Renee Good’s Family Sues Trump Officials Over Fatal ICE Shooting

The family of Renee Good, the Minneapolis resident who was killed by an ICE agent in early January during the Trump administration’s Operation Metro Surge, has filed two lawsuits against the U.S. government and specific individuals involved in the events they allege led to her death.

One of the lawsuits lists the United States of America as its sole defendant. The suit cites the 1946 Federal Tort Claims Act, a law that allows people to sue the federal government for personal injury, property damage, or death as a result of government employees’ negligent actions.

“DHS policy provides that officers ‘may use deadly force only when necessary, that is when the LEO has a reasonable belief that the subject of such force poses an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury to the LEO or to another person,’” the family’s court filing points out. “It was plain to [Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jonathan] Ross that Renee posed no such threat to anyone. Ross was out of the vehicle’s path before he fired his first shot, and he fired his second and third shots from the side of the vehicle as it moved away from him.”

The second lawsuit named specific individuals as defendants, including Ross, as well as others within the Trump administration, such as White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, White House border czar Tom Homan, and more. President Donald Trump is not listed as a defendant.

The suit again highlights Ross’s negligence, and suggests that, in addition to targeting immigrants in the Twin Cities, Operation Metro Surge served “to silence, by intimidation, arrest, and violence, the neighbors and allies of those targeted communities who observed, documented, and warned of that campaign.”

Good “was killed on a public street, while doing what thousands of her neighbors were doing that winter: watching masked, armed men terrorizing her community and refusing to look away,” the suit contends.

The two lawsuits are seeking compensatory and punitive damages from the parties involved. In announcing the suits, Becca Good, Renee’s wife, spoke publicly for the first time since January about the agony she has experienced.

“Every morning, she’s my first thought. I think about how the kids are growing up without their mama. How I’ll grow old without the love of my life. … What happened to us should never happen to any family,” Becca Good said.

Despite widespread outrage among the American public, the Department of Justice refused to open a civil rights inquiry into Good’s killing. Instead, Attorney General Todd Blanche later launched an investigation into Becca Good’s connections to progressive organizations.

Immediately after Good’s killing in January, Trump defended Ross’s actions in an interview with The New York Times, wrongly claiming that the agent shot Good because she had hit him with her vehicle.

“She behaved horribly. And then she ran him over. … She didn’t try to run him over. She ran him over,” Trump said.

The interviewers corrected the president, pointing out that video of the incident showed her turning her wheels away from Ross and that the vehicle didn’t appear to strike him at all. (Multiple angles of video footage from the day of the shooting confirmed this.) Trump doubled down, telling them, “I’ll play the tape for you right now.”

When the video he watched contradicted his statement, he refused to correct himself. “Well, the way I look at it…it’s a terrible scene,” Trump said.

Later that day, Trump continued to peddle the false claim that Good ran over the agent in social media posts.