On the morning of Jan. 7, an ICE agent operating in a Minneapolis neighborhood shot and killed Renee Good, a U.S. citizen. Authorities have identified ICE agent Jonathan Ross as the suspect. Video footage shows he shot Good three times. The 37-year-old mother of three was parked in her SUV and began driving forward as another ICE agents tried to open her door—turning the vehicle away from Ross, who was standing near the driver’s side. Within hours, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Vice President J.D. Vance accused Good of being a domestic terrorist and a “brainwashed far-left insurrectionist” who caused her own death. President Trump insisted in a TruthSocial post that the agent acted in self-defense, stating that Good had run over the officer and needed hospitalization.
Eyewitness accounts and several video recordings of the shooting contradicted the Trump regime’s aggressive effort to demonize and criminalize Good. The FBI reversed an initial agreement that an investigation into Good’s death would be conducted jointly by both the FBI and Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, leading many to believe the Trump administration was actively engaging in a cover-up.
Six federal prosecutors in Minnesota resigned on Jan. 13 over the Justice Department’s push to investigate Renee Good’s widow and the Trump Justice Department’s reluctance to investigate the shooter, ICE Agent Jonathan Ross. Six prosecutors from the Department of Justice civil rights division also resigned in protest after the DOJ blocked a civil rights investigation into determining whether the ICE officer’s use of deadly force was justified. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Pastor Doug Pagitt, executive director of the Minneapolis-based organization Vote Common Good, which mobilizes people of faith to challenge the Republican party’s extremist right-wing agenda. Here he talks about how his community and the nation have responded to Renee Good’s death—with over 1,000 protests across the U.S. organized on short notice—and the threat that Trump’s masked ICE secret police force poses to the rule of law and democracy.
PASTOR DOUG PAGITT: In so many ways, I’m so proud of our city for the response that we had just hours after Renee was shot dead by an ICE agent. I was down on the scene and there were already hundreds of people gathered. There was cordoned off by the police and it was right around three blocks away from where George Floyd was murdered. So many of us gathered right in that same neighborhood five and a half years ago when there was another, in that case, a Minneapolis police killing of a person in our city. And so here we saw a number of organizers and protesters and city activists having to gather again. There’s a lot of ways I’m so proud of the way that the different communities, the faith communities, the civic communities, the on-the-ground, street organized communities came together. And that’s partly because we’re well versed in this.
Our little city here of Minneapolis has suffered in the last five-and-a-half years under the murder of George Floyd. A terrible school shooting that killed a bunch of Catholic children at their Catholic school starting beginning the school year. Political assassinations of a state senator and state representative for the election last November. And now this killing of Renee Good by federal agents. And the number of vigils that we’ve had to organize and the number of rallies and the number of calling out to our public officials: “You have to do something about it.” Too many of us are getting too good at this, and we shouldn’t have to be this good at figuring out how to raise a moral voice in opposition to laws that provide too many opportunities for harm and for these kind of brutal activities, half of which have come at the hands of people that we’ve invested with so much power and trust in our communities through our law enforcement agencies.
SCOTT HARRIS: Since the shooting on Jan. 7, Pastor Pagitt, there’s been an active campaign to smear the victim of the shooting, Renee Good, the 37-year-old mother of 3. They’ve described her as a domestic terrorist and a brainwashed, far-left insurrectionist that caused her own death. That’s a paraphrase of what Vice President JD Vance said just a few days ago. It seems that the objective here is to demonize and criminalize Renee Good to convince Americans that it was legitimate and to normalize her death. How do you respond to what really seems to be a very ugly campaign?
Instead, we hear just the opposite. We hear JD Vance blaming Americans for their own homicide. We hear Kristi Noem spreading lies about what happened. We hear Donald Trump being so conflated with the information that he’s received that he can’t speak clearly. It is a smear campaign, not just against Renee Good, it’s a smear campaign against Americans. Against anyone who opposes this administration for what they do and how they do it.
The one thing that we know the Trump administration wants to unleash on America, on Greenland, on Venezuela, on Mexico is violence. The thing they know is how to use scorn and anger and words of violence and actions of violence and bullying. And to quote the president, “I want to punch them in the face.” And so anger and violence begets anger and violence. So when we feel our anger burning, find a way to direct it and then find someone to help. You know what people need in the moment of crisis and violence? They need beauty and care and kindness.
For more information, visit Vote Common Good at votecommongood.
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