The Peoria-area native who shot and killed Renee Good during an immigration enforcement operation in Minneapolis earlier this year is named among federal officials in a civil lawsuit filed Thursday by Good’s family.
Jonathan E. Ross was identified as the Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer who shot Renee Good, 37, three times during an altercation caught on video and widely circulated on social media. WCBU learned through an examination of school and court records that Ross has ties to Peoria. The 2001 Richwoods graduate became a law enforcement officer in 2007 and joined ICE in 2015.
The complaint names Ross among senior Trump administration officials including White House aide Stephen Miller, former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Border Czar Thomas Homan, among others. It alleges a “conspiracy to interfere with civil rights,” specifically accusing the government of intentionally and unlawfully targeting ethnic communities in Minneapolis and protestors who opposed the administration’s immigration enforcement tactics.
It says, “Ross’s shots were the predictable and intended product of the operation that put him on Portland Avenue,” the Minneapolis street where Good first had a verbal exchange from the driver's side of her minivan with Ross, who had exited his vehicle and was filming Good with his cell phone, multiple videos of the incident showed.
“His conduct was in furtherance of a carefully planned, coordinated effort between senior federal officials and private actors to make two ethnic communities in Minnesota—Minnesotans of Somali and Hispanic descent and origin—the object of aggression and abduction, and to silence, by intimidation, arrest and violence, the neighbors and allies of those targeted communities who observed documented, and warned of that campaign.”
The lawsuit further points to the administration’s actions following Good’s death, alleging the federal government “immediately blamed Renee for her own death and absolved Jonathan Ross of all responsibility…
“On the morning of the shooting, the FBI and the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension [BCA] agreed to a joint investigation, as is standard in officer-involved deaths. By that evening the United States Attorney had reversed course.”
Months after the Jan. 7 shooting, Peoria’s representative in Congress said he “was watching” the administration’s response to a letter from New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, who was seeking information about whether Ross had been quietly reassigned in her state.
At the time, Rep. Eric Sorensen, D-Moline, said, “We need to make sure we have a military that works for the benefit of the people, so that CBP [Customs and Border Protection] and ICE go to the border where they are most needed and they don’t terrorize our citizens. And that this administration does not get a pass to be able to do that.”
According to CBS News, the Department of Homeland Security declined to tell Hochul where Ross is, citing safety concerns.
Ross is named as an individual in the lawsuit, not in his capacity as a federal law enforcement officer. The 149-page complaint specifically says Ross “went out on Jan. 7, 2026, masked, in unmarked vehicles with concealed plates, without a name, badge number, or other individual identifier, in conformity with the policies the operation’s architects had established,” for the purpose of “accost[ing] and assault[ing] civilians, like Renee, who tried to monitor the agents, protest their actions or alert their neighbors to the agents’ presence.
“An agent who executes a conspiracy’s object by taking to the streets in furtherance of it, deploying its core tactics, and then killing a person engaged in observing it has joined the conspiracy and is liable for its injuries.”
The suit, filed in the Minnesota’s federal district court, seeks a trial by jury and compensatory damages for the plaintiffs, which include Good’s partner, Rebecca Good, plus punitive damages against each defendant “in an amount sufficient to punish and deter.”
An initial hearing has not yet been scheduled.
