By Amy Swearer
Friday, January 09, 2026
It seems a new consensus has developed among the segment
of perpetually online legal wonks who don’t believe in national borders.
According to these pseudo-experts, U.S. citizens enjoy what basically amounts
to a categorical exemption from the jurisdiction and legal authority of federal
immigration agents. ICE agents, they proclaim, aren’t real law enforcement
officers, and therefore, you don’t have to listen to them, and there’s nothing
they can do about it.
It is unclear when, precisely, the “online experts”
reached this consensus. But its existence is evident in the aftermath of this
week’s deadly ICE-involved shooting in Minneapolis, which resulted in the
death of 37-year-old Renee Good. Good’s death prompted countless variations of
the “claim” to emerge from even “verified attorneys” on social media.
Accounts with hundreds of thousands — sometimes millions
— of followers confidently declared (and many are still declaring) that federal
agents instigated the deadly encounter by conducting an illegal stop of Good’s
car. In their view, Good was a U.S. citizen, and ICE agents are completely
prohibited from enforcing immigration laws against citizens. Evidently, they
believe that the “illegal stop” renders the ICE agents not only morally but
legally responsible for Good’s death.
It’s just not true.
Federal immigration agents are real federal law
enforcement officers. The ICE agents who ordered Good out of her car had
legitimate and lawful authority to arrest her. And none of those factors are
legally relevant to whether the agent who shot Good was justified in using
deadly force under the circumstances.
Yes, the primary mission of ICE is to enforce federal
immigration law, and its agents’ statutory authority centers on investigating
and arresting noncitizens who violate those laws. Moreover, citizens generally
fall outside the scope of ICE agents’ civil immigration enforcement authority.
This does not mean, however, that ICE agents lack any
jurisdiction over citizens and have no legal authority whatsoever to detain or
arrest citizens under any other circumstances. Nor does it mean that citizens
have carte blanche to impede ICE agents as they carry out their immigration
enforcement duties, to ignore lawful orders from ICE agents, or to otherwise
endanger their safety.
Contrary to these wild internet claims, ICE agents do, in
fact, have broad arrest powers and aren’t required to look on helplessly as
citizens violate ordinary criminal laws right in front of them with impunity.
Federal law specifically empowers ICE agents to arrest citizens and
noncitizens alike who commit “any offense against the United States” in their
presence. Additionally, they can arrest anyone — alien or otherwise — whenever
they have reasonable grounds to believe the person committed a felony under
federal law. In this case, Minnesota
state law also explicitly authorizes federal immigration officers to make
warrantless arrests when they’re acting within the scope of their federal law
enforcement assignments and come across certain conditions — including, for
relevant purposes, when they witness the commission of “any felony” or have
reasonable cause to believe one was committed.
As it turns out, several state and federal statutes made
it more than reasonable for ICE agents witnessing Good’s behavior that day to
arrest her. 18 U.S.C. Section 111, for example, makes it a crime to
impede or obstruct federal agents performing their official duties. That
definition quite comfortably applies to a woman who positioned her car nearly
perpendicular to the flow of traffic on a public roadway in a seemingly
intentional effort to block the path of a vehicle she knew contained ICE agents
conducting immigration enforcement raids. Similarly, Section
609.494 of the Minnesota Revised Statutes deems it a felony to engage in
words or acts intended to help a criminal offender avoid arrest or punishment —
something that arguably applies to a person who intentionally undermines a
federal agency’s efforts to arrest and deport criminal aliens.
Moreover, let’s assume purely for the sake of argument
that the “borders are bad” legal experts on social media are correct, and ICE
agents had no lawful basis for trying to detain or arrest Good under the
circumstances. It simply doesn’t matter in the way that advocates of the
“illegal stop” argument suggest.
Sure, had Good survived the encounter and been criminally
charged with evading arrest, she might have been able to invoke the stop’s
allegedly unlawful nature as a legal defense of her actions. But an “illegal
stop” would have no bearing whatsoever on the legality of the ICE agent’s
subsequent use of lethal force against Good as she tried to drive away (and
struck him with her vehicle in the process). There, the only relevant question
is whether the agent reasonably believed his actions were necessary to prevent
or resist the imminent infliction of death or serious bodily injury. If the
agent did, in fact, hold such a reasonable belief, then his actions constituted
a legally justified use of deadly force by a law enforcement officer under both
Minnesota and federal law.
It doesn’t matter whether a court might have, in theory,
later determined that the agents lacked sufficient legal justifications to
detain or arrest Good. The law doesn’t vindictively strip peace officers of
their right to claim self-defense under those circumstances.
The “internet narrative” telling people otherwise isn’t
just wrong — it’s dangerous. It encourages people like Renee Good to seek out
confrontations with federal agents, emboldened by the erroneous belief that
they aren’t just morally right, but legally untouchable. All because they took
legal advice from strangers on social media, none of whom will themselves bear
the deadly consequences.
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