The killing of Renee Nicole Good by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in an otherwise quiet South Minneapolis neighborhood on Wednesday was just the latest in a string of violent attacks on local residents by immigration officials.
“Immediately after, the same masked agents were faced with our grieving neighbors, rightfully demanding justice for a murder committed in our streets, and only continued to escalate,” said Minneapolis Council member Aisha Chughtai in a post after arriving at the scene on Thursday. “They shoved people to the ground, drove recklessly into crowds and deployed chemical irritants.”
The shooting follows a clear pattern of violence in cities with Democratic Party mayors across the country: Immigration police enter neighborhoods to aggressively arrest people off the street, including many U.S. citizens, and clash with concerned residents and local activists, then blame the victims when people get hurt or killed.
ICE agent Jonathan Ross fired three fatal shots into Good’s Honda Pilot as she turned and drove past him. Just before that moment, another masked federal officer had aggressively tried to drag Good from the car. At the time, Ross’s killing of Good was the ninth reported time an immigration agent had shot an unarmed civilian inside of their vehicle in the past four months, according to The New York Times. In each case, immigration officials claimed to shoot in self-defense and cited their fear of being hit by the vehicles.
Yet another shooting of a civilian by a U.S. immigration agent occurred one day later in Portland, Oregon, where the U.S. Border Patrol shot two people during a traffic stop on Thursday. Both people were hospitalized by local first responders and subsequently identified by federal authorities. As of Friday afternoon, their conditions haven’t been disclosed. Echoing the killing in Minneapolis, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) claims the driver attempted to ram the officer with his vehicle.
“We know what the federal government says happened here,” Portland Mayor Keith Wilson told reporters on Thursday. “There was a time when we could take them at their word. That time has long passed.”
Rep. Janelle Bynum (D-Oregon) said President Donald Trump’s immigration agents are engaged in “state-sponsored terrorism.”
“Stop fucking with us,” Bynum said in a statement. “This is the second shooting this week by agents following the orders of a wannabe dictator who is trying to take over cities and rule by instilling terror in the hearts of American people.”
Meanwhile, prosecutors in Chicago recently dropped felony charges against Marimar Martinez, a woman who was shot multiple times by a Border Patrol agent after a vehicle collision in October. The case against Marimer fell apart as defense attorneys threatened to release texts in court showing the agent making crude boasts about the attack in chats with fellow officers. Chicago prosecutors have recently similarly dropped charges against dozens of other protesters as well.
Activists in Chicago are also seeking justice for Silverio Villegas González, who was shot and killed in September by ICE agents who claimed that he tried to run them over with his car. While DHS publicly reported the ICE agents as having sustained significant injuries, an agent described them as “nothing major.”
Vance wrongly claimed that immigration officers have “absolute immunity” under federal law, sending a dangerous signal to the 12,000 ICE agents newly recruited under Trump about the amount of violence they may be able to enact without accountability.
Back in Minneapolis, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem accused Good of being an agitator and “domestic terrorist” after the fatal shooting, claims that are directly contradicted by video evidence and witnesses at the scene.
On Thursday, as the federal investigators blocked their state counterparts in Minnesota from accessing evidence from the scene, Trump administration officials doubled down on unfounded claims that Ross acted properly and in self-defense when he shot and killed Good, a narrative Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey called “garbage” and “bullshit.” The killing occurred after Trump sent 2,000 federal agents to Minneapolis for what ICE officials called “the largest immigration operation ever.”
In a social media post, Vice President J.D. Vance smeared Good as a “deranged leftist,” but he later admitted during a press briefing that he knew little about the 37-year-old woman and said he could not comment on her motivations at the time of the killing.
Vance also wrongly claimed that immigration officers have “absolute immunity” under federal law, sending a dangerous signal to the 12,000 ICE agents newly recruited under Trump about the amount of violence they may be able to enact without accountability from the highest levels of government. ICE recruitment materials and the Department of Homeland Security’s social media posts are notorious for sharing white nationalist imagery and likening immigration enforcement to playing violent video games.
Activists have documented ICE’s civil rights violations under both Democratic and Republican presidents, but Vance’s statements make clear how deeply politicized ICE has become in Trump’s second term. Good was a poet and loving mother, not to mention a citizen whom Vance was elected to serve. By smearing anyone concerned about ICE activities in their neighborhoods as “deranged” and “left-wing radicals,” Vance reinforces ICE as an enforcer of MAGA ideology.
It is clear that cracking down on dissent and framing peaceful protest as “domestic terrorism” has now become a key plank of Trump’s immigration crackdown.
While Trump issues orders conflating “anti-fascism” and left-wing social movements with “domestic terrorism,” ICE has inked at least $25 million in contracts with Big Tech for the latest in spy technology, including social media monitoring systems, cellphone location tracking, facial recognition, and remote hacking tools, according to the Brennan Center.
In September 2025, Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said the agency would use all of the agency’s resources, which includes the powerful Homeland Security Investigations division, to “track the money” and find activist “ringleaders,” suggesting without evidence that ICE protesters in Chicago were “outside agitators” who were paid to be there. The baseless claims reflect far-right and antisemitic conspiracy theories about philanthropists such as George Soros, a frequent target of Trump’s personal attacks.
“Over the past two decades, the staggering increase in government surveillance abilities has come with warnings that this power could be used to run roughshod over Americans’ free speech and privacy rights,” Brennan Center analysts Faiza Patel and Matthew Ruppert wrote in November. “With the Trump administration’s explicit campaign of using federal law enforcement — including ICE — to target its political opponents, that time has come.”
As Truthout and The Intercept have reported, ICE quietly subpoenaed Meta as part of an “official, criminal investigation regarding officer safety,” last year, demanding personal information attached to Instagram accounts used by activists to track ICE operations and warn the public. Civil liberties groups pushed back in court and warned of serious overreach; ICE only has a mandate to enforce immigration law, not criminal law against U.S. citizens.
By wrongly casting constitutionally protected acts such as filming immigration police in your own neighborhood as a “criminal” threat, which Trump officials have repeatedly done, Trump leverages the immigration crackdown to target two of MAGA’s perceived enemies at once: undocumented people, and local activists perceived as “leftist” because they care about their immigrant neighbors.
In a comment to New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said ICE is sending a message with its killing of Good.
“‘You want to defend your neighbors, you’re going to do it at the risk of your own life.’ I think that’s the unmistakable message,” said Ellison, who has vowed to seek justice for Good despite federal obstruction. “Just looking at the tape, they could have said, ‘You get out of here,’ right? And then she gets out of there. They didn’t want her to get out of there. They wanted to either drag her out of that car or do what they did.”
This pattern has emerged as the Trump administration has unleashed more brutality into the already violent immigration policing infrastructure.
For years ICE has been accused of violating human rights while avoiding transparency and accountability, including within its notorious jails, where at least 32 people have died while in ICE custody since Trump took office. Trump has now transformed the agency into an authoritarian weapon that can be deployed into any community across the United States — and against anyone perceived to oppose his regime.
Speaking against the authoritarian crackdown
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