- “Having seen the video myself, I want to tell everybody directly: That is bullshit.” – Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey
The fatal shooting of a 37-year-old woman by a masked ICE agent in south Minneapolis this week has detonated into a familiar American sequence: a bystander video, a rapid official narrative, a rapid political counter-narrative, and a public left to argue over the same seconds of footage while investigators have barely begun.
The woman killed was identified in multiple accounts as Renee Nicole Good.
Federal officials have framed the shooting as justified self-defense during a confrontation they describe as violent and politically fueled.
“Today, ICE officers in Minneapolis were conducting targeted operations when rioters began blocking ICE officers and one of these violent rioters weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism,” the Department of Homeland Security wrote in a statement. “An ICE officer, fearing for his life, the lives of his fellow law enforcement and the safety of the public, fired defensive shots.”
DHS added, “The alleged perpetrator was hit and is deceased. The ICE officers who were hurt are expected to make full recoveries.”
President Donald Trump amplified that framing in a social media statement that went well beyond a preliminary description of disputed facts.
“I have just viewed the clip of the event which took place in Minneapolis, Minnesota,” Trump wrote. “The woman screaming was, obviously, a professional agitator, and the woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense.”
Trump continued: “The situation is being studied, in its entirety, but the reason these incidents are happening is because the Radical Left is threatening, assaulting, and targeting our Law Enforcement Officers and ICE Agents on a daily basis.”
Minnesota’s Democratic leaders and Minneapolis officials watched the same kind of footage and reached a starkly different conclusion, disputing both the legality of the shooting and the good faith of the federal government’s immediate messaging.
“They are already trying to spin this as an action of self-defense,” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said at a news conference after the shooting. “Having seen the video myself, I want to tell everybody directly: That is bullshit.”
Frey added, “This was an agent recklessly using power that resulted in somebody dying.”
He then issued a blunt demand: “To ICE: Get the fuck out of Minneapolis.”
Frey also challenged the broader claim that the federal surge is making the city safer. “They are not here to cause safety in this city,” he said. “What they are doing is not to provide safety in America. What they are doing is causing chaos and distrust. They’re ripping families apart, they’re sowing chaos on our streets, and in this case, quite literally killing people.”
Gov. Tim Walz similarly argued that the confrontation and the shooting were predictable outcomes of a federally driven escalation that state leaders say they warned against.
“We have repeatedly warned that this federal mobilization was putting residents at risk,” Walz said in a statement, announcing that he directed state agencies to mobilize resources and instructed the National Guard to prepare in the event they were needed.
“Our top priority is keeping Minnesotans safe,” Walz said. “State and local leaders are taking every step to support law enforcement and protect residents, and state resources have been deployed to ensure our neighborhoods remain safe.”
Walz also accused the Trump administration of turning enforcement into spectacle. “This mobilization was about putting on a show from the beginning — let’s not give it to them,” he said.
Walz’s office said the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and the FBI are jointly investigating, and that the State Emergency Operations Center was activated to coordinate the state response.
According to a detailed account published by The Washington Post, videos posted online do not show what happened before the vehicle was stopped in the roadway, but they do show the moments immediately around the shooting.
The Post described two officers approaching the vehicle, the vehicle reversing, and one officer holding onto the door handle as the SUV moved, before a third officer fired three shots.
Minneapolis police, according to the Post account, said the driver suffered a gunshot wound to the head and was pronounced dead at the hospital.
What federal officials say happened in those seconds is described in absolute terms.
What local officials say happened is also described in absolute terms.
This is the governance problem at the heart of the current crisis: when federal agencies announce their conclusions in the language of certainty and criminality before an independent investigation produces findings the public can review, they effectively demand trust as a substitute for accountability.
That demand is harder to meet when the shooter is masked.
Sen. Scott Wiener of San Francisco, who has called for ICE to be abolished, framed the issue as a direct link between anonymity, impunity and the erosion of the rule of law.
“A masked ICE agent just shot and killed a woman who posed no threat to him or to others,” Wiener said in a statement. “The President and Department of Homeland Security are working overtime to try and justify killing an innocent civilian, calling her a ‘domestic terrorist.’ But make no mistake, this killing by ICE is not justifiable. The video is clear, and no amount of lies can obscure this truth.”
Wiener tied the shooting to his legislative push on masks and civil rights enforcement.
“This brazen lawlessness is exactly why I passed a law to ban federal law enforcement from wearing ski masks,” he said. “It’s why I’m fighting right now to strengthen California’s civil rights laws so people can sue federal officers who violate their constitutional rights — under current law, they can’t.”
Wiener’s point is not simply symbolic.
In a democracy, the use of deadly force by the state is supposed to come with maximal visibility, clear lines of responsibility and consequences for misconduct.
Masks invert that model by making the state’s most violent acts harder to attribute and harder to litigate, while also inflaming public suspicion that anonymity is not a safety precaution but a strategy.
The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Minnesota argued that the Minneapolis shooting is the “devastating and predictable” result of a broader, federally driven escalation.
“We are devastated by the news that ICE killed a woman this morning in Minneapolis,” said Deepinder Mayell, executive director of ACLU of Minnesota. “This tragedy is further proof that ICE is out of control, endangering our communities, and we must end this operation before anyone else is brutally hurt or killed.
“Since the launch of ‘Operation Metro Surge’ we have witnessed a remarkable string of unlawful activity targeting Minnesota communities and Minnesota values — this affects us all,” Mayell added. “We will keep observing, documenting, and fighting for the rights of all Minnesotans.”
Naureen Shah, director of policy and government affairs at the ACLU, tied the killing to what she described as “reckless, heavily armed agents” deployed with “impunity.”
“For months, the Trump administration has been deploying reckless, heavily armed agents into our communities and encouraging them to commit horrifying abuses with impunity, and, today, we are seeing the devastating and predictable consequences,” Shah said. “Congress must rein ICE in before what happened in Minneapolis today happens somewhere else tomorrow.”
The ACLU statement also pointed to litigation filed weeks earlier. “On December 17, 2025, the ACLU of Minnesota and its partners filed Tincher v. Noem, a lawsuit challenging ICE violence and misconduct towards Minnesotans exercising their First Amendment rights to assemble, observe, and protest federal agents’ immigration enforcement activities in our streets.”
One of the most disturbing elements in the public record so far is not just the shooting, but what witnesses say happened immediately after it.
In the Washington Post account, a resident who recorded video described ICE officers preventing anyone, “including a neighbor who identified himself as a doctor,” from approaching the vehicle.
“Can I go check a pulse?” the man said loudly, according to the Post’s description of the video.
“No, back up now,” an officer said.
“I’m a physician,” the man protested.
“I don’t care,” the officer replied, adding: “Give us a second, we have medics” on the way.
If that exchange is confirmed as depicted, it will become central to any assessment of the federal presence in Minneapolis, not because it is the only disputed moment, but because it speaks to a posture of domination rather than public safety: armed federal agents controlling a scene, controlling information and controlling who can act — even after a person has been shot.
That posture is why comparisons to George Floyd are erupting, even as the cases differ.
Floyd’s killing was carried out by Minneapolis police, captured in a sustained video, and became a global symbol of policing and racial injustice.
This week’s shooting involves federal immigration officers, a rapidly mobilized enforcement surge, and a dispute over whether a vehicle constituted an imminent threat.
But the emotional geometry is similar: South Minneapolis, a bystander video, an official explanation delivered quickly and defensively, and a public that no longer grants automatic credibility to authorities asking to be trusted.
The question for Minneapolis and the country is not merely whether this shooting will become “this year’s George Floyd.”
The question is whether the federal government has learned anything from 2020 about the cost of arrogance, the cost of secrecy and the cost of treating public outrage as a public relations obstacle rather than a democratic warning.
The federal government insists it is operating in the name of safety.
DHS’ statement says ICE officers are “just trying to do the job of MAKING AMERICA SAFE,” echoing Trump’s framing that the “Radical Left” is responsible for an environment of daily threats.
But local and state officials argue that the surge itself is the accelerant.
Walz directed resources and warned against a cycle of provocation and spectacle.
Frey warned that the justification narrative being offered by Washington is false and dangerous.
And Wiener argued the presence of masked federal agents is incompatible with accountability.
If investigators ultimately conclude that the shooting met the legal standard for deadly force, the federal government will still face a credibility crisis it helped create by rushing to declare motive, criminality and political blame.
If investigators conclude it did not, the country will confront a deeper crisis: a federal enforcement apparatus operating with sweeping discretion, aggressive tactics, and an institutional reflex to treat criticism as hostility rather than oversight.
Either way, the demand emerging from Minneapolis is not complicated.
Unmask the agents.
Release the full record.
Let independent investigators do their work.
And stop treating a political storyline — “domestic terrorism,” “professional agitators,” “a tragedy of her own making” — as a substitute for transparent, verifiable facts.
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In my opinion Walz and Frey are in part blowing this all up to try and deflect from the massive fraud being uncovered in Minneapolis and Minnesota.
Right. Sure. This is going to become George Floyd all over again. We’ll see where things go from there.
Oh I have no doubt the left will try to make this into a Floyd incident. Get ready for liberal cities to get looted and burnt. Professional agitators are scheming as we speak.
“Firearms may not be discharged solely to disable moving vehicles. Specifically, firearms may not be discharged at a moving vehicle unless: (1) a person in the vehicle is threatening the officer or another person with deadly force by means other than the vehicle; or (2) the vehicle is operated in a manner that threatens to cause death or serious physical injury to the officer or others, and no other objectively reasonable means of defense appear to exist, which includes moving out of the path of the vehicle. Firearms may not be discharged from a moving vehicle except in exigent circumstances. In these situations, an officer must have an articulable reason for this use of deadly force.”
What does that have to do with my comment?
It’s pretty simple, you are alleging political motivations for people being upset. So I figured I would post the actual law because if they broke it, everything you said is immaterial. So what do you think in terms of this incident?
It’s being reported that she was trying to block ICE vehicles and she did brush the officer with her car as she was trying to flee. That said I feel the officer overreacted and didn’t need to shoot. But who knows how threatened he felt at the time. She was there to disrupt and possibly fueled by all the rhetoric on the left like calling ICE the Gestapo.
That’s what DHS is saying. Local officials called it a god damn lie. That’s not exactly a non-denial, denial. ICE is definitely acting like Gestapo (again Gestapo not the SS).
“This is going to become George Floyd all over again.”
Being that the deceased is white is Davis going to have a street chalked with:
WHITE LIVES MATTER
You always grasp onto the important things in these discussions. Nevermind that ICE is trying to round up Brown and Black people.
“Local officials called it a god damn lie.”
There are several videos out with different angles. I just watched one where the officer was contacted by her vehicle.
If you look at the law, contact doesn’t justify the use of deadly force.
So it’s not a “God damn lie” that the officer was contacted by her car?
She didn’t “run him over,” as Trump has claimed more than once now. Nobody went to the hospital, as Trump claimed earlier.
The DHS spokewoman, the head of DHS, and the president all lied about this shooting. Their supporters are repeating those lies, blaming the victim, and have now begun framing the whole incident in racist terms.
Keith Olsen is doing that here on the Vanguard.
How am I framing the incident in racist terms Don?
Why does it always come down to racism?
“Keith Olsen is doing that here on the Vanguard.”
No he isn’t. But there would be more protests, if the victim wasn’t white.
From the video I saw on the national news, there was no reason to shoot that person. Clearly trying to get away – not run over anyone.
Apparently, the wrong people are often attracted to become part of law enforcement.
Don’t know why she (apparently?) chose to create a blockade, but that shouldn’t be a death sentence. (I’m less concerned about the guy who chose to be the “Orange Shrek” in Oakland awhile back. Authorities are going to use force at some point, but “lethal” shouldn’t be the first one.)
I had assumed this would end up as a federal issue which would make it problematic given the administration.
But just saw some analysis that suggested he could be tried in Minnesota state court.
Federal officers are not automatically immune from state criminal prosecution simply because they are enforcing federal law. Longstanding doctrine recognizes a qualified form of federal officer immunity that applies only when actions are lawful and within the scope of official duties, and recent Supreme Court guidance has emphasized that the protection extends only to conduct that is “necessary and proper” to executing federal authority.
If a shooting is determined to be excessive, unlawful, or outside an officer’s authorized role, a state may pursue criminal charges, even against a federal agent.
In practice, however, any such prosecution would almost certainly be contested in federal court, where judges would decide whether immunity applies, making accountability both legally complex and highly fact-dependent. Which again makes this problematic from a legal standpoint.
At this point, it increasingly appears that meaningful state accountability is unlikely.
Minnesota officials have now publicly confirmed they are being blocked from accessing evidence, witnesses, and investigative materials related to the fatal ICE shooting, forcing the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension to withdraw from the investigation entirely.
Federal authorities have asserted exclusive jurisdiction, effectively shutting out state investigators despite objections from the governor, mayor, and top law enforcement officials, who have cited contradictory federal statements and video evidence undermining claims of self-defense.
Worse than that, the federal blockade of the investigation strongly suggests that nothing meaningful will happen in terms of law enforcement at all.
Total partisan power play
The shooting was unjustified. This was murder. https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000010631041/minneapolis-ice-shooting-video.html
“This is the governance problem at the heart of the current crisis: when federal agencies announce their conclusions in the language of certainty and criminality before an independent investigation produces findings the public can review, they effectively demand trust as a substitute for accountability.”
I agree with this. I also believe the left and the locals announcing their conclusions in the language of certainty and criminality before an independent investigation produces findings the public can review is also F-‘d up. Weiner can can it, for example. This immediate polar partisan spin on all incidents will be the end of us.
“That demand is harder to meet when the shooter is masked.”
I agree, agents should not be masked. And protestors should never be masked either.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MN_9VqfVQ9c
Tin soldiers and Nixon coming
We’re finally on our own
This summer I hear the drumming
Four dead in Ohio
Gotta get down to it, soldiers are cutting us down
Should have been gone long ago
What if you knew her and found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?
La-la-la-la, la-la-la-la
La-la-la-la, la-la-la
La-la-la-la, la-la-la-la
La-la-la-la, la-la-la
Gotta get down to it, soldiers are cutting us down
Should have been gone long ago
What if you knew her and found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?
Tin soldiers and Nixon coming
We’re finally on our own
This summer I hear the drumming
Four dead in Ohio
Four dead in Ohio (four)
Four dead in Ohio (I said four, I said four)
Four dead in Ohio (how many more?)
Four dead in Ohio (why?)
Four dead in Ohio (I wanna know why)
Four dead in Ohio (you better tell me why)
Four dead in Ohio (why?)
Four dead in Ohio (why did they die?)
Four dead in Ohio (you tell me why)
Four dead in Ohio (I said why)
Four dead in Ohio (I wanna know why)
Four dead in Ohio (why?)
Four dead in Ohio (I said why)
Four dead in Ohio (why, Lord?)
Four dead in Ohio (why did they die?)
Four dead in Ohio (I said why)
Four dead in Ohio (why?)
Four dead in Ohio (yeah, why?)
Four dead in Ohio (please tell me why)
Four dead in Ohio (why?)
Four dead in Ohio (I wanna know)
Four dead in Ohio (why?)
Four dead in Ohio (why did they died)
Four dead in Ohio (you tell me why)
Four dead in Ohio (why?)
Four dead in Ohio (why?)
Four dead in Ohio (why?)
Four dead in Ohio (why?)
Four dead in Ohio (why?)
Four dead in Ohio
It’s being reported:
” Renee Nicole Good, the mom who was killed by a federal agent after veering her car toward him, was an anti-ICE “warrior” and was part of a group of activists who worked to “document and resist” the federal immigration crackdown in Minnesota, The Post can reveal.
Good, who moved to the city last year, linked up with the anti-ICE activists through her 6-year-old son’s woke charter school, which boasts that it puts “social justice first” and prioritizes “involving kids in political and social activism,” multiple local sources said.”
https://nypost.com/2026/01/08/us-news/renee-nicole-good-was-minneapolis-ice-watch-warrior-who-trained-to-resist-feds-before-shooting/
It’s being reported by a right wing publication using questionable sources you means.
The article quotes people identified by first name or general description:
A mother at a vigil who describes Good as a “warrior” and speaks subjectively about her character and actions. 
A former school gym teacher (Rashad Rich) describing how Good became involved in activism. 
County worker Kristin Peter, described as being part of the same ICE Watch team. 
These sources are unnamed or minimally identified and are used to portray Good’s activism and community context.
There is no corroborated reporting from major outlets that Good was a leader of a radical group or trained to “resist feds”. Instead, major outlets describe her as a mother of three who was not the target of the operation. 
Family members and community leaders describe her as compassionate, not confrontational. 
Other non-partisan outlets reported that she was identified locally as a resident and parent, but not that she was part of an extremist group or trained in aggressive tactics. 
The Post’s description of her as a politically armed “warrior” is not supported by independent reporting
Here’s Reuters, hardly a right wing news outlet:
“At the time she was shot, Good was participating in one of numerous “neighborhood patrols” organized by local activists to track, observe and film ICE activities, according to Michelle Gross, president of the Minnesota-based Community United Against Police Brutality and a paralegal for the National Lawyers Guild.”
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/ice-fatal-shooting-minnesota-woman-puts-us-edge-2026-01-08/
Reuters reported that Good was participating in organized neighborhood patrols to observe and document ICE activity, based on an on-the-record statement from a local civil liberties advocate. That account describes a lawful monitoring role and does not allege confrontation, militancy, or broader political activism. The New York Post instead used “activist” in a loaded, insinuative way that implied culpability or provocation, expanding a specific activity into a generalized and blame-adjacent identity.
And if you’re gonna say they’re the same thing, why didn’t you use the Reuters article which was going to always be more credible than the New York Post?
Boy, you’re insufferable. You tend to twist and spin everything you don’t agree with. You pick out one word “activist” and try to portray what the Post reported as wrong. What we now know is Good was likely there for a reason, not just someone who took a wrong turn.
BTW, if you’re going to request it of your commenters you should also cite several sources in your articles, not just left leaning ones.
You’re denying that the Post, owner by Murdoch, is right wing?
FWIW, I think the Post overstated their case. She was clearly involved in the anti-ICE movement, trying to portray her as a radical doesn’t meet the smell test. And so what? She still shouldn’t have been shot.
The Post is right leaning, I don’t deny that. But that doesn’t mean that their findings are wrong. You’re the one writing them off. You did that once before regarding the Hunter Biden laptop to find out later that that they were right and a victim of shutting down free speech. And if Good was truly trying to block ICE operations with her vehicle that’s a lot more than just “observing”.