On January 7, a federal ICE officer fired his weapon during a chaotic encounter in Minneapolis, killing 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good and touching off angry protests across the city. The shooting happened amid a high-profile federal immigration enforcement surge that has already inflamed tensions between local leaders and the Biden administration’s law-enforcement priorities.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and other federal officials insisted the officer acted in self-defense and described the day’s events as evidence of escalating threats against immigration personnel. Their warnings about increased assaults and death threats against ICE agents have been seized on by conservatives as proof that a lawless fringe is targeting officers doing a difficult job.
Local leaders in Minneapolis and St. Paul pushed back hard, saying the videos they’d seen did not match the federal account and accusing Washington of trying to inflame the situation. Governor Tim Walz ordered the National Guard to a heightened posture while city mayors denounced the deployment of armed federal teams, turning what should be a straightforward law-enforcement operation into a partisan spectacle.
Predictably, city and state officials turned to the courts instead of the ballot box: Minnesota, Minneapolis and St. Paul filed suit to halt the ICE surge, a blunder that will only encourage mobs and weaken the rule of law. Conservatives should be blunt about the consequence of weaponizing courts and protest culture against federal duties: when you neuter enforcement, you invite chaos.
This killing is not an isolated headline-grabber—federal sources point to a pattern of violent confrontations involving immigration agents in recent months, underscoring the high-risk environment in which these officers operate. The plain truth is that enforcing borders and immigration laws is gritty, dangerous work; it demands both courage in the field and clear backing from elected leaders, not finger-wagging and virtue-signaling.
Megyn Kelly’s hot take that “they’re not having sex” lands as more than a provocation; it’s a cultural diagnosis dressed up as a punchline. When a society decays into fractured families, declining social cohesion and moral drift, it produces a generation more prone to nihilism, violence and the mob mentality that attacks our officers — Democrats and media elites who shrug at that reality should be ashamed.
Hardworking Americans want safe streets, secure borders and honest government, not performative outrage and political theater. Conservatives must defend the right of federal and local officers to do their jobs, demand full transparency and due process for any use of force, and call out the radical politicians who stoke division for headlines while our cities burn.
