On the morning of January 7, 2026, an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good in south Minneapolis during a federal immigration enforcement operation. She was 37, a mother of three children, and a U.S. citizen. She was sitting in her Honda Pilot on a residential street when ICE agents approached her vehicle. She had reportedly just dropped her youngest child at school earlier in the morning. Good was not under investigation by ICE and had no criminal history.
The shooting of Good has sparked widespread protests locally and nationally, with demonstrators criticizing federal immigration enforcement practices and the handling of the investigation. Memorials and rallies took place near the scene in Minneapolis and in other cities. Her children are now without their mother. Her community is grieving and angry. And across the country, people are asking the same question: How did we get here?
Good wasn’t the only person shot by federal immigration agents in recent months. She was one of at least 16 people shot between July 2025 and early January 2026. Four people were killed. Seven more were injured. When you add incidents where federal immigration agents held people at gunpoint without firing, plus documented cases in which they used less-lethal weapons like rubber bullets and pepper balls during enforcement actions, tracking by independent news organizations shows at least 28 total use-of-force incidents involving these tactics. These figures are likely an undercount, since shootings and other use-of-force incidents involving immigration agents are not consistently made public.
Just one day after Good was killed in Minneapolis, federal agents shot two people outside a hospital in Portland. One was shot in the leg, the other in the chest. DHS gave the same explanation they’d given for Good: Agents fired when the driver tried to run them over with a “weaponized vehicle.” The pattern repeats itself over and over—agents shoot at people in vehicles, claim self-defense, and face little to no accountability while survivors get charged with assaulting federal officers.
This didn’t happen overnight. To understand how a U.S. citizen ended up dead on a Minneapolis street, shot by agents who weren’t even looking for her, you have to understand how immigration enforcement transformed from a bureaucratic function into something that looks more like a paramilitary force. You have to go back—not just to 9/11, but further.
How Immigration Enforcement Used to Work
For most of American history, immigration enforcement was boring. It mostly involved filing cabinets and carbon paper and people who spent their days processing forms. The U.S. Customs Service goes back to 1789, but the Border Patrol wasn’t created until 1924. The first agents rode horses they supplied themselves, carried revolvers they paid for, and didn’t even get uniforms until four years later. A lot of them came from the Texas Rangers or local sheriff’s departments, which mattered more than you’d think—it shaped the culture of the agency from the beginning.
That culture is worth sitting with for a minute. The Texas Rangers had a long, documented history of violence against Mexican Americans and Mexican nationals, including extrajudicial killings, mass executions, and what historians have called ethnic cleansing along the border during the early 1900s. When those men became the first Border Patrol agents, they brought that culture with them—a culture that saw certain people as threats rather than human beings, that viewed the border as a war zone rather than an administrative boundary, and that prioritized control and dominance over due process or dignity. The agency was literally built by men who’d spent their careers treating brown-skinned people as enemies. That foundational culture never fully went away. It just got a bigger budget and better weapons.
For decades after that, everything immigration-related went through one agency: The Immigration and Naturalization Service. INS did it all—border security, deportations, asylum cases, green cards, everything. People who worked there in the 70s and 80s describe it as “drowning in paperwork.” Deportation officers were called “desk officers” as a joke, because that’s where they spent most of their time. The work was serious, but it wasn’t tactical. It wasn’t militarized. Nobody was getting shot.
Then 9/11 happened.
The Transformation After 9/11
The attacks changed everything about how the federal government thought about immigration. The hijackers were foreign nationals who’d entered the country legally, so suddenly immigration became a national security problem. INS was already struggling—it was supposed to help people immigrate and deport people who broke the rules, and those missions contradict each other. Bo Cooper, who served as INS general counsel under Presidents Clinton and Bush, put it bluntly: “The idea was that there was a bit of a Jekyll-and-Hyde role for the INS if it was supposed to be dispensing benefits on the one hand and throwing the book with the other.”
Congress decided the agency couldn’t do both, so they blew it up and started over. The Homeland Security Act passed in 2002, and when DHS opened its doors in March 2003, INS was gone. Its old responsibilities got split three ways: USCIS handles benefits like green cards and citizenship applications, CBP handles borders and ports of entry, and ICE handles enforcement inside the country.
That last one was new. We’d never had a federal agency whose only job was interior immigration enforcement. ICE was supposed to enforce civil law—visa violations, overstays, paperwork violations—but it was built with the tools, culture, and authority of criminal policing, all justified in the name of preventing another 9/11. That mismatch mattered from day one. You were taking what used to be administrative violations and enforcing them like violent crimes. And then the agency grew—fast.
Today, ICE employs more than 20,000 people and operates in hundreds of offices around the world. Its budget is around $8 billion a year. CBP’s budget increased significantly after the creation of the Department of Homeland Security—rising from about $5.1 billion in FY 2003 to over $12 billion by FY 2024—reflecting sustained post-DHS growth in border enforcement funding. In the FY 2025 federal budget request, U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s budget was approximately $19.76 billion, with a net discretionary authority of about $16.6 billion. That money bought fences, drones, surveillance systems, and military equipment.
The culture changed too. Immigration enforcement used to mean forms and hearings. Now Border Patrol agents carry M-4 rifles, drive armored vehicles, and use night-vision gear. The transformation was dramatic. What started as a civil enforcement agency began operating more and more like a military force. And when you train people like soldiers and give them military equipment and tell them they’re protecting national security, they start acting like they’re at war. The problem is, they’re not at war—they’re policing American neighborhoods. And American citizens like Renee Good end up dead.
The Human Cost
Since ICE started publicly reporting deaths in custody in 2003, at least 185 people have died in immigration detention. In 2025 alone, 32 people died in ICE custody—matching the previous record high set in 2004 and making it the deadliest year for the agency in more than 20 years.
The American Immigration Council looked at what’s causing these deaths and found a combination of factors: overcrowding, poor detention conditions, medical neglect, escalating mental health crises, and gun violence. In less than a year, the current administration increased the population held in ICE detention facilities by nearly 50%. DHS currently holds nearly 69,000 people. Most facilities are operating beyond their contracted capacity. When you pack more people into spaces already documented as unsafe, deaths become predictable.
Medical experts who’ve reviewed these deaths keep finding the same problems: delayed care, misdiagnosis, unqualified staff, neglect. A report from 2024 looked at deaths between 2017 and 2021 and concluded that most of them were preventable. The same report found something even more alarming: The investigations were largely handled by the same federal system responsible for the conduct in question. Evidence was allowed to be destroyed, key witnesses were never interviewed, and critical facts were omitted from official findings. In effect, the agency was investigating itself—the same thing that’s happening right now with Good’s death—without independent oversight, without public transparency, and without meaningful consequences when failures were identified.
The conditions inside detention facilities don’t help. Overcrowding, poor hygiene, bad food, limited medical access—it’s been documented over and over. In one Massachusetts facility, 35 to 40 men were packed into a single windowless room with one toilet, sleeping on concrete floors. Immigration detention is supposed to be civil, not criminal. But if you’re inside one of these places, that distinction doesn’t mean much.
There are constitutional problems too. Immigration enforcement programs threaten Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches, Fifth Amendment due process rights, and equal protection guarantees. The 287(g) program—where local cops get deputized to do federal immigration work—has been linked to racial profiling and civil rights abuses. Nearly two-thirds of participating agencies have documented violations.
There’s almost zero accountability. There’s no clear law that lets people sue federal immigration agents for constitutional violations. Former staff from DHS’s civil rights office have warned that layoffs and budget cuts mean fewer internal checks, which means more deaths and more abuse. The agent who shot Renee Good will likely never face criminal charges. The FBI is investigating itself. There’s no state oversight. No independent review. No consequences.
Families Torn Apart
Around five million children live in mixed-status households in the United States, including more than four million U.S. citizen children. But the scale of family separation through immigration enforcement is far larger than most people realize.
Government data shows that over 231,000 non-citizen parents who reported having at least one U.S.-citizen child were deported by ICE from 2013-2018. In 2019 alone, nearly 28,000 deported people reported having U.S.-born children. These figures mean hundreds of thousands of U.S.-citizen children have been separated from a parent through deportation over time—even though the government does not track what happened to those children afterward.
Independent estimates paint an even starker picture: 4.7 million U.S.-citizen children live with at least one undocumented parent, putting them at constant risk of separation through enforcement. A decades-long review found 87,351 parents of citizen children deported from 2015-2017 alone. Because ICE does not centrally collect or disclose data on outcomes for children after a parent is detained or removed, precise national numbers are unavailable. But the real scale of family separation in the interior of the U.S. is in the tens to hundreds of thousands.
The psychological damage is profound and well-documented. Multiple studies link parental detention or deportation with significant mental health effects on children, including elevated stress, anxiety, depression, and trauma symptoms consistent with post-traumatic stress. The wounds don’t heal quickly—psychologists who’ve evaluated separated families find lasting trauma, especially in kids who watched a parent taken away.
Renee Good’s three children will now carry that trauma. They’ll grow up knowing their mother was killed by their own government, for no reason, and that nobody will be held accountable.
When Communities Stop Trusting
When immigration enforcement operates with even less accountability than ordinary policing—no Internal Affairs, no civilian oversight, no meaningful consequences—people rationally respond by avoiding all contact with authorities. They stop calling the police. They delay or avoid medical care. They decline to report crimes. They disengage from schools, courts, and social services. What collapses is not simply cooperation in individual cases, but generalized trust in public institutions.
Countries like Norway, Denmark, and Finland maintain a sharp separation between routine policing and immigration control. Police are not expected to act as immigration screeners, and residents generally believe that contacting authorities will not expose them or their family members to collateral enforcement. As a result, crime reporting rates are high, vaccination uptake is strong, and public institutions function as intended.
The United States is moving in the opposite direction. The 287(g) program—under which local law enforcement officers are deputized to perform immigration functions—has been particularly corrosive. Studies following the program’s expansion documented measurable declines in crime reporting in jurisdictions with active 287(g) agreements, especially for domestic violence and sexual assault, offenses that already suffer from underreporting.
This erosion of trust is self-reinforcing. When residents believe that a traffic stop, a call for help, or a hospital visit may trigger immigration consequences, they rationally avoid contact altogether. Police lose witnesses. Hospitals see patients later and sicker. Public agencies operate with incomplete information. Over time, communities begin to resemble low-trust societies not because of culture, but because institutional design has made distrust the safer option.
In Minneapolis right now, people are scared. They’re scared to call the police. They’re scared to drive their cars. They’re scared that what happened to Renee Good could happen to them. And they have every reason to be scared, because approximately 2,000 federal agents are deployed in their city, agents who’ve been trained for six weeks instead of six months, agents who cover their faces, agents who are shooting people and claiming self-defense, agents who face no accountability when they kill American citizens.
How We Fix This
The death of Renee Good and the system that made it possible didn’t appear out of nowhere. It’s the result of deliberate policy choices made over more than two decades. Which means it can be changed through deliberate policy choices again. Here’s how:
Independent Oversight and Accountability
First, we need real accountability. ICE and CBP cannot investigate themselves. Every shooting, every in-custody death, every use of force needs to be reviewed by an independent civilian oversight board with subpoena power and the authority to recommend criminal charges. These boards should include community members, civil rights attorneys, medical professionals, and former law enforcement officials—but not current DHS employees. Their findings need to be public. Their recommendations need to be binding.
We also need to create a clear legal pathway for people to sue federal immigration agents for constitutional violations. Right now, there essentially isn’t one. That needs to change. Agents need to know they can be held personally liable when they violate someone’s rights or kill someone without justification.
Separation of Functions
The mixing of civil immigration enforcement with criminal law enforcement tactics was a mistake from the beginning. We need to separate them again. Create clear bright lines: immigration violations are civil matters and should be handled with civil enforcement tools, not military equipment and tactical teams. If someone is suspected of an actual crime—not just an immigration violation—then criminal law enforcement can get involved. But agents enforcing visa overstays shouldn’t be carrying M-4 rifles and shooting people in vehicles.
Local police should not be doing federal immigration work. End the 287(g) program entirely. It destroys community trust, leads to racial profiling, and makes everyone less safe. Police departments that want federal funding should have to certify that they’re not performing immigration enforcement functions.
Drastically Reduce Detention
The current detention system is inhumane, dangerous, and largely unnecessary. Most people in immigration proceedings aren’t flight risks or public safety threats—they’re people waiting for their hearings. We need to shift to community-based alternatives to detention: ankle monitors, regular check-ins, case management. These programs cost a fraction of what detention costs, they’re more humane, and studies show they work just as well at ensuring people show up for their hearings.
For people who do need to be detained, we need real standards and real enforcement. Independent medical staff, regular inspections with consequences for violations, immediate access to lawyers, and absolute transparency about conditions and deaths. And we need to reduce the detention population dramatically—not 69,000 people, but a small fraction of that number.
Restore Due Process
Immigration courts are a disaster. As of 2024-2025, the immigration court backlog has exceeded 3.5 million pending cases, with roughly 700-735 immigration judges nationwide, meaning judges carry an average of 4,000-4,500 cases each. This workload makes it impossible to give cases the time and attention due process requires. At the same time, nearly half of all people in removal proceedings—approximately 49 percent—appear in court without a lawyer, because immigration proceedings are civil and the government does not guarantee appointed counsel.
These conditions result in hearings that are often rushed and highly procedural, with judges under pressure to move cases quickly in a system that prioritizes case completion and removals over individualized adjudication. In many jurisdictions, people wait four or more years for a final hearing or decision, underscoring how an underfunded and understaffed system delays justice while still pushing cases forward unevenly (Migration Policy Institute; TRAC).
Restoring due process requires adequately funding immigration courts, expanding the number of judges and support staff, guaranteeing legal counsel for those who cannot afford it, and giving judges the time and resources necessary to properly hear cases. People deserve a meaningful day in court, including in immigration proceedings.
Scale Back Enforcement Operations
The massive “blitz” operations need to stop. Deploying 2,000 agents to Minneapolis, agents with minimal training and military equipment, doesn’t make communities safer—it terrorizes them. It leads to shootings like Renee Good’s. It destroys trust. It tears families apart. We need enforcement that’s targeted, proportional, and focused on actual public safety threats, not sweeping operations designed to hit quotas.
Mandatory De-escalation Training and Revised Use-of-Force Policies
The current use-of-force policies clearly aren’t working. We’re seeing agents shoot people in vehicles over and over again, always claiming the vehicle was a weapon. We need strict policies that prohibit shooting at moving vehicles except in the most extreme circumstances, mandatory de-escalation training that actually works, and consequences when agents escalate situations unnecessarily. The default should be de-escalation, not drawing a weapon.
Training needs to be longer and better. Six weeks isn’t enough to prepare someone to make life-or-death decisions in high-stress situations. Bring training back to six months minimum. Include extensive de-escalation training, constitutional rights training, cultural competency training, and mental health crisis response. And make it clear that the job is civil enforcement, not warfare.
Protect Families
We need to stop separating families. Create explicit policies that protect parents of U.S. citizen children from deportation except in cases of serious criminal conduct. Track what happens to children when parents are detained or deported—the fact that we don’t currently do this is shameful. Provide support services for families that have been separated. And create pathways for deported parents of citizen children to return.
Data Collection and Transparency
We can’t fix problems we can’t see. ICE and CBP need to collect and publicly report comprehensive data on uses of force, shootings, in-custody deaths, complaints, disciplinary actions, and family separations. All of it. Updated monthly. Available to researchers and the public. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and right now these agencies operate in the dark.
Congressional Action
Congress needs to reassert oversight. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act that gave ICE $170 billion was a catastrophic mistake. That funding needs to be clawed back and redirected toward humane alternatives. Congress needs to hold hearings, demand answers, and use its power of the purse to force reforms. And ultimately, Congress needs to pass comprehensive immigration reform that creates legal pathways for people to come here and stay here, reducing the need for enforcement in the first place.
Where We Go From Here
Renee Good should be alive. She should have picked up her kids from school that afternoon. She should be with her family right now. Instead, she’s dead, killed by an agent of her own government, an agent who will probably never face consequences, in a system that’s designed to avoid accountability.
We can’t bring her back. But we can make sure her death wasn’t meaningless. We can use this moment to fundamentally rethink how immigration enforcement works in this country. We can acknowledge that the post-9/11 transformation was a mistake, that militarizing civil enforcement makes everyone less safe, and that there’s a better way.
The question isn’t whether we need immigration enforcement—reasonable people can disagree about what our immigration policies should be. The question is whether we can enforce those policies in a way that’s consistent with our values, our Constitution, and basic human dignity. Right now, we can’t. The system we’ve built makes tragedies like Renee Good’s death not just possible, but inevitable.
We’ve always said we’re a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants. We’ve said we can have secure borders and humane treatment. We’ve said we can enforce the rules while honoring our values. The death of Renee Good forces us to confront the gap between what we say and what we actually do.
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