The increasingly violent reality of the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda came into sharp focus again last week when plainclothes ICE officers opened fire on a car in New York City within seconds of surrounding the vehicle, wounding 28-year-old Oscar Belgal while his terrified 5-year-old son sat in the back seat. This alarming use of force, echoing across the country as communities grapple with a sharp rise in immigration enforcement violence, provides context for a major legal battle unfolding in Minnesota.

Just days before the New York shooting, the family of Renée Good, a 37-year-old mother of three who was shot and killed by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in Minneapolis earlier this year, filed two significant federal lawsuits against the U.S. government and top administration officials. Good’s family and lawyers seek to use two distinct legal paths to force accountability through the U.S. federal courts, even though doctrines such as qualified and sovereign immunity usually protect federal law enforcement officers and the administration’s top political leaders from facing civil rights lawsuits.

The twin lawsuits target both the officer that killed Good and the systemic policies that the lawsuit claims made her death inevitable and near-guaranteed impunity for the officer’s deadly use of force.

Minneapolis deadly encounter On January 7, 2026, during a tense confrontation between protesters and federal immigration officers deployed to Minneapolis as a part of the administration’s “Operation Metro Surge,” ICE officer Jonathan Ross fired three shots into Good’s car as she attempted to drive away. One bullet struck her in the head, killing her.

While the Trump administration initially claimed that Good was a “domestic terrorist” trying to run over the officer, the lawsuit argues that video footage clearly shows Good steering her vehicle away and talking to the officers using deescalating language. Good was a U.S. citizen and had no criminal history. After Good’s death, the administration neither indicted nor fired Ross and he is still in the agency as an active ICE officer.

A double attack on impunity To overcome the significant legal doctrines that protect ICE officers and the federal government from liability, the lawsuits — filed by Good’s partner and her brother — rely on a two-part approach primarily via two legal statutes.

Federal Tort Claims Act The first claim uses the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) and names the United Sates as the sole defendant. It accuses the government of battery, assault, false imprisonment, negligence, and intentional infliction of emotional distress that directly caused Good’s wrongful death. By using the FTCA, Good’s family and attorneys seek to hold the Trump administration liable for torts committed by federal immigration officers acting within the scope of their federal employment.

Typically, sovereign immunity protects the U.S. government from lawsuits; but Congress’ enactment of the FTCA provides an exception giving victims injured by government actions a mechanism for filing a lawsuit to seek damages. In the Good lawsuit, the FTCA legal claim focuses primarily on the mechanics of the shooting itself and the immediate liability of the government.

Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 Parallel to the FTCA claim is the second and more politically explosive lawsuit, which uses a provision of the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. Congress designed the law to protect citizens from organized and systemic civil rights violations. At that time, local and state authorities routinely refused to prosecute Ku Klux Klan members for violence they inflicted upon newly freed Black Americans. Congress responded by enacting this law to explicitly enforce the newly ratified Fourteenth Amendment and ensure protection of civil and voting rights.

The Good lawsuit brings claims under two provisions of the statute, 42 U.S.C. Section1985(3) and 1986, to allege a broad Trump administration conspiracy to violate civil rights, naming not only Officer Ross, but also senior administration officials including Stephen Miller, Tom Homan, and former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem.

The Section 1985(3) claim alleges that these officials conspired with private actors, including far-right online provocateurs whose allegations against the Somali community in Minnesota led directly to the administration’s Operation Metro Surge, as well as private corporations whose technology was used to target neighborhoods for enforcement and track observers and protestors. The Section 1986 claim arises from the officials’ failure to prevent the wrongs of the alleged conspiracy.

At the core of the Ku Klux Klan Act claim, Good’s lawyers argue that her death was not an isolated operational error, but the “predictable result” of an unconstitutional campaign driven by racial animus targeting Hispanic and Somali communities. The family alleges that Trump administration officials deliberately structured federal immigration crackdowns to encourage aggressive, hostile confrontations, while signaling to rank-and-file officers that they would never face legal consequences for using excessive force.

Bringing claims under Sections 1985 and 1986 avoids the strict legal limitations of “Bivens actions” which in the past allowed individuals to sue federal enforcement officers for Fourth Amendment violations but which the Supreme Court has heavily curtailed in recent decades. Systemic reckoning or indefinite impunity?

By linking executive policy to field-level operations, the lawsuit seeks to provide an alternative route to challenge immunity for high-ranking political appointees. If the federal court moves the case forward, it could establish a major precedent for holding top level administration officials accountable for the actions of ICE field officers. If the court does not allow the lawsuit to proceed, then the only way to ensure individual officials’ accountability for unlawful immigration enforcement violence will be for Congress to make overdue changes to outdated immigration laws which for decades have permitted immigration agent officers and agencies to operate with significant impunity.

Congress could pass a law that would create a clear cause of action so that victims of constitutional violations committed by federal law enforcement officers can sue in federal court. When local police officers violate the Constitution, they can be sued in federal court; but when federal law enforcement agents commit the same violations there is no parallel recourse.

While the Good family seeks unspecified compensatory damages, their primary focus is public accountability. At an emotional Minneapolis press conference, Renee Good’s partner Becca Good stated: “The whole world had to watch as our entire universe was destroyed. We were all robbed.”Following so closely on the heels of the recent New York City ICE shooting, the Renee Good lawsuits will test whether the federal judiciary is willing to hold federal officers accountable or continue to allow them to operate with near impunity on American soil.