After an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed a female who drove her vehicle into him on Wednesday, anti-ICE sentiment has risen to a fever pitch, fueled by the legacy media and Democrat politicians. They have argued, essentially, that the shooting means America can no longer enforce its immigration laws. What the incident actually highlights is the need for a just and decisive crackdown on anti-ICE obstruction, a crackdown that parallels the Jan. 6 manhunt, not in its corrupt politicization, but in its scale and effectiveness.
The incident in Minneapolis marks nearly one year of the deportations Trump promised during his campaign. Despite a relentless legacy media air war on the removals, they maintain broad U.S. support, with 31 percent saying all illegal immigrants should be deported and 51 percent stating some should be deported. But even as the Trump administration ramped up deportation efforts, so did the sheer number of bad actors assaulting, impeding, harassing, and blocking ICE agents. The more serious attacks garnered the headlines: Antifa members allegedly launched an attack on an ICE facility; in Dallas an anti-ICE gunman opened fire on a law enforcement vehicle, killing two and injuring a third; the Department of Homeland Security reported roughly 100 vehicular attacks on agents in 2025.
But it’s arguable that the smaller acts of obstruction have had the greater negative effect, cultivating a growing perception that it was possible to obstruct or interfere with the enforcement of immigration law without facing consequences. Young men cavalierly chucked rocks at law enforcement vehicles; protesters with freshly ordered (and unironed) Mexican flags blockaded highways. Tennessee congressional candidate Aftyn Behn gleefully announced on Facebook that she and her “girl squad” were “bullying the ICE vehicles.” A government bureaucrat in D.C. heaved a hoagie at agents and walked free. Examples have been myriad and consequences, apparently, have been few.
Media outlets like the Los Angeles Times questioned DHS’s claims of increased attacks on ICE and smugly shrugged off incidents in which the obstruction was less aggressively violent or agents were not seriously injured, downplaying cases in which “officers sustained minor injuries such as bruising following a punch, kick or bite.” Unchecked aggressions inevitably lead, however, to greater numbers of aggressions and to aggressions that are more severe. Anyone with a basic understanding of human nature could have predicted that these unchecked anti-ICE aggressions would lead to escalated action on both sides. It was simply a matter of time.
This last point leads back to Minneapolis and the death of Renee Nicole Good. Some have presented Good as the victim of happenstance who, having dropped off her young child at school, was swept up in an active ICE operation. More details are sure to emerge, but this narrative contradicts testimony and video evidence. A nearby resident described Good as driving “the main car leading the protest,” adding that she “was very successful in blocking traffic.” The resident later appeared on CNN, opining that the shooting had not been in self-defense, while also noting that Good “was blocking traffic, so they couldn’t progress. And, she was totally peaceful.”
Video footage also shows a woman claiming to be Good’s spouse outside of Good’s vehicle filming the incident, an odd position for someone who is just traveling home from dropping a child off at school. Further, she reportedly stated, “I made her come down here; it’s my fault.”
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said in a press conference Wednesday that Good was “blocking the officers in with her vehicle” and “stalking and impeding their work all throughout the day.” The New York Post reported that Good was a member of “ICE Watch,” a group that “recently shared an Instagram post of the group’s which encouraged agitators to bring items that would help them barricade the streets around where the shooting took place, even urging people to bring things to burn, such as dried-up Christmas trees.” Good was reportedly a “warrior” who was “trained against these agents,” according to a mother whose child attended school with Good’s son.
“Impeding,” “blocking,” and other forms of obstruction are hardly First Amendment-protected activities. While local prosecutors in sanctuary jurisdictions can hardly be expected to enforce laws against anti-ICE protestors, federal statute subjects anyone who “forcibly assaults, resists, opposes, impedes, intimidates, or interferes with … [a federal agent] while engaged in or on account of the performance of official duties” to severe penalties, including up to eight years in prison. Yet even as the Trump administration increased deportations in the latter part of 2025, its efforts to prosecute provocateurs obstructing immigration law enforcement efforts have largely fallen flat. In any case, the administration failed to carry out justice in a manner that was sufficiently swift, decisive, and visible enough to dissuade obstructionists from engaging in reckless, anti-ICE behavior of the kind that ultimately led to Renee Good’s death.
Now only a law enforcement effort with the magnitude of that launched by the Biden administration in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 protests will have any chance of restoring the law and order ICE needs to enforce immigration law effectively. Leaving aside the Jan. 6 prosecutions’ largely corrupt and politically weaponized underpinnings, the Trump administration needs to imitate its scale justly.
A few numbers illustrate just how massive such an effort would be: Wired reported the FBI’s J6 investigation as the largest in its history, as agents scoured social media, tracked geolocation data — including requesting “Google to identify all devices in a 4-acre area” around the Capitol — and delved into phone data (12,000 pages per phone in one case). NPR puts the number of those arrested at more than 1,500, with only two acquitted and more than 1,000 guilty pleas (unsurprising numbers given the skewed nature of the venues in which they were tried).
In 2022, the Bureau garnered an extra half billion dollars in funding, in part to go after J6ers, and the Justice Department’s budget also surged. The infamous Jan. 6 Committee alone burned through more than $17 million. Four years after the demonstration of Jan. 6, 2021, The Washington Post tallied up the Biden administration’s scalps: fines and restitution exceeding $1 million; four years of community service and 55 home detention years; more than 1,000 years in both probation and in supervised release; 1,300 years in prison.
Of course, the Trump administration must not irresponsibly sideline other urgent issues or neglect pressing duties — as the Biden administration did. The deportations, obviously, ought to continue, along with the investigations into fraud and other crime issues. But Trump officials need to grasp that the deportation operation is really two-pronged — carrying out removals and signaling that immigration law will be enforced by prosecuting those who obstruct it.
None of this is intended to lay the blame entirely at the feet of the Trump administration. Democrat politicians and the media waged a long-term campaign implying or outright stating that ICE officers are agents of evil who provoke violence merely by being present in sanctuary cities. At the same time, these talking heads have also sent the message that interfering with ICE is justified and there’s no real risk in doing so — even though interfering with armed agents in the midst of detaining lawbreakers is hardly a riskless endeavor, or a lawful one.
It should also go without saying that obstructionists are ultimately responsible for their own behavior. Yes, they can stand on the sidelines and blow whistles and yell and engage in disturbing fitness-themed protests; interfering with deportations, however, justifies aggressive legal action.
But all of this merely underlines how important it is for the Trump administration to counter this messaging immediately and decisively by enforcing the law. The alternative is further escalatory actions from anti-ICE obstructionists — to which ICE will be forced to respond forcefully — and, tragically, further loss of life.
