Explainer: Narrative Improper, ICE Brokers Lawfully Tried to Detain Girl Shot and Killed

After an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis, Minnesota, last week, top Democrats and social media leftists accused the agent of “murder” in “cold blood.”

Good, their narrative goes, did nothing wrong, and ICE agents broke the law by attempting to detain her. The agent purposely stood in front of her and did not shoot her in self-defense when she nearly ran over him. And in any event, he was not injured. 

That isn’t the case, as explained by a lawyer in JP and demonstrated by the agent’s documented injuries.

The Shooting

ICE had deployed 2,000 agents to Minnesota after recent reports that Somalis were running what a federal prosecutor called an “industrial-scale” scheme. Agents were there for “targeted enforcement,” the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reported, which crackpot leftists believe they are entitled to disrupt. Renee Good, the lesbian mother of three who was killed, apparently believed the same thing.

Early videos of the shooting showed an ICE agent approaching the driver-side door of Good’s Honda Pilot and attempting to open it, as another stepped in front of it. Apparently trying to escape arrest, the woman accelerated toward the agent. He shot her three times and killed her.

The shooting agent’s cellphone footage shows exactly what happened.

Obtained by Alpha News, the video shows the agent emerge from his vehicle, approach the passenger side of Good’s SUV, and walk around the front. Good appears to say, “Come and talk to me.” 

“That’s fine, dude,” she said. “I’m not mad at you.”

Good’s “wife,” Rebecca, confronted him: “Show your face,” she said as the agent circled the SUV. “You wanna come at us?” she asked. “You wanna come at us? I say go get yourself some lunch, big boy. Go ahead.”

As “wife” Rebecca attempted to get into the SUV on the passenger side, another agent approached Good on the driver side, yelling:

Get out of the car, get out of the car! Get out of the f***in’ car! Get out of the car!

While “wife” Rebecca held the handle on the passenger-side door, Good jammed the car into reverse. Then she accelerated with a determined look on her face.

“Oh,” the agent yelled as the SUV hit him. He fired three times. Good smashed into a telephone pole.

After calling a self-defense claim bulls**t, and having ordered ICE “to get the f*** out of Minneapolis,” far-left Democratic Mayor Jacob Frey insisted that the agent was unharmed. “The ICE agent walked away with a hip injury that he might as well have gotten from closing a refrigerator door with his hips,” he said two days later, Fox News reported. “Give me a break. No, he was not ran over. He walked out of there with a hop in his step.”

Answering these claims are Amy Swearer, a lawyer at Advancing American Freedom, and the officer’s medical records.

Leftist “pseudo-experts” on the law, she wrote for JP, believe Americans “enjoy what basically amounts to a categorical exemption from the jurisdiction and legal authority of federal immigration agents. ICE agents, they proclaim, aren’t real law enforcement officers, and therefore, you don’t have to listen to them, and there’s nothing they can do about it.”

Moreover, she continued, more than a few crackpots are suggesting, as social media accounts with “hundreds of thousands­ — sometimes millions — of followers confidently declared (and many are still declaring) that federal agents instigated the deadly encounter by conducting an illegal stop of Good’s car.”

Their argument: ICE agents cannot stop leftists from interfering when they enforce the law, and the so-called illegal stop proves that the agents are morally and legally responsible for Good’s unfortunate demise. 

Immigration Stop Was Legal

Not so, Swearer wrote:

Federal immigration agents are real federal law enforcement officers. The ICE agents who ordered Good out of her car had legitimate and lawful authority to arrest her. 

That doesn’t necessarily mean the agent was justified in shooting her, but it does mean their stopping Good and ordering her out her car was legal. And while immigration agents generally don’t interact with citizens, “this does not mean, however, that ICE agents lack any jurisdiction over citizens and have no legal authority whatsoever to detain or arrest citizens under any other circumstances,” Swearer continued:

Nor does it mean that citizens have carte blanche to impede ICE agents as they carry out their immigration enforcement duties, to ignore lawful orders from ICE agents, or to otherwise endanger their safety.

Contrary to these wild internet claims, ICE agents do, in fact, have broad arrest powers and aren’t required to look on helplessly as citizens violate ordinary criminal laws right in front of them with impunity.

8 U.S. Code 1357, “Powers of Immigration Officers and Employees,” permits agents “to arrest citizens and noncitizens alike who commit ‘any offense against the United States’ in their presence,” Swearer explained:

Additionally, they can arrest anyone — alien or otherwise — whenever they have reasonable grounds to believe the person committed a felony under federal law. In this case, Minnesota state law also explicitly authorizes federal immigration officers to make warrantless arrests when they’re acting within the scope of their federal law enforcement assignments and come across certain conditions — including, for relevant purposes, when they witness the commission of “any felony” or have reasonable cause to believe one was committed.

Other Justification for Shooting

And those aren’t the only laws that empower ICE agents to enforce the law against citizens. 18 U.S. Code 111 criminalizes impeding federal agents who are performing their duties, which “quite comfortably applies to a woman who positioned her car nearly perpendicular to the flow of traffic on a public roadway in a seemingly intentional effort to block the path of a vehicle she knew contained ICE agents conducting immigration enforcement raids.”

Likewise, Minnesota statute 609.495 “deems it a felony to engage in words or acts intended to help a criminal offender avoid arrest or punishment — something that arguably applies to a person who intentionally undermines a federal agency’s efforts to arrest and deport criminal aliens.”

Swearer also destroyed another leftist claim, that because the agent’s stop was unlawful, the agent’s shooting was also unlawful. In fact, the first argument, if even correct, would not mean the agent couldn’t defend himself if he “reasonably believed his actions were necessary to prevent or resist the imminent infliction of death or serious bodily injury. If the agent did, in fact, hold such a reasonable belief, then his actions constituted a legally justified use of deadly force by a law enforcement officer under both Minnesota and federal law.”

The armchair lawyers, Swearer wrote, are urging resisters like Good to confront “federal agents, emboldened by the erroneous belief that they aren’t just morally right, but legally untouchable.”

Swearer’s warning: Don’t take legal advice from social media lawyers who don’t have a law degree.

The Agent

As for the agent, he did indeed walk away from the event, but the Department of Homeland Security reported that he suffered internal bleeding.

What that means, DHS did not report, but the agent did land in the hospital and had not “walked away uninjured,” as some reported.

Aside from that, as the Minnesota Star Tribune reported when it identified him from court records, he had a valid reason to fear for his safety when he shot and killed Good.

On June 17, he was helping arrest Roberto Carlos Munoz-Guatemala, a Mexican illegal alien in Bloomington, the newspaper explained. Pulled over in his car, Munoz refused to open his window. When the agent broke a rear window to unlock a door, the illegal-alien thug drove off:

[Agent Jonathan] Ross was dragged alongside the vehicle and twice fired his Taser as Munoz weaved back and forth “in an apparent attempt to shake” him from the car. About 300 feet down the road, Munoz re-entered the street and the force knocked the officer from the car.

The agent required 33 stitches — 20 in his right arm and 13 in his left hand, the newspaper reported, citing court documents.

CBS News reported that the agent has received death threats.