In Liberty Plaza, a group of Ann Arbor residents gathered on what would otherwise have been an ordinary Friday night. They raised candles, phone flashlights and signs, and heard poems from members of the community. If things had gone differently hundreds of miles away, this night may have been completely different.
On Jan 7. 2026, Rene Nicole Good, in a video that has widely circulated on social media, was parked perpendicular to the street when she was approached by agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). ICE, an organization that is part of the United States Department of Homeland Security and is responsible for enforcing immigration law, appeared to approach Good’s vehicle. After a verbal confrontation with the agents, Jonathan Ross, who was at the front of Good’s vehicle, shot Good three times. This caused her to crash her vehicle.
Axel Vens is a 17-year-old high school student who attends the Early College Alliance program at Eastern Michigan University. Vens attended the vigil in support of Good. Vens’s mother was also participating in the event as a Marshall, helping organize the event.
“It keeps happening, and the fact that it was in broad daylight is especially scary, because it’s like there were many witnesses,” Vens said. “There is a very clear feeling of no repercussions for the actions of people in power. A scary amount of not being ashamed of killing someone, which feels bad.”
The crowd slowly grew over the course of the evening. For Vens, it was good to have a sense of community amidst the tragedy.
“I’m here because there are a lot of things happening in the country, and I’m scared. It’s better to be scared with other people who are scared,” Vens said. “It’s nice to have a sense of community instead of being in the dark.”
Thirty minutes into the vigil, the crowd steadily increased. One of the organizers spoke about Good’s life. Good was a 37-year-old mother of three, as well as a poet. Then two members of the community read poems describing their feelings.
The first poem was inspired by a poem written by Good. The poem won a prize from the American Academy of Poets and is named after the first line of that poem. “I want my rocking chair back.”
Jeff Kass, a teacher at Pioneer High School was the one who read it to the crowd that night. “When I read that as the first line of her poem, it immediately made me think of rocking chairs being a symbol of peace, of serenity, freedom, and the ability to just relax. That was taken away from her, and it’s being taken away from all of us. So I was trying to write something that would be a call to arms, to give up our comfort and safety when other people are being forced to do that.”
Since 1997, Kass has been an English teacher at Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor. He was horrified at the videos of the incident and was contacted by local poet and former CHS teacher Ellen Stone to read a poem at the vigil.
Kass was not only horrified by what happened to Good in Minneapolis but also by what has been happening across the country. He suspected that something like this was going to happen: ICE agents fatally shooting someone in broad daylight. For Kass, this was an inevitable outcome of increased ICE presence. It is not the country that Kass wants to live in and wanted to speak at the vigil in order to share in his grief.
The mood was overall optimistic about the event itself, if not the state of our country. At the same time, Kass believes that these kinds of events should do more to convince people about the gravity of the situation.
“I think it’s wonderful that so many people from Ann Arbor attended, but we’re preaching to the choir,” Kass said. “We need to go preach to the people who don’t necessarily think the way that most people in Ann Arbor do.”
In the aftermath of Good’s death, the protests inspired by her death and by anti-ICE sentiment have become a major focal point for the country. The protests that resulted from her death have also inspired anti-ICE protests in Ann Arbor, including one organized by CHS students.
