An American mother of three who was shot dead by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in Minneapolis in shocking and disputed circumstances was a prize-winning poet, it has emerged. Renee Nicole Macklin Good, who was described as engaging “in an act of domestic terrorism” by the US homeland security secretary Kristi Noem, studied creative writing at Old Dominion University in Virginia, according to a post on the school’s English department Facebook page.

While at Old Dominion, she won an Academy of American Poets prize in 2020 for a poem titled ‘On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs’. The poem is being shared widely on social media.

The Guardian reported that President Donald Trump spoke with the New York Times after news of the shooting and said that Macklin Good “behaved horribly”. 

It added that multiple angles of the shooting show her reversing her car and letting at least one ICE vehicle pass before an officer tells her to get out of the car. She then tries to turn and drive away. The agent shoots her several times, remains on his feet and walks away apparently uninjured as her car crashes into a lamp-post and parked vehicle.

The US vice-president, JD Vance, said that the dead woman was part of a “leftwing network” of people trying to “incite violence against our law enforcement officers”. He told a White House press briefing that the young mother was “a victim of leftwing ideology” and had been “brainwashed”.