Protests Erupt in Minneapolis After a Woman Is Killed by ICE Officers

The US Department of Homeland Security said that ICE was conducting “targeted operations” in the city that day, which were disrupted by the actions of people involved in unrest. According to the department, one individual attempted to use a vehicle as a weapon and ram officers. In response, an ICE officer opened fire, acting, it said, in self-defense.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem issued a separate statement. She said ICE officers became stuck in the snow and were trying to push their vehicle free when a group of “provocateurs” began blocking their way. The woman, whom Noem said had been following the officers throughout the day and interfering with their work, refused to leave her car despite repeated orders. She then attempted to run over an ICE officer, the secretary said. Noem described the incident as “an act of domestic terrorism” and said it was being investigated by the FBI. She also said that an ICE officer was struck by a vehicle, taken to hospital, and later discharged.

According to The Minnesota Star Tribune, the woman killed was identified as 37-year-old local resident Renee Nicole MacLean Good. She was a US citizen originally from Colorado who had recently moved to Minnesota. Renee Good is survived by three children—a daughter and a son from her first marriage, aged 15 and 12, and a six-year-old son who has been left a full orphan: his father died in 2023. Good’s former husband said that shortly before the encounter with ICE officers, she had dropped her youngest son off at school and was returning home with her current partner.

On social media, Associated Press notes, Renee Good described herself as “a poet, writer, wife, and mother”; her Instagram profile featured a rainbow-flag emoji. Her former husband said that Good was not involved in activism and had never taken part in protests, describing her as a “devout Christian”. In recent years, he added, she had largely focused on running the household.

In the aftermath of the incident, videos recorded by eyewitnesses from multiple vantage points began circulating on social media. The footage shows two people getting out of an ICE pickup truck. One of them approaches a Honda Pilot SUV that has blocked the road, demands that the driver open the door, grabs the handle, and tugs at it. The vehicle then moves slightly backward. At that moment, a third person appears in front of the hood from the other side. When the car, after reversing, begins to move forward, it is this individual who draws a weapon and fires at least two shots from close range, simultaneously jumping out of the vehicle’s path.

CNN, which analyzed three separate video recordings, reports that the ICE officer who opened fire initially moves behind the woman’s vehicle, heading toward its front. In one of the clips, CNN writes, the car appears to “make contact” with the officer before the first shot is fired. At the same time, the shooting begins when the ICE officer is already outside the vehicle’s path as it starts moving forward—he manages to step aside. He fires two shots from the side of the car, near the driver’s window. Associated Press, however, stresses that the available videos do not allow a definitive determination of whether there was physical contact between the vehicle and the officer, nor whether the woman had interacted with them before filming began.

Commenting on the incident, Donald Trump said he had watched the video and concluded that the woman at the wheel had behaved “extremely aggressively,” obstructing the work of ICE officers before “deliberately ramming an officer”. In his view, the officer “appeared to have acted in self-defense”. “Watching the attached clip, it’s hard to believe he survived, but he is now recovering in hospital,” the US president wrote. The video shared by Trump is filmed from the front and slightly above—it captures little of the shooting itself, showing mainly the car continuing to move forward by inertia. Trump added that the situation was being “fully reviewed”, but linked such incidents to what he described as постоянные threats from the “radical left” against ICE officers.

Following the woman’s death, Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey issued a public statement addressed to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “Get the hell out of Minneapolis,” he said. According to Frey, the agency justifies its presence in the city on public-safety grounds, yet its actions have produced the opposite outcome. “You talk about safety, but instead a person is dead. And that death is on your conscience,” the mayor said.

Two days before the incident, it emerged that the Trump administration was planning to deploy around two thousand ICE officers to Minnesota to bolster measures aimed at combating illegal immigration.

Associated Press notes that the shooting took place in an area south of downtown Minneapolis—less than two kilometers from the site where police killed George Floyd in 2020. After Renee Good’s death, city residents took to the streets in protest, demanding that ICE officers leave Minneapolis. By evening, according to Associated Press, hundreds of people had gathered for a vigil to honor her memory.