By Renee Hickman and Maria Alejandra Cardona
MINNEAPOLIS, Jan 8 (Reuters) – Tensions between Minnesota and federal officials deepened on Thursday over a U.S. Immigration agent’s fatal shooting of a 37-year-old mother of three in Minneapolis, an incident that drew condemnation from local officials and sparked widespread protests in the state and beyond.
State and federal officials have offered starkly different accounts of the shooting, in which an unidentified Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot U.S. citizen Renee Nicole Good in a residential neighborhood.
The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension said on Thursday it had initially agreed with the FBI to conduct a joint investigation into the shooting, but that the federal agency had “reversed course” and taken sole control of the probe. The decision, according to the BCA’s superintendent, Drew Evans, means the state bureau will no longer have access to the scene evidence, case materials or interviews.
“As a result, the BCA has reluctantly withdrawn from the investigation,” Evans said.
Keith Ellison, the state’s Democratic attorney general, told CNN that the FBI’s decision was “deeply disturbing” and said state authorities could investigate with or without the cooperation of the federal government. He added that the evidence he has seen, including some that has not yet been made public, indicates that state charges are a possibility.
U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told reporters in New York that the BCA was not “cut out” but did not have jurisdiction.
Democratic Minnesota Governor Tim Walz said at a press conference that any federal investigation that proceeded without state involvement would likely be seen as a “whitewash.”
“And I say that only because people in positions of power … from the president to the vice president to Kristi Noem have already passed judgement and told you things that are verifiably false,” he said.
The FBI declined to comment on the BCA statement.
The ICE agent who shot Good was among 2,000 federal officers that President Donald Trump’s administration had announced it was deploying to the Minneapolis area in what the Department of Homeland Security described as the “largest DHS operation ever.”
DHS officials, including Noem, defended the shooting as self-defense and accused the woman of trying to ram agents in an act of “domestic terrorism.” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, a Democrat, called that assertion “bullshit” and “garbage” based on bystander videos taken of the incident that appeared to contradict the government’s account.
Both Frey and Walz have called on Trump, a Republican, to withdraw federal agents from the city, saying their presence is sowing chaos in the streets. But the New York Times reported that the administration was deploying more than 100 additional Customs and Border Patrol personnel from other cities in the wake of the shooting.
BYSTANDER VIDEOS OF SHOOTING
The videos 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 at her door handle, the car briefly reversed and then began driving forward, turning to the right in an apparent attempt to leave the scene.
A third officer, who had been filming the scene before walking to the front of her car, drew his gun and fired three times while jumping back, with the last shots aimed through the driver’s window after the car’s bumper appeared to have passed by his body.
The video did not appear to show contact and the officer stayed on his feet, though Noem said he was taken to a hospital and released. Trump said on social media that the woman “ran over the ICE Officer.”
Minnesota law allows the use of deadly force by an officer only if an objectively reasonable officer would believe that doing so was necessary to protect the officer or others from immediate death or serious harm. Federal law has a similar standard.
The shooting left the city on edge, with thousands taking to the streets in protest. On Thursday morning, hundreds of demonstrators gathered at a federal building where an immigration court is housed, chanting “shame” and “murder” at armed and masked federal officers, some of whom used tear gas and pepper balls on protesters.
Protests were also ongoing or planned in other cities, including New York, Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles and Philadelphia.
Walz has put the state’s National Guard on alert, and Minneapolis public schools were closed on Thursday and Friday as a precautionary measure.
With classes canceled, 17-year-old Addie Flewelling attended the Minneapolis protest on Thursday to condemn the shooting and show her opposition to the immigration crackdown, including a raid at her high school earlier this week.
“Students were chased off of their place of education,” she said. “This is not OK. I’m scared to go to school.”
SLAIN WOMAN HAD THREE CHILDREN
Good had a 15-year-old daughter and two sons aged 12 and 6, according to the Washington Post. She graduated from Virginia’s Old Dominion University in 2020 with a degree in English, the school’s president, Brian Hemphill, confirmed in a statement.
“This is yet another clear example that fear and violence have sadly become commonplace in our nation,” Hemphill said. “May Renee’s life be a reminder of what unites us: freedom, love, and peace.”
While at ODU, she won an undergraduate poetry prize, according to a 2020 Facebook post by the school’s English department, which described her as hailing from Colorado Springs, Colorado.
“When she is not writing, reading, or talking about writing, she has movie marathons and makes messy art with her daughter and two sons,” the post said.
Good’s mother told the Minnesota Star Tribune that her daughter was “extremely compassionate,” and not the type of person to confront ICE agents.
The Minnesota operation, part of Trump’s nationwide crackdown on migrants, was also mounted in response to a politically charged investigation into fraud allegations against some Minnesota nonprofit groups in the Somali community. Trump has attacked Somalis and Somali Americans in Minnesota as “garbage.”
(Reporting by Renee Hickman and Maria Alejandra Cardona in Minneapolis; Additional reporting by Jonathan Allen, Helen Coster, Maria Tsvetkova, om Hals and Kanishka Singh; Writing by Joseph Ax and Daniel Trotta; Editing by Paul Thomasch, Deepa Babington and Matthew Lewis)
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