Confronting I.C.E. & Police Violence: “Interest Convergence” at the Inflection Point

Most people with access to a TV, computer, or cell phone have seen the chilling images of an armed masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in Minneapolis on January 7, 2026, shoot three times at point-blank range into the body of a 37-year-old U.S. citizen and mother of three, Renee Nicole Good, killing her as she was attempting to very slowly move her car away from an ICE operation. The video taken by another onlooker clearly shows that she was turning her car away from the officer in question.

Immediately following the shooting, chief federal officials, including President Donald Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of Homeland so-called “Security” Kristi Noem, and FBI Director Kash Patel all released statements labeling Renee Nicole Good as a “domestic terrorist,” or a “violent rioter,” or a “professional agitator” even though Renee’s final words to the I.C.E. officer were “I am not mad at you.”

Contrary to the clear evidence from recorded videos and from people on the ground, the Trump administration has argued that she had “weaponize[d] her vehicle to run over an officer even when most on-site videos do not confirm this and before any in-depth investigation had been conducted.

An independent private autopsy of Nicole, released January 21, determined that she was shot three times, with the fatal shot going into her skull, through her brain, and existing on the other side of her head. Other bullets struck her left forearm and right breast.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, under Secretary Kristi Noam, has become the Department of Surveillance and Rounding Up or the Department of Gestapo North America. Through I.C.E., it functions as a data collection and enforcement agency to hunt, surveille, arrest, and deport anyone with brown or black skin or who speaks Spanish: whether they are official U.S. citizens, or whether they are undocumented and have never committed any criminal offenses

Donald Trump and his Secretary of Supermasculinity (a.k.a. War) Pete Hegseth, have seriously lowered the standards of service for ICE officers and have reduced their training from the traditional 14 weeks to only six or less weeks, which is less time than the average training for people to work at the Cheesecake Factory.

Trump has ordered unidentified and masked (primarily) men, and has substantially increased funding and expanded resources, the scope, and the number of I.C.E. officers throughout the country. They have acted in ways that have contradicted Trump’s promise of arresting “the worst of the worst” undocumented immigrants who had committed criminal offences.

I.C.E. officers have, instead, often arrested, detained, and disappeared people who have not committed crimes, some U.S. citizens, and have deported them to U.S. detentions centers often far from their homes – including children as young a 5-years-old and even infants — or have flown them to foreign authoritarian countries not of their birth without due process of law.

Due to the enormous pushback by political commentators and by the public, the administration has attempted to walk back some of its clearly misleading and outrageously false allegations over the events on January 7. President Trump, being the narcissist that he is, changed his depiction of Renee as a “domestic terrorist” to her killing being “a tragedy” when he learned that Renee’s father is a Trump supporter and voted for him.

And when questioned by reporters at a press conference in Minneapolis on January 22, J.D. Vance admitted that “some mistakes” have been made during the ICE operations.

While the President still retains about half of those polled approving his actions on the southern border, recent studies show that Donald Trump’s approval rating has plummeted on all major political issues and, in particular, his key signature issue of immigration enforcement by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

A New York Times survey shows 58% of voters disapprove of his handling of immigration, while only 40% approve. On the issue of ICE’s handling of deportations, according to Siena Research Institute and Politico, the agency’s tactics have gone too far by 61% to 71% depending on the study.

Donald Trump and his administration’s policies and actions throughout his first year of his second term have generated some of the largest mass protest demonstrations ever recorded in U.S. history.

The recent murder of Renee Nicole Good makes it clear what people of color have always understood: that any one of us could be next! Whiteness will not save white people as they once might have believed.

Another Inflection Point:

Another key inflection point for people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds occurred on May 25, 2020, also in Minneapolis and only seven blocks away from Renee’s murder. An observer also recorded and released a cell phone video, this time exposing the brutal inhumane execution of George Floyd, an unarmed black man by three Minneapolis police officers. One of the officers, Derek Chauvin, pressed his knee on Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 43 seconds while Floyd gasped repeatedly “I can’t breathe.”

The video provoked public outrage throughout the U.S. and other countries across the world, exciting a mass confrontation of our collective longstanding systems of institutional and societal racism?

Throughout the decades, though, we have seen videos of police brutalizing people of color and specifically black people in incidents of racism: children sprayed with the full force of police water cannons during the 1960s, the terrifying attack by Los Angeles police officers on Rodney King, the killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Erick Garner on Staten Island, Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Walter Scott in North Charleston, Laquan McDonald in Chicago, Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Philando Castile in St. Paul, Stephon Clark in Sacramento to name only a few.

The visualization of the realities of systemic racism have had a profound impact on mass movements for social change during the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s through the 1970s forward, and on the momentous Black Lives Matter movement. More recently, massive numbers are showing up for the spontaneous and for the organized “Hands Off,” “No Kings,” and “I.C.E. Out” protest rallies.

While people of color do not need to be reminded of the impact of racism on their lives on a daily basis, during the last decade or so, white people have come out in increasingly large numbers to protest in solidarity?

Possibly the senseless murder of George Floyd in all its graphic details was the proverbial “straw” that broke white people’s denial of the profound legacy of racism. Possibly it was the incident that exposed the myth, the lie of the “bad apple” theory of one or two bad police officers or departments being the problem? Possibly watching the brutality by George Floyd layered on top of all the other incidents brought white people to that critical mass of understanding.

Maybe because so many white people were seated around their television screens while practicing social distancing during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic exposed them sufficiently to the horrors of racism for them to take a stand.

Or maybe, just maybe, it is something more. Maybe they believed that it is in their own self interest to speak up, to march, to challenge racism on the individual, institutional, and larger societal levels.

And what could be white people’s self-interest?

Well, for one, maybe white people saw in the treatment of George Floyd and now with Renee Nicole Good their own fears of being mistreated by police or I.C.E. Or possibly many may realize that they lose a piece of their humanity, integrity, and self-worth whenever they fail to intervene.

They may also realize that racism comes between people by destroying friendships and family relationships. It also perennially exposes to the world that the United States still has a very long way to go to ensure the “freedom and liberty” it has promised ever since Thomas Jefferson penned his words declaring:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

White people could also be coming to an understanding that racism makes bad economic sense for large corporations and smaller businesses alike by restricting or limiting potential markets and customers. For example, some corporations like Coca-Cola, Verizon, and Unilever dropped their advertising from social media platforms such as Facebook and X because of hate speech, and overt and more subtle “dog whistle” forms of racism.

Interest Convergence

The late Dr. Derrick Bell of New York University Law School forwarded the theory of “interest convergence,” meaning that white people will support racial justice only when they understand and see that there is something in it for them, when there is a “convergence” between the interests of white people and racial justice.

Bell asserted that the Supreme Court ended the longstanding policy in 1954 of “separate but equal” in Brown v. Board of Education because it presented to the world, and in particular, to the Soviet Union during the height of the cold war, a United States that supported civil and human rights.

Let’s take another example: the Church of Latter Day Saints (LDS) president, Brigham Young, instituted a policy on February 13, 1849, emanating from “divine revelation” and continuing until as recently as 1978 forbidding ordination of black men of African descent from the ranks of LDS priesthood.

This policy prohibited black men and women from participating in the temple Endowment and sealings, which the Church requires for the highest degree of salvation. The policy likewise restricted black people from attending or participating in temple marriages.

Young attributed this restriction to the sin of Cain, Adam and Eve’s eldest son, who killed his brother Abel: “What chance is there for the redemption of the Negro?,” stated Young in 1849 following declaration of his restrictive policy. “The Lord had cursed Cain’s seed with blackness and prohibited them the Priesthood.”

The twelfth LDS Church president, Spencer W. Kimball, who served from 1973 to his death in 1985, was supposedly touched with a vision, and he reversed the ban, referring to it as “the long-promised day.”

Well, we can ask today whether “revelation” or interest conversion was the determining factor in granting black people full membership rights in the Church at a time of ongoing and heightened civil rights activities in the United States and an increase in LDS missionary recruitment efforts throughout the African continent.

In another example, the issue of slavery became a lightning rod in the 1840s among members of the Baptist General Convention, and in May 1845, 310 delegates from the Southern states convened in Augusta, Georgia to organize a separate Southern Baptist Convention on a pro-slavery plank. They asserted that to be a “good Christian,” one had to support the institution of slavery and could not join the ranks of the abolitionists.

Well, again, whether by divine inspiration or interest convergence stemming from political pressure and shrinking church membership, 150 years later in June 1995, the SBC reversed its position and officially apologized to African Americans for its support and collusion with the institution of slavery (regarding it now as an “original sin”), and also apologizing for its support of “Jim Crow” laws and its rejection of civil rights initiatives of the 1950s and 1960s.

Oppressed & Hurt

Frederick Douglass, who escaped enslavement and worked for the cause of liberation for the remainder of his life, described the dehumanizing effects of slavery not on the enslaved alone, but also on white slavers whose position to slavery corrupted their humanity.

While the social conditions of Douglass’s time were very different from today, nonetheless, Douglass’s words hold meaning by analogy: “No man can put a chain about the ankle of another man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.”

It cannot be denied that racism has served white people by affording them great advantages and privilege throughout the centuries. Eventually, however, systemic racism has backfired, and the chain has taken hold of them.

Therefore, within the numerous forms of oppression, members of subordinate (sometimes called “minoritized”) groups are oppressed, while on many levels, members of the dominant groups are hurt. Although the effects of oppression differ qualitatively for specific subordinate and dominant groups, in the end everyone loses.

The meaning is quite clear: When any group of people is targeted for oppression, it is ultimately everyone’s concern. We all, therefore, have a self-interest in actively working to dismantle all the many forms of oppression, including racism.

I believe we are all born into an environment polluted by racism (among all the many forms of oppression), which fall upon us like acid rain. For some people, spirits are tarnished to the core, others are marred on the surface, and no one is completely protected.

Therefore, we all have a responsibility, indeed an opportunity, to join together to construct protective shelters from the corrosive effects of racism while working to clean up the racist environment in which we live. Once we take sufficient steps to reduce this pollution, we will all breathe a lot more easily.

No one ever again will have to plead “I am not mad at you” before being shot, and “I can’t breathe” at the hands (and knees) of I.C.E and police officers.