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MINNEAPOLIS — The family of Renée Good, a 37-year-old mother of three shot and killed by an ICE officer on Jan. 7, has filed twin federal lawsuits intended to pierce the legal immunity that usually protects federal agents and senior administration officials from civil liability. Delivered to the courts as of Feb. 5, 2026, the filings arrive just days after ICE officers in New York City fired on a car, wounding a 28-year-old man in front of his 5-year-old son. The timing has given the cases unusual national resonance.
Good, a U.S. citizen with no criminal record, died in Minneapolis during "Operation Metro Surge," a federal enforcement push that brought ICE agents into Somali and Hispanic neighborhoods across the city. Protesters had gathered to challenge the operation, and the scene had escalated into a tense confrontation. Good was sitting in her car and attempted to drive away.
ICE officer Jonathan Ross fired three shots. One struck Good in the head, killing her.
The administration described Good as a "domestic terrorist," asserting that she tried to run down Ross. The family's complaint rejects that version, pointing to video footage that it says shows Good steering away from officers and speaking to them in a de-escalating way. Ross was not indicted, fired, or publicly disciplined; he remains an active ICE officer. Good's family has emphasized that she faced no criminal charge before or after her death, and that no evidence has been publicly produced suggesting she posed a danger to officers.
The shooting has reverberated across Minneapolis. Immigrant-rights groups and local officials have called for a full federal review of Operation Metro Surge, and community vigils have kept the case in public view. For now, the lawsuits are the only formal accountability mechanism in motion.
Representing Good's partner and brother, the family's attorneys split the case into two filings.
The first, brought under the Federal Tort Claims Act, names the United States as the sole defendant. It alleges battery, assault, false imprisonment, negligence, and intentional infliction of emotional distress arising from the shooting. The FTCA is the largest statutory exception to sovereign immunity, the old common-law rule that blocks lawsuits against the government. The family is also relying on 28 U.S.C. § 2680(h), a law-enforcement proviso that permits intentional-tort claims against federal officers — a narrower but critical door.
The second filing invokes the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, the Reconstruction-era law Congress adopted after Southern states refused to prosecute Klan members who terrorized newly freed Black Americans. The claim runs through two sections: 42 U.S.C. § 1985(3), aimed at conspiracies that deprive citizens of equal protection, and 42 U.S.C. § 1986, which reaches officials who knew of a conspiracy and failed to stop it.
Alongside Ross, the complaint names White House adviser Stephen Miller, border czar Tom Homan, and former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. The alleged conspiracy also includes private actors: far-right online provocateurs whose anti-Somali messaging preceded Operation Metro Surge, and technology companies whose surveillance tools were used to identify neighborhoods, track protesters, and guide enforcement.
The choice of the Klan Act is no accident. Over the past decade, the Supreme Court has dismantled the Bivens doctrine, the judge-made remedy that once allowed individuals to sue federal officers for constitutional violations. In Ziglar v. Abbasi (2017) and Egbert v. Boule (2022), the Court refused to create new Bivens claims and directed litigants to Congress. By anchoring the case in an actual statute, the Good family avoids a route that has largely vanished.
The substantive theory is larger than a single bad shooting. The family argues that Good's death was the "predictable result" of an executive policy animated by racial animus against Hispanic and Somali communities. That policy, the complaint says, was built to provoke confrontation, rewarded aggressive conduct, and signaled to officers that they would never face legal consequences for deadly force.
The government and the named officials are expected to respond with motions to dismiss. They will invoke sovereign immunity, qualified immunity, and the discretionary-function exception, arguing that immigration enforcement priorities are policy judgments, not a conspiracy.
The legal bar for Section 1985(3) is steep. Plaintiffs must prove an actual conspiracy, class-based discriminatory intent, and an overt act causing harm. Such cases rarely succeed; most are resolved at the pleading stage. But if this one survives, discovery could pull back the curtain on Operation Metro Surge — producing internal records, emails, and directives that would previously have remained hidden.
Should the court dismiss the claims, the case would go to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, likely setting up a months-long appellate fight. For the family, that would extend a grief already complicated by a sense that the system refuses to respond.
The case also exposes a structural gap in civil rights law. When local and state officers violate the Constitution, victims can sue under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, a direct statutory remedy in place since 1871. Federal officers face no parallel statute; plaintiffs are left with Bivens claims, which the courts have narrowed almost to nothing, or niche statutes like the FTCA and the Klan Act.
The practical effect, critics say, is that a citizen harmed by a local officer has a courtroom — while a citizen harmed by a federal officer often has to fight a procedural battle before reaching the merits. Civil-rights attorneys have long argued that Congress should close that gap with a direct cause of action against federal officers. The Good family's case gives that argument a human face, one the courts may now be forced to address.
At a press conference in Minneapolis, Becca Good, Renée's partner, distilled the family's anguish into a single sentence: "The whole world had to watch as our entire universe was destroyed. We were all robbed."
The lawsuits seek unspecified damages, but the far more emphatic demand is public accountability. With fresh video of an ICE shooting in New York circulating nationwide, the federal courts are being asked to decide whether old immunity doctrines still make sense in the age of large-scale immigration enforcement. The Renée Good cases will be one of the most closely watched answers.
