Minneapolis had been bracing for catastrophe before ICE killing

In the days before a federal agent shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, the Trump administration said it was launching what would be the agency’s “largest operation to date” in the Twin Cities.

Since early December, agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection and Homeland Security Investigations – many of them masked and brandishing rifles – have grabbed people at hardware stores and gyms, or outside homes and schools around the cities. They have violently tackled undocumented immigrants as well as US citizens, including advocates and protestors.

By the time Good was shot on Wednesday – in broad daylight, as dozens of bystanders screamed in shock – local leaders and human rights advocates had been bracing for a catastrophe.

“Before this administration, I don’t think we’ve ever seen this kind of hyper-militarized enforcement, with surges of thousands of officers,” said Setareh Ghandehari, the advocacy director at Detention Watch Network, a non-profit that tracks deaths in ICE custody. Advocates like Ghandehari have warned that more deaths could come, and that shows of force make everyone in the country less safe.

“I don’t think we should be surprised that this has been happening.” she said. “And unfortunately I think there is definitely a chance of an incident like this happening again if the administration and ICE continue to be allowed to act with impunity and without any semblance of accountability.”

Just a few days into 2026, the mobilization in Minneapolis suggests the administration has no plans of easing indiscriminate immigration enforcement operations that have defined the president’s second term.

Since the beginning of the second Trump administration, immigration officers have been connected to 14 shootings, including at least four fatal shootings, according to data compiled by the Trace, a non-profit newsroom focused on gun violence in the US. In September, immigration officers shot Silverio Villegas González, an undocumented immigrant, during a vehicle stop on the outskirts of Chicago.

In Good’s case – as in Villegas González’s case and the cases of non-fatal officer shootings – the Department of Homeland Security claimed that Good “weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers”, a statement that appeared to be contradicted by eyewitness accounts and videos of the incident. On several occasions, judges have dismissed cases in which ICE agents accused people they shot of attempting to hurt officers with vehicles.

Shootings have not been the only cause of death amid immigration raids. In October, a 24-year-old Honduran man died while trying to flee ICE agents in Virginia. In July, a farmworker died after falling from a greenhouse roof during an ICE raid in California.

And 32 people died in ICE custody in 2025, making it the deadliest year for the agency since 2004.

“Over the past year, the Trump administration has granted ICE agents virtual impunity to visit terror and violence on immigrant communities across our country,” said Kica Matos, president of the National Immigration Law Center. “The violence has to stop, immediately.”

The administration has justified its massive – and ultimately deadly – show of force in the Twin Cities as necessary to root out criminals, a refrain it used in other operations last year. But a preliminary analysis from Minnesota Public Radio of who is being arrested in the raids show that most of those targeted have no criminal convictions. Overall, most of the immigrants arrested by ICE since the beginning of the second Trump term have no criminal records.

In Minneapolis, residents and organizers were bracing for more violence. Hours after Good’s death, about 3 miles (5km) from where she was shot on Wednesday, armed immigration officers descended on Minneapolis’s Roosevelt high school, tackled people, handcuffed two staff members and released chemical weapons on bystanders, school officials told MPR.

“They don’t care. They’re just animals,” a school official told the station. “I’ve never seen people behave like this.”