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FBI Agent Resigns in Protest as Trump DOJ Investigates Renee Good—Not the ICE Agent Who Killed Her
The FBI has focused its investigation on Good's ties to activist groups as ICE agents have increasingly threatened people for filming and observing their operations.
Jan 24, 2026
A supervisor in the FBI's Minneapolis field office became the latest official to resign over the federal law enforcement agency's handling of the investigation into an immigration agent's fatal shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis earlier this month.
As the New York Times reported Friday, FBI agent Tracee Mergen, acting supervisor of the office's Public Corruption Squad, resigned after senior FBI officials in Washington pushed her to end a civil rights probe into the killing. The agency is focusing on investigating Good and her wife, who were legally observing US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, instead of determining whether ICE agent Jonathan Ross used excessive force.
An FBI source told CBS News that Mergen "would not bow to pressure" from the agency's leaders.
Starting immediately after Good was shot three times at close range by Ross, who was one of several agents who had approached her vehicle and, according to eyewitnesses, shouted conflicting orders at her, Trump administration officials have described Good and her wife as "domestic terrorists." They have accused her of trying to run over Ross, a claim that has not been supported by detailed analysis of footage of the killing.
Federal prosecutors have refused to allow authorities in Minnesota to conduct a probe into the killing, and Harmeet Dhillon, the Trump administration's assistant attorney general for civil rights, announced days after Good was killed that the US Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division would not be investigating—which would ordinarily be a standard step in a shooting involving a federal law enforcement agent. That decision led four top officials in Dhillon's office to resign in protest.
Six federal prosecutors in the US attorney's office in Minnesota also stepped down after the DOJ made clear that Becca and Renee Good—not Ross—would be the focus of an investigation.
Like many residents of Minneapolis, Chicago, and Charlotte, North Carolina have in recent months as thousands of ICE agents have descended on US cities and detained immigrants and citizens alike, the Goods were observing and filming ICE operations on January 7 when Renee Good was shot.
Filming ICE is legal as long as doing so does not interfere with agents' operations. Yet officers have increasingly threatened people for observing them and claimed that doing so is an act of domestic terrorism.
One agent in Portland, Maine on Friday told an observer she would be included in a "nice little database" and "considered a domestic terrorist," after she filmed ICE operations.
Volunteers for neighborhood ICE watches in Maine told the Portland Press Herald that ICE agents have shown up at their houses and issued warnings not to follow them.
The threats, and the FBI's insistence on investigating Good's alleged ties to what it calls "activist groups," come months after Attorney General Pam Bondi signed a memo expanding the DOJ's definition of domestic terrorism to include "impeding" law enforcement officers or "doxxing" them.
That memo followed National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NSPM-7, a document signed by President Donald Trump shortly after the assassination of right-wing political activist Charlie Kirk, which mandates a “national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts." The memo exclusively focuses on “anti-fascist” or left-wing activities.
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'Confirming Everything We Knew Already': Docs Show Trump Admin Targeted Gaza Activists for Their Opinions
Unsealed internal documents affirmed that the administration arrested and sought to deport pro-Palestine activists "solely on protected expression," as one rights group put it.
Jan 23, 2026
A federal judge on Thursday unsealed documents showing that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio personally approved the deportation of university students after receiving memos highlighting their involvement in constitutionally protected campus protests against Israel's genocide in Gaza.
Massachusetts-based Senior Judge William G. Young—an appointee of former President Ronald Reagan—unsealed 105 pages of documents he initially kept under wraps because they contained details regarding federal investigations. Young granted a request by media outlets including the New York Times to unseal the files as a matter of public interest.
Last year, Young ruled that the Trump administration broke the law by targeting pro-Palestine student activists in a bid to “unconstitutionally... chill freedom of speech.”
The unsealed documents include Department of Homeland Security (DHS) memos recommending that five student activists who were legally in the United States—Yunseo Chung, Mahmoud Khalil, Mohsen Mahdawi, Badar Khan Suri, and Rümeysa Öztürk—be deported, despite there being no evidence of wrongdoing.
"There are few things more un-American than masked agents throwing dissenters in the back of a van because the government doesn’t like what they have to say," Conor Fitzpatrick, supervising senior attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE)—which sued the administration over the unconstitutionality of its efforts—said Friday in a statement.
"But these documents prove that it was the students’ opinions alone, and not any criminal activity, that led to handcuffs and deportation proceedings," Fitzpatrick added. "The First Amendment means the government cannot punish speakers for their opinions, but that is exactly what the government is doing."
As the Times reported Friday:
The documents indicate that in nearly all instances, the arrests of the students were recommended based on their involvement in campus protests and public writings, activities that the Trump administration routinely equated to antisemitic hate speech and support for terrorist organizations. They also show that officials privately anticipated the possibility that the deportations might not hold up in court because much of the conduct highlighted could be seen as protected speech.
“Given the potential that a court may consider his actions inextricably tied to speech protected under the First Amendment, it is likely that courts will scrutinize the basis for this determination,” stated one memo on Madhawi, a Columbia University student and permanent US resident.
In another document, Trump administration officials admitted there were no grounds for deporting the students, but noted the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which empowers the secretary of state to expel noncitizens whose presence in the United States is deemed detrimental to US foreign policy interests.
Rubio cited the law to target pro-Palestine students for deportation, a stance that was rebuked in a June 2025 ruling from US District Judge Michael Farbiarz, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, who found that Khalil's "career and reputation are being damaged and his speech is being chilled" by the Trump administration's actions.
In May 2025, US District Judge William Sessions III—who was appointed by former President Bill Clinton—ordered the release of Öztürk. The Turkish PhD student at Tufts University was illegally snatched off a Massachusetts street in March 2025 and taken to a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) lockup in Louisiana after she published an opinion piece in a student newspaper advocating divestment from apartheid Israel.
"There has been no evidence that has been introduced by the government other than the op-ed,” Sessions wrote in his ruling.
One of the newly unsealed State Department documents states that DHS and ICE have "not provided any evidence showing that Öztürk has engaged in any antisemitic activity or made any public statements indicating support for a terrorist organization or antisemitism generally."
Fitzpatrick stressed that "this can't happen in a free society."
"It can’t happen in a free America," he added. "We’ll continue to fight this egregious violation of the Constitution every step of the way."
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'Stunning Abdication of Basic Human Decency': Trump Ripped for Expanding Global Gag Rule
"President Trump and his anti-abortion administration would rather let people starve to death in the wake of famine and war than let anyone in the world get an abortion—or even receive information about it."
Jan 23, 2026
As US Vice President JD Vance on Friday addressed anti-abortion activists at the March for Life, public health and reproductive rights advocates decried the Trump administration's expansion of the Mexico City Policy, which critics call the global gag rule.
Since the Reagan administration, Democrats have repealed and Republicans have reimposed the policy, which bans nongovernmental organizations that perform or promote abortion from receiving federal funding. While President Donald Trump reinstated it as expected after returning to office last year, multiple media outlets revealed the expansion plans on Thursday.
A spokesperson confirmed to NBC News on Friday that the US Department of State will release three final rules expanding the foreign assistance prohibition to include "gender ideology," and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), or what the administration is calling "discriminatory equity ideology," in line with various other Trump policies.
"President Trump and his anti-abortion administration would rather let people starve to death in the wake of famine and war than let anyone in the world get an abortion—or even receive information about it," Rachana Desai Martin, chief US program officer at the Center for Reproductive Rights, said in a Friday statement.
"People are already dying because of this administration's slashing of foreign assistance," she noted. "Now, they're making it harder for doctors and aid workers to provide food, water, and lifesaving medical care. This isn't about saving lives—it's a stunning abdication of basic human decency."
Guttmacher Institute director of federal policy Amy Friedrich-Karnik similarly called out not only the new "supercharged global gag rule" but also the second Trump administration's "unprecedented actions like the dismantling of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and rescission of US foreign assistance for family planning services around the world."
"Guttmacher research estimates that almost 50 million women and girls have already been denied contraceptive care in low- and middle-income countries due to these draconian actions," she explained. "This new radical policy threatens to aggravate the cumulative harms of earlier administration actions, undermining decades of bipartisan investment in global health and gender equality, and stripping resources from the world's most vulnerable populations, including LGBTQ+ communities around the world."
Amnesty International's senior director for research, advocacy, policy, and campaigns, Erika Guevara-Rosas, blasted the expansion as "an assault on human rights" that will be "disastrous and deadly."
"It strangles healthcare systems, censors information, and violates the rights to health, information, and free expression," she stressed. "It forces frontline providers and many struggling organizations that depend on US funding into an impossible choice: limit essential healthcare for the most vulnerable populations or shut their doors."
"Doubling down on this policy is cruel, reckless, and ideologically driven," she continued. "Expanding it to international and US-based organizations will impact the poorest and marginalized first and hardest, denying people the chance to live full, healthy, autonomous lives where they are able to access rights and services. It is further proof of this US administration's blatant disregard for international law, universal rights, and the rules-based international order."
Dr. Anu Kumar, president and CEO of Ipas, which works to increase access to abortion and contraception around the world, declared that "this radically expanded global gag rule is nothing short of a regressive, harmful policy that puts the United States even further out of step with our global counterparts."
"Bullying individual countries' governments into complying with anti-rights and extremist ideology held by the current US administration is despicable and unacceptable," Kumar asserted. "It will wreak havoc on global efforts to improve health, uphold human rights, and achieve gender equality."
The broadening of the global gag rule comes as survivors and US lawmakers continue to fight for the release of files from the federal trafficking investigation into deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, a former friend of Trump. Mina Barling, the International Planned Parenthood Federation's global director of external relations, said that "in an age of Epstein scandals and hocus-pocus designed to undermine science and medicine, the Trump administration has read the room."
"He knows his obsession with women's bodies is viewed cynically, so he has utilized the man-made panic funded by the fossil fuel industry to shift the focus of his policy against trans people," Barling said of the president. "The global gag rule is hate-bait designed to keep his donors happy and export more division to countries reliant on US aid, in the absence of economic justice."
"We stand in solidarity with women and trans people in all their diversity," she added. "We demand debt relief, and we support national sovereignty. We want to see a new global health architecture that is less susceptible to the whims of American politicians."
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