CREATORS: When Can an ICE Agent Shoot Into A Moving Vehicle?

 Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
January 13, 2026

On Jan. 7, 2026, Renee Nicole Good was fatally shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis, Minn. The shooting occurred during an ICE enforcement operation and has sparked nationwide protests.

In the moments before the shooting, Good is heard telling the agent that she wasn't mad at him, and the agent, identified as Jonathan Ross, began to circle her vehicle. She backs up her vehicle as Ross crosses in front of her, then she slowly begins to move forward and turns to the right. Ross is near her left headlight when he fires three shots into the vehicle, killing Good.

According to The New York Times, in the last four months, immigration officers have fired on at least nine people in five states and Washington, D.C. All of the individuals targeted in those shootings were, like Good, fired on while in their vehicles.

The pattern raises serious concerns. According to Reason Magazine, for decades, police officers have been trained not to shoot at moving vehicles. New York City's police department banned firing at unarmed drivers in 1972. After it did so, police shootings plummeted in the city. The country's 25 largest police departments generally prohibit firing at vehicles, according to the Times.

Seth Stoughton, a former police officer and current professor of criminal justice at the University of South Carolina, told Reason, "First, we need to keep in mind the legal rules that justify shooting at all ... officers can use deadly force when the subject is reasonably perceived as presenting an imminent threat of death or great bodily harm."

"So, at a very big picture level, we have to answer the question of: Did the officer reasonably perceive an imminent threat of death or great bodily harm? If the answer is no, there shouldn't be a shooting," continued Stoughton.

According to Reuters, there is no universal law enforcement training standard for firing into vehicles. But most police departments and federal policy bar shooting at a moving vehicle unless the driver poses an imminent threat of deadly force beyond the car itself.

Experts say firing at a moving car is one of the riskiest forms of lethal force, increasing the chance of stray gunfire or a loss of vehicle control that can endanger innocent bystanders. Why not just move away from the vehicle? Justice Department policy says deadly force is allowed only when no reasonable alternative exists, including stepping out of the vehicle's path.

The law has long been that police officers cannot use deadly force solely to arrest someone or to disable a fleeing vehicle if the person does not pose an immediate threat. According to The Associated Press, federal law enforcement officers operate under similar guidance.

The operating manual of the Department of Justice mandates that firearms should not be used simply to disable a moving vehicle. The policy allows deadly force only in limited circumstances, such as when someone in the vehicle is threatening another person with deadly force or when the vehicle itself is being used in a way that poses an imminent risk and no reasonable alternative exists but deadly force.

In the wake of Good's killing, President Donald Trump was asked if he believed deadly force was necessary in this case. His response: "It was highly disrespectful of law enforcement. The woman and her friend were highly disrespectful of law enforcement."

Vanita Gupta, a former associate attorney general who oversaw both the civil rights division that can prosecute federal agents and the civil division that defends them, told The New York Times, "Being 'disrespectful' does not warrant the use of deadly force."

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner's Toll, 2010, was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino

On Jan. 7, 2026, Renee Nicole Good was fatally shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis, Minn. The shooting occurred during an ICE enforcement operation and has sparked nationwide protests.

In the moments before the shooting, Good is heard telling the agent that she wasn't mad at him, and the agent, identified as Jonathan Ross, began to circle her vehicle. She backs up her vehicle as Ross crosses in front of her, then she slowly begins to move forward and turns to the right. Ross is near her left headlight when he fires three shots into the vehicle, killing Good.

According to The New York Times, in the last four months, immigration officers have fired on at least nine people in five states and Washington, D.C. All of the individuals targeted in those shootings were, like Good, fired on while in their vehicles.

The pattern raises serious concerns. According to Reason Magazine, for decades, police officers have been trained not to shoot at moving vehicles. New York City's police department banned firing at unarmed drivers in 1972. After it did so, police shootings plummeted in the city. The country's 25 largest police departments generally prohibit firing at vehicles, according to the Times.

Seth Stoughton, a former police officer and current professor of criminal justice at the University of South Carolina, told Reason, "First, we need to keep in mind the legal rules that justify shooting at all ... officers can use deadly force when the subject is reasonably perceived as presenting an imminent threat of death or great bodily harm."

"So, at a very big picture level, we have to answer the question of: Did the officer reasonably perceive an imminent threat of death or great bodily harm? If the answer is no, there shouldn't be a shooting," continued Stoughton.

According to Reuters, there is no universal law enforcement training standard for firing into vehicles. But most police departments and federal policy bar shooting at a moving vehicle unless the driver poses an imminent threat of deadly force beyond the car itself.

Experts say firing at a moving car is one of the riskiest forms of lethal force, increasing the chance of stray gunfire or a loss of vehicle control that can endanger innocent bystanders. Why not just move away from the vehicle? Justice Department policy says deadly force is allowed only when no reasonable alternative exists, including stepping out of the vehicle's path.

The law has long been that police officers cannot use deadly force solely to arrest someone or to disable a fleeing vehicle if the person does not pose an immediate threat. According to The Associated Press, federal law enforcement officers operate under similar guidance.

The operating manual of the Department of Justice mandates that firearms should not be used simply to disable a moving vehicle. The policy allows deadly force only in limited circumstances, such as when someone in the vehicle is threatening another person with deadly force or when the vehicle itself is being used in a way that poses an imminent risk and no reasonable alternative exists but deadly force.

In the wake of Good's killing, President Donald Trump was asked if he believed deadly force was necessary in this case. His response: "It was highly disrespectful of law enforcement. The woman and her friend were highly disrespectful of law enforcement."

Vanita Gupta, a former associate attorney general who oversaw both the civil rights division that can prosecute federal agents and the civil division that defends them, told The New York Times, "Being 'disrespectful' does not warrant the use of deadly force."

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner's Toll, 2010, was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino

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Mangino discusses Tepe murders on WFMJ-TV21

Watch my interview with Lindsay McCoy on WFMJ-TV21 about the Tepe murders in Columbus, Ohio.

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Federal immigration agents have shot into vehicles at least 13 times in the last six months

Here is a block of news worth reading from The Marshall Project:

When is deadly police force justified? Police officers are taught not to fire their weapons into vehicles. ICE agents haven’t had the same training. Mother Jones Federal immigration agents have shot into vehicles at least 13 times since July. The Wall Street Journal As protests against ICE agents grow, ICE officials tell agents to take “appropriate and decisive” action against perceived threats. The New York Times Even before Renee Good was named, the Trump administration began re-writing the history of her killing. Wired This isn’t a new problem. In the past, federal immigration agents have intentionally stepped in front of moving vehicles to justify shooting at drivers. The Nation TMP Context: Use of force by ICE agents. The Marshall Project

CREATORS: A Breakthrough in Fingerprint Analysis

Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
December 30, 2025

Fingerprints have long been considered the gold standard of crime investigation techniques. As early as 1903, America — with its new young president and former New York City police commissioner Teddy Roosevelt — began using fingerprints in criminal investigations. Fingerprint analysis became a "thing" back in the mid-18th century in India.

Within a couple of decades, the FBI began cataloging fingerprints. Today, the bureau is storing more than 200 million fingerprints.

Until recently, the FBI described fingerprint identification as 100% infallible. That is no longer the case. In the last twenty years, there hasn't been a lot of good news when it comes to forensic analysis, including fingerprint analysis.

What do we know about fingerprints? Impressions of fingerprints are left behind on various surfaces by the natural secretions of sweat. The friction ridges, the raised portion of the epidermis on fingers consisting of one or more connected ridges, are often the point of comparison.

First, an intentional recording of the fingerprint is made with black ink on a white card or recorded digitally. These are often collected after arrest and secured in a database. At a crime scene a "latent print," the chance recording of a fingerprint deposited on a surface, is captured through chemical methods and brought into a lab for expert analysis.

Fingerprint identification came under scrutiny in 2004. The FBI publicly acknowledged the fingerprint misidentification of an Oregon lawyer wrongfully implicated in a terrorist bombing in Madrid — a place he had never visited.

Through a study conducted in 2004, cognitive neuroscientist Itiel Dror found that otherwise competent and well-meaning experts were swayed by what they knew about a case submitted for analysis. Dror's study demonstrated that if an analyst knew that the suspect confessed or was arrested, the analyst's findings could be influenced. According to Frontline, cognitive bias seeped into the process even with the best-trained experts.

In steps deep learning, the use of multi-layered artificial intelligence to automatically learn complex patterns from vast amounts of data.

A recent study published in Science Advances entitled "Unveiling intra-person fingerprint similarity via deep contrastive learning" revealed a breakthrough in fingerprint analysis.

Law enforcement agencies worldwide have operated under the long-standing belief that no two fingerprints are alike, even across the ten fingers of a single individual.

The authors suggest that an investigator can sidestep the same-finger limitation by exploiting nontraditional fingerprint features. "Past studies provided evidence that fingerprint patterns may be partially genetically determined which implies that there could be similarities among fingerprints from the same person," the authors found.

In addition, "recent research shows that partial fingerprints from different users have common features that can be exploited to fool authentication systems."

The study concluded, "the ability to process and match distinct fingerprint samples from the same individual opens new investigative possibilities, particularly in cases where fingerprints are partial or collected under suboptimal conditions."

This breakthrough moves investigators away from matching the best print with the exact finger of a suspect. The study found, "The new AI model reduces this dependency by identifying shared features that remain stable across different fingers."

How does fingerprint evidence get in front of a jury?

Specialized rules of evidence allow expert testimony if the conclusions are based on knowledge, skill, experience, training or education in the techniques involved and the specialized knowledge will assist the judge or jury to understand the evidence or to determine a fact in issue. The testimony must be based on reliable principles and methods, consistently applied.

Here is the new dilemma. If Artificial Intelligence is used to determine a fingerprint match, how does the expert witness convey the process of using AI to evaluate the evidence? This information is crucial to whether a judge allows the expert's opinion and whether the opinion helps jurors understand the reliability of evidence.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner's Toll, 2010, was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino

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FBI refuses local Minnesota authorities access to ICE homicide investigation

Minnesota state officials have urged the FBI to bring them back into the fold on an investigation into the shooting by an ICE agent of Renee Good, reported Minnesota Public Radio.

Minnesota's Bureau of Criminal Apprehension was initially working in tandem with the FBI after an ICE officer killed the 37-year-old Good. But reversed course, saying it has sole authority.

Minnesota Department of Public Safety Commissioner Bob Jacobson said that could hamper a state investigation and possible prosecution.

“Unless we do that thorough investigation, unless we have access to all of that evidence, unless we have access to the agents that were involved in that, to any witnesses, without any of that, we would not be able to put together a quality investigation for any prosecutor to be able to make a determination as to whether or not someone should be charged with a crime,” he said.

Jacobson and Gov. Tim Walz urged the Trump administration to allow state and local law enforcement officers to participate in the investigation to ensure public trust in its results.

“Use our professional folks. They will gain you the credibility and the trust of Minnesotans to believe the work that you're doing is honest and it's not just a whitewashed to back fill a preconceived notion,” Walz said.

Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said Thursday that her office began exploring options available to ensure a state-level investigation could move forward.

“If the FBI is the sole investigative agency, the State will not receive the investigative findings, and our community may never learn about its contents,” Moriarty said in a statement. “We are speaking to our local partners on paths forward that will allow us to review the investigation and be transparent in our decision making."

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Propaganda failed at times for even the master purveyors of deceit

As the airwaves are flooded with government propaganda about the homicide of Renee Nicole Good at the hands of an ICE agent in Minneapolis, we are reminded that sometimes propaganda backfired on even the master purveyors of deceit. 

Hessy Levinsons Taft, who as an infant appeared on the cover of a Nazi magazine in Germany promoting her as the ideal Aryan baby, a distinction complicated by the fact that she was Jewish and had been exploited as part of a dangerous hoax, died on Jan. 1 at her home in San Francisco. She was 91.

Her death was confirmed by her family, reported The New York Times.

Terrifying at first, the story eventually became a source of pride for Mrs. Taft and her parents for the way it neatly illustrated the absurd pseudoscience underlying Adolf Hitler’s racial ideology.

“I feel a sense of revenge,” she said much later. “Good revenge.”

The episode began in 1934, when Hessy was 6 months old and her parents, Latvian opera singers living in Berlin, hired the well-known photographer Hans Ballin to take her portrait.

After framing the photo, her parents displayed it on their piano. One day, the woman who cleaned their home noticed it and told Hessy’s mother that she had seen her daughter on the cover of a magazine.

“My mother thought surely she must be mistaken, that there are many babies that look alike, and just told her, ‘Well, that couldn’t be the case,’” Mrs. Taft said in an interview with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1990.

The woman insisted that it was the same baby. “Just give me some money,” she said, “and I’ll get you the magazine.”

Soon she returned with a copy of Sonne ins Haus, or Sun in the Home, one of several pro-Nazi magazines that were allowed to circulate in the country after Hitler had shut down thousands of other publications. And there, on the cover, was the portrait from the piano.

Hessy’s mother flipped through the pages.

“On the inside of the magazine were pictures of the army with men wearing swastikas,” Mrs. Taft told the Holocaust museum. “My parents were horrified.”

Her mother went to Mr. Ballin’s studio and showed him the magazine. “What is this?” she said. “How did this happen?”

He told her that the Nazis had invited him to submit photos for a contest to find a baby representing the epitome of the Aryan race, and Hessy was among those he included in his submission. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of public enlightenment and propaganda, chose the winner.

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Mangino joins Nancy Grace on Crime Stories

Watch my interview on Crime Stories with Nancy Grace.

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