2026-01-10 10:15:26
A video reportedly filmed by the federal agent who shot and killed Renée Nicole Good in Minneapolis earlier this week was released on Friday by a conservative Minnesota outlet whose most prominent reporter is married to the city’s former police union head.
Alpha News—notable in part for its sympathetic coverage of Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer convicted in 2021 of murdering George Floyd—has since Wednesday published a flurry of articles including “ICE shooting in Minneapolis: Minnesota attorney explains how presumed innocence has been ignored again” and “REPORT: Woman killed by ICE agent was member of ‘ICE Watch’ group working to disrupt immigration arrests.”
Conservative commentators have seized on the 47-second clip to argue that it exculpates Ross and shows Good driving towards him.
Other viewers see the clip as further evidence against Ross.
Vice President JD Vance has shared the Alpha News video multiple times as of early Friday evening, writing in one post, “What the press has done in lying about this innocent law enforcement officer is disgusting. You should all be ashamed of yourselves.” The Trump administration has maintained that Good was a “violent rioter” who “weaponized her vehicle” in order to carry out “domestic terrorism.”
Visual investigations by publications including the New York Times, Bellingcat, and the Washington Post have refuted that account.
Yet the fact that the video from the shooter’s perspective was released at all, and with such speed, is remarkable—as is who it was leaked to.
Alpha News, founded in 2015, is a Minnesota outlet that has distinguished itself for years by running pieces that suggest Derek Chauvin suffered a miscarriage of justice. Its highest-profile reporter, Liz Collin, is married to former Minneapolis police union president Bob Kroll; in 2022, Collin published a book titled They’re Lying: The Media, The Left, and The Death of George Floyd.
In 2020, the ACLU of Minnesota sued Kroll in connection with claims that Minneapolis police used excessive force against protesters, according to Minnesota Public Radio, leading to a settlement that barred Kroll from serving as a police officer in Hennepin County, where Minneapolis is located, and two neighboring counties, Ramsey and Anoka, for the next decade.
A 2020 article by Mother Jones‘ Samantha Michaels details decades of allegations against Kroll of extreme brutality, as well as another lawsuit—filed by Medaria Arradondo, then the city’s chief of police—who accused Kroll of wearing a white power patch and referring to a Muslim congressman as a “terrorist.” (Collin’s book, in an excerpt published by Alpha News, decries protests against her husband: “‘Bob Kroll is a racist’ was a popular theme,” Collin writes.)
It’s unclear how Alpha News obtained the video apparently taken by Ross as he killed Good. Collin and Alpha News’ editor-in-chief did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In the video, Ross exits a vehicle and begins circling Good’s SUV before pointing the camera at Good, who says, “That’s fine, dude, I’m not mad at you.” Ross films the rear of the vehicle and the license plate. The camera pans to Good’s wife, also filming, who speaks to Ross—saying, among other things, “Go home.” An agent instructs Good to “get out of the car.” Good reverses before appearing to turn away from Ross and drive away. Simultaneously, the angle of the video shifts quickly, no longer pointing at Good, and several gunshots are audible. The camera briefly refocuses on Good’s car, turning away moments before it runs into a nearby vehicle.
In the background, a voice says, “Fucking bitch.”
2026-01-10 01:21:50
US Border Patrol shot and injured two people in Portland on Thursday, just one day after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent named Jonathan Ross shot and killed US citizen Rénee Nicole Good in Minneapolis.
People in Portland were already protesting the latter when they heard another shooting had happened in their city.
Local and federal authorities have said it was a man and a woman who were in a vehicle together, and, according to Portland police dispatcher reports, the man was shot in the arm while the woman was shot in the chest.
“We cannot sit by while constitutional protections erode and bloodshed mounts,” Portland Mayor Keith Wilson said in a statement, adding that the city is “not a ‘training ground’ for militarized agents, and the ‘full force’ threatened by the administration has deadly consequences.”
Wilson called on immigration officials “to end all operations in Portland until a full investigation can be completed.”
On Friday morning, the Department of Homeland Security released the names of who they say are the two individuals who immigration enforcement shot—Luis David Nico Moncada and Yorlenys Betzabeth Zambrano-Contreras. DHS says they are in the country without documentation from Venezuela and are “suspected Tren de Aragua gang associates.” The department did not provide evidence for these claims.
Earlier on Thursday, spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said the shooting involved Border Patrol agents who “were conducting a targeted vehicle stop” of someone from Venezuela. She continued: “When agents identified themselves to the vehicle occupants, the driver weaponized his vehicle and attempted to run over the law enforcement agents.”
Prior to the names being released, at a gathering outside City Hall Thursday evening, Mayor Wilson called McLaughlin’s description of what happened into question.
“We know what the federal government says happened here,” Wilson said. “There was a time when we could take them on their word. That time has long passed. We are calling on ICE to halt all operations in Portland until a full investigation can take place.”
On Thursday, hundreds gathered outside City Hall for a vigil. Hundreds more—nearly 500 according to Oregon Public Broadcasting—protested outside the Portland ICE facility. Six people were arrested during the protest, per police.
Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield announced Thursday evening that his office is opening an investigation into the shooting. “We have been clear about our concerns with excessive use of force by federal agents in Portland and nationally,” Rayfield said, adding, “Our office will take every step necessary to ensure that the rights and security of Oregonians are protected.”
One day earlier, in Minneapolis, DHS had also said that Good, the 37-year-old woman shot and killed, had “weaponized her vehicle” in an “act of domestic terrorism.” In that case, though, there were several angles of video footage that disputed the federal response. Visual investigations by Bellingcat and the New York Times have since contradicted the official message being presented by President Donald Trump and his administration.
Following the shooting of Good, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey told ICE to “get the fuck out of Minneapolis. We do not want you here.”
Oregon Senate Majority Leader Kayse Jama, who arrived in the US as a refugee from Somalia, echoed that sentiment on Thursday, telling federal immigration agents to “get the hell out of our community.”
2026-01-10 00:24:01
Not long ago, President Donald Trump had a clear opinion of Venezuelan oil.
Throughout his 2024 presidential campaign, he called the country’s crude “horrible,” “tar,” “the dirtiest stuff you can imagine,” and the “worst oil probably anywhere in the world.” But, less than two years later, President Trump has framed his move to depose Nicolás Maduro in large part as a move to seize this “garbage” oil.
Trump used to regularly disparage Venezuelan oil. Now he’s sent the American military in to capture it.
His reservations about the quality of the fossil fuels he plans to acquire have disappeared. Instead, the president has suggested he may be willing to send in more US troops to keep control of it and that he’s not “afraid of boots on the ground.” Gone, too, are Trump’s warnings that Venezuelan heavy crude will pollute the air in American communities when it’s refined stateside.
Trump’s disparaging remarks about Venezuelan oil were not a one-off. He made a version of the same argument at least five times between June 2023 and August 2024. The typical pitch went something like this: When I was president, we drilled top-tier American oil. Now we import tar from Venezuela and pollute our country in the process.
Here’s a longer version from a speech to North Carolina Republicans in June 2023:
When I left Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would have taken it over. We would have gotten all that oil. It would have been right next door. But now we’re buying oil from Venezuela. So we’re making a dictator very rich. Can you believe this? Nobody can believe this.
Their oil is garbage. It’s horrible. The worst you can get. Tar. It’s like tar. And to refine it you need special plants … We have liquid gold. The best, most beautiful stuff you can get. Liquid gold. Better than gold. Right under our feet … But with Venezuela, they put their oil and they refine it in Houston! So all those pollutants go right up in the air … So, we lose economically. And we also lose from an environmental standpoint. Because it is really dirty stuff. The dirtiest stuff you can imagine.
The bit has a typically Trumpian cognitive dissonance to it. If he’d been re-elected in 2020, America would have benefited greatly by taking control of Venezuela’s oil, he claimed. At the same time, Democrats were idiots for using such horrible, polluting oil.
Since capturing Maduro, Trump’s estimation of Venezuela’s fossil fuel reserves appears to have shifted. As he stated in a Tuesday post on social media, Venezuelan authorities are set to send the United States up to 50 million barrels of their “High Quality” oil.
The new plan, as Trump laid out in announcing Maduro’s capture on Saturday, is for American oil companies to spend “billions of dollars” rehabilitating Venezuela’s oil infrastructure. As the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, Trump and his team are now developing a “sweeping initiative to dominate the Venezuelan oil industry for years to come.” That would include “acquiring and marketing the bulk” of the oil from Venezuela’s state-run oil giant. The goal is reportedly to lower the price of oil to Trump’s preferred number of $50 a barrel, a level so low that it could imperil US production of the “liquid gold” Trump celebrated on the campaign trail.
“Their oil is garbage. It’s horrible. The worst you can get. Tar. It’s like tar.”
There are many potential roadblocks. Unlike Trump, fossil fuel companies, which have been notably quiet about any plans to expand production in Venezuela, remain fully aware of the risks of investing in a politically unstable country to get heavy oil at a time when prices are already low. They are now reportedly discussing seeking financial guarantees from the Trump administration before investing in Venezuela. Trump has similarly floated the possibility of reimbursing oil companies for the money they spend rebuilding infrastructure in the country.
Nor does there appear to be any near-term exit plan. Earlier this week, the New York Times asked Trump how long the United States is likely to assert control over Venezuela. Six months? A year?
“I would say much longer,” Trump responded.
2026-01-09 20:30:00
This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center. It first appeared on The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service. Subscribe to their newsletter.
Marc Dervaes sat straight-backed in a circle of 10 men at a clinic in Tijuana, Mexico. The glass window behind him looked out on a pool deck and the Pacific Ocean beyond.
Inside, sunglasses masked his eyes, and a beard grew down to his chest. His blank expression invited no sympathy, and Dervaes had none to give.
“I’m sorry if this offends anyone,” he said at the introductory circle, “but I really don’t care about any of you. I’m here for me.”
Dervaes knew the men would be curious about his amputation. He mentioned losing his right arm in Afghanistan but had no intention of sharing more.
Each man had his own reason to visit the clinic, where patients pay around $8,000 for a psychedelic treatment with little scientific backing. They all hoped suffering through a brain-bending, vomit-inducing, existential jolt would cure their ailments, which ranged from malaise to traumatic brain injury.
A veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Dervaes had one foot in the grave before contacting Ambio Life Sciences. Two months earlier, he had spent two days in a hospital back home in Colorado Springs with alcohol poisoning that he hoped would end his life.
“Peace was totally gone in this house,” said Michaela Dervaes, his wife of 26 years.
Dervaes called the clinic after leaving the hospital. The earliest it could schedule him was April 2026—a nine-month wait. Dervaes told the man on the phone he would be dead by then.
Two companies operating clinics in Tijuana, Ambio Life Sciences and The Mission Within Center, say they have treated about 3,000 U.S. veterans in the last decade. Both use the psychedelics ibogaine—derived from the root of a central African shrub—and 5-MeO-DMT—a chemical secreted by the Sonoran desert toad. A common motivation among participants has emerged: The talk therapy and prescriptions offered by the Department of Veterans Affairs proved ineffective.
Every time Breanna Morgan opens the clinic’s oversized wooden door and shows patients into the foyer—where a half-dozen staffers wait to greet them—she assumes it’s the worst day of their lives.
“They’re not here because they really want to be here,” Morgan, Ambio’s guest experience manager, said in an interview. “They’re here because it’s their only option.”
“They’re not here because they really want to be here. They’re here because it’s their only option.”
This is the story of one of those guests—a broken veteran whose ibogaine experience would put him face-to-face with everyone in his life he had ever wronged. His tears would soak through the eye mask patients wear to limit sensory input.
Back home, confronted by another tragedy, Dervaes would quickly regret his visit to the cliffside mansion and resent the clinic that took thousands of dollars from him.
Then, four months later, he would return.
For decades, overseas drug rehab clinics have offered ibogaine to people addicted to cocaine and opioids. The drug’s use among military veterans has surged over the last four years. Despite support from veterans, a push for more research, and efforts by advocates to legalize the psychedelic treatment in the United States, much remains unknown about the drugs’ long-term effectiveness and safety.
The federal Drug Enforcement Administration considers both ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT Schedule 1 substances, meaning the agency finds both have a high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use.
Psychedelic medicine advocates fear the expensive, decade-long process of bringing a new drug to market in the U.S. will adulterate both the drugs and the environments in which people take them.
Researchers, meanwhile, fear that the media hype and the proliferation of ceremonies replete with New Age rhetoric and dubious claims will undermine their efforts to gain FDA approval.
As debates play out at state legislatures and research conferences, it is here, in a coastal retreat center down the road from an open-air fruit stand, that veterans come in a desperate attempt to find relief.
Dervaes’ journey to the clinic began more than a decade ago. It was in September 2009 in eastern Afghanistan. Corn grew 8 feet high on either side of the unpaved road outside of Jalalabad.
Dervaes clutched the passenger’s seat grab handle as the mine-resistant ambush protected vehicle rumbled along. A platoon sergeant with 15 years as an Army infantryman under his belt, Dervaes felt invincible.
He had survived a bullet to his helmet during his first deployment to Iraq. On his second, he spent 16 grinding months guarding nighttime construction crews in Baghdad.
His convoy drove in a tight pack. That day, a gap formed between his truck and the three others ahead, Dervaes said. “The enemy took full advantage.”
Dervaes bent over a junction box to fiddle with a defective cord, his right arm still clutching the grab handle. When he looked up, he saw a man outside, a rocket-propelled grenade mounted on his shoulder aimed at Dervaes.
A big flash, pressure, and heat. Dervaes collapsed over the junction box. His right arm, wristwatch still attached, landed in the driver’s lap. He came to as the driver, his foot still on the gas, pulled Dervaes up by his helmet.
Another RPG shot through the passenger door and out the roof. The truck caught fire and filled with smoke. Chunks of flesh and bone covered the side of the cab. Dervaes heard screaming. “Someone else is hurt,” he thought. “Someone else in the truck is either dead or hurt.”
His body tingled. His vision grew blurry. A man with a belt-fed machine gun emerged from the stalks of corn. Somehow, the truck kept moving forward. “Drive. Drive. Don’t stop,” Dervaes said as bullets shattered the windshield.
He spent eight months recovering at an Army hospital in San Antonio, Texas, then returned to Fort Carson, Colorado, just as his unit got back from Afghanistan. He and the driver finally had time to look back. Dervaes longed to fill gaps in his memory.
“Who was screaming?” Dervaes remembers asking.
“It was you,” the driver said.
Like so many Americans, Dervaes battled prescription opioid addiction after his surgeries. He faced a personal crisis, described by many veterans, of adapting to a civilian life that lacks the structure, urgency, and adrenaline soldiers grow accustomed to at war.
He sought thrills as a U.S. Paralympic snowboarder. He and his wife began cave diving. As a volunteer for the nonprofit Team River Runner, he designed prosthetics for adaptive kayaking.
He helped to launch the Colorado Springs chapter of the nonprofit Wounded Warrior Project. He instructs children with disabilities in snowboarding.
More than a decade of athleticism landed him seven rib fractures, a concussion, a bruised lung, and three surgeries on his left arm, all between 2021 and 2025. So damaged was his left arm, his only arm, that he could hold neither a Voodoo Ranger beer can nor his basset hound puppy Ruby.
The pain led him to spiral.
Hours before traveling to Tijuana, Dervaes paced around the lobby of the Sheraton San Diego Resort. A hotel staffer asked if he was OK.
The night before, his wife blocked the hotel room door to prevent Dervaes from leaving. Sober for three months, a requirement of attending the clinic, Dervaes wanted a drink.
He feared the treatment, a last-ditch effort to address his deteriorating mental health and excessive drinking, would fail.
Two SUVs pulled up in front of the hotel’s entryway fountain. It was a Tuesday morning in early August. Dervaes sat alone in the back seat of one as drivers piled luggage into the trunks.
“How’s it going, man?” asked Brad Banks, a medical device salesman trying to quit drinking, as he slid next to Dervaes. Maintaining his forward gaze, Dervaes barely grunted.
The men rode in silence past the border checkpoints where Mexican officers wore rifles slung across their chests. In the beachside community of Playas de Tijuana, the SUVs turned down an unpaved road.
Across from a cluster of shanties, a concrete wall fortifies the clinic, an 11-bedroom compound where foreigners come and go each week.
A stay at Ambio starts with an EKG, one of many medical tests the clinic requires to ensure patients are fit for ibogaine. The drug has a narrow therapeutic window, meaning a little more than an effective dose can be toxic. Too much can cause heart arrhythmias.
A 2022 review of literature published on ibogaine found 38 deaths and 20 medical emergencies associated with its use documented in medical literature. In most of those cases, the drug was used to treat opioid addiction. Other emergencies may have gone undocumented given ibogaine’s use in nonmedical settings.
Both ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT can exacerbate existing mania or psychosis, according to Martín Polanco, a doctor who founded The Mission Within Center in Tijuana.
Three hours after arrival, the men changed into swim trunks and crowded back into the Suburbans. Dervaes’ tough-guy veneer started melting away on the drive to a backyard sweatlodge.
“I think it’s time we discuss sweat lodge etiquette,” he said from the back seat, squished beside two passengers. “No farting in the sweat lodge.”
Few people report enjoying their experience on ibogaine. Many have visions. Some see deceased relatives. To some patients’ chagrin, they see and feel nothing.
People who have taken ibogaine refer to the frequent vomiting during the more than 10-hour trip as “purging” and frame it as part of the healing experience.
The men sat around the large wooden dining table on Wednesday, the morning before they took ibogaine. Over French toast and chicken enchiladas, Isaac Pulido told them he could not predict how they would feel that night.
“Many years of doing this and we still don’t have the power,” he said.
Pulido estimates he has overseen more than 4,000 treatments over the last 16 years. A nurse with a doctorate specializing in intensive care, he oversees treatments at all Ambio’s clinics in Mexico.
“Remember, we come here to get healed. We don’t come here to get high,” he told the men. “But if you get high, oh my God, embrace it. Enjoy it.”
Doses at Ambio vary based on each patient’s body weight. If the person feels nothing after about two hours, they can take a booster pill.
“Remember, we come here to get healed. We don’t come here to get high. But if you get high, oh my God, embrace it. Enjoy it.”
It’s possible that lower, nonhallucinogenic doses have benefits without cardiotoxicity, said David Olson, a professor at the University of California, Davis, and director at the UC Davis Institute for Psychedelics and Neurotherapeutics.
But a lot of people who take hallucinogenic drugs want to trip out and end up disappointed if they don’t.
“They expect to see unicorns and all that shit,” Pulido said in an interview.
Dervaes did not see unicorns.
Around 10 p.m. that night, the men had swallowed their third pill. They collected pillows and descended stairs to the clinic’s treatment room. Twin mattresses lined the walls, each with a mirror propped in front of it.
The men sat cross-legged on the edge of their mattresses like preschoolers getting ready for nap time. They shook rattles and stared in their mirrors. Over the next hour, lo-fi music gave way to a chaotic mix of plucked string instruments, traditional ceremonial Gabonese music.
Six nurses, two paramedics, and two doctors kept watch over the patients, who wore heart monitors throughout the night.
As Dervaes shook his rattle, his reflection showed him something evil, as he recalled 36 hours after his ibogaine trip. He tried to smile or change his expression. He slid on an eye mask and lay back to visions he feared would continue all night: wave after wave of people he had wronged. Each time he tried to apologize, a new vision appeared.
The drug exacerbated the severe tinnitus in his left ear. When he lifted his mask, Dervaes saw the room on fire with piles of bodies and people retching.
In the early afternoon the following day, as the drug’s effects waned, Dervaes looked in the mirror. His big brown eyes looked back at him. His downturned and angry brows had vanished.
Ibogaine’s effect on the brain has long puzzled pharmacologists. The drug reduces depression and anxiety and blocks drug withdrawals, said Deborah Mash, a pioneering ibogaine researcher who received FDA approval to study the drug in the mid-1990s.
While ibogaine leaves the blood within 24 hours, its metabolite noribogaine—what the liver creates after processing ibogaine—stays in the body longer. Noribogaine pumps the brain with dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with mood and motivation. Drug abuse and depression are associated with dopamine deficiency. “You’re helping to restore dopamine homeostasis in the brain,” Mash said.
“The enduring effect is a question that neuroscience hasn’t completely worked out.”
The men ambled back to their rooms around midday Thursday. The sleepover party had ended. Many people experience hangover symptoms after the hallucinogenic effects of ibogaine wear off.
Only a few of the patients made it to breakfast the following morning. After a day of rest, the men would inhale another psychedelic, a synthetic version of 5-MeO-DMT.
The men circled up in the living room around noon on Friday. An Ambio employee’s prelude to the upcoming drug sounded like a warning: “For the people who are going to be here, waiting for their turn,” she said, “if you hear someone screaming for their lives or yelling like they’re about to die or something, don’t worry about it. It’s absolutely normal.”
“If you hear someone screaming for their lives or yelling like they’re about to die or something, don’t worry about it. It’s absolutely normal.”
Controversy exists over whether 5-MeO-DMT should be used in conjunction with ibogaine. “There’s no good medical or scientific reason for that at all,” said Albert Garcia-Romeu, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences who studies psychedelics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
Dervaes sat in a hallway waiting his turn. He had arrived at the clinic indifferent to others. Now, he couldn’t stop thinking about a fellow patient, a young man whose bad ibogaine trip caused him to cry throughout the night.
The sounds of wailing traveled down the hallway from a room where another patient, a fellow veteran, took 5-MeO-DMT.
“I have a feeling this is going to hurt,” Dervaes said. “It’s OK. I’ve got to let it go. I have to let all this go. I don’t want to carry it anymore.”
When his turn came, Dervaes sat on a cluster of mattresses covered in serape blankets. He inhaled vapor from a pipe and lay back. In less than a minute, he began to cry. “Holy shit,” he said, starting to sit up before lying back down to convulsions.
Dervaes came out of the trip ready for a second dose. “How do you feel?” the woman asked after he sat up minutes later.
“I feel reborn,” he said, his eyelashes wet with tears.
Five days later, back home in Colorado, Dervaes updated the group on his progress via their Signal chat.
He had gone to Costco.
“I DON’T GO TO COSTCO!” he wrote. “It was amazing, I didn’t feel like I wanted to strangle anyone! There was no anxiety, fear, or anger; I felt safe!!”
If patients experience stress after taking psychedelics, the drugs “can do more damage than good,” according to Gul Dolen, a professor of neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley.
Dolen’s work found psychedelics reopen “critical periods”—windows when the brain is more sensitive to its environment and more capable of learning during early childhood and other critical periods. In the same way a person who just had open-heart surgery shouldn’t climb stairs, people who take psychedelics shouldn’t expose themselves to traumatic events.
“Think of this as open-mind surgery,” Dolen said.
For Dervaes, the trauma returned less than a month after returning from Ambio. He lost a friend to suicide. The devastation ripped through his community of friends. In a Zoom call hosted by an Ambio counselor with about 30 former patients, frustration mounted. The healing stopped. Dervaes started drinking. “Regression,” he said.
Suddenly, he questioned everything about his ibogaine journey: the healing, the expense, the hope. “I was angry for even going there and wasting my time and money.”
Still, his wife, Michaela, noticed subtle changes. He was showing less rage on the road and making progress on letting things that upset him go. Over the next three months, he read more books than he had willingly read in his life, including A Lifetime at War, about a veteran more severely wounded than Dervaes.
“It was like: Wake the fuck up, man,” Dervaes said, “because you’re not the only one that’s out here hurting.”
Instead of retreating, he would double down. In early December, as the first snow peppered Colorado Springs, Dervaes packed his bag. Like a growing number of Ambio’s patients, he was returning. Things fell into place quickly. A spot became available at the clinic. A nonprofit agreed to sponsor his trip.
At a fireside ceremony before taking ibogaine for a second time, Dervaes vowed never to touch alcohol again. He has new goals, he said, and the tools to maneuver through life: prayer, meditation, plus treatments like magnetic e-resonance therapy for his post-traumatic stress and traumatic brain injuries. He said he might go back to Ambio again.
Michaela Dervaes met her husband at the San Diego airport as he returned from his second trip to Mexico. She looked into his face. The soft eyes and smile were back. The ups and downs have left her exhausted.
“Even though everything seems wonderful right now, there could be just something happening, and it’ll go downhill,” she said. For now, she is hopeful. She sees how hard he is trying. “With this new treatment, I’m thinking we’re at peace.”
This War Horse news story was edited by Mike Frankel, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Hrisanthi Pickett wrote the headlines.
2026-01-09 20:30:00
After an ICE agent shot and killed Renée Good in Minneapolis this week, firing his weapon as she attempted to drive away, protesters have amassed around the country, many wondering: Can that officer be taken to court?
The Trump administration, predictably, says the agent, Jonathan Ross, is immune from prosecution. “You have a federal law enforcement official engaging in federal law enforcement action,” Vice President JD Vance told reporters on Thursday. “That guy is protected by absolute immunity. He was doing his job.”
But what do independent attorneys say? After the shooting, I reached out to Robert Bennett, a veteran lawyer in Minneapolis who has worked on hundreds of federal court police misconduct cases during his 50-year career. “I’ve deposed thousands of police officers,” he says. “ICE agents do not have absolute immunity.”
Bennett says the state of Minnesota has the right to prosecute an ICE agent who commits misconduct. But, he adds, that might be difficult now that the FBI has essentially booted the state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension off the case—blocking access, the BCA wrote, to “case materials, scene evidence or investigative interviews necessary to complete a thorough and independent investigation.”
In the conversation below, edited for length and clarity, Bennett discusses how the shooting in Minneapolis unfolded and the legal paths forward.
When you watched the videos of this shooting, what did you see?
You saw what could be easily identified as four ICE officers. And they’re all experiencing, to a greater or lesser extent, the same set of operative facts, the same factual stimuli. But only one officer, seeing the set of circumstances, picked up his weapon. None of the other officers did. That’s a bad fact [for Ross].
Also, the officer walked in front of the car, which counts against him in the reasonableness analysis. If you look at the recent Supreme Court case of Barnes v. Felix, that’s problematic for the ICE agent.
What happened in Barnes v. Felix?
It’s a shooting case where the officer walked around the car, [lunged
and jumped onto the door sill], and put himself in harm’s way. You can’t bootstrap your own bad situation [to] allow a use of force.
What did the court find?
They sent it back to the trial court to consider it. But there’s good language in there.
You said it’s bad news for the ICE agent, Ross, that his colleagues didn’t pull their weapons. Can you talk more about that?
Sure, we’ve had several other cases. There was a tactical semicircle, a bunch of officers aiming their guns at a couple fighting over a knife; one officer out of the eight or nine fired his weapon, none of the others perceived the need to.
And that’s important because it suggests the officer who fired wasn’t reasonable, right? Under federal law, an officer can only use deadly force if they had a reasonable fear that they could otherwise be killed or harmed.
It’s an objective reasonableness standard. So it’s not whether you were personally scared out of your wits and fired your gun. It’s: Would an objectively reasonable officer at the scene have fired his weapon, believing he was in danger of death or immediate bodily harm?
In Ross’ case, there was a previous incident—Ross had shot [with a Taser] through a window before at somebody in the car, and the guy hit the gas, and Ross had stuck his arm through the broken window, and he got cut [and dragged about 100 yards]. And so he was supposedly reacting to that. He’s not an objective officer at that point.
The Trump administration has suggested that Ross is immune from prosecution as a federal officer. Why do you say he’s not?
There’s plenty of case law that allows for the prosecution of federal law enforcement agencies, including ICE. And it’s clear under the law that a federal officer who shoots somebody in Minnesota and kills them is subject to a Minnesota investigation and Minnesota law.
Now, the feds just took that away this morning, and they’ve already decided who’s at fault. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension was going to do an investigation to find out.
But I can tell you, the federal code provides that when there is a state criminal prosecution of a federal officer in Minnesota or any other state, the officer has the right to remove the case to federal court. So if Ross was charged in Hennepin County, he could remove the case to the United States District Court for the District of Minnesota, have a federal judge deal with his case. The code is explicitly predicting such a prosecution could take place. If there was immunity of an absolute nature, you wouldn’t need that section, right?
The administration seems to argue that Ross is protected under the Supremacy Clause, which essentially says that states can’t charge a federal officer if the officer was acting within the scope of his duties.
Do you think killing people is acting within the scope of their duties? What if they decided to kill the 435,000 people in the city of Minneapolis while they were here, would the Supremacy Clause give them a free pass? I don’t think so.
Also, if there was an actual independent investigation, and you apply the actual federal case law to this, and you concluded that Ross violated her rights by using excessive deadly force, he could be indicted federally. Now, nobody believes that would ever happen now: For a guy who talked a lot about rigged things, this [investigation] is rigged. Kash Patel took over the autopsy, so who knows, maybe they’ll say she died of a heart attack when she was backing up.
If the officer isn’t charged criminally, the other route is a lawsuit. What are the challenges there?
My team and I think there are ways to do it. I hope that her mother, or her next of kin, calls us and we’ll figure out a Bivens action or a Federal Tort Claims Act case, or something else. If you look at this case carefully, it has all the hallmarks of cases we’ve either won or settled for amounts of money no reasonable person would pay us if we weren’t going to win. It is essentially a garden variety unjustified use of deadly force case. And that’s based on the facts we know now; I bet the case is going to get better.
2026-01-09 20:30:00
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Combating climate change can feel particularly difficult these days. Countries, states, and municipalities across the globe are missing greenhouse emission reduction targets, and in the United States, President Donald Trump has rolled back key elements of his predecessor’s climate agenda.
Given the trajectory, it might be tempting for pro-climate policymakers to turn to more aggressive measures of getting people to take action, such as mandates, bans, or restrictions. People would then have to save the planet.
But a study published last week in the journal Nature Sustainability suggests that approach can carry real risks. It found that climate policies aimed at forcing lifestyle changes—such as bans on driving in urban centers—can backfire by weakening people’s existing pro-environmental values and triggering political backlash, even among those who already care about climate change. The findings suggest that how climate policy is designed may matter as much as how aggressive it is.
“Mandates can sometimes get you over a hump and tipping point, but they come with costs,” said Sam Bowles, an author of the paper and an economist at the nonprofit Santa Fe Institute. “There could be negative impacts that people don’t anticipate.”
Researchers surveyed more than 3,000 Germans and found that even people who care about climate change had a notably negative response to mandates or bans that did things like limit thermostat temperatures or meat consumption, which they saw as restricting their freedoms. The paper also compared that to people’s reaction to Covid-related requirements, such as vaccine and mask mandates. While researchers found a backlash effect, or “cost of control,” in both instances, it was 52 percent greater for climate than Covid policies.
“I didn’t expect that people’s opposition to [a] climate-mandated lifestyle would be so extreme,” said Katrin Schmelz, the other author of the study, who is also at the Santa Fe Institute. She said that people’s trust in their leaders can mitigate the adverse impact, and compared to the United States, Germans have fairly high trust in the government. That, she said, means she would “expect mandates to be less accepted and provoke more opposition here.”
Ben Ho, a behavioral economist at Vassar College, wasn’t involved in the study and wasn’t surprised by its findings. “This is fundamentally about how a society values individual values of liberty and expression against communal values like safety,” he said, pointing to a sizable body of similar research on the potential for backlash to climate policies. “What is novel about their work is to show that these backfire effects are still true today, and what is especially interesting is to connect their data to how people felt about Covid.”
“Ethical commitments and social norms are very fragile and they’re easily destroyed.”
The political consequences of climate-related mandates can be dramatic. In Germany, a 2023 law passed by the country’s then center-left government sought to accelerate the shift away from fossil fuels by effectively banning new gas heating systems and promoting heat pumps. Though the policy allowed for exemptions and subsidies, opponents quickly framed it as a ban, dubbing it the heizhammer, or “heating hammer.”
The measure became a potent symbol of government overreach, seized on by far-right parties and contributing to a broader public backlash against the governing coalition. “The last German government basically fell because they were seen to be instituting a ban on gas,” said Gernot Wagner, climate economist at Columbia Business School. The current government is attempting to roll back the legislation.
Germany’s experience underscores the risks the study identifies. Policies that are perceived as restricting personal choice can trigger resistance that extends beyond the measure itself, weakening public support for climate action more broadly. So far, policies in the US have largely avoided such opposition. That’s largely because American climate policies have historically been much less aggressive, with even progressives rarely turning to outright bans. But there is both precedent for a potential backlash and inklings of potential fights to come.
The 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act, for example, laid out the path to gradually phase out incandescent light bulbs. That led to the Light Bulb Freedom of Choice and Better Use of Light Bulbs acts, two 2011 bills that the then-burgeoning tea party movement pushed, without success. Today, methane, also known as natural gas, is at the center of similar cultural fights as cities attempt to ban new hookups and take other steps to curtail its use.
Opponents of climate action seem to have become aware of the power of bans to spark backlash, too. President Trump regularly refers to fuel-efficiency benchmarks as an electric vehicle “mandate.” The natural gas industry has also framed efficiency standards for gas appliances as bans and used the backlash effect to help successfully delay other explicit bans on gas in new construction, such as in New York state.
On its face, research like this can put lawmakers in a difficult position: If a policy isn’t aggressive enough, it won’t do much to combat climate change. But if it’s too aggressive, people could turn against it or even the entire political movement behind it, as in Germany, and progress can stall.
“This doesn’t mean we should give up on climate policies,” said Ho. “It just means we should be more mindful in how policies are designed, and that trust could be a key component.”
Schmelz and Bowles both point to a similar conclusion, and say that any policy should at least consider the plasticity of citizens’ beliefs and values. “Ethical commitments and social norms are very fragile and they’re easily destroyed,” Bowles said. Schmelz added that people in power “can upset and reduce willingness to cooperate by designing poor policies.”
One way that policies can avoid backlash is by focusing less on banning a particular action and instead on making the other options more abundant and more attractive (by adding tax incentives or rebates, for example). “Offering alternatives is helping in enforcing green values,” Schmelz said. Another option could be aiming to make climate-unfriendly activities more expensive rather than restricting them. As Bowles put it, “people don’t feel like they are being controlled by a higher price.”
The closer a policy gets to people’s personal lives, they say, the more important it is to be mindful of potential missteps. The authors also emphasize that they aren’t claiming mandates or bans never work—seatbelt laws and smoking restrictions have become commonplace, for instance. But those were enacted in a different era and there was little public dissent about their benefits to personal health.
“There was always somebody in that person’s family saying, ‘No, look, sweetheart, I really wish you would be wearing your seatbelt,'” said Bowles. “We don’t have that in the case of the environment, so it’s a much greater challenge to shift the rhetoric.”
But ultimately, Bowles said the broader message that he wants to convey is that people are generally generous and want their actions to align with their values. This new research underscores the need for policies that help them embrace that inclination, rather than temper it, which mandates or bans can do.
“People have a lot of good values,” he said. “When we look at our citizens and are designing policies, don’t take them to be jerks.”
