On January 7, 2026, an ICE agent named Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Good in a Minneapolis street. Good was 37, a mother of three, and — according to city officials — was acting as a legal observer at a confrontation between agents and protesters. Ross fired three times: once through her windshield and twice through her side window.
Within hours, President Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Good had run the agent over, citing a grainy video shot from a distance. Noem called it domestic terrorism.
Then the New York Times and other outlets published clearer video from several angles. Those videos show Good's vehicle turning away from Ross as he fired.
A week after that, Michael Baumgartner told reporters the shooting looked justified.
What he said
Baumgartner, who has represented Washington's 5th District since January 2025, made the comments to reporters in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, January 14, 2026:
"Obviously, it's a tragedy whenever anybody gets killed, but from what I've seen, it looks like a justified shooting."
His basis for that conclusion was two unnamed U.S. officials who had told CBS News that day that Ross suffered internal bleeding.
Two anonymous officials, speaking for the agency under investigation, versus published video from multiple angles. He went with the anonymous officials.
Compare that to what he said a moment later, when a reporter asked whether he agreed with Noem calling Good a domestic terrorist:
"I would like to refrain from making those kinds of comments until there's an investigation and I know more."
He'd wait for the investigation before saying anything about the dead woman's character. He would not wait for the investigation before clearing the man who killed her.
The person who actually investigates shootings for a living disagreed
Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O'Hara has criticized ICE agents' conduct in his city, and said the agent who killed Good violated "traffic stop 101" by putting himself in front of her vehicle as he circled it, filming her with his phone.
O'Hara runs a police department. He is describing basic officer-safety procedure — the thing recruits are taught so that an agent never ends up standing where a moving car can justify shooting.
It's also worth noting who was allowed to look into it. State and local law enforcement in Minnesota were excluded from the federal investigation into Good's death and denied access to evidence, which raised concerns that an inquiry run solely by the Trump administration wouldn't be seen as legitimate. So Baumgartner's "let's wait for the investigation" meant waiting for an investigation run entirely by the administration whose agent pulled the trigger.
This isn't an isolated case. We've documented two other ICE killings in a single week last July where the government's initial account collapsed once the facts came out, and a federal lawsuit alleging DHS surveilled and punished Americans who filmed immigration agents — the exact activity Good was engaged in when she was killed.
The governor who reacted was the problem, apparently
Washington Governor Bob Ferguson posted on X on January 8:
"Now ICE is killing moms in the street? The escalating violence from the Trump Administration against immigrants and protestors is absolutely outrageous."
Baumgartner's verdict on that:
"That is highly irresponsible and it fosters the kind of division and paranoia amongst the public that's very dangerous. I was really disappointed that so many public elected officials, like Gov. Bob Ferguson, rushed to make irresponsible statements."
Set the two side by side. Ferguson described what had happened — an ICE agent killed a mother in the street — the day after it happened. Baumgartner declared the killing justified six days after that, on anonymous sourcing, and called Ferguson the reckless one.
Meanwhile the administration had labeled Good a domestic terrorist before any investigation at all. Baumgartner had no criticism for that.
The letter he sent the day after she died
There's one more piece to the timeline that's easy to miss.
The day after Good was killed, Baumgartner sent a letter to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins asking them to review potential fraud in Washington state's administration of federal food assistance and other benefit programs.
His stated reason was Minnesota. In 2022, federal prosecutors there charged dozens of people — most of Somali descent — in a large fraud scheme. Trump cited that case in December 2025 when he ordered the Minneapolis immigration operation that Good was observing when she was killed.
Baumgartner wrote that he was "not alleging misconduct by Washington state," only seeking assurance "that Washington's administration of major federal funds is protected against the same vulnerabilities that have been publicly documented in Minnesota."
Asked whether it's appropriate for the administration to target an entire ethnic group in Minnesota because most of those convicted were Somali American, he said authorities should "follow the crimes and the evidence wherever it leads," and added:
"If there are significant problems amongst significant ethnic groups, we shouldn't not investigate those groups for the sake of wokeness or DEI."
Read the sequence plainly. An immigration crackdown justified by a fraud case involving Somali Americans killed a U.S.-citizen bystander. Baumgartner's response, one day later, was to ask the federal government to look for the same kind of fraud in his own state — and a week after that, to tell reporters the killing looked fine to him.
What this tells 5th District voters
Baumgartner has built a big part of his first term on immigration enforcement. He joined House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan and Rep. Tom McClintock in a letter pressuring Washington's attorney general over the state's sanctuary law, charging that "The state of Washington not only actively thwarts federal immigration enforcement, but it also targets local law enforcement officials for complying with federal law."
The month before that, ICE agents in Spokane Valley broke a car window and dragged out two green-card holders on their way to a court hearing; a seven-months-pregnant U.S. citizen riding with them was also removed from the car against her will. At his March 2025 town hall, constituent Michaela Kelso asked him what he would do about it. He first asked the booing crowd how many of them had voted for Trump — fewer than a dozen hands went up out of hundreds — and then answered:
"So you're not going to like my answer but it would be far better for the security of the state of Washington and for immigrants in the state of Washington if Washington was not a sanctuary state."
He added that he intended to "make that happen," and declined to say what he meant by it when reporters asked afterward.
You can hold every one of those positions and still wait for the facts before declaring a killing justified. Baumgartner didn't.
Renee Good was an American citizen standing in an American street. Asked about her death, a member of Congress spent his answer defending the agent, criticizing a governor for objecting, and pivoting to food-stamp fraud.
Source
Orion Donovan Smith, "Rep. Baumgartner weighs in on ICE shooting of Renee Good in Minnesota; calls for review of potential fraud in Washington", The Spokesman-Review, January 15, 2026. Photo by Orion Donovan Smith / The Spokesman-Review.
