The family of Renee Good, a 37-year-old woman fatally shot by a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis on January 7, has filed a civil lawsuit against the US government.
Good and her wife had been taking part in daily protests in the city against the deployment of armed and often masked federal agents sent to Minnesota to arrest and identify undocumented migrants for deportation.
Two civil suits were filed on October 1 by the Romanucci Blandin Law firm. The plaintiffs 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 suit names the United States of America as the sole defendant. The other names a series of government and border control officials, including the ICE officer who shot Good, 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.
The lawsuits allege "federal conspiracy with discriminatory design and authorized use of force against observers," claiming this resulted in "extreme and unconstitutional force" being used against "people exercising their rights under the constitution's Bill of Rights."
"Renee's death was not an accident," the law firm said 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."
The suits further allege that Operation Metro Surge, the federal enforcement campaign in Minneapolis, "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."
The filing also states 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."
Good's death, followed two weeks later by the death of nurse Alex Pretti, intensified already-sizeable protests against the deployment of ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents in Minneapolis under Operation Metro Surge. The operation ceased entirely by mid-February.
The crackdown in Minneapolis, a city with a large Somali population, came as part of President Donald Trump's stated policy of tough enforcement on migration and border security, and amid his assertions that local authorities in some Democrat-run states do an inadequate job fighting crime and irregular migration.
