The federal response to the killing of Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old Minneapolis woman shot and killed by ICE agent Jonathan Ross, highlights the growing architecture of political prosecutions targeting dissent.
According to an ACLU lawsuit, immigration officers have been surveilling activists in the Twin Cities who monitor ICE activity, in violation of their First Amendment rights.
Organizers Brandon Sigüenza and Patty O’Keefe — both U.S. citizens — reported that immigration officers offered money or legal protection if they would provide the names of protest organizers or undocumented neighbors. This is intelligence-gathering aimed at mapping activist networks.
At the same time, federal investigators examining Good’s killing have reportedly scrutinized her connections to activist groups — even as it appears the federal agent will face zero repercussions, despite emerging evidence for a criminal inquiry. First Amendment advocates note that Good’s political background is legally irrelevant to what happened at the time of the shooting — particularly since Ross did not know anything about her activism at the time he killed her.
Teresa Nelson, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union in Minnesota, said she saw “a lot of throughlines” between the reported investigation into Good’s possible activist ties and how officials have responded to other police custody deaths in the state.
Behind the scenes, the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) posture has triggered internal revolt. Six federal prosecutors in Minnesota resigned over the DOJ’s insistence on pursuing a criminal investigation into Becca Good while declining to open a civil rights probe into Jonathan Ross.
Expanding “Domestic Terrorism” to Ensnare Protest
This case is unfolding against a broader federal expansion of prosecutorial authority. Attorney General Pam Bondi recently issued guidance broadening the definition of domestic terrorism to include not only violence, but actions such as impeding law enforcement or doxxing officers — categories critics argue blur the line between criminal conduct and constitutionally protected political speech.
President Trump’s NSPM-7 directive further instructs federal agencies to compile lists of groups or entities that may be associated with domestic terrorism, even when conduct is nonviolent.
This framework creates legal and political cover for investigating protest movements as extremist threats — a foundation for future political prosecutions of organizers, nonprofits, and civil-society networks.
Potential Impact of Subpoenas
Meanwhile, federal prosecutors have issued sweeping grand-jury subpoenas to Minnesota political leadership, including Governor Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison, and municipal officials in Minneapolis and St. Paul, as part of a broader probe into alleged obstruction of ICE operations.
These subpoenas have the potential to extend investigative reach into policy allies, advocacy ecosystems, and immigration-justice networks — signaling a widening perimeter of federal scrutiny around organized opposition to ICE.
Bridging the Pattern
The throughline is institutional experimentation that hardens into precedent. Political scientists have documented how authoritarian governments experiment with repression by refining legal tools on activists before institutionalizing them at scale.
Federal agencies often test aggressive legal theories at the edges of constitutional limits, defend them in court, and — when they hold — convert them into reusable enforcement tools. Over time, what begins as a one-off justification becomes normalized doctrine. We’ve seen this pattern before, from the FBI’s COINTELPRO program targeting civil rights and antiwar groups to Justice Department efforts in the Pentagon Papers era to develop legal theories that could have criminalized the press. The DOJ is once again laying legal groundwork — around protest, activism, and “domestic terrorism” — that can later be cited, expanded, and reused in political prosecutions against dissent.