Relatives of Renee Good file lawsuit against US government over fatal shooting by ICE agent

Relatives of Renee Good, the 37-year-old woman shot dead in her car in Minneapolis by a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent on January 7 this year, are suing the US government in a civil lawsuit connected to her death that was filed on Thursday.

Good and her wife had been taking part in daily protests in the city against the deployment of armed and often masked federal agents deployed to Minnesota to arrest and identify undocumented migrants for deportation.

The lawsuit alleges "federal conspiracy with discriminatory design and authorized use of force against observers," saying that this resulted in "extreme and unconstitutional force" being exerted against "people exercising their rights under the [US] constitution's Bill of Rights."

Good's killing, followed two weeks later by the death of nurse Alex Pretti, intensified the already-sizeable protests against the deployment of ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents in Minneapolis known as Operation Metro Surge.

What do the lawsuits allege?

The plaintiffs in the twin civil suits from the Romanucci Blandin Law firm, filed on October 1, are Good's brother Brent Ganger — acting as trustee for her other next of kin including her three children — and her partner Becca Good.

One names the United States of America as the sole defendant.

The other names a series of responsible government and border control officials, including but not limited to the ICE officer who shot Good in her car, White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller, and the US Secretary of Homeland Security at the time of the shooting, Kristi Noem.

"Renee's death was not an accident," Romanucci Blandin Law wrote in a statement. "It was the predictable result of a coordinated campaign by senior officials in this administration to target Minnesotans of Somali or Hispanic origin and silence anyone who dared to raise their voice in protest."

They allege that Operation Metro Surge "was built on exaggerated fraud accusations that the White House embraced as a pretext for thousands of masked, unidentified federal agents to rove neighborhoods and stop people based on how they looked."

It said that government officials "told agents to force confrontations with observers like Renee and led agents to believe that they would face no consequences for using force."

The crackdown in Minneapolis, which has a large Somali population, came as part of President Donald Trump's tough stance on migration and border security, and his assertions that local authorities in some Democrat-run states do an inadequate job fighting crime and irregular migration.