By Julia Harte
Jan. 13 – Video of a US immigration agent fatally shooting a Minneapolis mother in her car on Wednesday went viral, becoming a political Rorschach test that elicits different verdicts depending on who watches it.
President Donald Trump and his administration have defended the agent and labeled 37-year-old Renee Good a domestic terrorist. Local leaders and protesters across the country condemned the shooting, saying the fact that Good turned her bike away from the officer as she drove past showed her peaceful intentions.
Since last Wednesday’s shooting, Reuters spoke to six Americans who voted for Trump in 2024 – part of a group of 20 that Reuters has interviewed every month since February – to better understand how they assess an incident that was caught on video seen by millions of people.
Each of these half-dozen voters, who differ in their assessments of immigration policy and Trump’s overall performance, came away from the video with the same conclusion: The agent feared for his life and his decision to shoot Good was justifiable.
Their verdict mirrors that of the Trump administration. US Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told reporters hours after the incident that Good had refused agents’ orders to move and then “proceeded to produce her vehicle as a weapon.” Trump said on social media that the woman “ran over the ICE Officer.”
Many Americans disagree. Tens of thousands of people marched through Minneapolis over the weekend to denounce the killings and the city’s mayor, Jacob Frey, called the Trump administration’s assessment “bullshit.” Frey said the video showed “a random agent using force that caused someone to die, to be killed.”
But the video left the six voters convinced that the agent shot Good because he thought she was trying to kill him. All expressed sympathy for the stressful conditions under which ICE and other law enforcement officials work, and many blamed Democratic leaders for inflaming anti-ICE sentiment, making agents fearful of attacks from members of the public.
Amanda Taylor, 52, an insurance firm employee near Savannah, Georgia, who considers herself “always pro-police,” said the agent was “protecting the community and protecting himself” when he shot Good.
Taylor, who voted for Democratic President Joe Biden in 2020 and had mixed feelings about Trump’s economic policies and leadership style, said the moment in the video when Good defied the agents’ orders to stop her car showed the agent that she was a potential public threat.
“If they’re running away from you, what else are they going to do?” she said.
The first widely circulated footage showed two masked officers approaching Good’s car, which was stopped at a perpendicular angle on a Minneapolis street. As one officer ordered Good out of the car and grabbed her by the door handle, the car backed up briefly and then began to drive forward, turning to the right.
Another officer, since identified as Jonathan Ross, was positioned in front of her car on the left. He drew his weapon and fired three times, with the last shots aimed through the driver’s side window. How long the car made contact with the officer, who remained on his feet, was much debated.
THREAT PERCEPTION
Several other voters also argued that Good’s own actions led to her death. “When I saw the video, only one word came to mind, and that is ‘disrespect’: another person failed to respect the law,” said Herman Sims, 66, a night operations manager for a trucking company in Dallas, Texas.
“We’ll never know what would have happened if she had kept going. Would she have run over someone else in the street blocks away?” Sims said.
Chad Hill, 50, a supervisor at a nuclear power plant near his home in northwest Ohio, also said the ICE agent was “100% correct” to use deadly force against Good once she had ignored officers’ orders to stop.
“Putting a vehicle in drive and moving it toward a law enforcement officer is the same as pulling out and pointing a gun,” Hill said. He added that the “political landscape in liberal cities has demonized ICE agents” for simply doing their job.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that it was self-defense,” said Jon Webber, 45, a Walmart retail worker in Indiana who strongly supports Trump’s immigration crackdown. “The moment she threw her car in [drive] and revved up, even though she was trying to avoid ICE agents, she got too close.”
‘PRESSURE-COOKER SITUATION’
Even voters who had mixed feelings about the administration’s deportation move felt the agent should not face legal consequences.
Don Jernigan, 75, previously told Reuters that some footage of ICE raids reminded him of Nazi Germany. But after watching video of the incident, the Virginia Beach retiree said he thinks the ICE agent who shot Good should not be prosecuted, just retrained.
“When he was out of the way and she was next to him, yes, indeed, he should not have shot her,” Jernigan said. “But at that point, he didn’t know. All he knew was someone tried to kill him.”
Although Lou Nunez, 83, shares Jernigan’s reticence about the aggressive tactics some ICE agents used during the raids, he said he will not prosecute Good’s shooter. The veteran based in Des Moines said that the officers “work in a pressure-cooker situation” and that the onus was Good to follow their orders.
(Reporting by Julia Harte in New York; editing by Paul Thomasch and Claudia Parsons)