This story was originally published by the Nashville Banner. Sign up for their newsletter at nashvillebanner.com/newsletters.
Hundreds of Nashvillians gathered in Centennial Park on Thursday night, their faces lit by candles and the glow of cell phone lights as they held a vigil for Renee Good, the Minneapolis woman who was shot and killed by federal immigration agent Jonathan Ross on Wednesday.
The demonstration also served as a protest of President Donald Trump’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants and the increasingly militarized Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency that is carrying it out. It was one of multiple protests held Thursday in Nashville after Good’s killing.
“They expect us to simply stand by as they take away our liberties and freedoms,” community organizer Arturo Salomon told the crowd, speaking from the steps of the Parthenon.
Kelli X, pastor of The Village Church in Madison, spoke against what she described as an ideology of white supremacy pushing Americans to fear and hate their neighbors.
“Our neighbors may look like us or they may not look like us,” she said. “They may speak our language or not speak our language. They may not be from here, but we know that no person is illegal.”
The shooting on Wednesday took place during an operation in a neighborhood in south Minneapolis. Ross shot Good multiple times as she turned her car away from him, apparently trying to leave the scene. Good and her wife, who was in the passenger seat of the car, had driven down the residential street into the area where agents were gathered.
In the immediate aftermath, President Donald Trump, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin and other administration officials said the agent had acted in self-defense after Good tried to run him over in “an act of domestic terrorism.” Videos of the shooting, which have been closely analyzed by multiple news outlets, contradicted those descriptions of the incident.
On Thursday morning, more than 100 people gathered in Nashville for a vigil and protest outside the ICE field office off of Brick Church Park Drive. A federal agent watched from the office parking lot as the crowd stood across the street, many of whom held pictures of Good or anti-ICE signs. Several read “Abolish ICE.”
Standing around the perimeter of the demonstrators were people from the United Volunteers of Tennessee, wearing neon green vests. One of the group’s members, who declined to give his name, said they were with the organization’s safety team, which works “to keep demonstrations in our community organized, disciplined and peaceful.”
“We want to make sure tensions do not escalate between demonstrators and law enforcement,” he told the Nashville Banner. “What we especially do not want to do is give ICE, the federal government, exactly what they’re looking for right now, which is some sort of provocation or a reason to retaliate against people.”
Several community organizers and officials addressed the crowd, including leaders from Music City MigraWatch and Metro Nashville Council members.
“Renee mattered and she was murdered,” council member Terry Vo, who chairs the Metro Council Immigrant Caucus, said. “We are here in solidarity, we are here in grief and we are here in righteous anger. ICE did not just appear in Nashville last year. They’ve been terrorizing our community for years. In 2019, ICE agents shot a Mexican immigrant in the stomach and elbow. This past year, several of our legal verifiers have had weapons pointed at them simply for documenting what is happening in our neighborhoods.”
The 2019 shooting occurred in a grocery store parking lot in Antioch, after an ICE agent fired at a 39-year-old Mexican man who was allegedly trying to flee an immigration arrest. He survived and was later indicted for illegally re-entering the U.S. after being previously deported following domestic violence charges.
Since Trump has taken office, though, ICE operations have expanded to include many people without any criminal history, despite the administration’s claim to prioritize dangerous individuals. Less than half of the people detained in the agency’s May operation in Nashville had a criminal record. A report from the Deportation Data Project showed that undocumented immigrants with no criminal record made up around a third of all ICE arrests through the first nine months of Trump’s second term.
Salomon, the advocate who would also speak later at Centennial Park, told the crowd outside the Nashville ICE field office that the agency was “criminalizing and hunting our neighbors, people who have suffered persecution in their home countries and are now being hunted by the same country that once gave them refuge.”
Another man who declined to give his name said he’d come to the gathering because he felt there needed to be “as much light as possible” on Good’s killing and ICE’s conduct in general. He wore a sweatshirt that read “Raised by Immigrants: We are the dreams they turned real.” As a worker in the construction industry, he said he’s seen the effects of the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts.
“I deal with a lot of subcontractors, a lot of the labor force, and they’re scared,” he said. “There’s been a lot of times when I’ve gone to pick up vehicles at job sites because they left them there and found a different way to get home. They’ll leave halfway through the job, scared because of the activity in the area.”
As the people who had gathered for the morning vigil made their way back to their cars, Jesus Ruiz walked with his 6-year-old son. Around the boy’s neck was one of the whistles organizers had given out, as they have become a popular way to warn community members about the presence of ICE agents. Ruiz said he felt it was important for his son to see “the community to show up and make their voices heard against injustice.” But he had other reasons for attending the gathering. Ruiz grew up in Maricopa County, Arizona under Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s notoriously harsh anti-immigrant policies and he also used to work at the Department of Homeland Security.
“For me, not only is it personal as a son of immigrants and first generation citizen of this country, I’ve also seen it from within,” he said.
Before quitting in 2020, Ruiz said he was an asylum officer at DHS, interviewing migrants seeking refuge in the U.S. The people he interviewed, he said, would tell him about how they were mistreated by ICE agents and officers at detention facilities. He said he also saw what it did to young people who joined the agency with good intentions or because they needed a good-paying job. Many of them, he said, were military veterans who had done tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He had some empathy for them, he said, “once you’re doing active harm to people, that’s when it becomes unsustainable.”
This article first appeared on Nashville Banner and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
