It started as an incident that’s increasingly typical across the United States – a shouting match between federal immigration agents and their activist opponents.
But it ended just seconds later in an unprecedented tragedy on a snowy residential street – one that now threatens to tear the country apart.
A small group of armed agents of President Trump’s controversial Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) were on a routine operation on Wednesday morning, emerging from unmarked vehicles to detain undocumented migrants.
The agents were in Minneapolis, the biggest city in the Midwest state of Minnesota. Predictably, given its staunchly Democrat population, they ran into concerted opposition.
As revealed in video footage from bystanders, anti-ICE protesters blew whistles and screamed at the masked agents as they walked along the snow-lined street, their vehicles idling nearby.
The blare of massed car horns and whistles has become a familiar sound in the city in recent weeks, after the Trump administration pledged to swamp Minneapolis with at least 2,000 ICE agents, and local protesters responded by setting off a sonic warning system every time the ‘feds’ appeared.
In this case, the ICE convoy – SUVs and pick-up trucks – decided to leave the vicinity, moving off with lights and sirens blaring.
It started as an incident that’s increasingly typical across the United States – a shouting match between federal immigration agents and their activist opponents. Pictured: ICE agents approach a vehicle before shooting the driver dead
But it ended just seconds later in an unprecedented tragedy on a snowy residential street – one that now threatens to tear the country apart. Pictured: Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who fatally shot a woman in Minneapolis
Renee Nicole Good (pictured) was shot dead shortly after dropping her young son off at school
But they were blocked by a maroon SUV, a Honda Pilot, parked askew in the middle of the street.
Behind the wheel was Renee Nicole Good, a local woman who had dropped her young son off at school not long before.
After about three minutes, an ICE agent walked around Ms Good’s vehicle, whose back window was festooned with stickers, filming on his phone.
The Honda’s driver rolled the car forward slightly, turning left (towards the ICE convoy), but then stopped and waved for other cars to drive past.
A silver ICE pick-up stopped, two more agents got out of it and walked towards the vehicle.
‘Get out of the car! Get out of the f*****g car!’ shouted one of them as a balaclava-clad agent grabbed the door handle on the driver’s side and reached through the open window.
But the Honda was already reversing before its wheels turned to the right and it started to drive off – away from the agents.
It was too late. At around 10.25am, three shots rang out in rapid succession, fired by the agent who’d originally circled the vehicle with his phone camera and who was yesterday named as Jonathan Ross.
He’d then positioned himself just to the left of the front of the car and drawn his gun, reportedly shouting at the driver to ‘stop’ before opening fire.
He fired into the windscreen – witnesses recalled hearing a sudden ‘putt, putt, putt’ sound – and continued shooting as the car swerved past him. It came to a halt a few seconds later, crashing into a parked vehicle.
The first shot was fired around 11 seconds after the ICE agents were first seen leaving their pickup truck.
After about three minutes, an ICE agent walked around Ms Good’s vehicle, whose back window was festooned with stickers, filming on his phone. ‘Get out of the car! Get out of the f*****g car!’ shouted one of them as a balaclava-clad agent grabbed the door handle on the driver’s side and reached through the open window
The killing set off a firestorm that has spread far beyond Minneapolis, a city that Trump had targeted in his immigration crackdown after it became the focus of a multi-million-dollar benefits fraud scandal centred on its large Somali population
As its driver slumped at the wheel, the airbag deployed and was left smeared with blood. The agent holstered his gun and walked unhurriedly towards the Honda before turning back and telling his colleagues to summon an ambulance.
Video footage taken from a distance in front of the car suggests the vehicle clipped the agent, but other footage makes clear the driver didn’t run him over.
Witnesses said the agents refused to let anyone, including a man who identified himself as a ‘physician’, go to the driver’s aid.
An ambulance crew were later photographed trying to revive her while the ICE agents, including the shooter, got in their vehicles and drove away – which critics said amounted to blatant interference with a crime scene.
A prize-winning poet and keen amateur guitarist, Ms Good, 37, only moved to Minneapolis last year from Kansas City, Missouri.
She had three children – a 15-year-old daughter, a 12-year-old son and a six-year-old boy – who lived with her. They were by two husbands, the second of whom, Tim Macklin, died in 2023. She had since re-married, this time to a woman, 40-year-old Rebecca Good.
They were renting a two-bedroom, $300,000 family home in a popular gay neighbourhood, Powderhorn.
Their home is just three blocks from where she was shot.
Two doors away, a poster on another house proclaimed: ‘We are family – stand with immigrants.’
Police tape surrounds a vehicle suspected to be involved in a shooting by an ICE agent during federal law enforcement operations on January 7, 2026, in Minneapolis, Minnesota
A female supporter yesterday stood outside the Goods’ neatly kept home – its front windows still festooned with Christmas decorations – to prevent the media from approaching its occupants.
‘She moved in less than a year ago. We talked a handful of times, just saying hi, how are you,’ a neighbour told the Daily Mail. ‘Her son was cute and bubbly. He loved our dog.’
‘I’m hoping she finds justice. F*** ICE. That’s pretty much how everyone around here feels.’
Renee Good’s first husband – he has not so far been named – has insisted she was not an activist. He said she was a devout Christian who had travelled to Northern Ireland on ‘faith missions’ when she was younger.
Ms Good’s father, Tim Ganger, said his daughter, originally from Colorado, had ‘a good life but a hard life’.
Her mother, Donna Ganger, said she was ‘one of the kindest people I’ve ever known’ and ‘extremely compassionate’, and wouldn’t have dreamt of confronting federal agents.
She described her daughter’s shooting as ‘stupid’ and insisted ‘she was probably terrified’.
According to a video that circulated rapidly online after the shooting, a distraught woman claiming to be Ms Good’s wife dissolved in tears near the wrecked car as she admitted she had urged her to join the protest.
The same woman was seen in various clips as, before the shooting, she followed the ICE agents and filmed them. Later, she was seen trying to help Ms Good as she sat bleeding in the driver’s seat.
Law enforcement stands guard at the scene in Minneapolis, Minnesota after the shooting
People demonstrate against ICE in Minneapolis. Activists have taken to the streets and pelted law enforcement with snowballs
‘I made her come down here, it’s my fault,’ she can be heard sobbing. ‘They just shot my wife.’
The killing set off a firestorm that has spread far beyond Minneapolis, a city that Trump had targeted in his immigration crackdown after it became the focus of a multi-million-dollar benefits fraud scandal centred on its large Somali population.
Minneapolis was always likely to be a combustible place to blanket with ICE agents.
The city erupted into rioting in 2020 after a white police officer killed African American George Floyd, during which a police station and surrounding businesses were burnt down.
The city’s Left-wing leaders later proposed abolishing the police entirely.
At demonstrations across the US yesterday, anti-ICE protesters held up signs demanding ‘Justice for Renee’ while Left-wing celebrities such as Mamma Mia star Amanda Seyfried and Sex And The City’s Cynthia Nixon also weighed in on social media.
In Minneapolis, a crowd gathered within hours of the shooting with some protesters burning the American flag and others clashing with police.
Minnesota’s outgoing governor, Democrat Tim Walz – Kamala Harris’s running mate in her doomed 2024 presidential election bid – suggested on Wednesday that he was preparing the National Guard in case protests – and counter-protests – escalated out of control.
Meanwhile, America’s Left and Right have divided into all-too-predictable camps on the fatal shooting – and, specifically, on whether the federal agent or the driver was to blame.
President Trump and his administration have branded Ms Good a ‘domestic terrorist’ and ‘professional agitator’ who ‘weaponised her vehicle’ before being shot by an agent in ‘self-defence’ after she tried to kill him.
Department of Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem claimed Ms Good been part of a group of protesters who had been ‘stalking and impeding’ ICE officers throughout the day.
Some Republicans in Congress don’t go quite so far but have pointed out that Ms Good should have complied with the ICE agents’ demand she stop her car.
Trump’s opponents counter that Ms Good was not remotely a ‘terrorist’ and that none of the agents were in danger. Some believe she may have panicked when faced by the armed men.
Trump’s critics have produced video evidence that certainly contradicts the official government narrative: careful analysis from several angles shows the car did drive towards the agent as he stood in front of it, but he was able to step out of the way and let off at least two shots at the side of the vehicle as it passed.
Was she simply turning the car around so she could drive away?
Ms Good has reportedly never been charged with any offence beyond getting a parking ticket.
Her defenders insist she was murdered by a trigger-happy federal agent. Reports Jonathan Ross was dragged 50ft by a car last June may encourage his accusers in their case that he wildly over-reacted.
Some Democrat leaders in the state say she’d been at the scene as a ‘legal observer’ – a volunteer who monitors how police and federal agents conduct themselves on operations.
On Wednesday, in an emotional press conference, Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey angrily dismissed the White House portrayal of the shooting as ‘bull***t’, adding: ‘This was an agent recklessly using power… that resulted in someone dying, getting killed. The narrative that this was done in self-defence is garbage.’
Undeterred, Vice President JD Vance urged ICE agents to stick to their task. He wrote on X: ‘To the radicals assaulting them and threatening them: congratulations, we’re going to work even harder to enforce the law.’
Ordinary people can watch the videos – frame by frame if necessary – and make up their own mind who is responsible.
However, it’s unlikely many Americans will approach the controversy with an entirely open mind.
Trump’s migrant deportation drive – and particularly the heavy use of ICE agents to round up people who’ve often been living in the US for decades – has proved to be one of the most controversial policies of the President’s second term so far.
Last month, it was revealed that the number of people in ICE detention had reached a record high of more than 68,400.
Supporters have applauded the President’s determination to tackle a previously intractable problem. Illegal immigration soared under Trump’s Democrat predecessor Joe Biden.
The Republican administration is even having success with a scheme called Project Homecoming that offers illegal aliens $1,000 and a free flight to ‘self-deport’, although some have complained they were not paid the promised sum.
Opponents counter that quite aside from questions of fairness, it is economic madness to deport so many long-standing, working migrants when Trump had appeared to have only dangerous criminals in his sights.
More troubling still, they believe the President has created in ICE a ‘personal army’ which seems alarmingly unaccountable and is, according to its critics, unconstitutional, not to say ‘un-American’.
ICE agents, who often hide their faces and wear no identifiable insignia or identification, can detain people without charges or a hearing before flying them abroad.
Their supporters reply that the secrecy is necessary because ICE agents are regularly threatened and their details published online.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration insists that strong-arm measures are needed if the President is to make good on his election promise to drastically crack down on illegal immigration and expel millions.
Last year, the White House dramatically increased spending on ICE, setting aside $75billion for the agency over the next four years out of a $170billion budget for immigration enforcement and border security.
With protesters angrily confronting heavily armed agents at every opportunity, some will say that a death like Wednesday’s tragedy in Minneapolis was inevitable.
And with Minneapolis’s Left-wing mayor Jacob Frey saying that ICE needs to ‘get the f*** out’ of his city, and the Trump administration making it equally clear that it won’t be pushed around, the terrible events of this week might have been just the opening shots.
