I did not expect today to be the day. We always knew, but today was a like any other day until it wasn’t. I have a hard time with this.

We have always known the danger. Anyone who documents power up close does. Anyone who follows enforcement knows the risk is not theoretical. But knowing something intellectually is different from watching it cross the line into finality.

Renee Nicole Good was an observer.

She paid attention. She bore witness. She watched people with authority operate in public and understood that sunlight is one of the few tools civilians still have. That is not provocation. That is not interference. That is democracy in its most fragile form.

Today, that line between observing and surviving collapsed. It shook the ground.

This work has never been safe but today stripped away any remaining illusion that it was merely uncomfortable for most. Merely a chance of a minor inconvenience.

Following ICE, documenting them, recording patterns, routes, behavior, escalation, is now undeniably life-threatening. Today was the day it was no longer theory, but a reality.

Those of us close to this work have seen the consequences up close. We have seen families forced to move with little notice. We have seen people lose housing, stability, and access to basic services overnight. We have watched communities scramble to keep each other safe when the system turns hostile.

That closeness changes how clearly you see the risk. This is not distant analysis. It is lived reality, repeated often enough that no one involved mistakes it for abstraction.

We document because history demands a record. We help where we can because people cannot wait for justice to arrive before they need to survive. They cannot wait the years it takes to correct what has been broken.

What we are witnessing in this era is not a series of isolated incidents. It is a structure. It is an apparatus that normalizes force, dehumanization, and secrecy while punishing anyone who refuses to look away. History has names for periods like this. None of them are kind.

Calling it what it is matters.

This was not a tragedy born of confusion. It was not an accident. It was not an unfortunate outcome of chaos. It was the predictable result of an enforcement culture that treats presence as threat and accountability as hostility.

It was a murder.

Renee did not disappear into statistics. She did not vanish into a footnote. She was a person who chose to witness, and that choice cost her her life. That should stop us all cold.

We all saw the videos, every angle, every action. We have all read the details by now and feel as if we know Renee personally.

For those of us who do this work, today redraws the map. The danger is clearer. The stakes are higher. The cost is no longer abstract.

And yet, the need to document has not diminished. It has intensified. Because when power becomes afraid of being seen, it becomes lethal. And when people are being hunted, looking away is not neutrality.

We will grieve and we will carry this, all of us. And we will remember Renee not as a symbol, but as a person who stood where history demanded someone stand.

“For the GOOD of all things.”