The rise of mass automobility has fueled a culture where tens of thousands of car crash deaths every year are deemed acceptable by the powerful in the interest of keeping cars moving. The killing of Renee Nicole Good, though, offers a disturbing reminder of the other side of that coin: how the powerful can selectively decide that the threat of automotive violence is an acceptable pretext for other kinds of deadly force.
Last week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Minneapolis shot and killed 37-year-old, poet, wife and mom of three children behind the wheel of her SUV. According to video analysis from the New York Times, an ICE officer had reached into Good’s driver’s-side window and attempted to open the door while demanding, “Get out of the fucking car,” after which the motorist attempted to drive away. Before she could, though, a second officer — who had crossed in front of her vehicle while filming her, but was not directly in its path at the time — shot her at close range through her windshield.
Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, though, told reporters that Good had deliberately “weaponize[d] her vehicle, and she attempted to run law enforcement over,” which Noem characterized as “an attempt to kill or to cause bodily harm to agents — an act of domestic terrorism.”
As Vision Zero advocates, it’s rare to hear a powerful government leader decry an act of aggressive driving in this way — and disturbing to hear it in response to what appears, from several separate analyses, not to be an act of aggression at all, but a woman fleeing a crowd of armed, masked men who had reached into her car. More often, we rage at the apathy with which these officials treat traffic violence, which has helped turned the U.S. road into what academics Robert Braun and Richard Randell once called “a space of exception … wherein a constant threat of automobility violence has become a permanent state of normality.”
But as advocates of color have argued for generations, “automobility violence” also includes violence that law enforcement perpetrates against the traveling public — and in many ways, automobility itself can have a disturbing multiplier effect on law enforcement’s justification to kill. Because like the road itself, the car has always been its own “space of exception”: at once a mode of transportation, and, as Noem suggests, a possible weapon.
That inherently violent potential of the car is part of why law enforcement has been granted what some consider such a dangerous level of discretion to search vehicles, in a way they would never be allowed to search homes without a warrant, as Sarah Seo documented in her essential book, “Policing the Open Road.”
That carveout has opened disturbing questions about the line between discretionary and arbitrary policing, especially as some officers have used the slightest hint of probable cause as pretext to search the cars, bikes, and bodies of American travelers. Mobility justice advocates point out that the burden of those searches falls heavily on the unhoused, people of color, and other vulnerable groups, often so much that it becomes tantamount to sustained harassment and surveillance.
If a law enforcement officer believes a driver is threatening the officer’s life, that can easily become a justification for deadly violence. If that belief turns out to have merely been a pretext to use deadly force, courts might sanction the officer — but the victim is still dead. Communities of color know well how often those on-the-fly estimations of probable cause tilt towards outright racism, with people of color more likely to be perceived by cops as a deadly threat even when they are entirely unarmed; George Floyd was killed less than half a mile from where ICE killed Renee Nicole Good.
Even if racist law enforcement officers don’t perceive our bodies to be potential threats, though, they might well fear being killed by the “weaponizable” automobiles so many of us are forced to drive — or at least, to weaponize that very real fear as a pretext for officers to commit deadly gun violence. And in a time when the powerful are increasingly bending reality to stoke paranoia, flood public space with armed agents of the state, and distort collective perceptions of who is a criminal deserving of deadly consequences, we should not be surprised when they do.
Disturbingly, it seems the Trump administration is doing it more than ever before.
Later in her press conference, Noem claimed that “we’ve seen over 100 of these vehicle rammings happen in just recent weeks,” and “four different domestic terrorist attacks on federal officers by the ramming of vehicles” that day alone. (Notably, she did not mention that ICE agents have shot at car drivers that they believed would run them over 10 times in the last four months — including one Illinois shooting that killed Silvero Villegas Gonzalez, a 38 year-old father of two, who, like Good, appeared to be driving away from officers when he was shot.)
“It’s clear that it’s being coordinated,” Noem said of the vehicle-rammings. “People are being trained and told how to use their vehicles to impede law enforcement operations, and then to run over anybody who gets in their way while they go out there and try to disrupt peace and public safety.”
Noem cited no actual evidence of a coordinated effort by any vehicle-ramming radicals.
And while police officers have been vehicle-rammed, there’s little evidence it’s happening at anywhere near the scale she suggests. According to numbers from the FBI’s Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted database, 18 officers were killed in an intentional vehicle ramminsg in the two years between Jan. 1 2024 and Dec. 31, 2025, roughly 17 percent over law enforcement officer deaths. Vehicle ramming attacks that didn’t kill officers, by contrast, were rare enough that they didn’t even get their own category in the FBI’s database, folded instead into the 16.8 percent of assaults that involved some “other” dangerous weapon.
Some might even question the legitimacy of those statistics in light of the swirl of distortions that have surrounded the killing of Renee Good, and the disturbing flexibility of car violence to be reclassified as “accidents” or assaults as benefits the preferred narrative of the powerful.
If we want to get back to reality, we must finally demand real accountability in the “space of exception” that is the American road itself.
