Last week, ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, just blocks from where George Floyd was killed by a police officer five years ago. Good was a 37-year-old mother of three who, reports suggest, had been serving as a legal observer. The administration recklessly and baselessly labeled her death an act of “domestic terrorism.” Many Americans who watched video footage from Ross himself conclude that the footage tells a different story: Good speaking politely before attempting to leave. A new poll finds that the majority of Americans—53%—now believe that Ross’s shooting was not justified.
Good’s killing is not an isolated incident. According to The Guardian, immigration agents have shot at people 16 times since January 2025. Over 170 U.S. citizens have been wrongfully detained. Lower courts have found that federal tactics likely violated the Fourth Amendment—including a Chicago judge who ruled that agents’ use of chemical munitions against peaceful crowds “shocked the conscience”—though the Supreme Court has stayed some of these rulings on appeal. At least five senior prosecutors in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division resigned this week, reportedly in protest after leadership said they could not investigate the Minneapolis shooting but instead were being forced to investigate the victim, Good herself. Minnesota, Minneapolis, and Saint Paul have filed a federal lawsuit alleging that Operation Metro Surge amounts to “a federal invasion” involving racial profiling, unlawful force, and retaliation against legal observers. Illinois and Chicago have filed their own lawsuit over similar allegations.
In this environment, “Know Your Rights” resources have taken on renewed urgency. ICE and Border Patrol are now operating far beyond the border, conducting raids in apartment buildings in Chicago, stopping drivers in rural North Carolina, and deploying thousands of agents to cities like Minneapolis that have never seen enforcement at this scale. Legal organizations across the country have worked tirelessly to update their materials for a post-protected-areas landscape, while state attorneys general in Minnesota, New York, Illinois, and California have issued official guidance to fill the gap left by a federal government that treats established law as optional rather than an obligation.
This administration’s dismissiveness toward the law should make us realistic about what Know Your Rights information can and can’t do. At the start of the administration, I said: we can’t “know your rights” our way out of this one.