Renee Good: A victim of ICE’s dangerous tactics?

“Renee Good’s final moments were spent in her maroon Honda Pilot, her son’s stuffed animals peeking out from the glove compartment,” said Ray Sanchez in CNN.com. Good, 37, had just dropped her 6-year-old at school last week when she and her wife, Becca Good, stopped their SUV in the middle of a tree-lined street in Minneapolis, partially blocking traffic. Becca said they “stopped to support our neighbors,” who were protesting as federal immigration agents conducted an operation nearby. One of those agents was Jonathan Ross, an Iraq War veteran and 10-year ICE officer. In an encounter captured on cellphone video by Ross and bystanders, Ross circles around Good’s SUV as another ICE agent orders the mother of three to “get out of the f---ing car” and grabs for the door handle. Good reverses briefly, then accelerates forward while turning sharply to the right; standing by the driver’s side headlight, Ross fires three times, killing Good. “F---ing bitch,” a male voice can be heard saying. The shooting instantly became “the center of a furious debate” over whether Ross was a rogue officer who executed an innocent citizen or whether Good—whom Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem labeled a “domestic terrorist”—posed a mortal threat. Sorry, but “this is not something that can be both-sided,” said Jennifer Rubin in The Contrarian. Footage clearly shows Good, whose last words to Ross were “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you,” turning her wheel hard to avoid him. This was a cold-blooded killing by an agent of a “lawless regime.”

Good’s death was a “tragedy,” said National Review in an editorial, but it was of her own doing. No ICE agent is obligated “to let himself potentially get run over.” Good probably was trying to drive off rather than hit Ross. But the agent—who last year was dragged 100 yards by an escaping car—didn’t know that as the SUV “jumped toward him,” and he opened fire believing he was in “mortal peril.” Good had defied a “lawful order” to exit the car and drove off “with reckless disregard” for the agents’ safety. If not for that, “this never would have happened.” Yet rather than accept the “conclusion that anti-ICE agitation is hazardous for everyone involved,” local Democrats are whipping up rage, with Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey accusing Ross of “recklessly using power” and demanding that ICE “get the f--- out of Minneapolis.”

Whether Ross feared for his life when he fired the first shot is an open question, said Jacob Sullum in Reason. But he fired the second and third through the driver’s side window, when he was clearly out of the car’s path and the threat had passed. And Ross failed to observe training and “basic precautions” when he placed himself in front of the car while also holding a cellphone, “keeping one of his hands occupied during a potentially dangerous encounter.” Instead of engaging with such facts, the Trump administration revved up the “smear machine,” said Adam Serwer in The Atlantic. A Homeland Security spokeswoman called Good part of a gang of “violent rioters,” Vice President JD Vance branded her a “deranged leftist,” and President Trump blatantly lied that she “ran over” Ross. Their “indifference to facts, to due process, to the dignity of the deceased, and to basic human decency” was stunning.

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By smearing Good and circling their wagons around Ross, the administration “sent a message,” said Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times: Challenge us and this is what you get. In Minneapolis and other cities targeted in Trump’s immigration crackdown, residents have resisted with protests, organized watch patrols, and efforts to document agents’ actions. For MAGA, Good—whom Trump complained was “very disrespectful to law enforcement”—“quickly came to stand in for all the grating Resistance moms they’d like to see crushed,” and her death was seen as “a fair penalty for disobedience.” In branding Good, a progressive
lesbian, “a domestic terrorist,” the administration drew their battle lines, said Nick Catoggio in The Dispatch. Whether she actually tried to ram Ross was less important than the fact that she was aligned with the Left. That made her “a lawful combatant in a hot culture war” in which “the good guys are entitled to kill you.”

An incident like this was “utterly predictable,” said Jeremiah Johnson, also in The Dispatch. ICE and its partner agencies have been tasked with deporting an unprecedented 1 million migrants a year. “To carry out that mission, they’ve been empowered to act with near total impunity.” In the past year, masked agents have repeatedly attacked protesters merely for filming them, recklessly caused traffic accidents, pointed guns at children, knelt on top of a pregnant woman while arresting her, and detained an unknown number of Americans. There have been at least 13 cases since July of agents firing at or into civilian vehicles, wounding at least eight people and killing two; at least five of those shot were U.S. citizens. And things could soon get worse: Racing to add 10,000 new agents and more than double its workforce, ICE last year lowered fitness and education standards for new recruits, cut training in half, and beckoned prospective far-right hires with an ad campaign filled with appeals to “heritage” and the “homeland.” It’s a “recipe for violence” that will result in “more Renee Goods.”