Renee Macklin Good’s killing exposes how Trump’s expansion of ICE and CBP power has turned civil immigration enforcement into a violent, unaccountable force.
On Jan. 7, 2026, Renee Macklin Good became the latest person to die because of Donald Trump’s aggressive and brutal immigration agenda. She is not the first to lose her life at the hands of immigration enforcement agents, nor will she be the last, unless we take action to dismantle the power and authority given to ICE and CBP over the last year.
In the aftermath of Macklin Good’s death, Jennifer Mascia, writing for The Trace, a journalism website devoted to tracking gun violence in America, released an updated analysis of DHS use of force incidents in the last year. She noted, “… Where immigration agents have gone, gun violence has usually followed.”
Since the escalation of immigration enforcement beginning last year in Los Angeles, immigration agents have opened fire 16 times and held people at gunpoint at least 15 times, according to The Trace. Macklin Good is one of four people who have died, while another seven have been injured in these incidents, including Maramir Martinez, a U.S. citizen shot by a Border Patrol agent at least five times when he rear-ended her vehicle during an immigration action in Chicago.
Not all the incidents, however, took place in targeted cities, as the list also includes violent incidents along the border—a reminder that for many immigrants and asylum seekers … and for residents of border communities … the risk of a violent encounter is ever-present.
Border advocates have fought for years to bring attention to lethal incidents along the border, where immigration checkpoints and racial profiling are common DHS tactics. According to the Southern Border Communities Coalition, 362 people have died during encounters with CBP since 2010. The Trump administration is now deploying the same aggressive tactics used along the border in its interior operations.
When those tactics are used alongside recruitment campaigns encouraging new hires to protect the homeland and help decide who will live in this country; questionable training; and administration rhetoric that comes out of the nationalist movements of the 1930s and ’40s; violence against innocent people—regardless of race or nationality—is inevitable.
Still, Macklin Good’s death is shocking—perhaps because we have been able to watch the videos of that moment for ourselves, or perhaps because shooting into the windshield of a moving car is so far outside the bounds of good policing.
For others, her place in the world as a white Christian woman and a U.S. citizen exercising her First Amendment rights might have touched a nerve with many who never saw themselves as having a stake in the immigration movement. Or perhaps, as Becca Good said in a statement about her wife’s death: They came to protest with whistles, while ICE had guns.
Whatever the reason that people have responded with such outrage, the throughline is this: Under the law, DHS agents are granted limited authority to enforce immigration laws. They are not police officers, and their narrow authority has been expanded by the Trump administration far beyond the civil immigration laws they are expected to enforce.
The outrage is so visceral because it is now clear that ICE and CBP are being used as Donald Trump’s own private army, and they are being fed messages of hate and suspicion that brook no dissent. Renee Macklin Good, and many others, are the casualties in an offensive being waged not just against immigrants, but against anyone who gets in the way.
The law is clearly on the side of restraint. Trump’s efforts to deploy the National Guard have frequently been blocked or limited in the federal courts. Local jurisdictions are adopting policies limiting cooperation with DHS, while a federal judge ordered ICE agents to wear body cameras in Chicago, given the evidence that officers often justify violence by accusing the victim of threatening them.
In the case of Maramir Martinez, the Border Patrol agent originally claimed that she had rammed the car to injure him. Instead, video of the incident revealed that he rammed her car before shooting at her.
That kind of impunity is being baked into Trump’s DHS. But the notion that immigration law enforcement is about punishing people for being in the country without authorization is part of DHS’ DNA.
In the moment, ending the deployment of the National Guard, stopping all mass deployments of DHS agents for immigration operations and reallocating resources to ensure training, equipment and oversight must be part of restoring accountability and returning DHS to its lane.
A Roadmap to Modernize U.S. Immigration
More must be done.
Coincidentally, a collection of blueprints for reforming the immigration system—all written by women—has just been issued by Hyphen, a philanthropic think tank. Two of the authors, Claire Trickler-McNulty and Royce Bernstein Murray, former Biden administration officials, lay out ideas for reforming immigration enforcement, detention and removal operations. These ideas range from creating a statute of limitations on the prosecution of illegal entry to providing financial assistance to support returns of people who are ineligible to remain in the country to reducing the use of detention.
They caution that all their proposals must be done in concert with other proposals in the document that would resuscitate legal immigration, refugee admissions and immigrant inclusion. Taken together, the blueprint offers ideas for legislative reform that are worth debating and refining and could restore some balance to the immigration system.
Community Safety Can’t Exist Where Fear Is the Policy
The more fundamental question is not about immigration reform, but about the way institutions can be manipulated when there is no shared vision. Most Americans seem to agree that immigration is a good thing, that people who have been in the country for decades should have a chance to stay, and that supporting refugees and people in need is part of American values. And yet, those general thoughts don’t have a focus, one that ties support for immigration to support for other social justice issues, one that grounds the work in a way that allows more organized advocacy and forceful pushback.
Consequently, Trump has been able to leverage anti-immigrant sentiment, first to attack immigrants, but more and more to terrorize whole communities. Finding the common ground, both under the Constitution and in our values, is the only way to protect ourselves.
Fundamentally, a community thrives when its residents feel that they have economic opportunity, feel safe and are treated with dignity. In this case, the importance of community safety can spark a discussion about what residents genuinely need to feel safe—and even what safety means. Honest probing on this topic will involve peeling back layer after layer of structural, institutional and cultural issues, and I suspect every community’s answer will be slightly different. It is clear, however, that the presence of DHS agents on the streets, often masked and with unclear jurisdiction, is undermining safety. That observation can be the catalyst that unites diverse opinions and serve as a starting point for change.
Becca Good summed it up perfectly when she asked people to honor her wife’s legacy by “rejecting hate and choosing compassion, turning away from fear and pursuing peace, refusing division and knowing we must come together to build a world where we all come home safe to the people we love.”
