An avoidable death in ICE confrontation

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced earlier this week that it was deploying around 2,000 agents to Minnesota in the “largest immigration operation ever,” a boast intended to cause fear, not de-escalate an already tense situation there over deportations. What happened next was predictable.

On Wednesday morning, as ICE moved through a Minneapolis neighborhood, Renee Nicole Good, 37, the mother of three children including a 6-year-old, sought to move her car after agents surrounding it demanded she step out. One of the masked ICE agents, Jonathan Ross, who had been injured after being dragged 100 yards by a car in a 2025 detention episode, responded by firing multiple bullets and Good was dead.

The death was avoidable. A professional and nonpartisan investigation shouldn’t be.

Before all the evidence is collected, facts ascertained and an investigation conducted, many people are judging bystander videos and picking camps based on their politics. That’s why the FBI and Department of Homeland’s Security’s highhanded dismissal of conducting a joint probe with state investigators is a terrible decision. On Thursday, Minnesota officials said the FBI was taking over the investigation of the fatal shooting, and not allowing them access to the evidence. The FBI works all the time with local enforcement; their refusal to do so here will jeopardize the integrity and credibility of any findings.

Worse, it will not allow this tragedy to become a much needed reset of the deportation process, which has been repeatedly marked by instances of masked enforcement officers overreacting in courthouses, on school grounds and in local communities. There have been at least five fatal ICE shootings, according to The Associated Press.

President Donald Trump, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and others have repeatedly told the public that ICE would only go after “the worst of the worst.” In December, ICE said it had arrested more than “400 illegal aliens including pedophiles, rapists, and violent thugs” in Minnesota. Those are exactly the people who ICE and other law enforcement agencies should be going after.

Widening the mission beyond murderers, rapists and the most violent to meet quotas and doing it in a bold and aggressive way causes fear and tension about who is a target among law-abiding people, citizens and noncitizens alike.

Noem adds more fuel to this powder keg. Hours after Good’s death, the Cabinet member labeled her a “domestic terrorist.” She was not. The FBI’s definition of domestic terrorism includes the phrasing “intimidate or coerce a civilian population; influence the policy of government by intimidation or coercion; or affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination or kidnapping.”

Now, a young mother who won poetry honors in college, and whose ex-husband said she was only dropping off her son in the neighborhood, is dead. It’s time for the Trump administration to reassess the core mission of ICE, which has a goal of deporting 1 million people per year, and has a four-year budget of $170 billion.

Our political divides are widening, now dangerously so.