Verified: Feb 22, 2026
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- Eight Pathways, Eight Failures
- ICE’s Rapid Expansion and the Incentive Structure Behind It
- The Federal Jurisdiction Blockade: Legal Basis and Contested Limits
- The Civil Lawsuit: Bivens Claims, Qualified Immunity, and Long Odds
- The Pretti Shooting, Seventeen Days Later: The Same Template
- Congressional Response: Democratic Demands, Republican Silence on the Shootings
- Open Questions: Jurisdiction, Civil Suits, and Institutional Incentives
Renee Nicole Good‘s SUV was stopped sideways across a one-way street when ICE agent Jonathan Ross fired three shots and killed her — the first through the windshield as she drove away, the second and third through the driver’s side window. She was 37 years old, a mother of three, an American citizen. On January 7, 2026, the Hennepin County Medical Examiner ruled her death a homicide. Video footage, according to reporting at the time, contradicted the federal government’s claim that she had attempted to run over the agents at the scene.
What happened next is the subject of this article — not the shooting itself, but the accountability system that was supposed to respond to it.
Eight mechanisms exist to hold a federal officer responsible when a use of force results in death: internal agency review, the DHS Inspector General, DOJ Civil Rights Division prosecution, FBI investigation, civil rights litigation, Federal Tort Claims Act suits, state criminal prosecution, and congressional oversight. Most are severely compromised in practice. In the Good case, the DOJ halted its own civil rights investigation — prompting career prosecutor resignations — and documented evidence suggests every remaining mechanism has been blocked, closed, or shut down.
Whether that is a breakdown, a design, or the expected result of legally defensible individual decisions is the question this article examines.
Eight Pathways, Eight Failures
Here’s what the accountability system looks like on paper. ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) is described as having a role in use-of-force investigations, though its specific mandate and practical reach are not publicly documented. The DHS Inspector General provides independent oversight of the department. The DOJ Civil Rights Division can prosecute federal officers under 18 U.S.C. § 242 for willfully depriving someone of their constitutional rights.
The FBI has independent civil rights investigative authority. Victims’ families can theoretically sue individual officers under the Bivens doctrine — though the Supreme Court has severely restricted Bivens and courts routinely dismiss such claims in immigration enforcement contexts — or sue the federal government under the Federal Tort Claims Act, which also has significant exceptions and does not provide a straightforward remedy. State prosecutors can investigate homicides within their borders. And Congress can compel testimony, hold hearings, and pass legislation.
A defender of the administration’s conduct would argue that each closure reflects legally routine uses of executive discretion. DOJ leadership has broad and well-established prosecutorial authority to decline cases it judges unlikely to meet the applicable legal standard. Federal jurisdictional doctrine is real law with a long history. OPR non-disclosure of pending investigations is standard practice across federal agencies, not evidence of suppression.
On this view, each mechanism closed for independent, legally defensible reasons. The fact that they all closed at once comes from the cases’ shared factual and legal profile rather than coordination. What the evidence presented below cannot fully resolve, but warrants scrutiny, is whether the consistency across every available pathway reflects that harmless explanation, institutional inertia, or something more deliberate. The argument that it reflects deliberate design requires engaging the strongest version of the alternative before it can carry analytical weight.
The DOJ Civil Rights Division successfully prosecuted Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for violating George Floyd’s rights. In the Breonna Taylor case, it secured one trial conviction and one guilty plea, while felony charges against two other officers were reduced to misdemeanors. It has the specialized expertise, the legal authority granted by Congress, and the prior cases to pursue exactly this kind of case.
Within a week of Good’s death, DOJ leadership ordered career prosecutors and FBI agents who had opened a civil rights investigation to cease that investigation. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche stated there was “no basis” for a criminal civil rights probe. Six career officials in the Division’s criminal section announced their departures, citing the Good case alongside broader frustrations over political leadership’s handling of the Breonna Taylor case and a Tennessee excessive force case.
The strongest version of Blanche’s position deserves engagement. Under 18 U.S.C. § 242, the government must prove that an officer acted “willfully”, that is, with specific intent to deprive someone of a constitutional right, not merely that the officer used excessive force or made a bad judgment call. That is a famously high bar.
The Justice Department declined to bring § 242 charges against officers involved in the death of Michael Brown — a conclusion documented in DOJ’s own published report. It reached a similar conclusion in the Eric Garner case, according to widely reported accounts, though DOJ has not published a comparable formal report confirming that declination. In both cases, career prosecutors, not political appointees, reportedly determined the willfulness standard could not be met.
A serious DOJ official would argue that declining a § 242 prosecution is not the same as approving the underlying conduct. It is a judgment that the specific intent element cannot be proven beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury. What makes the Good case harder to dismiss on those grounds is the video evidence, which multiple reports indicate directly contradicts the government’s account of the threat posed. That evidence bears directly on the willfulness question. An officer who shoots someone who is clearly not posing a threat has a harder time claiming he believed he was acting lawfully. That the investigation was closed before that evidence was fully developed, rather than after, is what critics argue strains the prosecutorial-discretion justification.
Then the FBI investigation, which had opened, was apparently redirected. Not away from the case entirely, but toward investigating Good’s widow for allegedly impeding ICE operations by filming the shooting, while the probe into Ross was closed. Critics argue this represents a deliberate reversal of accountability priorities. The government has not publicly explained the relationship between the two decisions.
The strongest version of the government’s position is that the investigation of Good’s widow was a separate, independently started action based on specific conduct, not a replacement for the Ross investigation. That position has not been publicly documented. At least six federal prosecutors in the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s office resigned in protest after being pressured to pursue that investigation.
State investigation was blocked through a federal jurisdictional claim. The U.S. Attorney’s office claimed exclusive federal authority over the case because Ross was a federal officer carrying out a federal law enforcement operation, preventing Minnesota investigators from accessing key evidence. The Hennepin County Medical Examiner could perform an autopsy. State prosecutors could not obtain the scene reports, witness statements, or federal investigative files needed to build a case.
ICE’s OPR has not publicly announced any action. No findings have been released. No administrative discipline has been imposed. Whether the OPR has even opened a file on the case is unknown to the public. ICE does not routinely release use-of-force investigation findings; whether local police departments do so more consistently is asserted but not independently verified here.
No criminal charges have been filed — DOJ declined federal prosecution, and state charges remain possible. Ross was placed on administrative leave following the shooting; his precise employment status as of this writing has not been publicly confirmed.
ICE’s Rapid Expansion and the Incentive Structure Behind It
The accountability failures exist inside an agency that has been transformed at extraordinary speed.
Since January 2025, ICE has hired over 12,000 new agents, more than doubling its workforce from roughly 10,000 to roughly 22,000 personnel. To hire that many people that quickly, the agency lowered the minimum age requirement from 21 to 18, removed the previous 37-year-old hiring cap, and offered recruitment bonuses.
Training was cut from 22 weeks to approximately 47 days. Spanish language training, previously five weeks, was eliminated. Agents now rely on mobile translation apps in the field.
In July 2025, Congress passed the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.” Reports suggest it appropriated roughly $170 billion for immigration and border enforcement over four years, with ICE receiving approximately $75 billion of that total. The Brennan Center has described this as creating a “deportation industrial complex” built around a specific numerical target: approximately one million deportations annually. The bill also included signing bonuses of up to $20,000 for new ICE officers committing to five years of service — though at least one source cited a $50,000 figure, that conflicts with the legislative text — and expanded student loan repayment assistance.
Here’s the part that matters for accountability: when financial incentives are tied directly to enforcement volume, the pressure on agents to act shifts. Studies of quota-adjacent enforcement systems, including research on the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk program and criminological literature on enforcement volume incentives, suggest that quota-driven systems increase the likelihood of aggressive enforcement, inadequate warrant review, and less attention to legal constraints.
A serious institutional economist or law enforcement scholar would push back on the simple version of that claim. Many agencies operate under performance metrics and volume targets without producing higher misconduct rates. The causal pathway from institutional incentive to individual agent decision requires more specificity than the general research literature provides.
The stronger version of the systemic argument is not that bonuses cause individual agents to shoot people. Rather, it is that financial incentives shape how the agency operates day to day, resource allocation, and supervisory tolerance for aggressive tactics in ways that build into elevated risk across an agency. That is a more spread-out effect. It is harder to trace to any individual incident but visible in aggregate data like use-of-force rates.
None of the accountability mechanisms in place are designed to catch or push back against pressure created by the agency’s reward system. The OPR investigates individual incidents, not the system of rewards and targets built into the agency. The DOJ Civil Rights Division prosecutes statutory violations, not a system that was built in a way that leads to illegal outcomes. Congress, which created the incentive structure, is rarely inclined to investigate its own policy effects. The American Immigration Council’s analysis of the bill documents its immigration and border enforcement funding in detail, though it does not cover the bill’s broader fiscal provisions. The accountability system, however, has no mechanism for responding to it.
Jonathan Ross, to be clear, was not a newly hired agent operating under compressed training. He had served in the Border Patrol since 2007 and in ICE since 2015. He was described as an experienced officer and member of ICE’s special response team. His profile does not fit the new-hire concern, and that tension is worth acknowledging directly.
The institutional incentive argument applies most clearly to the surge of new agents operating under compressed training, not to a veteran special response team member. The more applicable systemic argument for the Ross case is the broader cultural and supervisory shift within an agency that had more than doubled in size and was operating under explicit volume targets. That context may affect how experienced agents understand the tolerance for aggressive tactics, even if it does not directly explain any individual decision.
The institutional context doesn’t excuse the shooting. But the 353 percent increase in use-of-force incidents documented during Operation Metro Surge suggests something was changing at the agency level, even if the causal mechanism in any individual case remains uncertain.
The Federal Jurisdiction Blockade: Legal Basis and Contested Limits
The legal basis for the state investigation blockade is genuinely contested, though the government’s position is not without substance.
The government’s claim rests on the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution (the constitutional rule that federal law overrides state law) and a legal principle the Supreme Court established in 1890. That principle comes from a case called In re Neagle, which holds that federal officers acting within the scope of their official duties may be protected from being charged by the state when state law would conflict with the exercise of federal authority. The doctrine has real depth. In Tennessee v. Davis (1880), the Supreme Court upheld the removal of a federal revenue officer’s state murder prosecution to federal court, reasoning that states cannot be permitted to obstruct federal operations through criminal prosecution of federal officers. In Tarble’s Case (1872), the Court held that state courts lack authority to interfere with federal officers acting under federal authority.
The government’s argument, in its strongest form, is that allowing Minnesota to investigate and potentially prosecute a federal agent for conduct during a lawful federal immigration enforcement operation would do precisely what those cases prohibit. It would expose federal officers to the deterrent effect of state criminal liability for decisions made in the course of carrying out federal law, thereby weakening federal enforcement capacity.
On this view, the jurisdictional assertion is not a litigation tactic. It is a structural constitutional principle with over a century of precedent behind it.
The doctrine’s limits, however, are equally real. Neagle and its later cases do not grant absolute immunity; they grant immunity only for actions taken within what federal law allows. And that is precisely the contested question here.
The question, then, is whether Ross’s shooting of Good was authorized by federal law. The government says yes: self-defense as part of a lawful immigration enforcement operation. The video evidence, according to multiple reports, says something different. And here’s the constitutional problem: because the state has been blocked from investigating, it cannot develop that evidence into a prosecutable case. The government is claiming that its own conduct was lawful. It is blocking the investigation that would test that claim, and then pointing to the absence of contrary evidence as confirmation that the claim is correct.
No court has ruled on the validity of the federal government’s jurisdictional claim in the Good case. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison and the cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul sued in federal court to challenge the constitutionality of Operation Metro Surge more broadly. They argued it violates the Tenth Amendment (which limits federal power over states) and the Administrative Procedure Act (which sets rules for how federal agencies must operate). But they did not seek a specific court ruling on whether federal jurisdiction bars state investigation of the Good shooting. The Brennan Center’s analysis of when states can prosecute federal agents suggests the doctrine’s limits are genuinely contested. Without judicial review, the blockade stands, asserted without contradiction.
The Civil Lawsuit: Bivens Claims, Qualified Immunity, and Long Odds
The Good family has retained Romanucci and Blandin, the law firm that secured a $27 million settlement in the George Floyd case, and is exploring civil legal action.
A Bivens claim against Ross would require proving he violated a constitutional right; Ross could then invoke qualified immunity, which shields officers unless the right was “clearly established” — a separate and increasingly difficult legal hurdle. The Supreme Court has made this standard increasingly hard to meet in new or unusual situations. Our earlier analysis of legal protections in federal deadly force cases covers the doctrine’s recent narrowing in detail.
An FTCA claim against the government itself would need to overcome a legal rule that shields the government from lawsuits over judgment calls made by its employees (the discretionary-function exception). It would also need to navigate the intentional torts exception — though for federal law enforcement officers like ICE agents, that exception includes a proviso preserving claims for assault, battery, false imprisonment, and false arrest, making it a narrower barrier than it first appears. Qualified immunity, which we’ve covered separately in our piece on the laws that determine accountability when federal agents kill citizens, allows cases to be dismissed before trial if the officer’s conduct didn’t violate clearly established law.
The practical effect: even if the family files suit, they face years of litigation with a high chance of dismissal on immunity grounds before reaching a jury. The case may eventually produce an appellate ruling that clarifies the law for future cases. That’s genuinely valuable. But it doesn’t deliver accountability for this case, for this family, in any timeframe that resembles justice.
The Pretti Shooting, Seventeen Days Later: The Same Template
On January 24, 2026, seventeen days after Renee Good’s death, Alex Jeffrey Pretti was shot multiple times and killed by CBP agents during Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis. He was a 37-year-old intensive care nurse at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center. He had been at the scene of an ICE operation, observing and filming, attempting to direct traffic away from the enforcement action.
He was pepper-sprayed, wrestled to the ground by multiple agents, and then shot. Video evidence shows him being disarmed and restrained on the ground when he was shot. He was apparently not posing an imminent threat at the moment the shots were fired.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem characterized Pretti as having committed “domestic terrorism.” Tom Homan, when asked about that characterization on Meet the Press, was told by the interviewer: “You don’t have evidence that she’s a domestic terrorist.” Homan replied only: “I don’t know what the Secretary has that I don’t.” Even within the administration, there was a notable gap between Noem’s framing and Homan’s more measured approach. That gap is itself worth noting. Homan’s comment on the Good shooting: “We’ve all seen the video, and again, no one knows what was in the officer’s mind. We’ll let the investigation play out.”
The investigation has not, as of this writing, played out in any public way.
What the Pretti case reveals is that the Good case was not the only instance of these accountability questions coming up. The federal government’s response to Pretti’s death followed the same template: jurisdictional assertion blocking state investigation, no § 242 investigation opened, no criminal charges filed, no administrative discipline announced. Two American citizens were killed by federal agents in the same city under the same operation within seventeen days of each other. The system produced identical results in both cases.
Whether this reflects deliberate policy, institutional inertia, or the use of standard legal doctrine applied to similar facts, the same jurisdictional posture, the same § 242 threshold, the same OPR non-disclosure practice, is a question the available evidence cannot fully resolve. But the consistency across every available mechanism in both cases warrants scrutiny.
During Operation Metro Surge’s first two months, DHS was aware of a 353 percent increase in use-of-force incidents. Documents obtained through litigation show 67 such incidents reported between January 19 and March 20, 2025. ICE leadership’s documented response focused on prosecuting assaults against its own personnel, not on the use-of-force incidents themselves.
Congressional Response: Democratic Demands, Republican Silence on the Shootings
Democratic members of Congress pushed for investigation. Rep. Jamie Raskin, ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Pramila Jayapal, ranking member of the Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement, joined other Democratic leaders in issuing a statement. They demanded that Attorney General Pam Bondi explain why the DOJ had refused to investigate the shootings. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, along with 36 Democratic colleagues, urged the DHS Office of Inspector General to speed up an investigation into ICE’s use of force.
House Majority Whip Tom Emmer of Minnesota issued a statement saying “Job well done, Tom Homan” in response to the announced conclusion of Operation Metro Surge. It is not clear from available reporting whether Emmer’s statement addressed the Good or Pretti shootings specifically, or whether it was directed at the operation’s immigration enforcement outcomes, arrests and deportations, rather than the use-of-force incidents.
The strongest Republican congressional argument for the operation’s conduct is not that the shootings were unimportant. It is that the enforcement operation itself was lawful and necessary, that the accountability mechanisms (OPR review, OIG investigation, civil litigation) are working as designed even if slowly, and that Democratic calls for DOJ intervention reflect a preference for a legal standard, § 242 prosecution, that career prosecutors have historically found difficult to meet even in high-profile cases.
That argument does not engage the specific evidentiary questions raised by the video footage in either case. No Republican member of Congress from Minnesota has publicly addressed those questions directly.
The 2026 DHS spending bill included $20 million for body cameras for ICE agents. But the broader financial incentive structure embedded in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the quota targets, the signing bonuses, the student loan forgiveness linked to how many people agents deport, remains written into law. Congress cannot easily undo its own recent appropriations through new legislation. Such legislation would face a presidential veto and require a two-thirds majority in both chambers to override it.
The DHS OIG investigation that was formally announced is proceeding. OIG investigations average approximately 4 months (118–129 days) to complete — frequently exceeding the 60-day target, but available data does not support the claim that they typically take over a year. The Good and Pretti families are waiting.
Open Questions: Jurisdiction, Civil Suits, and Institutional Incentives
The federal jurisdictional blockade of state investigation has never been tested in court in the specific context of the Good or Pretti cases. Minnesota’s lawsuit challenging Operation Metro Surge’s constitutionality is proceeding. But it doesn’t directly ask whether the Supremacy Clause bars a state from investigating a homicide committed by a federal officer whose conduct may not have been lawfully authorized. That question, if it ever reaches a federal court, could produce a ruling that either confirms the blockade or tears it down. The State Court Report, a legal analysis publication, has analyzed when states can prosecute federal agents and suggests the legal shield the federal government is claiming has more limits than the government’s confident assertion implies. But “suggests” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. No court has ruled.
The civil lawsuits filed by the Good and Pretti families will eventually produce rulings from federal appeals courts on Bivens claims and qualified immunity in ICE cases. Those rulings could make it easier or harder for future victims’ families to sue federal agents. A circuit split on Bivens is confirmed, with different federal appeals courts reaching different conclusions, though the specific claim about recent Ninth Circuit decisions narrowing Bivens is not supported by available evidence. The Supreme Court may eventually have to settle the question.
And the performance bonuses and deportation targets written into the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will continue shaping ICE’s institutional culture for years, regardless of what happens in any individual accountability case. The 353 percent spike in use-of-force incidents during Operation Metro Surge was a product of that institutional context.
Whether Congress revisits those incentive structures, whether courts weigh them when deciding if an agent’s actions were constitutional, and whether the DHS OIG’s eventual report addresses systemic incentives rather than individual incidents will determine whether the accountability system can be rebuilt to match the institutional reality it’s supposed to oversee.
Renee Good’s children are still waiting for an answer to a simpler question: whether anyone will be held responsible for their mother’s death. As of this writing, no mechanism in the system has produced one.
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