LGBTQ+ ally, actress Julia Roberts, delivered a beautiful tribute to Renee Nicole Good — the 37-year-old queer mother of three in Minneapolis, Minnesota, whose killing by a federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer last January began a national outcry against the current president’s anti-immigrant regime — while talking at Rise Up, Sing Out: A Concert for the First Amendment. The event, held at The Town Hall in New York City, was an occasion “for people around the country to stand up to authoritarian shifts threatening our democracy today,” according to Broadway World. 

Roberts spoke alongside other allies like Jane Fonda, Bette Midler, and Joy Reid and alongside LGBTQ+ entertainers such as sexually fluid actress Tessa Thompson, gay musician Rufus Wainwright, gay actor Wilson Cruz, transgender Drag Race alumn Peppermint, and queer Native American actor Lily Gladstone. The event’s ticket sales and donations benefitted the Committee for the First Amendment, an advocacy collective relaunched by Jane Fonda that seeks to defend free expression against government repression, industry complicity, and intimidation.

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“Renee Nicole Good is not a symbol,” Roberts said at the event. “She is an American woman, a queer woman who was doing the very best she could do to be good in an unjust world.”

“I am honored to celebrate her life and her legacy tonight,” Roberts added, “because the life she gave is our responsibility to carry.” Roberts then read the poem “For Renee Nicole Good Killed by I.C.E. on January 7, 2026,” written by Amanda Gorman, the first U.S. National Youth Poet Laureate.

The poem They say she is no more, That there her absence roars, Blood-blown like a rose. Iced wheels flinched & froze. Now, bare riot of candles, Dark fury of flowers, Pure howling of hymns. If for us she arose, Somewhere, in the pitched deep of our grief, Crouches our power, The howl where we begin, Straining upon the edge of the crooked crater Of the worst of what we’ve been. Change is only possible, & all the greater, When the labour & bitter anger of our neighbors Is moved by the love  & better angels of our nature. What they call death & void, We know is breath & voice;  In the end, gorgeously,  Endures our enormity.  You could believe departed to be the dawn When the blank night has so long stood. But our bright-fled angels will never be fully gone, When they forever are so fiercely Good.

Also invoking Good during the event, Thompson said, “Minnesota was a battleground again after ICE murdered Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good, and again I was filled with despair and rage. But what was most heartbreaking and most enraging at the time about the murders was how unsurprising they were to me as a Black American.” 

“There is a kind of bone-tired exhaustion in fighting the battles that we have fought so many times before, in insisting time and time again, generation after generation, that people have the right to exist, even if they speak out against the state…. but the people had the power to protect one another, and the people refused to let Renee Good and Alex Pretti’s murders intimidate them into inaction,” Thompson added.

“The collective became the hope. That community care is why my reservoir of optimism has not yet run dry. I felt it then, and I feel it now in this room together tonight,” she concluded. “So, it’s our job, even and especially in the face of despair, to keep that hope alive.”

Gladstone also expressed similar feelings of exhaustion, albeit from a Native American perspective.

“For many Americans, this era of division, of stolen speech, broken promises, families torn apart, of risking all you have for the simple right to exist as you are, this may feel unprecedented. You may think, ‘How did we get here?’” Gladstone said. “For the First Peoples of this land, unfortunately, this has been ongoing since the birth of this country as we know it today. So, perhaps the question then is not, ‘How did we get here?’ It’s, ‘How are we still here?’ and maybe more importantly, ‘How do we move forward?’”

Speaking about the current presidential administration’s removal of rainbow crosswalks nationwide (but particularly in San Antonio, Texas), Cruz said, “When the governor of Texas [Republican Greg Abbott] clicked his little boot spurs and had all the rainbow crosswalks painted over, activists grabbed their brushes and painted the sidewalks instead, because that’s what we do.”

“It goes to show: if you lower our flags, we will raise them back up, baby. You can paint over our rainbows, but we’ll paint an even brighter one to lead the way,” Wilson said. 

“I want to remind you that this is Pride Month in America” he continued. “And while we are very, very proud, this year, our rainbow flag is battle-worn.” He then noted that the current presidential administration tried to remove the Pride flag from the National Memorial of the Stonewall Uprising, but, Cruz noted, “It was only returned when activists brought it back themselves.”

Speaking about the plight of trans Americans under the current administration, Peppermint said, “We live in a time where that spotlight is dangerous for so many trans Americans. Trans children who should be living openly in their truth are intimidated by a government that cares more about censoring their bodies than feeding them. A government more concerned with what school sports they can play than whether or not those very schools are properly funded.”

“These attacks on the trans community, they serve as a distraction from the immense hoarding of wealth and resources by billionaires and now trillionaires, a distraction from the failures of this government to protect its people instead of harming them, and these discriminatory attacks on the trans community also distract us from the very lopsided rate of anti-trans violence and murder that way too many trans people have fallen victim to,” she continued.

Peppermint said that 11 trans people have been murdered in the past three months in the U.S. country, adding, “and I’ve not seen a single word about it on the news.” 

“I grew up during a time when transness wasn’t recognized or talked about, and yet here I am, baby,” she said, “having experienced things most people, let alone trans people, don’t get to experience. And still I recognize my privilege in just simply surviving and being out and proudly trans.”

Reid blasted the current administration’s censorious policies against TV journalists, and said, “It’s not just journalists: Jimmy Kimmel [was] suspendeduntil the people rose up to put him back on the air. The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, fired after more than 30 years, that show was on the air because a certain orange a**hole, whose name is no longer on the Kennedy Center, cannot take a joke.”

Reid then noted, “Brandon Carr, the man who wrote the blueprint to dismantle the FCC in Project 2025 is now running it, and added, “He is weaponizing the agency to bully and control the press and suppress the wider televised media.”

She then listed off journalists who have recently lost their jobs or been persecuted: “Jim Acosta out at CNN, Karen Attiah fired from The Washington Post, and me more than a year ago. All of us shown the door for just doing our jobs, standing up to the administration, and in my case also for speaking out against the genocide.”

She continued, “Don Lemon arrested, Georgia Fort arrested, Terry Moran fired from ABC, Scott Pelley fired from CBS by the clique of far-right ideologues who bought it and handed it over to a zealot named Bari Weiss, who may … soon also control CNN.”

“Pelley, one of the most trusted voices in news from what was the most trusted news program in America. 60 Minutes, he told The New York Times, and I quote, ‘CBS News is on fire.’ …But as excited as I am to be on this stage, I also understand the stakes in the assignment, because the threat is not coming, friends — it is here.”

Pro-LGBTQ+ children’s entertainer Ms. Rachel spoke out against “thecruel policies of family detention and family separation,” saying ” the American Academy of Pediatrics says, there is no safe amount of time for a child to be in detention.”

She met a 10-year-old boy who had been held at the Dilley Immigration Detention Center in southwest Texas. “He was begging for help to get out of what we know is a family prison, a prison that is neglecting, abusing, and traumatizing kids.”