PORTLAND AVENUE, MINNEAPOLIS (The Daily Whatever Press)—On January 7, Renee Good dropped her 6-year-old off at school, got back in her Honda Pilot, saw federal agents rolling up on her neighbors, and did what every mom in every drop-off line in America has done at least once: she leaned on the horn.
Then a goddamn ICE agent shot her in the head.
She was 37, a mother of three. Her partner, Becca, was filming. According to the family’s lawsuits, Renee had turned her wheels away from Agent Jonathan Ross and was easing forward slowly when he opened fire. We’ve all watched the video that supports this claim.
A woman, an SUV, and a car horn. That was the threat to national security.
Nine months later, her family is suing, and the way they’re doing it is the best news I’ve read all year—which is a sad fucking sentence to type, but here we are.
The first suit, filed under the Federal Tort Claims Act, is the one you’d expect: wrongful death, battery, assault, false imprisonment, negligence, and emotional distress for Becca, who watched the person she loved die in the driver’s seat.
The second suit. Holy shitballs. The family’s lawyers dusted off the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871—a Reconstruction-era law written to go after organized campaigns of terror—and pointed it straight at the federal government. Their argument is that Renee’s death was exactly what Operation Metro Surge was built to produce: a coordinated effort to target Somali and Hispanic Minnesotans and to shut up anyone who watched, documented, or warned.
People like a mom with a horn.
Somewhere, Ulysses S. Grant is slow-clapping from the afterlife.
Ross is named, obviously. But so is former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. And White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. And former Border Patrol Commander at Large Gregory Bovino, former acting ICE Director Todd Lyons, border czar Tom Homan, Corey Lewandowski, and 10 John Doe agents. The family is going for it and I am so here for it.
As family attorney Ben Berkman put it, the case “reaches every official who put him on the street that day.”
That’s the whole move, and it’s glorious.
When my daughters were little and one shoved the other off the swing, I didn’t only talk to the shover. I talked to whoever was standing behind her whispering do it. Every mom on earth understands accountability better than the Department of Homeland Security, and this lawsuit is the first time in months I’ve watched someone hand them the parenting manual.
White House spokesperson Lauren Bis says the administration will “vigorously defend these baseless civil lawsuits.”
Baseless. A woman is dead on a residential street in south Minneapolis. There’s video. There’s a witness who loved her. There’s a bullet—multiple bullets; the three that killed her and a fourth that grazed her, to be precise. The base is right fucking there.
And Renee isn’t the only name. Alex Pretti was killed by DHS agents in January, too. In March, the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office and two state agencies had to sue the federal government just to see the evidence in both deaths. Renee’s brother, Brent Ganger, said that since she died, nothing meaningful has changed.
Bull. Fucking. Shit. Not his statement—the fact that it’s true.
Women have always been the neighborhood’s early-warning system: the phone tree, the porch light, the PTA email chain, the casserole that shows up before you’ve told anyone. Renee ran the 2026 version. She saw danger heading for her neighbors and made noise. That’s what we raise our daughters to do. If something’s wrong, be loud.
An agent of the United States answered that noise with bullets, and then the government called her family’s grief baseless.
So fuck that. And fuck every official on that cast list who figured the paperwork would never find them.
Becca Good spoke publicly for the first time on Thursday. “We were all robbed,” she said. They truly were. I have no words strong enough to express how deeply sorry I am to them.
Instead, I will cheer on the way this courageous family is honking back—in federal court, with a 155-year-old law written for exactly this kind of terror.
Lean on it.
Hi, I’m Dana. And I Write Out Loud.
I Write Out Loud is my primary home for cultural memoir, personal essays, and live conversations about the strange, brave process of becoming yourself in midlife. If you like essays with a point of view and a pulse, you’ll find plenty to read there.
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It’s amazing how certain regions of the United States voted for policies that would make everyone hate them. They weren’t trying to help anyone. They were voting to dominate and destroy places like Minneapolis, and we’ve spent all this time trying to figure out how we could Reach across the aisle to them.
Now instead of admitting what they did, they are targeting our Federal Judges.
And still, the cities have no recourse. We’re on our own.
Just praying for karma, and hoping the Republicans can’t incite enough hatred to get their wish of unleashing the military on us.