ICE

Jacob Sullum | 1.12.2026 3:50 PM

During a contentious interview with CNN's Jake Tapper on Sunday, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem reiterated her claim that Renee Good, the woman who was fatally shot by an immigration agent in Minneapolis last Wednesday, was engaged in "domestic terrorism" because "she weaponized her vehicle to conduct an act of violence against a law enforcement officer and the public." Noem added that Jonathan Ross, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer who killed Good, "acted on his training and defended himself and his life and his fellow colleagues" when he fired at the Honda Pilot she was driving.

Judging from bystander video of the incident, those claims are dubious. That evidence does not definitively resolve the question of whether the shooting was legally justified. But it does suggest that Good, who was monitoring ICE activities in Minneapolis and attracted attention because she was blocking a lane of traffic on Portland Avenue, was trying to leave the scene rather than trying to run Ross down. It also indicates that Ross' tactics deviated from Justice Department guidelines and from police training regarding traffic stops.

"Those officers had been out in an enforcement action," Noem told Tapper. "A vehicle had been stuck [in the snow]. They had come to help get that vehicle out. That's when this individual [Good] started blocking traffic for minutes and minutes….[She] was yelling at them and impeding a federal law enforcement investigation. That's what you need to focus on, Jake….They were breaking the law by impeding and obstructing a law enforcement operation."

On Friday, Vice President J.D. Vance posted Ross' own cell phone video of the encounter, saying it confirmed that "his life was endangered and he fired in self defense." But that video is inconsistent with Noem's account in some ways, and it raises questions about Ross' behavior prior to the shooting.

Although Noem said Good "blocked the road for a long time," Ross' footage and the other videos show cars........

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