Across cities swept up in this year's federal immigration operations, women who show up with a phone camera to document ICE activity keep describing the same arc: agents who answer the lens not just with an order to back away, but with a gendered slur, a visit to their home, or worse. Eight months into that pattern, the accountability wall around it has cracked for the first time — a federal officer now faces criminal charges tied to one of the shootings that helped define this fight, even as the women doing the watching say the hostility hasn't let up.
A Killing That Set the Tone
The clearest example is still Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old Minneapolis mother of three shot and killed on Jan. 7 by ICE agent Jonathan Ross as she sat in her SUV during an enforcement operation blocks from her home. Ross's own body camera caught what he said seconds after firing, calling her a "a vulgar insult". Within hours, the Department of Homeland Security had branded her actions domestic terrorism. Her wife, Becca Good, rejected that framing directly: "We had whistles. They had guns," she said in a statement days later.
The fuller picture is more contested than either side's shorthand suggests. CNN reported that Good sat on her son's charter-school board and had been tied, in school records, to efforts encouraging parents to monitor ICE activity — the association federal officials leaned on to justify the shooting, alongside a claim that she used her car as a weapon. Video reviewed by the network showed her steering clear of the agent rather than toward him as she pulled forward, and the Marshall Project has reported that a separate video analysis undercut the president's own claim that Good had run an agent down.
Not an Isolated Remark
Court filings and personnel records show the language used against Good wasn't a one-off. A Capital & Main investigation published in March found racist or sexist remarks tied to three of the shootings its reporters examined, out of a wider count of 13 shootings involving federal immigration personnel since June 2025. One of those agents, who killed a Black man while off duty, had also drawn separate accusations of derogatory comments about Black and Latino people. In another, a congressional forum surfaced texts in which a Border Patrol agent bragged in graphic, dehumanizing terms about wounding Marimar Martinez, a Chicago teacher he'd shot multiple times. None of the agents in Capital & Main's tally had been criminally charged at the time of its reporting. That 13-shooting count has since climbed well past 20, by outside trackers' estimates, as the crackdown expanded into Texas, Maine and beyond.
A Watch Network Built Mostly by Volunteers
The women facing this treatment belong to an informal, fast-growing corps of so-called legal observers who track tips, film arrests and sound whistles to warn neighbors when agents are near. One Minneapolis coalition, COPAL, told CNN in January that roughly 5,000 trained volunteers now sit within its monitoring coalition alone — a figure organizers say has only grown as comparable networks have sprung up well beyond Minnesota. Organizers describe the typical recruit as a parent handling school pickup or a retiree with open afternoons, not an activist by trade; a Spanish teacher in her late twenties who signed up the day after Good died told CNN she couldn't stand by while federal agents flooded her hometown.
That visibility has a cost. A Marshall Project analysis traced a pattern of agents running observers' license plates, showing up at their homes and making clear their addresses were already known. Two federal lawsuits filed this year go further, alleging agents used facial-recognition scans and biometric databases to identify and threaten observers on the spot; one plaintiff in Maine says a masked agent told her she was "considered a domestic terrorist" for filming a raid. Separately, The 19th has tracked a rise in filmed encounters where agents used physical force against women during enforcement stops — from a courthouse hallway shove in Manhattan to a pregnant woman dragged through the snow in Minneapolis.
South Florida's Own Watch Grows Under New Pressure
The dynamic carries particular weight here. Doral, where close to seven of every 10 residents were born outside the United States and more than a third trace their roots to Venezuela, has operated under a 287(g) partnership with ICE since its city council unanimously approved the arrangement in April 2025, giving local police a limited immigration-enforcement role; the city now appears on lists of active participating agencies alongside Coral Gables, Hialeah and Homestead. That standing cooperation raises the stakes for residents already tracking agent activity independently. Volunteers around Gainesville have built a Telegram tip line and hotline to flag suspected agents, part of a statewide effort that has expanded since January and that includes a very different kind of participant in Miami: makeup artist and life coach Christina Neptune, who posts every sighting she gets to Facebook, Threads and Instagram.
New York's State-Sanctioned Version, Six Months In
Not every jurisdiction has left this work to volunteers. New York Attorney General Letitia James spent this year building out her Legal Observation Project, which sends trained staff in matching purple vests to log what agents do without stepping into an operation itself. DHS pushed back the moment it launched in February, with a spokesperson telling Reuters that federal agents "wouldn't have to be in the field" at all if New York's own police and state officials simply cooperated with them.
The First Crack in Accountability
For most of this year, no agent involved in any of these shootings had faced criminal consequences. That changed in May, when Hennepin County prosecutors brought assault charges against ICE agent Christian Castro — four of them, plus a separate charge for falsifying a police report — after he fired through the door of a Minneapolis apartment, wounding Julio Sosa-Celis, and allegedly misled his own agency about what happened. Castro has fought extradition from Texas ever since, and CNN reported this week that the Justice Department is now weighing federal charges of its own — a step that would mark the administration's first move toward prosecuting one of its own immigration agents. Ross, notably, has not been charged in Good's death; he was quietly reassigned out of Minnesota after just three days of leave, prompting New York's governor to publicly demand confirmation he hadn't landed in her state.
Cameras Are Coming, With Conditions
Under pressure from lawmakers in both parties, ICE now says it expects every field officer to be wearing a body camera by the end of this month. But the agency's policy gives its director broad discretion to withhold footage of shootings when release isn't judged to be in the agency's own interest, a carve-out that drew objections from Republican senators as well as Democrats. Its sister agency, Customs and Border Protection, still hasn't released any footage from the fatal shooting of Minneapolis nurse Alex Pretti in January; the agency's commissioner has told lawmakers it will do so only when the moment is right.
For the women still doing this work — from Minneapolis intersections to Doral sidewalks — the arithmetic hasn't changed much: cameras without release requirements, a legal-observer network growing faster than the protections around it, and, for now, exactly one agent facing a courtroom.
