A woman was shot and killed Wednesday by a federal immigration officer in Minneapolis, inflaming an already fierce debate over President Trump’s deportation agenda.
Dueling, partisan narratives quickly emerged, with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) calling the woman a domestic terrorist and arguing the entire episode was a terrorist attack.
That prompted a furious response from Minnesota leaders, including Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey (D), who said the accusation was “bulls‑‑‑” and that the woman’s death was the result of “an agent recklessly using power.”
Frey also told U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to “get the f‑‑‑ out of our city.”
President Trump later Wednesday afternoon blamed the incident on “the radical left,” arguing the officer had acted in self-defense, describing the shooting victim as a “professional agitator” who “viciously ran over” an ICE officer.
Democrats in Minnesota and in Congress saw a very different incident, saying the shooting victim — identified by The Minnesota Star Tribune as 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good — posed no threat to the officers and was killed in cold blood.
“There’s no evidence that has been presented to justify the shooting of an unarmed woman in Minneapolis,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) told NewsNation. “We’ve got to make sure that the rogue ICE agent who pulled the trigger resulting in the death of an American citizen is criminally investigated to the full extent of the law.”
“Instead of protecting our communities, they are unleashing violence — terrorizing neighborhoods and now killing a civilian,” said Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who represents much of Minneapolis. “This is not law enforcement. It is state violence.”
The partisan nature of the fight, which seems likely to extend for some time, was unmistakable.
The violence took place against the backdrop of Trump’s law enforcement surge on Democratic-run cities and states.
Trump has recently been focused on Minnesota, where Gov. Tim Walz, the Democrats’ vice presidential nominee in the 2024 presidential election, has frequently sparred with the president on a host of issues, including a fraud controversy in the state involving many residents of Somali descent.
Walz characterized the federal agents in Minneapolis as a “modern-day Gestapo.”
“I’ve seen the video,” he wrote on X. “Don’t believe this propaganda machine.”
Video footage shows the woman operating a car that was stopped in the middle of a street, surrounded by three officers.
One of them tells the woman to “get out of the f‑‑‑ing car,” while one masked officer repeatedly pulls on the driver’s door handle.
The officer who eventually fires the shots approaches the car from the front and begins to draw his weapon as the car turns its wheels — beginning to drive away from the officers.
Three shots ring out, beginning as the officer is in front of the car and continuing as it passes to his side. With the driver incapacitated, the car then careens to the side of the road, crashing into a parked car.
DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin wrote in a post on X that “one of these violent rioters weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them — an act of domestic terrorism.”
House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) also echoed Trump in blaming “the mindset of the left.”
“This whole mindset on the left is the biggest problem ,” he told The Hill. “Where the sanctuary jurisdictions interfere with federal law enforcement doing their job, dox them, harass them, interfere.”
The DHS’s use of force guidelines say officers are “prohibited from discharging firearms at the operator of a moving vehicle” and are not even supposed to use “warning shots” to disable cars.
Rep. Glenn Ivey (D-Md.) who prosecuted police excessive force cases as a state’s attorney for Prince George’s County, said the officer appears to be in violation of that policy and also risked endangering others in the process.
“He’s going to say that he felt he was in danger for his life that she was going to try and ram him with the car. It didn’t look like that to me when I looked at the video,” Ivey said.
“You should never come in front of a car when you’re trying to stop it,” he said, adding that the shots also risked danger to other officers and witnesses.
“It was really stupid to fire the gun with that many people around, especially since there was no felony. You’re only supposed to use deadly force when somebody’s life is in danger, and certainly not for any kind of misdemeanor issue. And at the time they were trying to get her out of the car, I’m not even sure there was a criminal offense that had been committed,” Ivey said.
ICE has been dispatched for surges across the country — most of them in bluer regions controlled by Democrats — which have sometimes triggered clashes with local residents. Despite pledges to go after the “worst of the worst,” more than 70 percent of those currently held in immigration detention have no criminal record.
The agency has repeatedly clashed with protesters, arresting clergy members in Illinois and arresting Newark Mayor Ras Baraka (D) as he attempted to tour an ICE facility in New Jersey. The resulting scuffle led to charges for Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.), who stands accused of attacking officers with her forearms.
Democrats and immigration advocates have condemned ICE’s tactics, accusing officers of aggressive, reckless behavior, often carried out while they are wearing masks.
“Today’s deadly tragedy in Minneapolis is the direct result of the Trump administration’s reckless policy of violent overreach against immigrants and the American citizens who surround them. It is clear the administration has sought to create an environment of fear, violence and federal brutality that puts all our communities at risk. Federal law enforcement must get off the streets and go back to their primary job: Protecting our nation through professional investigations,” the Congressional Hispanic Caucus said in a statement.
“Before all the facts were even known, Secretary Noem was already accusing the victim of domestic terrorism. The preliminary video evidence tells a very different story, one where deadly violence could easily have been avoided.”
Minneapolis has experienced the fallout of excessive force by an officer previously, with the city’s police put under a consent decree after a police officer killed George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, in 2020. The officer was convicted of murder and sentenced to more than 20 years in prison. The Trump administration moved to scrap the decree.
ICE said its operation in Minneapolis was slated to be the agency’s biggest ever, with the Trump administration separately focused on the state over a fraud scheme involving child care providers.
Residents of the overwhelmingly Democratic city have been largely opposed to the ICE deployment, an operation designed to target the sizable population of Somali immigrants in the city.
Rep. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.), who represents neighboring St. Paul, bashed Trump for sending 2,000 ICE agents to “racially profile and arrest Minnesotans.”
“Trump’s reckless and dangerous immigration policies do nothing to make us safer. What they are doing is sowing chaos, division, and distrust not only in Minnesota, but across the nation. Today in Minneapolis, these actions resulted in a masked federal agent fatally shooting a woman in the head,” she wrote on X.
“ICE must immediately cease and desist their actions in Minnesota to allow state and local law enforcement officials to restore order, prevent further violence, and conduct a full, independent, and transparent investigation.”
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison (D) said Wednesday the state would investigate, but blamed Trump for fomenting the violence he called “a causal factor.”
“If anyone broke the law in today’s act of violence, I will do all I can to ensure they are held accountable,” he wrote on X.
