‘It could have killed me’: Minnesota shooting solidifies the anxieties of people who track ICE

By Eric Bradner, Michael Williams, CNN

(CNN) — In every city where President Donald Trump’s immigration agents have arrived in force, they’ve been trailed by people who seek to monitor or protest their activities, often in close quarters.

At times, those two groups have collided with tragic results — including an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent’s fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good on Wednesday morning, as she appeared to attempt to drive away from ICE agents ordering her out of her vehicle on a Minneapolis street. Video obtained by CNN on Friday shows Good’s wife and Jonathan Ross, the officer who fired the fatal shots, recording each other with their cellphones before Good tries to drive off.

Good’s last words to Ross were: “I’m not mad at you.”

In the Trump administration’s telling, those protesters, including Good, are “agitators” or even “domestic terrorists.” Vice President JD Vance described Good as part of a “left-wing network to attack, to dox, to assault and to make it impossible for our ICE officers to do their job.” FBI director Kash Patel has suggested federal law enforcement will investigate leaders and funders of the loosely organized groups which have followed and documented immigration enforcement efforts.

People who track ICE scoffed at the notion that they are terrorists or part of any organized cell.

“I mean, gosh, we’re like, moms in Toyota Corollas,” said one Minneapolis-area activist who participates in anti-ICE patrols and declined to give her name because she feared retribution from the administration.

“We’re mental health workers, we’re teachers, we’re people that are connected to our communities in such a way that we see there’s harm being done,” she said. “There’s nobody in my contact group who are professional agitators.”

Confrontation in Minneapolis

The moments which led to the encounter that ended in Good’s death on that icy Minneapolis street are still unclear. While Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has accused Good of “stalking agents all day long,” her ex-husband told the Associated Press that she had just dropped her 6-year-old son off at school and was headed home before she noticed a group of ICE agents in the street.

Good’s wife, Becca Good, said in a statement to MPR News that on Wednesday morning, they “stopped to support our neighbors. We had whistles. They had guns.” She did not further address the lead-up to the shooting.

In the days after Good’s shooting, a number of anti-ICE activists drew comparisons to an incident in Chicago last year. Marimar Martinez, a US citizen, was shot five times by a Customs and Border Protection agent in Chicago who accused her of ramming her vehicle into his SUV. Martinez survived, and Martinez’s defense attorney alleged it was actually the agent who sideswiped Martinez. The Justice Department later dropped its charges against Martinez.

Good’s death appears to have hardened protesters’ resolve in Minneapolis, leading to tense standoffs. For people who take it upon themselves to track ICE’s movements and warn neighbors about their presence, the killing has crystallized their worries about following a law enforcement agency that has used increasingly harsh tactics to deliver on the Trump administration’s mass-deportation promise.

Lucia Gardner, a longtime Minnesota teacher and mother, said federal agents drove last week through her New Hope neighborhood at slow speeds up and down the street, so she decided to follow them, notifying neighbors along the way. Later that evening, she found ICE agents parked in front of her house.

“I could have been the person shot last night because I’ve been there,” Gardner said. “The thing that I was doing that didn’t seem like it should be dangerous was apparently dangerous. It could have killed me.”

‘Most people in these situations panic’

Activist groups across the country, meanwhile, are trying to prepare protesters who monitor federal immigration agents to avoid the kind of escalation that happened in Minneapolis.

Jill Garvey, co-director of States at the Core, which holds virtual “ICE Watch and Community Defense” training programs, said her group attempts to train people to remain as calm as possible in such scenarios.

“Most people in these situations panic, and that’s what I saw in the video,” she said of Good. She said ICE agents often rush to surround individuals’ vehicles, and said the group recommends that those involved in such encounters keep their windows up and doors locked, put their cars in park, take their hands off their steering wheels, make sure their phones or recorders are running and verbalize their rights — such as telling agents, “I have a right to be here.”

Garvey said in the wake of Good’s killing, “at least the people I’m training the last 24 hours are feeling like it’s more important than ever.” She said half of the more than 800 people who participated in a Wednesday night training session were from Minnesota.

“What I don’t think was lost on anybody was, we wouldn’t have really known the truth of what happened unless this woman’s neighbors had been documenting what was going on. We have videos from multiple angles,” she said.

Garvey said the group’s training programs emphasize documenting ICE’s actions, supporting those being targeted and deescalating to mitigate violence.

“It’s also not about interference,” she said. “We’re pretty explicit that we don’t recommend interference. We don’t recommend putting your body between an ICE agent and their target. And certainly, don’t put your hands on any federal agent — that’s incredibly dangerous.”

A push for dash cameras

Nick Benson, a longtime plane-spotter in Burnsville, Minnesota, who has monitored deportation flights, took to the social media website Bluesky this week to ask for donations to cover dash cams for those observing ICE activities in his state. He posted an Amazon wish list that featured a dash cam and memory card — $144 plus tax for both.

As of Friday afternoon, he said, 410 had been ordered. An Amazon driver delivered a huge tote of dash cams while he was speaking to CNN, and told him another was on the way.

Benson said he realized the need for more tools for drivers to document what they are seeing after he heard from other Minnesota activists that ICE agents were behaving recklessly and falsely accusing citizens of wrongdoing.

“In a situation where it’s the word of a bunch of federal agents versus a concerned citizen,” he said, “the only recourse we have in a situation like that is when we have dash cams that are documenting what is happening all the time.”

Benson said the dash cams were being distributed across the Twin Cities in part through networks of activists he knows — or that he’s been put in touch with. “Everyone’s networked with each other,” he said. “I’ll bring a few grocery bags (of dash cams) to one person, and they’re taking care of it on their end.”

However, he disputed the Trump administration’s characterizations of protesters as part of any larger organization.

“It’s not a well-defined flow chart,” he said. “I’ve been in model train clubs that have more thorough organizations than the community here.”

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CNN’s McKenna Ewen contributed to this report.