Al-Awda, the Palestine Right to Return Coalition, condemns in the strongest possible terms the murder of Renee Good by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in Minneapolis. This killing is not an isolated tragedy, but part of a wider system of state violence, racialized repression, and contempt for human life that stretches from occupied Palestine to migrant, Black, Indigenous, Arab, Muslim and working-class communities across the United States. We are particularly aware that her murder comes as part of a full-fledged state-sponsored racist assault on the Somali community in particular in Minneapolis, targeting Somalis as Black people, Arabs and Muslims at the same time that the U.S. and “Israel” are attempting to divide Somalia itself.
We mourn Renee Good, who was attending the protest against the ICE assault as a legal observer, and stand in solidarity with her family, loved ones, and community, who are once again forced to confront the lethal consequences of militarized police forces operating with near-total impunity – in the same city where George Floyd was murdered, less than six years later. The expansion of ICE, its routine and public display of state violence, and its treatment of human beings as disposable objects of enforcement are a direct reflection of a political system that has abandoned any pretense of respect for human rights or the rule of law. Of course, there is nothing new about U.S. violence, routinely exercised both abroad and against internally colonized peoples, as the primary mechanism of imperialist extraction of wealth and the theft of lives, futures, and human dignity.
While Renee Good was a U.S. citizen standing against ICE injustice, too many lives have already been taken by ICE; in 2025 alone, 32 people died in its custody – in addition to the murder of Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez, a Mexican resident of Chicago, shot dead by ICE agents in September, and Keith Porter, Jr., a Black man, also a U.S. citizen, killed by an off-duty ICE agent during a New Year’s Eve celebration in Los Angeles. The targeting of migrant communities inside the United States is combined with a hybrid war on the nations and peoples of the world, from Venezuela to Somalia to Palestine, including forced migration and displacement. Our Arab, Muslim and Palestinian communities are particularly so targeted, as the U.S. denies visas to all carrying Palestinian passports at the same time it arms, funds and directs forced displacement, ethnic cleansing and genocide inside occupied Palestine, and as Palestinian youth like Leqaa Kordia remain locked up in immigration detention. We demand their immediate release.
This killing must also be understood in the broader context of the long-standing and intensifying U.S.–”Israeli” security alliance, often described as the “deadly exchange.” This alliance is not merely a matter of shared tactics or training, but of shared ideology and interests: normalizing collective punishment, racial profiling, militarized borders, surveillance, and the routine killing of those deemed expendable. It is an alliance that treats certain lives as obstacles to be managed, removed, or eliminated, and routinely lies and manufactures pretexts seeking to justify the most abhorrent of crimes.
The U.S.–Zionist security partnership represents a shared architecture of imperialist repression, one that has been developed through decades of colonial domination, occupation, and counter-insurgency. The same system responsible for genocide, starvation, and mass displacement in Gaza also enables the daily violence of policing, surveillance and targeting of oppressed communities, and incarceration inside the United States. The impunity given to racist police – and now, ICE officers – mirrors that demanded for Benjamin Netanyahu, Yoav Gallant and their fellow war criminals, with the long arm of U.S. sanctions being used against international courts seeking any form of accountability for genocide.
The U.S.-Zionist genocide in Gaza and throughout Palestine has laid bare the total moral and legal collapse of the imperial order. International law has been shredded in real time, first and foremost in Gaza, and civilian life is rendered meaningless as entire populations are declared “legitimate targets.” In the imperial core, police and immigration agencies operate with ever-more flagrant brutality, granted the same impunity amid escalating “war on terror” rhetoric.
From Gaza to Caracas to Minneapolis, the crimes of U.S. imperialism are escalating, even as U.S. President Donald Trump and his officials blatantly declare their commitment to violent repression, resource theft, and genocidal colonialism. This comes only days after the U.S. violently attacked Venezuela and kidnapped its legitimate president, Nicolas Maduro Moros and his wife, Cilia Flores, while boasting of stealing its resources and extracting its financial revenues.
Al-Awda PRRC reaffirms that the struggle for Palestinian liberation is inseparable from the struggle against racism, militarism, border violence, and state terror, especially in the United States, which is responsible for funding and, indeed, directing, the ongoing genocide against our people in Palestine, as well as continuing to threaten and attack Lebanon, Yemen and Iran.
We call on all people of conscience to take action against ICE in our communities, to reject the U.S.–Israeli “deadly exchange” across borders, to confront the genocide in Gaza and throughout occupied Palestine, and to take to the streets in protest for human dignity, liberation, and the right of all peoples to live free from imperialism.
From the river to the sea, and from the streets of the United States to the communes of Venezuela to the besieged neighborhoods of Gaza, our struggles are connected — and so must be our resistance.
Al-Awda, the Palestine Right to Return Coalition
