Hours after a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent fatally shot Renee Nicole Good on a snowy Minnesota street, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said he had been worried just such a thing might happen ever since US President Donald Trump’s administration made his city the latest focus of its aggressive immigration crackdown.
“We have stated that something like this, where either a civilian, a police officer or even an ICE agent was going to get badly injured or killed,” he told CNN on Wednesday last week. “Tragically, it’s happened.”
It has happened elsewhere. At least 11 people have been shot by federal immigration agents since September last year, including a Venezuelan man and woman on Thursday last week in Portland, Oregon. Unless something changes, there would almost certainly be more.
Law enforcement experts have been warning for months that it is a serious risk to public safety to deploy thousands of masked federal agents with varying degrees of training and without orders to coordinate or even communicate with local officials. Under previous presidents, federal agents communicated with local officials — even in sanctuary cities.
The easiest way to eliminate risk would be to remove federal immigration agents from city streets. The next-best thing, as the Trump administration seems unlikely to cancel its mass deportation campaign, is to ensure more transparency and accountability. That would comport more with the guidelines local law enforcement must follow.
Most police officers — particularly in large, urban departments — must wear body cameras. There are policies governing recording and when footage must be released to the public. ICE, by contrast, only started issuing body cameras to its agents in 2024, and it remains unclear how many agents use them.
As a result, protesters often show up when federal immigration agents are working, recording video with their phones, unsure if documentation will be available any other way.
The widespread use of masks also has made it harder — if not impossible — for the public to file complaints about individual agents whose anonymity has seemingly encouraged some of them to use excessive force. Impunity invites public anger, and the angrier people get, the greater the chance of a violent confrontation.
Imposing more oversight on federal agents is in Trump’s best political interests. His administration’s increasingly unpopular mass deportation campaign has only reinforced the perception that he is focused on his own obsessions at the expense of issues that are important to voters? (such as lowering the cost of housing, utilities and groceries).
Details are still emerging about why Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, was shot. Trump has insisted that she “violently, willfully and viciously ran over the ICE Officer.”
US Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has said the agent, identified as Jonathan Ross, fired in self-defense to stop “an act of domestic terrorism.” US Vice President J.D. Vance called Good’s death “a tragedy of her own making.”
Videos circulating online are far less conclusive. Two immigration agents are shown approaching Good’s sport utility vehicle (SUV), which was parked in the middle of a street. One tells her to “get out” and tries to open the driver’s-side door. Good instead backs up and turns the vehicle away from the agents, but is shot three times by a third agent — Ross — who appears to step in front of her SUV.
The sequence of events is similar to what happened near Chicago in September last year, when federal agents killed a Mexican immigrant named Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez. Then, too, the US Department of Homeland Security said he tried to hit agents with his vehicle.
An analysis by the New York Times found that all 11 of the people who have been shot by federal agents in the past few months were in vehicles. In each case, the Trump administration has said those agents feared for their lives and fired in self-defense.
Video has not always backed up those claims. For example, with Villegas-Gonzalez, surveillance footage from two nearby businesses showed him backing up and driving away while agents stood alongside his car.
In October last year, US Border Patrol agents said a Chicago woman tried to “ram” them with her vehicle and shot her five times, labeling her a “domestic terrorist.” The charges were dropped after video showed a federal agent had actually hit her vehicle with his.
Sometimes the threat to federal immigration agents is real. In June last year, Ross was dragged by a driver he had tried to stop, leading to serious injuries.
Even so, the Trump administration could do more. Local law enforcement agencies tend to have strict use-of-force policies that limit what officers can do to stop a fleeing suspect, including prohibiting officers from shooting at moving vehicles except in specific circumstances to save lives.
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE and Border Patrol, also prohibits firing at moving vehicles unless there is a “reasonable belief that the subject of such force poses an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury.”
However, some law enforcement experts said that policy is not as explicit as it should be in requiring agents to move out of a vehicle’s path to reduce the risk of having to use deadly force.
Without changes, it is likely many Americans — and certainly Democratic politicians — would continue to question the Trump administration’s statements about confrontations with agents, and understandably so.
There have been frequent discrepancies with even trivial incidents, such as an agent in Washington who testified that a sandwich thrown at him had “exploded all over” his chest; a photo showed it was still wrapped when it hit the ground.
“There was a time when we could take them at their word,” Portland Mayor Keith Wilson told a news conference in Oregon on Thursday last week.
Casting doubt on what led up to the Border Patrol shooting of Luis David Nico Moncada and Yorlenys Betzabeth Zambrano-Contreras, he added: “That time is long past.”
Oregon officials plan to conduct their own investigation, examining whether agents used force “beyond the reasonable scope of their duties.”
In Minnesota, a federal investigation is under way and, on Friday, state officials said they would conduct their own probe, too. However, they say the Trump administration has inexplicably blocked access to key evidence. That is not the way to achieve transparency or accountability — or to make sure US streets are safe.
Erika D. Smith is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. She is a former Los Angeles Times columnist and Sacramento Bee editorial board member. This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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