Picture it: a crisp January morning in Minneapolis, snowy sidewalks crunching underfoot, the low hum of morning traffic, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer Jonathan Ross and “ICE Watch” activist Renee Good, strangers until that moment, crossed paths on a residential street near 34th Street and Portland Avenue.
I won’t pretend to know more than the broad strokes of either’s lives. But their roles in the current American political drama — one enforcing the law, the other resisting it — reveal how these strangers became bound by tragedy.
A good beginning point for the story of Good and Ross might be the moment former President Joe Biden took the oath of office. Biden immediately halted border wall construction and suspended the “Remain in Mexico” program that required asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico for U.S. court hearings.
These moves, combined with political instability across Latin America, including Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela, fueled massive migrant caravans north. Credible estimates suggest 5 million to 15 million illegal crossings over four years, overwhelming communities and shifting the political winds decisively.
President Donald Trump‘s 2024 reelection was powered largely by a promise to end the chaos. Back in office, he tapped South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem as homeland security secretary and Tom Homan as border czar — both hard-liners who embraced visible, aggressive enforcement with little patience for oversight. Raids intensified, rhetoric sharpened, and the Department of Homeland Security deployed militarized teams to round up targets.
Meanwhile, an increasingly violent and radicalized Left seized on the highly visible raids. George Soros-backed entities such as the Indivisible Project organized and funded groups of left-wing agitators who organized flash mobs, blockades, and fiery protests that turned city streets into battlegrounds. In Democratic circles, it became normal to regard ICE officers as the “Gestapo” and all deportation efforts as fascist overreach.
Ross, a 43-year-old Iraq War veteran who served as a machine-gunner on a gun truck, embodied the other side of the divide. He had joined Border Patrol and ICE upon returning home from the war. By the time Noem and Homan came on the scene, he’d been an intelligence agent, a fugitive operations officer, and a team leader with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. For two decades, Ross gathered information on cartels and hunted down high-value targets in Minneapolis.
Six months ago, Ross nearly died while attempting to apprehend Roberto Munoz-Guatemala, an illegal immigrant and sex offender. Munoz-Guatemala had refused to exit his vehicle, so Ross broke the backseat window. As he reached inside to unlock the door, the criminal hit the gas, dragging Ross 100 yards in only 12 seconds. Ross spent the next six months recovering, returning to duty only days before the shooting in Minneapolis.
Good, an accomplished poet, was 37 the morning she died. Unlike Ross, Good appeared to wander through life in search of meaning. Her first marriage produced two children, now teenagers. Her second husband, Timmy Macklin Jr., an Air Force veteran and a stand-up comedian with whom she co-hosted a podcast, died in 2023. This left her alone to raise their son, now 6. Her family has said that she suffered deeply from Macklin’s death.
She and her youngest son took up with Becca Good in late 2023, taking Becca’s last name. They briefly moved to Canada following Trump’s reelection but returned to Minneapolis in the summer. The two referred to each other as their married partner, and Becca Good referred to the son as her own.
The Goods became involved in radical politics. They enrolled the boy at Southside Family Charter School, which proudly offers what it calls a “social justice curriculum.”
Renee Good began attending meetings for the group “ICE Watch”, a group of activists dedicated to disrupting ICE raids funded partially by Indivisible Twin Cities. The group urged activists to intervene during ICE arrests, posting pictures on its Instagram account about how to “de-arrest” ICE targets. This included tips on how to yank them out of an officer’s grasp and how to pressure officers to release people they’ve taken into custody by “totally surrounding” them “or otherwise blocking them and/or their vehicle and chanting.”
Renee Good appeared to be acting out her training the morning she encountered Ross. According to the DHS, she’d been “stalking and harassing” ICE officers in Minneapolis throughout the day. At the moment of the encounter, her SUV was parked sideways in the middle of the road with the intention of impeding ICE vehicles.
A cellphone video taken by Ross that morning shows him coming to the front of the SUV as other officers approached Renee Good in the driver’s seat. Meanwhile, Becca Good stalked around the officers, holding her camera in Ross’s face and shouting taunts.
“You want to come at us? You want to come at us?” she shouted. “Go get yourself some lunch, big boy.”
“Get out of the car, get out of the f***ing car,” an officer demanded, stepping up to the window and grabbing the door handle.
“Drive, baby, drive, go!” Becca Good shouted at her wife. And so she hit the gas, driving into Ross, who had only been back on duty a few days. He opened fire, killing her.
Multiple videos of the shooting that revealed different angles ripped through social media. Some appeared to bolster the idea that Ross had acted in self-defense. Others made the shooting appear unwarranted. Prominent voices on both the Left and the Right insisted the other side was manipulating the visual evidence.
Having viewed these videos hundreds of times now, my own fallible judgment is that the shooting was legally justifiable but ultimately unnecessary. I believe he was struck by the car but that his life was not endangered. His recent history of being nearly dragged to death, however, casts his decision in a more sympathetic light.
Above all, I find myself struck by the wastefulness of it all. The waste of a mother spending her mornings stalking federal officers and making terrible scenes. The waste of a life that shouldn’t have ended that day, but did for innumerable reasons — Biden’s open border policies, political radicalization, and heightened tensions.
This isn’t to say that both sides are at equal fault, nor that tension is unjustified. Only that humans are fragile. In tense moments, we often react poorly — we hit the pedal, we pull the trigger. Instinct takes over. We react poorly because we are scared — scared of having our city overrun by “fascists,” or scared of being grievously injured by another getaway car. And once we hit the pedal or pull the trigger, we can’t take it back.
At a press conference shortly after news of the shooting broke, Noem called it an act of “domestic terrorism,” defending Ross’s action and vowing to press on.
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Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) alluded to the Civil War, reminding the nation that, “When things looked bleak, it was Minnesota’s 1st that held that line for the nation on July 3, 1863, and I think now we may be in that moment.” He then threatened to deploy the National Guard against federal law enforcement.
We are living through a storm. And until it passes, we are forced to wonder: Who will fate toss into each other’s path next?
Peter Laffin is the Washington Examiner‘s senior editor for In Focus and Restoring America.