Mother shot dead by Ice agent identified as Renee Good: Protests as public outraged by fatal Minneapolis shooting

The identity of the woman shot and killed by a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer in Minneapolis on Wednesday (January 8) has been revealed. Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother-of-three who had recently moved to Minnesota was shot in the head after being approached by an ICE agent.

Ms Good, who was a US citizen born in Colorado, had recently moved to Minnesota and appears to never have been charged with anything involving law enforcement beyond a traffic ticket. Protesters are now venting their outrage following the fatal shooting.

Dozens of protesters gathered early on Thursday outside a federal building on the edge of Minneapolis that is serving as a major base for the immigration crackdown. They shouted “no more Ice”, “go home Nazis”, “quit your job” and “justice now” as US Border Patrol officers pushed them back from the gate, doused them with pepper spray and fired tear gas.

“We should be horrified,” protester Shanta Hejmadi said. “We should be saddened that our government is waging war on our citizens. We should get out and say no. What else can we do?”

The anti-immigration enforcement protests were not confined to Minneapolis, as demonstrations also took place, or are expected to, on Thursday in New York City, Seattle, Detroit, Washington DC, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Antonio, New Orleans and Chicago. Protests were also scheduled in smaller cities later this week in Arizona, North Carolina, and New Hampshire.

In social media accounts, Ms Good described herself as a “poet and writer and wife and mom”. She said she was currently “experiencing Minneapolis”, displaying a pride flag emoji on her Instagram account.

Her ex-husband, who asked not to be named out of concern for the safety of their children, said Ms Good had just dropped off her six-year-old son at school on Wednesday and was driving home with her current partner when they encountered a group of Ice agents on a snowy street in Minneapolis, where they had moved last year from Kansas City, Missouri.

Video taken by bystanders posted to social media shows an officer approaching her car, demanding she open the door and grabbing the handle. When she begins to pull forward, a different Ice officer standing in front of the vehicle pulls his weapon and immediately fires at least two shots into the vehicle at close range.

In another video taken after the shooting, a distraught woman is seen sitting near the vehicle, wailing: “That’s my wife, I don’t know what to do!”

Despite the video footage, Trump administration officials are painting Ms Good as a “domestic terrorist” who had attempted to ram federal agents with her car. Her ex-husband said she was no activist and that he had never known her to participate in a protest of any kind.

He described her as a devoted Christian who took part in youth mission trips to Northern Ireland when she was younger. She loved to sing, participating in a chorus in high school and studying vocal performance at university.

She studied creative writing at Old Dominion University in Virginia and won a prize in 2020 for one of her works, according to a post on the school’s English department Facebook page. She also hosted a podcast with her second husband, who died in 2023.

Ms Good had a daughter and her son from her first marriage, who are now ages 15 and 12. Her six-year-old son was from her second marriage.

Donna Ganger, her mother, told the Minnesota Star Tribune the family was notified of the death late on Wednesday morning. “Renee was one of the kindest people I’ve ever known,” Ms Ganger told the newspaper. “

“She was extremely compassionate. She’s taken care of people all her life. She was loving, forgiving and affectionate. She was an amazing human being.”

Hundreds of people turned up for a Wednesday night vigil to mourn her death and urge the public to resist the immigration crackdown.

Appearing in the White House briefing room, vice president JD Vance’s voice rose as he decried what he called the “corporate media” for its coverage of the incident. “This was an attack on law and order. This was an attack on the American people,” said Mr Vance, who maintained it has not been portrayed that way by many journalists.

Mr Vance said the Ice officer was clearly justified in shooting Ms Good and he is not worried about prejudging an investigation that is just getting under way.

Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem called the incident an “act of domestic terrorism” against Ice officers, saying the driver “attempted to run them over and rammed them with her vehicle. An officer of ours acted quickly and defensively, shot, to protect himself and the people around him”.

US President Donald Trump made similar accusations on social media and defended Ice’s work. HOwever, Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey called Ms Noem’s version of events “garbage”.

“They are already trying to spin this as an action of self-defence,” Mr Frey said. “Having seen the video myself, I want to tell everybody directly, that is bullshit.”

He also criticised the federal deployment and said the agents should leave.

The head of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) said on Thursday that the US attorney’s office had barred it from taking part in the investigation.

BCA Superintendent Drew Evans said in a statement that after the agency consulted with the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office, the US attorney’s office and the FBI following the shooting, it was decided that the BCA Force Investigations Unit would conduct a joint investigation with the FBI. But he said the FBI later informed the BCA that the US attorney’s office had changed the plan.

“The investigation would now be led solely by the FBI, and the BCA would no longer have access to the case materials, scene evidence or investigative interviews necessary to complete a thorough and independent investigation,” Mr Evans wrote.

“Without complete access to the evidence, witnesses and information collected, we cannot meet the investigative standards that Minnesota law and the public demands. As a result, the BCA has reluctantly withdrawn from the investigation. The BCA Force Investigations Unit was designed to ensure consistency, accountability and public confidence, none of which can be achieved without full co-operation and jurisdictional clarity,” he wrote.

Minnesota governor Tim Walz demanded that the state be allowed to take part, as it would be the only way the public could be confident in its findings, noting it would be “very, very difficult for Minnesotans” to accept that an investigation that excludes the state could be fair.

“And I say that only because people in positions of power have already passed judgment from the president to the vice president to Kristi Noem, have stood and told you things that are verifiably false, verifiably inaccurate,” Mr Walz said.