The United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency emerged from post-September 11th federal restructuring. With the creation of the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2002, three new subsidiaries were created to replace the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the United States Customs Service: Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). CIS processes legal immigration and naturalization bureaucracy, and CBP handles border patrols and port inspections, while ICE pursues immigration violations.
Before covering the controversies surrounding these agencies, especially ICE, it is essential to make a distinction between illegal and criminal activity. Philosophers and legal theorists have wrestled with this for centuries, but I analyze this question based on consent. A crime violates consent by trespassing against life, liberty, and/or property. Examples include murder, rape, assault, battery, theft, and fraud. The Latin term malum in se can be applied to acts which are wrong in and of themselves. This is in contrast to illegal or malum prohibitum acts which violate legislative dictates, but do not violate consent. Examples include breaking prohibition, licensing, gun control, or immigration laws.
According to Brett Snider's 2019 article on Findlaw, there are two distinct categories of immigration law violations: improper entry, and unlawful presence. Improper entry is a federal misdemeanor, and consists of entering the US outside official ports of entry; eluding examination or inspection by immigration officers; and/or willfully concealing, falsifying, or misrepresenting facts when immigrating. Unlawful presence is not even technically a crime, just a civil infraction, and can be as simple as overstaying a work, travel, or education visa. Both categories fall under malum prohibitum rather than malum in se by my analysis.
Donald Trump and many Republicans, especially his Make America Great Again (MAGA) base, demand stronger borders. Some such advocates for border control assert that CBP and ICE are extensions of our right to property through the collective authority of our representative government, and as such, undocumented immigrants are trespassers. I see this as a mistake in reasoning, but one at least in accord with popular beliefs about democracies and republican forms of government. Others, however, simply conflate the concepts of illegal and criminal, ignoring any distinction between the categories of crime as defined above in their zeal for obedience to political authority.
Under today's Trump/MAGA propaganda machine, concerns about immigration are combined with other malum prohibitum issues like drug smuggling and malum in se crimes like human trafficking and gang violence to portray all "illegals" in the same light as the Muslim terrorist scares which justified creating the DHS, ICE, and CPB in 2002 in the first place. This fear has led the rabid base of the American right wing to justify any and all enforcement actions as necessary for our safety and security.
Furthermore, these common justifications for aggressive ICE crackdowns do not fall under ICE jurisdiction unless they are also connected to immigration and foreign trade. There is a separate department within DHS for human trafficking, plus the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), and doubtless many more alphabet soup goon squads for those matters.
Nonetheless, it does not matter to MAGA if ICE operates as a literal secret police with unmarked cars, masks, and a blend of plainclothes and paramilitary gear. They must be obeyed no matter what, and any abuse of power is justified by the imagined dangers they allegedly thwart. Who cares if due process devolves to "a buraucrat signed a paper?" So what if US citizens are detained, beaten, deported, or even killed? They should all have done as they were told. Comply or die.
Meanwhile, the American left is denouncing ICE, but I can't shake the feeling this is more about partisan opposition to Trump than any real principled stance for individual rights. I remember how loudly they called for making anyone who dissented from COVID policy into a second-class citizen. No matter the arguments they actually made, they were automatically a "science denier" who wanted to see people die. Your rights to work, travel, and trade needed to be curtailed for public safety. This is essentially the same excuse used by MAGA now as they demand punitive measures against "illegals," and anyone who protests against their Great Leader for that matter.
On January 7th, 2026, Renee Good was shot by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Social media has become a morass of angry shouting by defenders and critics of ICE with the circumstances surrounding that event and questions of who was in the wrong.
According to the internet, Good was from Colorado Springs, Colorado; she had previously lived in Kansas City, Missouri; she briefly relocating to Canada after the 2024 presidential election; and she recently moved to Minneapolis with her wife. It sounds like she was the kind of lesbian left-wing wingnut MAGA sees as one of the biggest problems in America right above the level of those "illegals," so I'm not surprised to see her demonized. However, it does not matter whether they, or I, disagree with her politics in order to weigh the right and wrong in her death.
ICE has escalated its presence in many cities, and is engaging in aggressive patrols. One such patrol got stuck in the snow and ice of Minneapolis winter near a dual-language elementary school where local residents were standing watch in response to these patrols. DHS secretary Kristi Noem alleges Good was "stalking and impeding ICE all day," but it was only about 9:35 AM local time, and Good had just dropped her son off at school.
For the sequence of events, I will copy slightly-abridged quotes from the Wikipedia article about the incident, with a few comments of my own. I offer the obvious caveat that new facts may come to light, and Wiki can be flawed, but to my knowledge at the time of this post, these basic facts are not in dispute.
At 09:35:05 Central Standard Time, Good's maroon Honda Pilot SUV was stopped sideways on the one-way Portland Avenue. Ross drove his SUV around Good, stopped ahead of her, began recording video, and stepped out with his face covered. He walked in front of her SUV, and she backed up. Ross walked toward and around Good's SUV while recording her face and rear license plate. Good tells him: "That's fine, dude. I'm not mad at you." Good's wife stood behind their SUV, also recording on her cell phone, and said: "Show your face. That's OK. We don't change our plates every morning, just so you know. This will be the same plate when you come talk to us later. That's fine. US citizen, former fucking veteran, disabled veteran."
At present, reports are unclear to me as to whether Good was parked that way to deliberately impede traffic, but the next paragraph and video footage suggests otherwise. Ross is the ICE agent who would subsequently shoot Good. Why did he decide to stop and harass her in the first place? He isn't a traffic cop. Further, any law enforcement officer is supposed to establish probable cause, or at the very least a reasonable, articulable suspicion, of a punishable crime.
At 09:36:58, a Ford Explorer entered Portland Avenue, Good waved, apparently to indicate that the Ford should pass in front of her SUV, which it did, along with another vehicle. Meanwhile, Ross returned to the right side of Good's SUV while Becca said: "You wanna come at us? You wanna come at us? I say go get yourself some lunch, big boy." [A] Nissan Titan stopped to the left side of her SUV and two more ICE agents stepped out.
Again, it appears Good was not trying to block traffic. Filming and even heckling government agents is explicitly protected activity under the First Amendment to the US constitution and numerous court cases. But why was Ross bumbling around with his phone out to record if there was suspicion of a crime in progress? That's what his body cam is for, right?
An eyewitness said ICE agents gave conflicting orders, with one telling Good to drive away while another shouted at her to get out of the SUV. At 09:37:08, the ICE agents from the Nissan pickup approached Good's SUV as one of them repeatedly ordered her to "get out of the fucking car". Good remained in her vehicle and put the transmission into reverse.
Police shootings are often preceded by aggressively-shouted contradictory orders, which serve only to confuse the citizen and all but guarantee "failure to comply" as justification for escalation. Additionally, ICE has not demonstrated probable cause to detain or arrest Good at this point, much less shown they have jurisdiction over her, but MAGA commentary invariably cites her "failure to comply" or "obstruction" in their justification for what comes next.
A number of events then occurred near-simultaneously:
- One of the ICE agents who approached her placed his hands on the driver's door handle and open window of Good's vehicle.
- Becca attempted to open the front passenger door.
- Good drove a few feet in reverse.
- Ross walked to the front-left of Good's vehicle.
Here is where I become extremely critical of Ross. He had no business walking around Good's car, much less standing in front of her. I don't see how this makes sense from "official procedure" or basic situational awareness.
The agent at the driver's door reached through the open window, and Becca shouted, "Drive, baby, drive!"
Good began to drive forward while turning the steering wheel to the right and away from Ross, the correct direction of traffic on the one-way street.
People debate back and forth about whether Good steered toward or away from Ross, but frankly, I see that as irrelevant. She was approached by hostile masked men, surrounded, shouted at from many directions with contradictory commands and no real probable cause for any of it. She sought to flee when someone tried to open her door, which is a completely reasonable response.
Ross drew his gun, leaned forward, and fired three shots at Good in the moving SUV in under one second, killing her, at 09:37:13.
Debate continues as to whether Good's car hit Ross, with some video appearing to show him standing well clear, while others show him getting clipped by the fender. As generative AI deepfakes proliferate, it's even hard to be sure which videos and images circulating on social media are even genuine.
If I were in this situation as a mundane citizen, acting in the same way as ICE agent Ross, there would be no question that I had initiated the incident, recklessly escalated matters, and then committed murder. However, the badges and titles seem to make it harder for most to grasp that, and partisan presuppositions muddy the waters still further. The disregard for facts and principles in favor of party lines reminds me of both the murder of George Floyd (coincidentally also in Minneapolis) and the chaos surrounding Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
My initial response to the death of Floyd is here. I still think the police restraint technique and failure to render aid were both inexcusable regardless of Floyd's alleged drug use and counterfeit money. You can read my response to the Rittenhouse acquittal here, but in short, I think the court decision was correct.
In the case of Floyd, the activist left turned discussion away from police reform and toward a partisan framing of racial injustice under the banner of Black Lives Matter (BLM). The right swung back in line to support the police restoring "law and order" in response to BLM protests. The same rally around law enforcement is happening now as MAGA demands crackdowns on ICE protesters, and DHS Secretary Noem even called Good a "terrorist."
In the Rittenhouse case, the right could see how he acted in self-defense against a violent mob when in reasonable fear of imminent bodily harm, but refuses to understand that Good was also fleeing a violent group of armed thugs. Instead, they demand unquestioning obedience to anyone with a badge. "I feared for my life" apparently only applies to Ross after instigating the entire matter in the first place, and not to his victim.
In case it isn't clear, Ross is not even remotely in the right based on my analysis of the available information. ICE does not have jurisdiction to arbitrarily detain American citizens, but Americans are supposedly protected from unreasonable searches and seizures. Americans also have the explicitly-protected right to observe and record police despite Trump administration claims to the contrary. Neither filming nor protesting qualify as "obstruction." Ross and his cohorts do not appear to have met the threshold for probable cause even if they had jurisdiction.
The Supreme Court of the United States is only starting to overturn previous assumptions about how to analyze the circumstances surrounding police shootings, most significantly in Barnes v. Felix, and while they have not addressed the issue of police creating the dangerous situation, they also now require a consideration of the circumstances leading up to the shooting, not just the moment the shooting occurred, when determining excessive force. I contend the "totality of circumstances," including everything done by ICE agents up to the shooting was responsible for the fatal outcome.
At most, Good was guilty of a mild traffic infraction, assuming she parked her car sideways on purpose. She does not appear to have been stalking or harassing ICE, obstructing any specific enforcement activity, or anything els emore egregious than failure to RESPECT MAH AUTHORITAH! Ross lacked probable cause for the initial approach and walkaround. The other ICE agents had no probable cause to attempt to detain Good, much less try to open her door. They reportedly gave conflicting orders to someone in a sudden high-stress situation. Ross was an idiot when he walked in front of Good's car. There is no way she presented a lethal threat which warranted proportionally lethal force in response at those speeds and in those conditions.
The law often holds its enforcers to a lower standard than it does the general public, even though these armed goons are allegedly highly-trained professionals. All I am doing here is holding him to the standard I hold myself as an armed American. It's my job whenever I strap on my pistol to make a mental note to use it as a last resort. Conflict should be avoided, de-escalated, or escaped if practicable. Ross and company initiated conflict, escalated it, and then murdered the woman trying to escape.
The police state is a consequence of bipartisan actions and excuses ratcheting up tension for decades. It's not "just a few bad apples," either. The full proverb reminds us that one bad apple spoils the whole barrel. The barrel is rotten. To the left angry at the overreach committed by Trump's administration today, I tried to warn you when you ignored the crimes of Biden and Obama. Whether the party power balance shifts in the midterm elections at the end of the year, or in the next presidential election, or even further down the road, the precedents cheered by MAGA today will be denounced when exercised against them, and I will only say, "I told you so."
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