Good’s death on a Minneapolis street during a federal immigration operation is now at the center of a dispute over whether an ICE officer used lethal force appropriately, as federal officials described the moment and policing experts questioned key choices visible in bystander videos.
The videos, recorded from multiple angles, show a Honda SUV stopped nearly perpendicular across a one-way residential street as snow piled along the curb. Federal officials said the officer acted in self-defense, asserting that Good was engaging in an “act of domestic terrorism” when she pulled forward toward him and that the officer was lucky to escape alive, according to the Associated Press report by Claire Galofaro.
In the footage described by the AP, the Honda was stopped on Portland Avenue just before the shooting, with the driver-side window open and the driver waving an arm as if to signal traffic to go around. One large SUV drove around the front of the Honda while several unmarked federal vehicles idled nearby, the AP said, as bystanders shouted at officers, blew whistles, and honked to draw attention to the federal presence.
As officers approached the Honda, one officer ordered, “Get out of the car. Out of the car. Get out of the f---ing car.” According to the AP, the Honda’s reverse lights came on and it began rolling slowly backward as an officer grabbed the driver-side door handle and tried to pull the door, then put an arm into the open window. A third officer stood just in front of the driver, appearing to hold a phone up as if recording.
Geoffrey P. Alpert, a policing expert at the University of South Carolina, told the AP that it was “absurd” for an officer to use his body to block a 4,000-pound SUV, questioning: “Why would he do that? Why would he put himself in a more dangerous position than he was already in?” Darrel W. Stephens, a former chief of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department, also said the sequence appeared baffling, describing the moment as “a dangerous decision to make” and saying that, when he was a police chief, he prohibited officers from standing in front of vehicles in the early 1990s.
After the officer unholstered his gun, the AP said the officer shot into the windshield and then moved away as the Honda turned away. The officer fired a second time from the side of the car, with a third shot following immediately, the report said. The AP also noted that none of the other officers drew weapons, and that three seconds after the shooting, the Honda crashed into a parked car with enough force to send tires flying and send snow billowing.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem described the incident as an “act of domestic terrorism” against ICE officers and said, in the AP account, that the woman “attempted to run them over and rammed them with her vehicle,” adding that an ICE officer acted quickly and defensively and shot to protect himself and people around him. President Donald Trump, in a post on Truth Social, said the ICE officer shot Good in self-defense and that it was “hard to believe he is alive,” while the AP said Trump also claimed Good “viciously ran over the ICE officer,” and that it is unclear in the videos whether the car made contact with the officer.
Noem has not publicly identified the shooter, the AP said, but the report noted that court records from a case last June involving the same officer—when the officer was dragged by a fleeing vehicle—identified the officer as Jonathan Ross. The AP said most police departments long ago prohibited officers from shooting at moving vehicles except in limited circumstances where there is no other option to save lives, and it quoted Sharon Fairley, a law professor and criminal justice expert at the University of Chicago, saying that if the officer succeeds, “you have a motor vehicle, a two-ton vehicle that’s not being directed, and it creates a huge public safety risk.”
Fairley said the investigation will likely look at whether the officer acted reasonably not only when firing but also in the moments leading up to it, including whether the agent put himself in danger by stepping in front of the car and whether other choices were available. She said, “The question is going to come down to is was the officer reasonable in their belief that the driver presented an imminent threat of death or bodily harm to himself or to someone else,” describing it as “really the legal question that has to be answered.”