A 'Kent State Moment'—When Power Gaslights What We Can all See With Our Own Eyes, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

 A 'Kent State Moment'—When Power Gaslights What We Can all See With Our Own Eyes

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

January 10, 2026

There are moments in this nation’s history when what the powerful say is so transparently opposed to what any reasonable person can see—with their own eyes, with their own conscience—that we must call it what it is.

This is one of those moments.

Renee Nicole Good should still be alive.

Renee Nicole Good

She was a 37-year-old mother and an award-winning poet, driving with her
partner shortly after dropping off her child at school in Minneapolis when an ICE agent fired—killing her (Bjornson, 2026). 

Video footage and eyewitness accounts suggest she was not charging anyone, not wielding a weapon, not threatening lethal harm. Instead, the footage shows a woman who moments before being shot said, “I’m not mad at you,” revealing a human being clinging to peace even as violence unfolded.

Accordingly, I encourage you to see the video from the perspective of the ICE agents posted by The Guardian to witness a peaceful Renee Good with one of the two cops who then calls her a "f-ing bitch" right before she was shot in the face one or more times and summarily killed (Vargas, 2026).

But instead of truth, we are being offered something far worse: denial dressed up as an official story. How deeply offensive.

Kristi Noem

In the hours and days after Renee’s death, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance rushed forward with sharp, self-serving narratives about self-defense and “domestic terrorism.” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem issued a premature, a priori conclusion—declaring Renee a threat before facts, investigations, or even basic accountability have been offered. 

And what's with the get-up? Wearing an over-sized cowboy hat worn for a photo op, jarringly out of step with the gravity of the moment. Even her eyes were hidden—mirroring masked ICE agents whose anonymity shields their violence from accountability.

This is not leadership. This is gaslighting.

Gaslighting isn’t merely lying. It is attempting to make the public distrust its own senses—its own basic moral compass. It insists that what feels wrong, what looks wrong, and what is wrong is somehow righteous, necessary, inevitable—or something else altogether.

This is why this moment feels like a Kent State moment.

Kent State was not only the killing of four students by the National Guard in 1970. It was the lie that followed—the attempt to justify lethal state force against unarmed youth, and then to sanitize that violence into a narrative of necessity. Despite photographs, witnesses, and tears, officials tried to tell the nation that nothing extraordinary had happened—that the pain we saw was a distortion. The lie was worse than the bullets. It asked us to turn away from what history later confirmed was inescapably undeniable.

Because what followed Kent State wasn’t just outrage. It was a breaking point in how Americans saw state power and the stories told to protect it.

That is why I am calling this a Kent State moment.

And I am not alone (e.g., OB Rag, 2026).

What makes this moment especially eerie—almost unbearable in its symmetry—is geography itself. According to The Associated Press, Renee Good was killed about a mile from where Minneapolis police murdered George Floyd in 2020. One mile. Close enough that the memory of that pavement, that breath, that collective trauma still lingers in the city’s air. The distance is short, but the connection is vast—linking the two deaths in public memory as reminders of how easily state violence reappears, even after national reckoning, including promises of reform.

Here at home in Washington, Rep. Jasmine Crockett, herself moved to tears, did what true representatives are supposed to do: she named the human pain this incident has caused and asked those on the other side of the aisle to show something called humanity—to care about a mother who lost her life, a family shattered, and a community outraged. Crockett’s voice broke as she asked: Where is the decency? The courage? The basic heart to acknowledge a life lost, rather than rush to defend federal force?

Her tears were not performative. They were painfully real—so honest they undid me. They became a moral mirror, exposing a political body far more concerned with controlling its story than confronting the searing truth of a mother’s death and a child left orphaned.

And that is the real tragedy here.

Because this was not an abstract policy clash. This was a human being—a wife, a mother, a friend, a neighbor—whose last moments were recorded not as an act of aggression, but as a cry for peace and connection. Her partner’s anguished pain—chasing the car, saying “They shot my wife”—is etched into the conscience of any American who has ever lost someone they loved.

And yet the strongest responses from the federal stage have been attempts to reframe reality instead of confronting it.

To repeat, this is gaslighting. They are telling us what to see, even as the evidence screams otherwise. Power is demanding obedience to a lie.

That is why we must say, clearly: We see what happened. We see the video. We see the pain. We refuse to let a political narrative overwrite what is unmistakably evident.

A Kent State moment is not just a historical comparison. It is a wake-up call. It is a moment of moral reckoning when the state’s attempt to redefine reality collides with the undeniable truth that humans can see with their own eyes and feel in their own hearts.

We should not let this go quietly.

Renee Nicole Good deserves more than euphemism or spin. Her family deserves honesty. And the American public deserves leaders willing to name what is true rather than protect a narrative that defies what we all can plainly see.

This is not just politics. This is conscience.

And we should not pretend it is anything less.

References

Associated Press. (2026, January 7). ICE officer kills a Minneapolis driver in a deadly start to Trump’s latest immigration operation. AP News. https://apnews.com/article/minnesota-immigration-enforcement-shooting-crackdown-surge-173e00fa7388054e98c3b5b9417c1e5a

Bjornson, G. (2026, January 8). Renee Good had just dropped 6-year-old off at school when she encountered ICE. Soon her partner was crying, “They just shot my wife.” People. https://people.com/renee-good-dropped-6-year-old-off-at-school-before-ice-encounter-11881867

OB Rag. (2026, January 8). ICE agent who killed Renee Good needs to be identified, arrested and brought to trial for murder. OB Rag. https://obrag.org/2026/01/ice-agent-who-killed-renee-good-needs-to-be-identified-arrested-and-brought-to-trial-for-murder/

Vargas, R. A. (2026, January 9). Renee Nicole Good said ‘I’m not mad at you’ before ICE agent shot her, video shows. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/09/ice-agent-minneapolis-bodycam-footage

West, A., & Fiorillo, C. (2026, January). Kristi Noem hides face under massive ‘stupid’ cowboy hat as she gives update on ICE shooting. MSN. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/kristi-noem-hides-face-under-massive-stupid-cowboy-hat-as-she-gives-update-on-ice-shooting/ar-AA1TXHXU

Secret Attempted Deportation of Close to 700 Guatemalan Children Blocked by Federal Judge, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Secret Attempted Deportation of Close to 700 Guatemalan Children Blocked by Federal Judge

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

September 1, 2025

Staffers of the Attorney General's Office take the data of relatives outside of the Returnee Reception Center while waiting for the arrival of minors intended to be deported from the United States, at the Guatemalan Air Force Base in Guatemala City on Aug. 31. Johan Ordonez/AFP Getty Images

In a stunning and chilling move over the holiday weekend, the Trump administration attempted to secretly deport hundreds of Guatemalan children—The Guardian reporting as many as 700—loading some onto planes before a federal judge intervened. Justice Sparkle Sooknanan, a Biden appointee, issued a temporary order halting the expulsions, noting that these children were being denied their legal right to seek asylum and risked being sent back to danger. Thanks to the National Immigration Law Center for defending these children's rights.

Attorneys did not mince words: this was child abuse disguised as policy.

Without the judge’s intervention, terrified children would have been expelled in the dead of night, stripped of protections guaranteed under U.S. law.

Of all this administration’s cruelties toward immigrants and its utter disregard for human rights, this stands out as an outlier among outliers. Not just Trump, but advisor Stephen Miller’s fingerprints are smeared across this operation—Miller, whose sadistic obsession with inflicting pain on immigrant families has long driven the administration’s most inhumane policies. 

Critics have even drawn chilling comparisons between Miller and Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s infamous propagandist, noting their shared reliance on fear, lies, and dehumanization as tools of power (Daily Kos, 2017). 

Joseph Goebbels and Stephen Miller.  Source: Daily Kos

Like Goebbels, his uncanny look-alike, Miller, understands that words and images can be weaponized: the relentless portrayal of immigrants as threats, the unending refrain of ‘invasion’ rhetoric, and the poisonous lie that immigrant children are a burden rather than a blessing.

Goebbels used propaganda to normalize the unthinkable; Miller uses policy and spin to achieve the same end—conditioning the public to accept, even rationalize, the abuse of small and young, vulnerable human beings.

What makes this episode even more alarming are the unanswered questions. We still do not know the exact ages of the children targeted—whether toddlers and very young children were among those nearly deported. If so, how many? Nor do we know where they were being held under the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, or in what conditions.

Equally disturbing is the possibility that ICE or U.S. Department of Health and Human Service officials ignored their own legal safeguards. Were attorneys, guardians, or child advocates notified in advance? If not, then the government sought to disappear children into dangerous situations without even the most basic due process protections.

And what of the dangers these children would face if returned? Violence, poverty, persecution—none of this appears to have been meaningfully assessed. Let us not forget: these are children who already managed the treacherous path from Guatemala to the U.S., carrying trauma from violence, displacement, and the long, perilous journey north. To now subject them to sudden deportation only compounds their mental anguish, turning resilience into retraumatization.

Finally, there are questions about whether the Guatemalan government truly requested their return, or whether this claim was exaggerated by the Department of Justice to justify a rushed and unlawful operation.

These children did not—nor have they ever—posed any risks to our country. The only “risks” here are the ones fabricated by a xenophobic administration: the false claim that children are a burden on our schools, that immigrant families undermine our communities, or that asylum seekers threaten national security. These are bogus risks, built on fear and racism, not fact.

We cannot remain silent.

Join us Thursday, September 4th at 5PM for the Austin SDS Rally—UT students standing against the Trump administration’s bigoted and reactionary agenda.

References

Eisner, C. (2025, Aug. 31) Hundreds of unaccompanied Guatemalan children can stay in the U.S. for now, judge says, Morning Edition, NPR. https://www.npr.org/2025/08/31/nx-s1-5524312/federal-judge-block-guatemalan-children-deportation

Guardian. (2025, Aug. 31). Judge orders US to halt deportation of hundreds of Guatemalan children, The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/31/judge-blocks-deportation-guatemalan-children

hammerinhank. (2017, November 5). Trump’s Stephen Miller and Hitler’s Joseph Goebbels are chillingly similar. Daily Kos. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/11/5/1687333/-Trump-s-Stephen-Miller-and-Hitler-s-Joseph-Goebbels-are-chillingly-similar?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Jordan, M. & Kavi, A. (2025, Aug. 31). Judge Halts U.S. Effort to Deport Guatemalan Children as Planes Sit on Tarmac, New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/31/us/politics/trump-deportations-judge-guatemala-children.html