Michael Cavlan had settled into a routine of patrolling his neighborhood by car most mornings when, early on January 7th, he received an alert on his phone informing him about Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity near his house in Powderhorn, in South Minneapolis. The previous day, the Department of Homeland Security had announced that it was sending two thousand immigration agents to Minnesota to take part in Operation Metro Surge, a campaign of mass detention and deportation that the Trump Administration advertised as the largest D.H.S. undertaking ever. Cavlan, a salty, gray-haired nurse and union steward, is a first-generation Irish American; in 1969, his Irish Catholic parents, inspired by the U.S. civil-rights movement, had moved the family back to Northern Ireland to participate in its push for independence. Since the surge began, on December 1st, Cavlan had joined other Minneapolis residents in monitoring the presence of federal agents in town—“Just being there and making sure ICE wasn’t doing anything illegal,” he told me.
On the same morning, a short drive away, a therapist who asked to be identified as Bre was also patrolling, having woken up to an alert on her phone about ICE activity at her daughter’s former elementary school. “I put clothes on, and I drove straight to the school,” she told me. By the time she got there, the ICE agents had left, but she noticed a telltale convoy of S.U.V.s with tinted windows speeding down the street and decided to follow them.
Bre arrived at the intersection of Thirty-fourth Street and Portland Avenue, where she saw a group of ICE agents standing around as a crowd of people shouted at them. A woman’s body lay on the ground, surrounded by paramedics, and a man—a doctor, Bre later found out—was screaming. “He said, ‘They pointed a gun at me! They wouldn’t let me take her pulse!’ ” Bre recalled.
She noticed that the woman’s clothes had been cut off so that the paramedics could perform CPR. The sidewalk was icy, and the woman’s skin was exposed to the cold. “Her underwear was bloody,” Bre said. “I thought, Is this a miscarriage?” Unsure of how she could help, Bre left for an appointment. “I didn’t know until later that afternoon that she was one of us, and that she died,” she said. Cavlan, who had arrived there around the same time, knew exactly what he was seeing. He notified the Signal group that had sent him the initial alert. “I said, ‘Hey, dispatch, this is Irish. I’m here at the scene. ICE has shot somebody.’ ”
A few hours later, Bre would learn what happened the way nearly all of us did, through video. Renée Good—a thirty-seven-year-old mother of three and an American citizen who was, like Bre and Cavlan, monitoring ICE’s presence—tries to maneuver her Honda to leave the area after an agent tells her to “get out of the fucking car.” An agent in front of the car shoots Good multiple times, first through the windshield and then through the driver’s-side window. (“Fucking bitch,” he says afterward, in a video recorded on his phone that was released later.) The Honda continues down the street and crashes into a parked car, as Good’s wife, Becca Good, who was recording the altercation, runs after it.
Renée Good’s biography defied easy political categorizations: she was raised Christian in one of the most conservative cities in the country and had started a new chapter of her life in one of its most liberal. She grew up in Colorado Springs, in a community that Becca Hainsworth, who was friends with Good as a teen-ager, recalled as “very military-heavy, very religious-heavy.” Both were enthusiastic members of a Presbyterian Church in America youth group called Village Seven; Good was an occasional soloist on the worship team. “She had one of the most beautiful singing voices I’ve ever heard in my life,” Hainsworth said.
Good married her high-school boyfriend, Justin Sheppard, in 2009; he joined the Air Force, and they had two kids before divorcing in 2015. In her thirties, while pregnant with her third child, Good studied English as an undergraduate at Old Dominion University. Her second husband and the child’s father, an Air Force veteran named Timmy Ray Macklin, Jr., died in 2023, a few months after the two broke up.
Renée and Becca Good started their relationship that year, and, according to public records, Renée took Becca’s last name in the fall. The couple moved to Minneapolis from Kansas City in 2025. “I guess they made the decision that if Trump won the election, they were going to get out before the inauguration,” a former neighbor told the Kansas City Star. They settled in a neighborhood with a supportive network of queer families. In one of the only public statements she has made since Renée’s killing, Becca Good spoke of “a strong shared sense here in Minneapolis that we were looking out for each other.” She continued, “Here, I had finally found peace and safe harbor. That has been taken from me forever.”
The agent who killed Good, Jonathan Ross, had worked for ICE since 2015, after previous stints in the National Guard and Border Patrol. In June, 2025, Ross was dragged by a vehicle driven by a Cuban immigrant whom he was attempting to arrest. (The driver, Roberto Munoz-Guatemala, was later convicted of a felony charge for assaulting a federal officer.) By midday on January 7th, members of the Trump Administration were arguing that Ross had acted in self-defense. Posting on Truth Social, the President said that Good “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE officer”; Vice-President J. D. Vance called her a “deranged leftist”; and Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy and Trump’s homeland-security adviser, described Good’s interaction with Ross before her death as “domestic terrorism.” (D.H.S. has continued to claim that Good “weaponized her vehicle” and attempted to hit Ross.)
“This is literally one of the most docile, kind, sweet, empathetic, shy people I know,” Hainsworth said. She told me that, after she’d found out that Good still had a pulse when the paramedics arrived, she watched the video of the shooting “five thousand times over.” “I know Renée,” she said. “I know her facial expressions. I know what her face looks like when she’s scared, and she’s scared.” I asked her why she had watched the video so many times, and she started to cry. “I just didn’t want her to be alone, you know?” she said.
In Minneapolis—which had exploded into destructive mass protests following the murder of George Floyd by a police officer named Derek Chauvin in 2020—officials scrambled to prepare for a potentially similar response to Good’s killing. Joe Thompson, then a senior official in the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s office and one of the city’s few intermediaries between the local and federal governments, requested that immigration agents pause enforcement activities while the shooting was investigated. For several hours, it appeared that they had. Then, in the early afternoon, Jacob Frey, the mayor of the city, gave a press conference during which he told ICE agents to “get the fuck out of Minneapolis.” Not long afterward, two dozen Border Patrol agents descended on Roosevelt High School as class was getting out, prompting a confrontation in which the agents deployed pepper spray and arrested four people, including a teacher. (A D.H.S. spokesperson said that the agents had been pursuing a U.S. citizen who was “actively trying to impede operations.”) Minneapolis public schools cancelled classes for the rest of the week.
Frey told me that “get the fuck out” was not, as he put it, “in my talking points” for that day, but he stood by his speech. “People think of it as purely a message to ICE and the federal Administration,” he said. “But it was also a message to my constituents, because they need to know that there is a government on their side.” Some locals on the ground, however, felt let down. “The elected officials abandoned us,” Cavlan, who regularly volunteers as a street medic and has run for Senate as a Green Party candidate, said. “Mayor Frey, what was his big thing? He said ‘fuck.’ ”
By evening, a memorial had been set up at the site of the shooting. Bre quietly joined the vigil. “I didn’t talk to anybody,” she said. “I just kind of cried in the crowd with everyone.”
Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, told me that he’d spoken with Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, on the day of Good’s death. She and Walz had been fellow-congresspeople from the Upper Midwest; Walz recalled exercising alongside her at the Capitol gym. “I had a very heated conversation that ended with me saying, ‘Well, I hope you can sleep well tonight, Kristi,’ ” he told me. “And she said, ‘I certainly will.’ ”
In the following days, as Minneapolis processed its outrage and grief, Trump deployed another thousand agents to the state. On January 13th, he posted on Truth Social, “FEAR NOT, GREAT PEOPLE OF MINNESOTA, THE DAY OF RECKONING & RETRIBUTION IS COMING!”
