A WoMN stopped an unprovoked ICE assault with her voice

Kelly - I Could Be Your Mother

What you are about to read is an excerpt from WOMN, a collaborative effort of the women of Minnesota who kept showing up during Operation Metro Surge, holding the grief, the rage, the tenderness, and the fierce love that women know so well.

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***Trigger Warning - this excerpt depicts a physical assault, so if you need to take a breath, grab a weighted blanket, or come back to it when you’re steadier, please do that first. You can also skip it. I have other stories coming that aren’t so raw.***

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“I’m not mad at you, dude.”
~Renee Nicole Good’s last words
before being shot three times
by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, MN
on January 7, 2026

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Use of Force Voice

Something happened to the women in Minnesota when Renee Good died.

Operation Metro Surge had been on the streets of Minnesota for just over a month. ICE presence in the Twin Cities increased from 150 agents to over 3000 agents, twenty times bigger, and triple the size of the Minneapolis police force. On January 7, 2026, Renee Nicole Good, a peaceful protestor, was shot three times and killed by an ICE agent.

The women of Minnesota watched that video, and the multiple angles of it, over and over and over again. We couldn’t not watch it. We couldn’t look away because that felt like abandonment. Watching Renee’s death was a way of loving her, if even just through a mobile phone screen. It was our way of honoring her and absorbing her life force into us.

“I’m not mad at you, dude.”

That nervous little laugh she gave — we know that laugh. We’ve all made that laugh that says “I’m okay” even when we’re not sure we are. We add the chuckle to keep the temperature of an intense situation down while our hearts are hammering.

Usually, that little half-laugh works. But that day, for Renee, it didn’t.

We imagined ourselves facing ICE in our own ways, because it could happen. And, we have a duty to live up to Renee’s courage and memory.

ICE agents were everywhere in those early days of January 2026, in grocery store parking lots, at school bus stops, in caravans of three or more SUVs with overly dark windows and no front license plates driving through our neighborhood streets, and staged in the parking lots of our the parks where our children play on swingsets and jungle gyms.

We kept going grocery shopping, and walking our dogs, and feeding our sourdough starters. When ICE showed up in the center of our everyday lives, we found out what our voices could do.

Kelly

“What are you doing? I could be your mother. I’m just going grocery shopping.”

Kelly said this from the pavement of a Target parking lot in bitter January with a masked man’s full body weight on top of her.

“Bitch, what are you looking at?”

That’s how it started.

There were a bunch of ICE agents at the store entrance, but Kelly wasn’t paying attention to them. Healing from a broken pelvis seven weeks earlier, she was focused entirely on walking on icy pavement. She wasn’t even sure he was talking to her.

He just stomped right up to her, grabbed her arm, and threw her to the ground. Her head hit the pavement hard enough to cause a concussion as he straddled her and tried to punch her in the face.

But, Kelly grew up with Abuse as a sibling in her home. Her body has kept the score since she was four years old, and her nervous system has a full catalog and reference manual for every shift in weight and micro-facial-expression that precedes assault.

She looked up at him, this masked man wearing camo gear, ICE prominently displayed on his chest, a gun on his hip. He had a look in his eye that was two red-tones darker than human. She’d already turned her head the instant his fist was set to land on her face. His punch grazed her cheek and ear instead.

All the textbook stress responses—fight, flight, freeze, and fawn—would have failed her. With a cracked pelvis still healing, she couldn’t fight. Pinned underneath him, she couldn’t flee. Her history as a survivor had taught her that freezing often led to worse injuries. And, Kelly knew fawning from the inside. It’s Stockholm Syndrome on steroids: make yourself smaller, read the danger, say the soothing thing, do whatever keeps the pain from getting worse. She had survived that way before. But not here. This man wanted to feed on her fear, and fawning would only have confirmed the submission he was trying to beat into her.

Instead, she went underneath all of it, to the place inside him where he was still somebody’s child. She channeled the voice of the Divine Mother—a primal frequency. Educated in the grammar and rhythm and punctuation of male violence, Kelly knew how to tug on the thread of humanness with the only tool he could not take from her: her voice.

“I could be your mother.”

Something in his eyes clicked off for a moment, and he pushed off of her.

She had found the thread with nothing but her voice and everything she had survived. Just like Renee did, Kelly used her voice.

Unlike Renee, Kelly’s word-spell worked.

This is an excerpt from WOMN — a book about the women of Minnesota and what Operation Metro Surge made of us.

It’s a mutual aid effort — written by us, for us, moving hand to hand the way love does when it’s real. New excerpts will be released as I write them, every Tuesday, here on Fierce Love. When the manuscript is complete, I plan to release it the grassroots way. Self-published, and supported by grief at grounding community gathering events and independent bookstores.

If this chapter found you, it found you for a reason.

If you want to support this effort, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Paid subscribers will receive full chapters (not just excerpts) with my author’s commentary about my process and experience at least once a month. The first paid post will publish this Thursday, April 16, 2026.

Fierce Love is a community space, and your voice belongs here just as much as any story I publish.

If Kelly’s story touched you, please add your voice by sharing in the comments. Tell us what it stirred. Share with us what it woke up inside you. Tell us about the WOMN in you that recognized herself here. Respond to the other stories commented here.

I’m listening. We all are.

That’s how we work.

I love you fiercely,

TeriLeigh 💜