[Episcopal News Service] The Jan. 7 killing of a Minnesota woman by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has sparked outrage in the state and beyond, with local authorities calling on the Trump administration to end its enforcement activities in and around Minneapolis.
Witness video of the incident shows the woman, later identified as 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good, using her SUV to block traffic, possibly related to growing citizen efforts to alert immigrants to ICE’s presence and shield them from detention. Several ICE agents can be seen surrounding Good’s vehicle, trying to open her door and yelling at her to get out. As she turns to try driving away, one of them opens fire on her. The vehicle crashes farther down the street, and Good died later at a hospital.
The Trump administration has claimed the officer fired in self defense; Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem went as far as to accuse Good of “domestic terrorism.” That and other details of the killing are in dispute and remain under investigation.
Minnesota Bishop Craig Loya issued a statement on Facebook invoking the biblical story of Herod and calling on Christians to respond “not in outrage or with reciprocal violence” but with love in opposition to “the lust for a false and hollow power.”
His full statement follows below:
Beloved in Christ,
Matthew’s account of Epiphany, the feast we celebrated yesterday, shows that there are two responses to the manifestation of a poor, helpless, migrant child lying in a feeding trough as the the place where the God of the whole cosmos resides: fear and joy. King Herod meets the news of King Jesus with fear that quickly turns into a murderous rage as he slaughters an untold number of infants to eliminate the threat to his power. The wise men who had been watching the skies for a sign are overwhelmed with joy at the good news that Herod’s campaign of terror through violent force has met the unstoppable power of God’s love.
The Herods of the world, and their fear driven campaigns of terror, are ever with us. Today in Minneapolis, after deploying thousands of federal immigration agents in recent days, an individual was shot and killed by those agents. The news is crushing, to be sure, but we ought not be shocked. The federal government has been making good for a full year on its promise to enforce immigration policy through a racially narrow lens and with a cruel delight. An incident like the one today in Minneapolis was inevitable, and such violence is likely to remain a feature of our common life as long as federal agents are being deployed to cities seen to oppose the current administration for the sole purpose of provocation and intimidation.
As people of the Epiphany, our call is to stand in the midst of a world where Herod continues to flex and posture, not in outrage or with reciprocal violence, but gazing in wonder and expectation for the joyful manifestation of Jesus wherever the poor, the outsider, the weak, and the oppressed are to be found. As people of the Epiphany, in the midst of a world where cruelty tries to pose as power, we continue to rejoice in the assurance that absolute and final power resides in poor and crucified Jesus, who alone is the true king. Our Epiphany joy is not some naive and shallow notion that everything will be ok, when everything is so obviously not ok. Our Epiphany joy is the deep, defiant, revolutionary hope we have in the assurance that love is the most powerful force in the universe. Like the wise ones searching for Bethlehem, we wait, we watch, we follow where love leads, knowing that only God’s action in the world can finally and fully heal all that the lust for a false and hollow power had broken down, world without end.