https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/ice-officer-shoots-woman-dead-in-dramatic-escalation-of-trump-crackdown-20260108-p5nsgn.html

Minneapolis: A US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer has shot and killed a 37-year-old woman in Minneapolis, in a dramatic escalation of the Trump administration’s latest immigration crackdown in a major American city.

The woman, who city police said was not a target of an immigration operation, was shot in a car in front of a family member during a traffic stop in a snowy residential neighbourhood south of downtown Minneapolis. Local Democrat senator Tina Smith said she was a US citizen.

The New York Times identified the woman as Renee Nicole Good, according to two local officials with knowledge of the investigation. Local newspaper The Minnesota Star Tribune quoted family members as saying Good had a son aged four or five, whose father had died in 2023. Soft toys could be seen in photographs from the scene.

The deadly incident has fuelled a national debate over Trump’s efforts to send heavily armed federal agents into US cities in his push for mass deportations, with operations ramping up last year from Chicago to Los Angeles. Within hours, the Minneapolis killing ignited protests as far away as New York City.

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Good’s mother, Donna Ganger, told the paper her daughter was “one of the kindest people I’ve ever known” and was probably “terrified” at the time of the shooting, which took place just a few blocks from some of the city’s oldest immigrant markets and 1.6 kilometres from where George Floyd was killed by police in 2020. The shooting quickly drew a crowd of hundreds of angry protesters.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, while visiting Texas, described the incident as an “act of domestic terrorism” carried out against ICE officers by a woman who “attempted to run them over and rammed them with her vehicle”. She said the officer had shot her in defence, “to protect himself and the people around him”.

But Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey blasted that characterisation as “garbage”, saying he had seen video of the shooting that directly contradicted the government’s narrative, and it was “reckless” and unnecessary.

“They’re already trying to spin this as an action of self-defence,” a visibly angry Frey said. “Having seen the video myself, I want to tell everybody directly – that is bullshit.”

Videos of the shooting posted on social media and verified by Reuters raised doubts about the government’s account. One widely shared video shows a maroon Honda SUV partially blocking a road. As the clip begins, the driver inches forward before stopping to let another car drive past.

Footage posted on social media appears to show masked ICE agents approaching a car, before firing at the driver as they attempt to drive away.

The driver, with the window down, then appears to gesture to an approaching ute to go ahead as well. Instead, the ute stops, and two officers exit and approach the Honda on foot. As one of the agents orders the driver out of the SUV and grabs at the door handle, the vehicle reverses briefly, and a third agent comes around to the front of the car from the passenger side.

The driver then goes forward, turning the wheels to the right in what appears to be an effort to head up the street away from the officers. The agent in front of the car pulls his weapon, steps back and fires, with the left front bumper coming close to his legs.

He fires three shots, with at least one shot after the car’s front bumper has already passed him. It was not clear from the video whether the car made contact with the officer, who stayed on his feet throughout the encounter.

After the shots are fired, the car accelerates up the street and crashes into parked cars and a utility pole. Witnesses screamed obscenities, expressing shock at what they had seen.

Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara gave no indication that the woman was trying to harm anyone at the time of the shooting and said she had been shot in the head. Preliminary investigations indicated her vehicle was blocking traffic when a federal officer approached on foot, he said.

“The vehicle began to drive off,” he said. “At least two shots were fired. The vehicle then crashed on the side of the roadway.”

President Donald Trump said in a social media post he had viewed video footage of the incident and criticised the woman shot as acting “very disorderly, obstructing and resisting” and “then violently, wilfully, and viciously” running over the ICE officer.

“The situation is being studied, in its entirety, but the reason these incidents are happening is because the Radical Left is threatening, assaulting, and targeting our Law Enforcement Officers and ICE Agents on a daily basis,” Trump wrote. “They are just trying to do the job of MAKING AMERICA SAFE.”

A dark-coloured SUV with a bullet hole through its windshield and blood splattered across the headrest was seen rammed into a pole on a snowy street after the shooting.

Venus de Mars, who lives near the site of the shooting, described seeing paramedics perform CPR on a woman collapsed next to a snowbank near the crashed car. Shortly afterwards, they loaded her into an ambulance that drove away without its sirens on.

“There’s been lots of ICE activity, but nothing like this,” Mars said. “I’m so angry. I’m so angry, and I feel helpless.”

The shooting has drawn hundreds of protesters into the streets near the scene, some of whom were met by heavily armed federal agents wearing gas masks who fired chemical irritants at the demonstrators.

Addressing the media, Frey blasted Noem’s characterisation of the shooting and the federal deployment of more than 2000 officers as part of the immigration crackdown in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St Paul, telling ICE officers to “get the f—- out of Minneapolis”.

“They are not here to cause safety in this city. What they are doing is not to provide safety in America. What they are doing is causing chaos and distrust,” Frey said. “They’re ripping families apart. They’re sowing chaos on our streets and in this case quite literally killing people.”

Mayor tells ICE to get out of Minneapolis after fatal shooting

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey has addressed the fatal shooting of a woman by federal agents.

However, he also urged residents to remain calm, as did state Governor Tim Walz, who criticised the immigration crackdown but called on people to protest peacefully.

“Do not take the bait,” he said. “Do not allow them to deploy federal troops into here. Do not allow them to invoke the Insurrection Act. Do not allow them to declare martial law.”

He said the shooting was “totally predictable” and “totally avoidable”.

Hours later, at an evening news conference in Minnesota, Noem didn’t back down, claiming the woman was part of a “mob of agitators”. She said the veteran officer who fired his gun had been rammed and dragged by an anti-ICE motorist in June.

“Any loss of life is a tragedy, and I think all of us can agree that in this situation, it was preventable,” Noem said, adding that the FBI would investigate.

The shooting marks a dramatic escalation of the latest in a series of immigration enforcement operations carried out in major American cities under the Trump administration. This incident marks at least the fifth time a person has been killed in a handful of states since 2024.

The Twin Cities have been on edge since DHS announced on Tuesday that it had launched the operation. More than 2000 agents and officers were expected to take part in the crackdown tied in part to allegations of fraud involving Somali residents, related to childcare and other social services.

Protesters at the scene after the shooting vented their anger at the local and federal officers who were there, including Gregory Bovino, a senior US Customs and Border Patrol official who has been the face of crackdowns in Los Angeles, Chicago and elsewhere.

In a scene that hearkened back to the Los Angeles and Chicago crackdowns, bystanders heckled the officers and blew whistles that have become ubiquitous during the operations.

“Shame! Shame! Shame!” and “ICE out of Minnesota!” they loudly chanted from behind the police tape.

During her Texas visit, Noem confirmed the DHS had deployed more than 2000 officers to the Twin Cities and they had already made “hundreds and hundreds” of arrests.

Immigration agents have been involved in other similar shootings during the Trump administration’s crackdown.

During “Operation Midway Blitz”, Trump’s immigration enforcement surge in Chicago last year, ICE agents shot and killed Silverio Villegas Gonzalez, a 38-year-old Mexican national. Gonzalez, a cook and father of two with no criminal record, was shot in his car after agents attempted to arrest him.

A DHS statement said Gonzalez had steered his car at agents, dragging one officer and causing him to fire out of fear for his life. Police bodycam footage obtained by Reuters complicated that narrative, with the ICE agent saying his injuries were “nothing major”.

Border Patrol agents also shot a woman in Chicago in October. DHS said the shooting was in self-defence after the woman, Marimar Martinez, rammed into the agents’ vehicle. But her lawyer said video footage showed the agents hit her car before opening fire.

In December, ICE agents fired at a van carrying two men they were targeting for arrest, leaving one with bullet wounds. A DHS statement said the men drove the van at ICE officers, prompting them to fire in self-defence.

For nearly a year, migrant rights advocates and neighbourhood activists across the Twin Cities have been preparing to mobilise in the event of an immigration enforcement surge. From houses of worship to caravan parks, they have set up very active online networks, scanned licence plates for possible federal vehicles and bought whistles and other noise-making devices to alert neighbourhoods of any enforcement presence.