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On 25 May 2020, America witnessed a stunning act of police brutality when a police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, murdered George Floyd. The killer, Derek Chauvin, apparently confident that he would be immune to accountability, did his deed in the open, with other officers standing by and in front of a crowd of onlookers.
The video of Floyd’s murder shocked the nation.
Fast forward to 7 January 2026, and barely a mile from the spot where Chauvin killed Floyd, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three. She had no criminal record and had just dropped one of her children to school.
Good, who described herself as a “poet and writer and wife and mom” had only recently moved to Minneapolis from Kansas City, Missouri. The Associated Press reports that 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.”
What could be more American?
Her “crime” was her refusal to meekly submit to ICE’s desire to rule the streets of her city.
Again, the killing was done out in the open, with other ICE agents also on the scene. Again, it was done in front of a crowd of onlookers who were stunned by the brutality of what they witnessed. Their cellphone videos have gone viral and given Americans the chance to see for themselves what violence done by agents of our government looks like.
In 2020, Floyd’s murder galvanized nationwide protests calling for reform, including some that demanded defunding of the police. The question is, how will the American people react to Good’s death?
It is up to us to say “no” to what we saw and to demand that ICE be reined in. We can and should do so lawfully, peacefully and without resorting to violence.
One doesn’t have to be a radical to see that what happened on the streets of Minneapolis in 2020, just like what happened there five and a half years later, is an instance of people whose duty it is to uphold the law and protect the American people not doing all they can to avoid resorting to violence.
When the ICE agents arrived at the scene where Good’s car was partly blocking the street, they immediately started shouting and issuing expletive-laden commands to her. One of them rushed to her vehicle and tried to open the driver’s side door.
It all happened in a flash and was frightening to watch, even before the shooting started.
Instead of staying calm and working to de-escalate the situation, the ICE agents made the difficult situation worse. As professors Dr Clemens Lorei and Dr Kerstin Kocab explain, police officers use de-escalation “techniques every day … While at one time, it may have been relatively rare to … attempt to calm down an agitated member of the public and show them empathy, these skills are becoming more frequently employed in modern policing.”
Indeed, ICE’s own use-of-force policy says that agents are only authorized to use force when “no reasonably effective, safe and feasible alternative appears to exist”. It instructs them to use “de-escalation” techniques and show “respect for human life”.
But those guidelines were issued in 2023, under the Biden administration. They clearly were not followed by the ICE agents, who confronted and killed Good. The New Republic reports that sources in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agree.
The video of the scene shows Good trying to drive away when one of the ICE agents, who appears to be standing to the side of the vehicle, opens fire. He does so at a moment when his life was not in danger.
One wishes that Good had not reacted as she did, but she did nothing that justified the use of lethal force.
Forty years ago, in 1985, the US supreme court ruled that police cannot use lethal force just to stop someone from fleeing and escaping. In Tennessee v Garner, they likened the use of such force to a “seizure” of the kind governed by the constitution’s fourth amendment.
Writing for the court, Justice Byron White said: “The intrusiveness of a seizure by means of deadly force is unmatched. The suspect’s fundamental interest in his own life need not be elaborated upon. The use of deadly force also frustrates the interest of the individual, and of society, in judicial determination of guilt and punishment.”
He explained that lethal force can be used only “if the officer has a good-faith belief that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others”, and only if force is necessary to apprehend a fleeing suspect.
A “good-faith belief” means that the use of lethal force must be objectively reasonable. Admittedly, the supreme court’s standard does not make such split-second judgments easy.
That’s why we demand a high level of training and a disposition toward de-escalation before we give someone a gun and let them loose anywhere in this country. We expect a lot of those who exercise the coercive power of the state.
But it seems that under the Trump administration, ICE is resorting to violence as a common tactic. What happened in Minneapolis was the ninth ICE shooting since September. And it was not the first time federal agents have killed someone amid an immigration crackdown. Last September, for instance, Silverio Villegas Gonzalez was killed when he allegedly tried to flee from a traffic stop.
ICE is enacting a vision of a world that, to quote Stephen Miller, deputy White House chief of staff, “is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power”. America should not accept that view.
Justice White offered a better view, a view that would have saved Good’s life: “It is not better that … felony suspects die than that they escape.” That is the view that we should embrace and rally behind in the wake of her death.
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Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, is the author or editor of more than 100 books, including Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty
