken” over the incident that occurred in her neighborhood.
“Right here on this block, children who attend my church catch the bus every morning on their way to school,” she said. “And yesterday, their block—their bus stop—became a scene of terror.”
Bardwell said the neighborhood children did not “catch the bus today, because we made a decision to keep them safe from our own government.”
“Renee Good deserves justice,” Imam Mowlid Ali of Abuubakar Mosque in south Minneapolis told the gathered crowd. “Her child deserves justice. Her family deserves justice. We demand accountability.”
Between speakers, which also included rabbis, chants of “ICE out now” rang through the crowd.
Bates closed the gathering by saying, “We are going to show the rest of this country how to care for one another.”
- About the Author
- Latest Posts
Senior Editor at Good Faith Media.