An American Tragedy, An Unchanged Law

Two midwesterners, one fatal encounter, and four decades of Congressional failure

They are hard videos to watch. Because I really wish neither of them was there.

Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis last Wednesday. Two Midwesterners now inextricably linked in tragedy as debate over America’s immigration law intensifies. The aftermath has focused, like so much of our discussion these days, on whose side you are on. Ross is a murderer. Good is a terrorist. And on and on.

The better question is what brought them to the intersection.

We’ve been stuck in a debate over laws that have not changed, not meaningfully, in my entire adult life.

I saw news of Good’s death just a day after I’d released a column about Venezuela, where I focused on the President saying he would now run that country. When I first saw the news out of Minneapolis I thought: How can we run Venezuela, when we can barely run Minneapolis?

In the days since Good’s children lost their mother and Ross’s life changed forever, people in power have drawn instant conclusions. So too it seems have many members of the public. I wondered how much these two have in common: Both children of the 80s, both raised in Midwestern families, both trapped by our political dysfunction.

One is dead. One was already injured. I really wish neither of them had been there.

Renee Nicole Good on the left. Jonathan Ross with his wife on the right.

Two Lives, Same Generation

Ross is 43. My age. He reportedly graduated from high school in Peoria, Ill., just 40 minutes from where I grew up. He served in the Indiana National Guard, deployed to Iraq in 2004-05, joined Border Patrol in 2007, then ICE in 2015. He lives in a Minneapolis suburb with his wife and children. Six months before this shooting, he was dragged about 100 yards by a fleeing vehicle during an arrest, suffering injuries that required 33 stitches.

Good was 37, a mother of three. Her youngest was just six, a child she dropped off at school that morning in the Honda Pilot that would end up struck with bullets, with her unharmed family dog in the backseat. She grew up in Colorado, lived in Kansas City, moved to Minneapolis. She was a writer with an English degree from Old Dominion University.

They never needed to meet this way.

Had Ross not returned to work after that traumatic June incident, had he not been deployed for heightened enforcement, he wouldn’t have even been in that neighborhood.

Had Good not responded to neighbors’ whistles alerting her to ICE’s presence, had she not positioned her car in the street to observe, we might never know her name.

Both were US citizens. Both have advocates now insisting they acted rightly. Both were called terrorists and murderers within hours.

Rhetoric Changes, Law Doesn’t

President Trump came to office promising the largest mass deportation ever.

He’s deployed harsh language, violent videos, and unusual offshore prisons. Yet he is, at best, a conflicted messenger: His companies have employed undocumented immigrants, he’s married to an immigrant, and some independent analysis despite the rhetoric puts his first-year deportations below Obama’s annual average.

Obama used much more careful rhetoric, spoke protectively of immigrants and the American dream. Dreamers gained protections from the administration. The law itself never changed, though, and thus the administration never created a fully secured legal path to citizenship for those who’d been here since childhood. Our immigration laws remain essentially what they were when Ross, Good, and I were children. Even as deportations under President Obama were quite high, illegal immigration ticked upwards.

In 1986, it was President Ronald Reagan who signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, granting amnesty to roughly three million undocumented immigrants. People were living in the shadows without papers when Ross, Good, and I were born.

Since then, immigration has been a wedge issue to motivate voters, never a problem Congress actually solves. Generations live in limbo as congressional majorities shift.

Caught Between Administrations

Ross joined ICE in 2015, when I left the White House. I can only imagine what this decade has been like, working for an agency whipsawed between administrations.

Trump’s ICE, Biden’s ICE, Trump’s ICE again.

Different rhetoric, same law. And after June, after being dragged around 100 yards and nearly killed by someone using a car as a weapon? I can only imagine Ross’ state of mind must have been altered.

Good was acting as a legal observer that morning. Video shows her smiling at Ross through her car window: “That’s fine, dude, I’m not mad at you.” Then her vehicle moved. Then shots through the windshield.

Right-wing media sees an agent who feared for his life, a man recently traumatized by a car used as a weapon. Left-wing media sees a mother murdered while driving away, not toward. Fox viewers see only Ross’s humanity on display. MSNow viewers see only Good’s.

What Actually Changes

I spent years in an administration that on paper wanted to change the law.

We didn’t, not because we didn’t care. Congress didn’t act. The DREAM Act passed the House in 2010 but failed in the Senate, falling five votes short of the sixty needed. Other legislative fights consumed our focus. Maybe we should have pushed harder. Maybe we couldn’t have succeeded anyway.

That same playbook happened in the last administration. So close to bipartisan reform, and no action.

Now I watch politicians act as if this is straightforward. That we can thrive economically without immigrants, though that’s not how America was built. Or that objecting to enforcement, without changing the law, protects anyone. It doesn’t.

And that’s what makes me so sad about the violence last week. This tragedy won’t change anything in the near term. Unless voters force the issue this November. Unless we demand Congress finally act on immigration reform instead of using it to win elections.

At the root of the debate, the law needs to evolve constantly to keep up with the need. Laws always need to change to reflect the times and they haven’t. Ross and Good couldn’t do that on that street that day. Neither of them, with a whistle or a gun, could have changed the law.