Renee Good’s family files lawsuit after her Minneapolis shooting during Operation Metro Surge

Fast Read

Renee Good was shot and killed in her vehicle by a federal immigration agent on Jan. 7 in south Minneapolis. His family and partner are now suing the United States, the agent and federal officials.

Lawyers for Renée Good’s family on Thursday invoked an 1871 law intended to combat Ku Klux Klan terror by filing two civil lawsuits seeking accountability for the killing of Good by a federal agent during Operation Metro Surge.

The lawsuits name Jonathan Ross — the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who killed Good — as well as current and former Trump administration officials, including Gregory Bovino, Kristi Noem, Tom Homan and Stephen Miller.

“The day of accountability has arrived for our own American government and its government agencies,” attorney Antonio Romanucci told reporters Thursday as he stood with Good’s family after filing the lawsuit. “Our government is killing our citizens without any legal justification. »

The lawsuits seek accountability for the decisions of federal officials and agents as well as damages “for the immense suffering Renée endured in the final moments of her life and for the deep and lifelong losses” suffered by her family.

“She was the love of my life,” Becca Good, Renee’s partner, told reporters Thursday in her first public remarks since witnessing Renee’s murder. “She was funny, smart and beautiful. She was the center of my universe. You don’t know how much light someone gives you until it’s gone.”

She spoke tearfully about Good’s three children. “No child should grow up without a parent. No one should lose their sister or daughter. No one should have to live without their soulmate,” she added. “Real accountability and real change is the only way to ensure that no family has to experience what we are experiencing.”

A “campaign of terror”

Renee Good was shot and killed in her vehicle by Ross, the ICE agent, on the morning of January 7 in south Minneapolis, near East 34th Street and Portland Avenue. She and her wife had stopped to watch as ICE agents gathered at the scene.

Federal authorities quickly called the shooting justified, saying Good, 37, attempted to run over ICE agents with his vehicle and that the agent — later identified as Ross — fired to protect his life and the lives of other agents.

A bystander’s video, however, contradicts this account. Eyewitnesses said the officers gave Good conflicting orders about whether she should stay or leave, and that she simply appeared to want to leave the scene.

Ross, the ICE agent who killed Good, was one of thousands of federal immigration agents who flooded the Twin Cites over the winter as part of Operation Metro Surge. Federal officials said they were seeking to find and deport the “worst of the worst,” but that’s not what happened.

Data later showed that less than 25 percent of those arrested had a criminal conviction on their record. Just over 13 percent of those arrested faced criminal charges.

The White House used “unfounded and exaggerated accusations” about fraud in Minnesota to send masked agents into Minneapolis neighborhoods to “harass people based on their appearance” and made those agents believe they would face no consequences for their actions, attorney Benjamin Berkman said.

The second of the two civil suits invokes the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871.

Congress passed the law at the time “because masked men were traveling in disguise on the highway to terrorize their neighbors because of their race,” Berkman said. One hundred and fifty-five years later, armed men came to Portland Avenue in disguise. They went there as part of a campaign to terrorize people based on their appearance – and now Renee Good is dead.

The use of the anti-Ku Klux Klan law, he added, “hits the officer who fired those shots and all the public officials who put him on the street that day.”

The Justice Department, responding to an MPR News inquiry, said it “declines to comment on pending litigation or investigations.”

A message left with the Department of Homeland Security, seeking a response to the lawsuits, was not immediately returned.

Vigils for Renee Good were held across Minnesota hours after her killing, as the state found itself at the center of a national debate over immigration enforcement.

Two and a half weeks later, federal agents in Minneapolis fatally shot Alex Pretti, 37, on Jan. 24 near 26th Street and Nicollet Avenue.

The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that Pretti was armed with a handgun, that a struggle ensued as agents tried to subdue him, and that one agent “fired defensive shots.” But video and eyewitness accounts once again challenged federal officials’ account.

MPR News reporter Jon Collins contributed to this report.

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