The videos are difficult to watch. In one, a 37-year-old mother is shot through her car windshield after turning her steering wheel away from a federal agent. In another, a 37-year-old nurse is pinned to the ground by six federal officers before being shot in the back. Both were American citizens. Both were exercising their constitutional rights. Both are now dead.
Jonathan Freedland, who has covered the United States for over 30 years for The Guardian, offered a stark assessment to CBC News: “The way to understand Donald Trump’s first year of his second presidency is about grabbing power and removing any restraints on his power. That’s the game he’s playing. And I think ICE is part of that.”
The deaths of Renee Nicole Good on January 7 and Alex Jeffrey Pretti on January 24 have transformed Minneapolis into ground zero for an escalating confrontation between federal immigration enforcement and American civil liberties. The question hanging over these shootings is no longer just about immigration policy. It’s about whether federal agents can kill American citizens on American streets with impunity, and whether the constitutional rights of assembly, speech, and due process still mean anything.
The Pattern of Violence
ICE was created over 20 years ago with a mandate focused on illegal immigrants who commit crimes in the US. But under Trump’s second term, its budget tripled to $120 billion over three years, and its targeting expanded dramatically. What followed was predictable: confrontations with American citizens became routine.
Good’s killing was the ninth time in five states and Washington, D.C., that ICE agents had opened fire on people since September 2025. Four other people had already been killed during federal deportation operations before Pretti became the fifth. In 2025 alone, 32 people died in ICE custody, the deadliest year in more than two decades, followed by at least four more deaths in just the first weeks of 2026.
The cruelty, as critics observe, appears to be the point. As one Border Patrol agent told a woman recording him days after Good’s death: “Have y’all not learned from the past couple of days?” When she asked what lesson she was supposed to learn, the implication was clear. Glenn Kirschner, who spent 30 years as a US government prosecutor, put it bluntly to CBC News: “That agent told that woman, haven’t you learned your lesson from the shooting of Renee Good. He said the quiet part out loud.”
What the Videos Actually Show
Federal officials immediately labeled both Good and Pretti as “domestic terrorists” who attacked officers. The videos tell a different story.
In Good’s case, multiple cameras captured the encounter from different angles. She had stopped her Honda Pilot partially blocking a street where ICE agents were operating. Agent Jonathan Ross, wearing a mask and body armor, recorded the encounter with his cellphone. When Good began to drive away, ABC News analysis shows she turned her steering wheel to the right, away from where Ross was standing, just over one second before the first shot was fired.
Frank Figliuzzi, who spent most of his 25-year career at the FBI reviewing officer-involved shootings, analyzed the footage for CBC News. “Drawing your weapon should only happen when you’re in that imminent fear,” he said. “He drew his weapon when he placed himself in harm’s way by moving to the front of her vehicle. The other agents did not. The other agents did not fire.”
Ross fired three shots. The first went through Good’s windshield. The final two were fired through the side driver’s window after he had moved out of the vehicle’s path. “He cannot then say that he continued to think that there was an imminent fear of death once he’s moved to the side of the vehicle and out of harm’s way,” Figliuzzi concluded. On Ross’s own cellphone video, someone can be heard saying “f***ing bitch” moments before Good’s SUV crashed into a parked car.
The independent autopsy commissioned by Good’s family found she was shot three times, including once in the head near the temple.
Pretti’s death followed a similar pattern of official narrative colliding with video evidence. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem claimed Pretti was “attacking” officers and “brandishing” a weapon. Stephen Miller described him as a “would-be assassin.” But bystander videos verified by Reuters, the BBC, The Wall Street Journal, and multiple other outlets show Pretti holding only a phone in his hand. He can be seen standing between an agent and a woman who had been pushed to the ground, putting his arm around her protectively. He was then pepper-sprayed and wrestled to the ground by several federal agents. Around six officers surrounded him when he was shot.
A preliminary government review obtained by NPR made no mention of Pretti attacking officers or threatening them with a weapon. It states simply that “Pretti resisted their efforts and a struggle ensued” before two officers shot him multiple times in the back.
The Accountability Vacuum
In both cases, what happened after the shootings reveals as much as the shootings themselves.
President Trump instantly absolved Agent Ross. “She behaved horribly and then she ran him over,” he said of Good. Vice President JD Vance claimed Ross was “protected by absolute immunity,” a legal concept that does not exist for law enforcement officers in the United States. Secretary Noem called Good’s actions “domestic terrorism” without providing evidence.
“They pre-cleared him before an investigation even commenced,” Kirschner observed. “Donald Trump pre-cleared him with public statements. JD Vance pre-cleared him. Kristi Noem pre-cleared him based on no evidence.”
Federal authorities blocked state and local officials from accessing both crime scenes despite court orders demanding preservation of evidence. In Pretti’s case, Minnesota obtained a search warrant for public areas that federal investigators simply ignored. The state filed an emergency lawsuit to prevent tampering with evidence, which a judge granted, but by then federal agents had already secured and removed materials from the scene.
When a passing doctor asked to help the bleeding Good, he was denied access. After Pretti was shot, witnesses reported that none of the agents attempted to help him, and they initially wouldn’t allow a physician to approach the body.
Governor Tim Walz called federal officials’ actions “an inflection point in America,” pointing to their “closing the crime scene, sweeping away the evidence, defying a court order and not allowing anyone to look at it.” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey was more direct about the federal narrative: “bullshit.”
The Question Nobody Wants to Answer
The footage from Minneapolis has been seen by more than eight in ten US voters, according to polling. A majority, 53 percent, believe Good’s shooting was not justified. Even some Republicans have broken with the administration. Senator Bill Cassidy called the events “incredibly disturbing” and said “the credibility of ICE and DHS are at stake.” Senator Thom Tillis urged an investigation and warned that “any administration official who rushes to judgment and tries to shut down an investigation before it begins are doing an incredible disservice to the nation.”
But the more uncomfortable question remains largely unasked in official Washington. Philip Maddox, a Minneapolis resident who recorded one confrontation with immigration agents, articulated it to CBC News after an agent pointed a gun at him while he was observing from a public street: “I take it as a threat, you know, that we will shoot you if you get in our way. And we have permission to do so.”
Canadians have been asking Americans directly: Is your country turning into a police state? One Minneapolis resident gave CBC an answer that deserves to be heard: “I think we’re there. I don’t think we’re turning into it. I think we’re there. Having masked agents patrolling the neighborhood, just shooting us, harassing people that are protesting or just observing. And as soon as you speak up against them, you’re labeled a domestic terrorist.”
Two 37-year-old Minnesotans are dead. A poet and a nurse. Both American citizens. Both killed by federal agents. Both labeled terrorists by the same administration that blocked investigations into their deaths. The evidence of what happened is on video for anyone to see. The only question left is whether seeing still matters.