Family of Renee Good files wrongful death lawsuit over ICE shooting

Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Membership today.

The family of Renee Good, the mother shot and killed by an ICE agent in Minnesota this year, has filed two federal lawsuits alleging wrongful death.

Good, 37, was fatally shot on January 7 on Portland Avenue, Minneapolis, after a confrontation with ICE agent Jonathan Ross, who opened fire on her as she sat behind the wheel of her SUV, apparently attempting to leave the scene of their argument.

“Renee’s death was not an accident,” the law firm representing Good’s family, Romanucci and Blandin, said in a statement.

“It was the predictable result of a coordinated campaign by senior officials in this administration to target Minnesotans of Somali or Hispanic origin and silence anyone who dared to raise their voice in protest.”

Attacking the federal immigration crackdown in which the agent concerned was deployed, they said: “Operation Metro Surge was built on exaggerated fraud accusations that the White House embraced as a pretext for thousands of masked, unidentified federal agents to rove neighborhoods and stop people based on how they looked.

“Administration officials told agents to force confrontations with observers like Renee and led agents to believe they would face no consequences for using force.”

The two lawsuits were filed by Good’s partner, Becca Good, and the deceased’s brother Brent Ganger.

The first, filed against “the United States of America,” alleges the wrongful death of Renee Nicole Macklin Good under Minnesota law predicated on claims of battery, assault, false imprisonment, intentional infliction of emotional distress and negligence that caused her death.

The second alleges a conspiracy to interfere with civil rights. It names among the defendants: Ross, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller; former Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem; former Border Patrol commander-at-large Gregory Bovino, Corey Lewandowski and “John Doe federal agents 1-10.”

Good’s death was met with a huge public outcry, not least because it was seen around the world in viral cell footage recorded by several bystanders at the scene.

The protests only grew louder when another citizen, intensive care nurse Alex Pretti, was also killed by federal agents in the same city later that month, prompting locals to take to the streets amid the bitter winter cold to protest against the incursion.

In the footage of Good’s final moments, she is seen in the driver’s seat of her vehicle blocking part of the road and repeatedly honking her horn to draw attention to the presence of the agents.

Two immigration officers get out of a truck, their faces covered, before one orders Good to get out of her car. She reverses briefly, then turns the steering wheel as the officer says again: “Get out of the car.”

“Drive, baby, drive!” Becca Good can be heard urging from the sidewalk.

An officer, later identified as Ross, then draws his weapon and fires into the SUV’s windshield. He lurches back as the car turns away from him.

The officer, now very close to the open window on the driver’s side, opens fire twice more, fatally shooting Good.

Federal officials reacted at the time by insisting the officer had acted in self-defense and that the deceased had engaged in “an act of domestic terrorism,” a claim that was widely dismissed and ultimately played a part in Noem’s eventual downfall and demotion.

She was dismissed from the DHS by President Donald Trump in March, made “Special Envoy to the Shield of the Americas, and was replaced as secretary by former Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin.

The killings of Good and Pretti account for two of the 10 people known to have died in encounters with immigration officers during Trump’s second term.

Most recently, an ICE officer fatally shot a 25-year-old Colombian man, Johan Sebastian Duran Guerrero, in his car in Biddeford, Maine, in July and, just last week, immigration agents shot and wounded Venezuelan delivery driver Rafael Garces-Perez, 28, in Austin, Texas.