Along the freezing roads of Minneapolis, chaos erupted on January 7th as Immigration & Customs Enforcement officers and police encircled a lone SUV riddled with bullet holes. Inside slumped 37-year-old Renee Good, slowly succumbing to her gunshot wounds. Everyone at the scene seemed to recount different stories of the event. Some say that she tried to run over the ICE officers and was met with reasonable force, while others see this as another example of law enforcement brutality. All we know is by the time paramedics had come to her aid 15 minutes later, Good had passed.
The Mentor Editorial Board believes that ICE should change their approach to seizing illegal immigrants and be mindful of their power as federal law enforcement. The shooting made waves across America, with protests all over the country detesting ICE’s actions. Since President Trump’s second term, there have been many accounts of agents abusing their power across the U.S, creating a law enforcement group akin to the authoritarian Peacekeepers of the Hunger Games. Good’s death had been the final nail in the coffin, and has now released discourse with American citizens and politicians alike.
Trying to get to the facts of the shooting only leads into a rabbit hole of misinformation and hyperbole, the most controversial being the events preceding the altercation itself. Despite Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem labeling Good as a “domestic terrorist,” many city leaders have stated that she had only acted as a legal observer of the ICE protests the day of the shooting. Noem commented that Good had been “stalking and impeding” the unmarked ICE vehicles, leading to the altercation. But Good’s ex-husband said that she was dropping her six year-old son off to school and “came upon a group of ICE agents.”
The only objective piece of evidence that people can get a hold of is the two pieces of footage from an ICE officer and a bystander filming behind Good’s vehicle. Ross’s video does not show much of the shooting itself, more of the altercation that led to it, but the viewpoint of the backside of the incident really paints a clear picture of what really happened.
The accusation of Good “weaponizing her vehicle” is false. Two U.S. officials who had seen the medical records of ICE officer Jonathan Ross, who was allegedly struck by Good’s car, said that he had suffered from “internal bleeding” in his chest. Comparing their statements to the video, you can clearly see a sizable amount of space between Ross and the vehicle she turned away from him. And that leads to another point: the angle of the tires. The video shows the tires turned away from Ross in an attempt to flee the scene, not in front of the officer.
And that is why the modern ICE officer is nearly untouchable. With the Trump Administration at their side, officers can easily arrest people with only the suspicion that a person might not be a citizen, which has led to several situations of racial profiling and false imprisonment. More than 170 legal citizens were detained last year, alongside another 130 people who were supposedly interfering with officers, with most cases being dropped.
In ICE’s defense, they have stopped a lot of crime with their drug seizures against the cartels. September 2025 marked a 56% decrease in Fentanyl trafficking compared to the previous year. ICE has put away many violent criminals, but that pales in comparison to the number of people detained without criminal records. More than 70% of illegal immigrants detained had never committed a single crime. The only crime they committed was coming into the country illegally, but the system put in place to process these immigrants is the one to blame.
Immigrating into the United States is a slow and grueling process. Green cards are limited by the government annually and can cost up to more than $10,000. To put this in perspective, most illegals come from a background of poverty, and getting this amount of money seems nearly impossible. And that’s not also taking into account the violence that occurs in these crime-ridden countries, where death lurks just around the corner. So instead of taking the legal route, they take their chances.
If people are to put trust in their government again, there need to be some changes in the way they treat illegal immigrants. The first change being that all ICE officers should be more surveilled with the help of body cams.
There had previously been an executive order made by the previous administration to expand the usage of Body Worn Cameras, but funding was abruptly cut by Trump. The last update from Homeland Security was that ICE was equipped with around 4,400 BWCs last June, which is a pretty underwhelming number knowing that there were 22,000 officers at the time. Ross and the ICE officers were not wearing body cams, not even a dashcam in the vehicle. If they had, there could have been more solid evidence on how the altercation started. We just can’t ask ICE to start playing nice, so we might as well start holding them accountable.
It’s been a really bleak start for 2026, after being pretty bleak for the past couple years. A lot of people have lost faith in this country. They question if America is still the “Land of Opportunity” when they witness the people that are deprived of it, but there is still a chance at redemption. America’s beauty lies in its diversity. There is no set race or religion that defines this country. What that binds us together is our hard work towards a better tomorrow. And every day, thousands of families risk their lives for another opportunity at life. That does not make them illegal. That makes them American.
Elaine R. • Jan 31, 2026 at 2:12 am
Renee Good’s death is tragic. That fact is not in dispute. What is in dispute—and what your editorial fails to respect—is the difference between tragedy and proof. In your rush to deliver a moral verdict, you abandoned the very standards of evidence and restraint that journalism is meant to uphold.
Your editorial concedes, repeatedly, that the facts of the January 7 incident are unclear: conflicting accounts, rampant misinformation, and limited footage. And yet, despite admitting this uncertainty, you confidently declare that ICE’s account is false, that Good did not pose a threat, and that the officers involved acted improperly. You cannot have it both ways. If the truth is murky, certainty is irresponsible. Declaring conclusions where evidence is incomplete is not advocacy—it is speculation dressed up as authority.
The core of your argument rests on lay interpretation of video footage: perceived distance between officer and vehicle, inferred intent from tire angle, and assumptions about internal injuries. These are precisely the kinds of claims that cannot be responsibly made without forensic analysis or expert testimony. Camera angles distort depth. Internal injuries do not require dramatic visual impact. An editorial board substituting its own visual guesswork for formal investigation is not “speaking truth to power”—it is abandoning rigor.
You also rely heavily on rhetorical exaggeration, likening ICE to a dystopian authoritarian force. This analogy may be emotionally satisfying, but it is analytically hollow. ICE officers are subject to internal affairs investigations, DOJ review, civil litigation, and congressional oversight. Those systems may be imperfect—but portraying the agency as “nearly untouchable” is demonstrably false and weakens legitimate reform efforts by replacing critique with caricature.
Your broader claims about racial profiling and arbitrary detention suffer from the same flaw: numbers without context, conclusions without scale. Dropped cases are presented as evidence of abuse, when in reality they are a normal and necessary feature of due process. Enforcement agencies encountering non-criminal individuals is not proof of misconduct; it is a function of civil immigration law. Conflating enforcement with brutality is a category error.
Even where your editorial lands on solid ground—such as the call for expanded body-worn cameras—you undermine your own position by presuming guilt. Accountability measures are strongest when framed as tools of transparency and professionalism, not as restraints imposed on villains. Body cameras protect civilians and officers. Treating them as punishment reveals bias, not balance.
Your closing claim—that those who enter the country illegally are therefore “American”—is rhetorically stirring but legally incoherent. American ideals are aspirational; American citizenship is defined by law. A society governed by emotion rather than law is not compassionate—it is arbitrary. Immigration reform is a legislative responsibility. Demanding that frontline officers rewrite the law through selective enforcement is neither just nor sustainable.
America deserves better than certainty without evidence. It deserves journalism that can mourn a death without manufacturing conclusions, demand accountability without discarding facts, and argue for reform without sacrificing intellectual honesty.
Tragedy should prompt investigation—not indictment by editorial fiat.