Nine Months After They Killed Renée Good, ICE Is Still Shooting — and Still Not Charged

On January 7, 2026, ICE agent Jonathan Ross put three bullets into Renée Nicole Macklin Good's car as she tried to drive away from a traffic stop in south Minneapolis. She died there, one more name on a list that Wikipedia editors have had to keep as a running tally because there are now too many entries to hold in memory: at least 30 documented shootings by ICE and CBP agents since the second Trump administration began its immigration surge, spread across nineteen states and the District of Columbia. Good was a U.S. citizen. So was Marimar Martinez, shot five times in Chicago weeks earlier. So was Keith Porter, killed by an off-duty agent in Los Angeles on New Year's Eve for the crime of celebrating outdoors while Black. Citizenship was never the point. Compliance was never the point either — it never stopped the agents from firing.

The pattern in case after case is identical: an agent claims a vehicle was driven at him, a claim later undercut by video, body cameras, or the fact that the charges filed against the survivor get quietly dropped once prosecutors have to actually look at the footage. Marimar Martinez's charges: dismissed. Francisco Longoria's: dropped when the officer's story didn't hold up. Phillip Brown's traffic-stop charge, dismissed by a judge who said on the record he found the agent's decision to open fire "completely unclear." The TikTok streamer whose indictment collapsed in December. This isn't a string of unfortunate accidents. It's what happens when an agency built for paperwork enforcement is handed guns, a 2,000-agent surge into a single metro area, and a political mandate that treats every non-compliant driver as a justified target.

What makes Good's case different is the scale of the institutional cover job that followed. More than a dozen federal prosecutors in Minneapolis and Washington resigned in protest after DOJ's Civil Rights Division refused to even open a constitutional investigation into her killing. Minnesota's attorney general sued DHS. Tens of thousands marched through a Minneapolis January in -30°F windchill — organizers say the largest protest in state history — and the response from Washington wasn't retreat, it was to reportedly investigate the left-leaning groups who organized the marches, not the agent who fired the shots. As of late August, CNN reported federal prosecutors were merely "considering" civil rights charges against Ross. Considering. Eight months on. That word is doing a lot of work for people who face immediate loss of liberty for reversing a car five feet the wrong way.

This is the actual function of prosecutorial discretion in a system built to protect its enforcers: delay is acquittal. Every month DOJ spends "considering" is a month Ross keeps his badge, keeps his pension accruing, and every other agent watching learns the actual consequence of killing a US citizen who was trying to leave rather than comply — none. The chart below, built entirely from Wikipedia's sourced, dated log of these shootings, doesn't need embellishment: the monthly count didn't fall after Good's death sparked national outrage. It barely dipped. Public fury is not a deterrent when there's no accountability mechanism behind it.

None of this required inventing a Gestapo comparison, though plenty of mainstream commentators — even Joe Rogan — have reached for one anyway. It requires only reading the record ICE itself generates: agents who fire first, spokespeople who fabricate the ramming narrative on cue, and a Justice Department that treats "considering charges" as an acceptable answer to a body count. Abolition isn't rhetoric here. It's the only demand consistent with an agency that has shown, thirty times over, that it cannot be reformed into not shooting people.

Sources

Wikipedia: Killing of Renée Good
Wikipedia: List of shootings by U.S. immigration agents in the second Trump administration
CNN: Justice Department considers bringing charges against ICE officer
Washington Post: Trump aides declared 16 DHS shootings since July justified before probes completed
NPR: Use of force has become a 'default tool' for ICE officers, ACLU report finds