No indictments are drawn up in a few days.
Misconduct Expert Says State Has the Right to Charge ICE Officer Who Killed Renée Good Alas, the FBI’s takeover of the investigation could make it difficult.
Quote:
After an ICE agent shot and killed Renée Good in Minneapolis this week, firing his weapon as she attempted to drive away, protesters have amassed around the country, many wondering: Can that officer be taken to court?
The Trump administration, predictably, says the agent, Jonathan Ross, is immune from prosecution. “You have a federal law enforcement official engaging in federal law enforcement action,” Vice President JD Vance told reporters on Thursday. “That guy is protected by absolute immunity. He was doing his job.”
But what do independent attorneys say? After the shooting, I reached out to Robert Bennett, a veteran lawyer in Minneapolis who has worked on hundreds of federal court police misconduct cases during his 50-year career. “I’ve deposed thousands of police officers,” he says. “ICE agents do not have absolute immunity.”
Bennett says the state of Minnesota has the right to prosecute an ICE agent who commits misconduct. But, he adds, that might be difficult now that the FBI has essentially booted the state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension off the case—blocking access, the BCA wrote, to “case materials, scene evidence or investigative interviews necessary to complete a thorough and independent investigation.”
In the conversation below, edited for length and clarity, Bennett discusses how the shooting in Minneapolis unfolded and the legal paths forward.
When you watched the videos of this shooting, what did you see?
You saw what could be easily identified as four ICE officers. And they’re all experiencing, to a greater or lesser extent, the same set of operative facts, the same factual stimuli. But only one officer, seeing the set of circumstances, picked up his weapon. None of the other officers did. That’s a bad fact [for Ross].
Also, the officer walked in front of the car, which counts against him in the reasonableness analysis. If you look at the recent Supreme Court case of Barnes v. Felix, that’s problematic for the ICE agent.
What happened in Barnes v. Felix?
It’s a shooting case where the officer walked around the car, [lunged and jumped onto the door sill], and put himself in harm’s way. You can’t bootstrap your own bad situation [to] allow a use of force.
What did the court find?
They sent it back to the trial court to consider it. But there’s good language in there.
You said it’s bad news for the ICE agent, Ross, that his colleagues didn’t pull their weapons. Can you talk more about that?
Sure, we’ve had several other cases. There was a tactical semicircle, a bunch of officers aiming their guns at a couple fighting over a knife; one officer out of the eight or nine fired his weapon, none of the others perceived the need to.
And that’s important because it suggests the officer who fired wasn’t reasonable, right? Under federal law, an officer can only use deadly force if they had a reasonable fear that they could otherwise be killed or harmed.
It’s an objective reasonableness standard. So it’s not whether you were personally scared out of your wits and fired your gun. It’s: Would an objectively reasonable officer at the scene have fired his weapon, believing he was in danger of death or immediate bodily harm?
In Ross’ case, there was a previous incident—Ross had shot [with a Taser] through a window before at somebody in the car, and the guy hit the gas, and Ross had stuck his arm through the broken window, and he got cut [and dragged about 100 yards]. And so he was supposedly reacting to that. He’s not an objective officer at that point.
The Trump administration has suggested that Ross is immune from prosecution as a federal officer. Why do you say he’s not?
There’s plenty of case law that allows for the prosecution of federal law enforcement agencies, including ICE. And it’s clear under the law that a federal officer who shoots somebody in Minnesota and kills them is subject to a Minnesota investigation and Minnesota law.
Now, the feds just took that away this morning, and they’ve already decided who’s at fault. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension was going to do an investigation to find out.
But I can tell you, the federal code provides that when there is a state criminal prosecution of a federal officer in Minnesota or any other state, the officer has the right to remove the case to federal court. So if Ross was charged in Hennepin County, he could remove the case to the United States District Court for the District of Minnesota, have a federal judge deal with his case. The code is explicitly predicting such a prosecution could take place. If there was immunity of an absolute nature, you wouldn’t need that section, right?
The administration seems to argue that Ross is protected under the Supremacy Clause, which essentially says that states can’t charge a federal officer if the officer was acting within the scope of his duties.
Do you think killing people is acting within the scope of their duties? What if they decided to kill the 435,000 people in the city of Minneapolis while they were here, would the Supremacy Clause give them a free pass? I don’t think so.
Also, if there was an actual independent investigation, and you apply the actual federal case law to this, and you concluded that Ross violated her rights by using excessive deadly force, he could be indicted federally. Now, nobody believes that would ever happen now: For a guy who talked a lot about rigged things, this [investigation] is rigged. Kash Patel took over the autopsy, so who knows, maybe they’ll say she died of a heart attack when she was backing up.
If the officer isn’t charged criminally, the other route is a lawsuit. What are the challenges there?
My team and I think there are ways to do it. I hope that her mother, or her next of kin, calls us and we’ll figure out a Bivens action or a Federal Tort Claims Act case, or something else. If you look at this case carefully, it has all the hallmarks of cases we’ve either won or settled for amounts of money no reasonable person would pay us if we weren’t going to win. It is essentially a garden variety unjustified use of deadly force case. And that’s based on the facts we know now; I bet the case is going to get better.
Renee Good’s activismQuote:
Renee Nicole Good, the mom who was killed by a federal agent after veering her car toward him, was an anti-ICE “warrior” and was part of a group of activists who worked to “document and resist” the federal immigration crackdown in Minnesota, The Post can reveal.
Good, who moved to the city last year, linked up with the anti-ICE activists through her 6-year-old son’s woke charter school, which boasts that it puts “social justice first” and prioritizes “involving kids in political and social activism,” multiple local sources said.
“She was a warrior. She died doing what was right,” a mother named Leesa, whose child attends the same school, told The Post at a growing vigil where Good was killed Wednesday.
Good and her wife, Rebecca, 40, were raising the boy together in the mostly working-class, activist-heavy neighborhood of south Minneapolis, which features tree-lined streets and a large number of homes with windows decked out in LGBTQ+ flags or signs depicting George Floyd.
Just as many others did in the lefty enclave, Good sent her son to Southside Family Charter School, a K-5 academy opened in 1972 that from its inception has been “unabashedly dedicated to social justice education,” according to co-founder Susie Oppenheim.
It was through her involvement in the school community that Good became involved in “ICE Watch” — a loose coalition of activists dedicated to disrupting ICE raids in the sanctuary city.
From my understanding, she was involved in social justice … we are a tight-knit community and a lot of parents are [activists],” former Southside gym teacher Rashad Rich, who resigned from the school last month, told The Post.
He said current event topics like the killing of George Floyd were regular parts of the curriculum, and that last month students took a field trip where they learned about “aboriginal issues” — a reference to the indigenous people of far-away Australia.
Coalitions similar to ICE Watch have cropped up all over the country — with activists using phone apps, whistles and car horns to warn neighborhoods when ICE shows up.
ICE Watch and adjacent groups can also turn confrontational — with numerous instances of activists ramming agents with their cars in the past.
“[Renee Good] was trained against these ICE agents — what to do, what not to do, it’s a very thorough training,” Leesa said.
“To listen to commands, to know your rights, to whistle when you see an ICE agent,” she added
ICE Watch recently shared an Instagram post of the group’s that encouraged agitators to bring items that would help them barricade the streets around where the shooting took place, even urging people to bring things to burn, such as dried-up Christmas trees.
This call for aggressive and even violent resistance comes as ICE agents have faced an unprecedented spike in car attacks, surging by some 3,200% over the last year, shocking data released by the Department of Homeland Security revealed to The Post.
County worker Kristin Peter, 30, who was also at the vigil, said Good was on the same ICE Watch team as one of her co-workers, and that she herself was attending a meeting of the group Thursday night.
They were on the same team, they would eat meals together,” she said as she waved a lit bundle of sage at the memorial site.
School friend Leesa said a lot of families associated with the school live in the area where Good was killed.
On Thursday, the streets of the neighborhood were lined with heart-shaped signs featuring quotes by Assata Shakur, a radical black liberation activist who fled to Cuba in the 1970s after being convicted of murdering a New Jersey state trooper.
According to the Southside Family Charter School’s website, it provides “an academically challenging, socially conscious education to diverse learners,” and declares it’s “proud” to offer what it calls a “social justice curriculum.”
A photo from its Facebook page shows a dry-erase board of students’ “hopes and dreams” for the future, which include “Donald Trump’s heart grows 3x as big.”
The Goods had no love lost for President Trump themselves, leaving their Kansas City, Missouri, neighborhood for Canada after the 2024 election with plans to leave the country for good.
They lived in the Great White North for a few months before settling in Minneapolis, a former neighbor told KMBC.
Rebecca, who was confronting ICE agents outside the SUV at the time of the shooting, was filmed sobbing “it’s my fault” after the shots rang out and she realized Renee had been struck.
“I made her come down here, it’s my fault,” she said, her face covered in blood after rushing to her partner’s aid.
“They shot her in the head. I have a 6-year-old in school,” she said.
I think we should scratch the weaponized portrayals of the late Renee Good as a naive do gooder or a terrorist. Civil disobedience is not terrorism. I am not buying the
Post’s trying to convince me she was trying to hurt or kill Ross. You don’t turn your wheels if that is your intent. Bringing her back to the U.S. is not the thing her wife should feel bad about. “Drive Baby Drive” now makes some sense.
None of the above absolves Ross.
_________________
“Self Acceptance is a process not a performance”
“You are autistic enough. And you always have been”
Professionally Identified and joined WP August 26, 2013
DSM 5: Autism Spectrum Disorder, DSM IV: Aspergers Moderate Severity.
11 Jan 2026, 5:20 am
