Photo credit: Jonathan Ross, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Saturday, Jan 10, 2026
By Devin Savage
What kept me awake on a Friday night:
The fatal shooting of Renee Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer on a Minneapolis street corner represents more than a tragic incident. It reveals a fundamental design failure in how force is being deployed on American streets—a failure with catastrophic potential that is poised to generate more civilian deaths unless rapidly addressed.
Good was apparently shot point blank after stopping to support neighbours during an ICE operation in her community. A frame-by-frame analysis of bystander footage shows the ICE officer had moved clear of Good’s vehicle and fired at least two of three shots from the side as it veered past him—contradicting the self-defence narrative immediately promoted by federal officials. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem called Good’s actions “an act of domestic terrorism.” Vice President JD Vance blamed her for her own death. We’re asked by the Trump administration to suspend belief of what we saw with our own eyes on the video evidence. The gaslighting has already started.
My quick-take: this is what happens when an enforcement mechanism designed for one environment—border security—is deployed in a radically different environment: American residential neighbourhoods where citizens exercise First Amendment rights to monitor government activity. Neither party understands the rules of engagement because no coherent rules exist, and there is no obvious chain of authenticity to present to the American people as to why this militia-like force is in their city, stalking their neighbourhoods.
The Constitutional Gap
Something looks like a duck, and is quacking like a duck. But what is it really?
The American Constitution contains a deliberate prohibition against deploying military forces on domestic soil to police civilians. This isn’t an oversight—it’s a foundational principle designed to prevent exactly the kind of force we’re now witnessing on American streets. The military is trained for combat, for identifying and neutralising threats in hostile territory, for operating under rules of engagement designed for warfare. These skills and protocols are fundamentally incompatible with civilian policing in a democratic society.
ICE (Enforcement and Removal Operations) exists in a dangerous gap that exploits this constitutional prohibition whilst simultaneously mimicking military-style operations. It isn’t technically the military, so the constitutional restrictions don’t apply, and the courts have not weighed in on the matter yet. But it also isn’t traditional law enforcement, so the frameworks Americans understand from local policing don’t apply either. The result is a force that operates with military-style tactics—plainclothes operations, profile-based targeting, aggressive encounter protocols—but without the constitutional constraints that keep the military off American streets or the accountability structures that govern local police.
This gap creates catastrophic potential on two levels. First, ICE agents appear to receive border enforcement training—how to secure boundaries, intercept illegal crossings, presume attempted evasion by those being pursued—but no coherent training on how to encounter American citizens exercising constitutional rights on residential streets. Second, American citizens have no framework for understanding what ICE’s authority actually is, what their obligations are in an ICE encounter, or whether the rights they possess in traditional policing situations apply when facing ICE.
Neither party knows the rules. Both parties are operating on assumptions that don’t match. And ICE carries guns into this confusion.
Everyone Is a Target
In my book The DNA of Disaster: Catastrophe by Design, I use Satan as a somewhat tongue-in-cheek example of Dark-Sky Monument Building—the construction of a villain so useful that he shows up reliably in every sermon simply by being named. Satan’s job description, as handed down by religious authorities almost everywhere, is to visit the scenes of humanity’s crimes and expose the flaws of mortals for public display. The utility of such a figure lies in his convenience: he needs only to be named to inspire fear and loathing, and his presence requires no physical form at all- he exists only in the minds of those within earshot of his mention.
But Satan’s real lesson for understanding ICE’s catastrophic deployment lies in his operational methodology: everyone is a potential target. Satan is “unaffected by physical barriers or by the wishes of those who would rather not be tempted.” He can appear anywhere, anytime, to anyone—and his accusatory function makes no distinction between the genuinely ‘wicked’ and those who simply find themselves in his crosshairs.
ICE operates with a similar lack of differentiation. When enforcement is designed for a border—a clear boundary between “here” and “there,” between citizen and non-citizen—the target population is defined by location and by crossing the border, or at the very minimum the attempt to cross the border. But when that same enforcement mechanism is deployed in American neighbourhoods, the distinction collapses. Everyone becomes a potential target because the agents have no reliable way to differentiate, and more importantly, no training in how to encounter citizens exercising their constitutional rights.
Renee Good ostensibly stopped to support her neighbours. She was monitoring government activity—a fundamental democratic practice. But to ICE, trained for border enforcement and deployed in an environment they don’t fully understand and populated by people they don’t know, she became a threat simply by being present, by questioning, by not immediately complying with commands that had no clear legal foundation.
The Legal Grey Zone
The differences between ICE and traditional police aren’t subtle:
Warrants: Local police need a judicial warrant signed by a judge based on probable cause to enter a home. ICE uses administrative warrants (Form I-200 or I-205) signed by ICE officials, not judges. These do not give ICE legal authority to force entry into private homes, yet agents present them in ways that imply equivalent power. Confusion is a predictable outcome.
Deception tactics: ICE training explicitly includes the use of “ruses”—agents wearing vests that say “POLICE” rather than “ICE,” claiming to be detectives investigating local crimes to gain entry. Whilst undercover tactics exist in traditional policing, using deception to bypass Fourth Amendment warrant requirements is altogether a different modus operandi. An MO on shaky legal territory.
Accountability: Local police answer to mayors, city councils, civilian oversight boards. ICE operates under the Department of Homeland Security with internal review by the DHS Office of Inspector General. There are fewer requirements for body cameras, less public transparency regarding field operations.
Right to counsel: In criminal proceedings, defendants have a right to an attorney. In immigration proceedings—classified as civil, not criminal—detainees have no right to government-appointed counsel. If you want a lawyer, you must find and pay for one yourself, even from a detention centre.
Detention standards: Criminal jails must adhere to specific state and federal standards for prisoner rights, healthcare, and safety. Many ICE facilities are run by private, for-profit corporations under “National Detention Standards” that are often less rigorous or more loosely enforced.
Americans understand—however imperfectly—how to interact with local police. They know (or believe they know) their rights, the procedures, the lines that shouldn’t be crossed. With ICE, that framework doesn’t exist. Citizens don’t know whether they’re required to comply, whether they have standing to question, whether their act of monitoring constitutes obstruction. And ICE agents, trained for border enforcement rather than civilian policing, don’t know how to respond to citizens who may refuse to treat them as legitimate authority figures in a residential neighbourhood.
Historical Precedent: Slave Patrols and Militia Forces
This isn’t the first time America has deployed enforcement mechanisms that operate outside traditional policing frameworks. In the years before the Civil War, slave patrols functioned as militia forces with broad authority to stop, question, and detain based on appearance and suspicion rather than evidence of specific crimes. They operated in a legal grey zone where the rights of those they encountered were unclear or nonexistent, and where the patrol members themselves had minimal training and maximal discretion.
The parallel to ICE is uncomfortable but apt. Both operate as occupying forces in communities where residents don’t recognise them as a legitimate authority. Both use profile-based enforcement rather than warrant-based arrests. Both carry deadly force into encounters where the rules of engagement are undefined. Both create situations where neither party knows what’s expected, and that mutual uncertainty generates catastrophic potential.
The Kent State shooting in 1970 offers another parallel: National Guard troops, trained for military operations, were deployed to manage civilian protesters. Four students died because soldiers with military training applied military rules of engagement to a civilian context. The Mayor of Kent, Leroy Satrom, requested that Republican governor James A Rhodes call in the Ohio National Guard to assist efforts to contain Vietnam War protests on campus. The guardsmen evidently had no training or guidance on how to correctly police a college campus protest that had become a bit ‘hot headed’. On the flip side, the students didn’t know they were facing soldiers who might shoot real bullets. The catastrophic potential was built into the ‘design’ of that entire scene. Did we forget this lesson?
The Catastrophic Potential
When a system designed for one environment is deployed in another without adaptation, failure is practically inevitable. ICE, created in the aftermath of 9/11, became the largest and most well-funded federal law enforcement agency in U.S. history with the passage of Donald Trump’s ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’. ICE was designed and, AFAIK, conceived for border enforcement: clear geographical boundaries, presumed non-citizen targets, and the US citizen non-targets can simply be identified by the fact that they are not generally present, at least not crossing the Rio Grande, not trying to dodge them at Eagle Pass, not trying to scale the border wall, not trying to smuggle drugs, weapons, or humans into the USA at ports. Minneapolis is about 300 miles from any US border. American residential streets present a radically different environment: no clear boundaries, presumed citizen status of all those encountered (innocent until proven guilty), citizens with embedded constitutional rights to monitor government activity and question authority. The streets of America- where police know the usual suspects and the normal hot-spots for criminal activity, are a different environment altogether. ICE ‘agents’ simply do not know their environment when they arrive at American cities.
The design failure generates catastrophic potential in every encounter:
- ICE agents approach civilians with border enforcement assumptions
- Civilians approach ICE agents with traditional policing expectations
- Neither party shares a framework for what constitutes compliance, obstruction, or threat
- ICE agents escalate based on non-compliance with demands that may have no legal foundation
- Civilians resist based on rights that may not apply in the legal grey zone ICE inhabits
- The presence of deadly force means mistakes and wrong assumptions are potentially fatal
Renee Good is dead because she existed in this gap. She stopped to support neighbours. She questioned ICE officers about face masks and licence plates. She didn’t immediately exit her vehicle when commanded. In a traditional policing encounter, these actions might generate a ticket, an argument, perhaps an arrest. In an ICE encounter, with agents who don’t know how to police civilians and civilians who don’t know how to respond to what amounts to an occupying force, these actions led to her death.
Federal officials immediately framed Good as a threat: “stalking agents all day long,” “impeding law enforcement,” committing “an act of domestic terrorism.” The smear campaign is rapid and comprehensive—Good becomes responsible for her own death because she failed to treat ICE as legitimate authority with the right to demand her compliance.
But legitimacy in democratic policing isn’t declared from above. It’s earned through transparency, accountability, and adherence to standards that protect both officer and citizen. ICE has none of these in its current deployment. It operates as a foreign force on American streets—foreign not in the sense of nationality, but in the sense of being unknown, unaccountable, and unbound by the frameworks Americans expect from law enforcement.
The Path Forward
The solution isn’t difficult to fathom or to design. We’ve seen this before. Either ICE must be radically reformed to operate under the same constraints as traditional police—judicial warrants, local accountability, civilian oversight, prohibition on deception tactics, body cameras, transparent use-of-force standards—or it must be removed from American streets entirely and restricted to its original border enforcement function.
The current deployment is catastrophic by design. It places agents with border enforcement training in civilian contexts they don’t understand, facing citizens with expectations those agents can’t meet, all while carrying deadly force into encounters where neither party knows the rules of engagement.
More Renee Goods are inevitable unless this design failure is addressed. The catastrophic potential isn’t theoretical—it’s active, immediate, and lethal. Every day ICE operates on American streets under current protocols is another day where the mismatch between design and environment can generate fatal outcomes.
Americans didn’t invite an occupying force. They were promised border security. What arrived at their city is something else entirely—a force that operates in legal grey zones, uses deception as standard practice, answers to no local authority, and treats every encounter as potential enforcement action because it has no framework for distinguishing between targets and citizens exercising their constitutional rights.
The Trojan Horse has been opened. What crawls out on a daily basis isn’t what was promised or expected, or even warranted- and additionally doesn’t even wear a consistent uniform. Until Americans recognise that ICE on residential streets represents a fundamental transformation in how force is deployed on our American streets—not an immigration policy but an occupying force—the catastrophic potential to generate preventable deaths will persist.
Renee Good stopped to support her neighbours with whistles and eyewitness accounts, but ICE carried guns and, apparently, grudges to the encounter. That asymmetry, combined with the absence of rules both parties understand, made her death a predictable outcome. The question now is whether Trump and co. will recognise the design failure before the next fatal encounter, or whether we’ll continue to blame victims for failing to properly submit to a force that operates outside the frameworks democratic policing requires. I see nothing on the horizon to stop Trump and co from becoming a scourge on American streets far into the future.
With kindest regards,
Devin Savage
Tübingen
Thanks to Google’s Gemini, Claude.ai and now Chat GPT for the research assistance.
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Now for the post-hoc additions:
Update 14 Jan, 2026:
A Need for Oversight has been Highlighted
The fatal shooting during a recent ICE operation in Minneapolis has intensified national scrutiny of federal immigration enforcement tactics and accountability mechanisms. Federal authorities maintain the agent acted in self-defence, while local officials and civil-rights advocates dispute that characterisation and have criticised the decision to keep the investigation exclusively under federal control. The Justice Department has indicated it will not open a separate civil-rights inquiry at this time, a choice that has further fuelled protests, calls for congressional oversight, and renewed legal challenges by states and advocacy groups. Together, these developments have sharpened debate over the use of force by immigration agents, the limits of federal immunity, and whether existing post-hoc judicial review is sufficient to protect constitutional rights in civilian spaces.
Just a refresher- here are the Fourth and Fifth Amendments:
Fourth Amendment
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Fifth Amendment
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
Q & A:
Legal Context: Why ICE Raids Raise Constitutional Questions
Q: Are ICE raids legal?
Yes — immigration enforcement is authorised under federal law. But legality depends on how operations are carried out. Federal authority does not override the Constitution. ICE agents, like all law-enforcement officers, remain bound by Fourth Amendment limits on searches and seizures and Fifth Amendment due-process protections.
Q: If courts oversee law enforcement, why don’t judges stop problematic raids beforehand?
Because U.S. law almost never requires advance judicial approval for immigration enforcement operations. Courts review ICE conduct after the fact, through lawsuits, injunctions, or civil-rights claims — often only after people have been detained, injured, or killed. This creates a structural gap between constitutional rights and real-time accountability.
Q: What does “rules of engagement” mean in a civilian context?
In the military, rules of engagement clearly define when force may be used. In civilian law enforcement, use of force is governed by constitutional standards — but for federal immigration agents operating in public spaces, those standards are often opaque, inconsistently applied, and reviewed only retroactively. The phrase highlights the absence of clear, publicly accountable operational limits during large-scale raids.
Q: Are ICE agents immune from prosecution or lawsuits?
Not automatically. Federal officers can claim qualified immunity or Supremacy Clause protection, but those defenses apply only if actions were both authorised by law and constitutionally reasonable. Excessive or unjustified force — especially lethal force — can defeat immunity. In practice, however, federal investigations and closed evidence processes make accountability difficult.
Q: Why does federal control of investigations matter?
When investigations into federal agents are handled exclusively by federal authorities, states and local governments may be excluded from evidence and decision-making. Critics argue this undermines independent oversight and public confidence, particularly when the incident involves the death of a civilian in a public setting.
Q: What changed after the Minneapolis shooting?
The fatal shooting of a civilian during an ICE operation has intensified national scrutiny of:
- the use of lethal force by immigration agents,
- federal refusal to involve state investigators,
- and the adequacy of existing accountability mechanisms.
It has prompted public protests, calls for congressional oversight, and new legal challenges questioning whether current enforcement practices exceed constitutional bounds.
Q: Is ICE an “occupying force” under the law?
No — not in a formal legal sense. The term is used here descriptively, rhetorically even, but not technically, to capture how large-scale, armed federal operations in civilian neighborhoods can resemble an invasion. These forces exert coercive control without meaningful local consent or immediate judicial supervision. It is a political-constitutional critique, not an invocation of international war law.
Q: What is the core constitutional concern?
That enforcement power has expanded faster than oversight. When armed federal agents operate in civilian space with limited transparency, minimal local accountability, and only after-the-fact judicial review, constitutional protections risk becoming theoretical rather than real.
Why this matters
Constitutional rights are not self-executing. They depend on structures that prevent harm — not just remedies that respond to it. The current debate is less about immigration policy itself than about whether democratic systems still provide meaningful checks on coercive state power exercised in public spaces.
Agree? Don’t agree? Spot a mistake? Send in a comment please! Thanks.
