Usually when a government agency is caught up in a major public scandal, its employees and officials lay low, show some contrition as they carry out damage control, and stay on their best behavior until it blows over. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal deportation forces are not acting like a typical government agency.

Few government agencies have faced the kind of public relations crisis that ICE plunged itself into last week, after an agent killed an unarmed mother in Minneapolis, Renee Good, who was driving away from him, in what polling shows most Americans view as an unjustified shooting. ICE and other deportation forces were already embroiled in nationwide outrage over a year’s worth of shockingly lawless, heavy-handed, and often violent behavior, which had seen them illegally detain countless US citizens, shoot a US citizen woman five times and brag about it, and take the life of an immigrant man for injuries the agent himself admitted were “nothing major.”

But shooting an unarmed US citizen who posed no threat in cold blood — before calling her a “f—ing b—” and blocking medical aid from reaching her as she died — is on a level beyond even this.

If the past week is anything to go by, though, being responsible for what a majority of Americans view as an unjustified murder of a US citizen that should be criminally prosecuted has not moderated federal agents’ behavior. Instead, if anything, they have responded with more aggression, by being more willing to threaten deadly force, and have even repeatedly used their killing of Good to intimidate protesters.

A video from the day after Good’s murder shows an ICE agent pointing a loaded firearm at a protester’s face at point-blank range in Minneapolis, while a different video from Rosemount, Minnesota, posted on Saturday has an agent pointing his handgun sideways at a driver filming the interaction from his car.

One dumbfuck cosplaying Grand Theft Auto with the sideways gun while his buddy reaches directly in front of him to fail to break the window twice lmfaooooo oh my god this would be so funny if we weren’t sitting on the other side of that gun pic.twitter.com/2ZjFngZo9v

— Lydia Kauppi (@lydiakauppi) January 11, 2026

Meanwhile, just blocks from where Good was killed, a local pastor reported telling ICE agents who he had seen approaching a Latina woman to take him instead, and that he wasn’t afraid of them. The agents allegedly pointed guns in his face, handcuffed him in an SUV, and then repeatedly asked him, “Are you afraid yet?” Eventually, he said, they let him go, telling him, “Well, you’re white. You wouldn’t be fun anyway.”

In several cases, federal agents appeared to be gloating about Good’s murder at their hands, in order to intimidate protesters and legal observers.

“Have you not learned? This is why we killed that lesbian bitch,” one woman, a Marine veteran, told Status Coup News that federal agents said to her after violently arresting her for following them, an allegation backed up by her friend. “Have y’all not learned from the past couple of days? Have you not learned?” another agent told a protester before trying to snatch her phone.

An ICE agent in Minnesota to a woman recording him: “Have you all not learned from the past couple of days?”

He then knocked her phone out of her hand.

What has America become? pic.twitter.com/5NvLeaQncQ

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) January 10, 2026

“You did not learn from what just happened?” a masked agent told one man, after angrily berating him for following them. “This is a big game to you guys?” another masked agent asked while advancing on a whistle-blowing protester. “That’s why that lady got hurt the other day.”

For those counting, that’s at least four separate incidents of deportation agents unashamedly pointing to their own killing of a US citizen to threaten other protesters.

This is alongside a plethora of other shocking abuses carried out by deportation forces in the week since: shoving a man silently filming into the path of a moving bus, assaulting and arresting a man filming them at a gas station, breaking into houses without a legal warrant, ramming cars through a red light, smashing car windows and dragging the occupants out, illegally kneeling on their necks, getting physical with local elected officials, threatening to detain a US citizen because she didn’t have identification on her person, abducting a random Spanish-speaking teenager — you could go on and on.

It goes beyond Minneapolis. In Hartford, Connecticut, the very next day after Good was killed because the ICE agent who shot her supposedly feared she would drive into him, ICE agents knocked a woman protesting the murder over with their own vehicle. Think about all that for a second: the exact violent act that deportation agents say justifies their use of deadly force — and which did not actually happen in Minneapolis — is what ICE agents did to people peacefully protesting that idea. The very next day, no less.

It is almost as if ICE and other deportation agents are reveling in the hypocrisy and double standards that the Trump administration’s unqualified defense of their behavior has given them license to indulge in.

This is besides the litany of other abuses we’re now disturbingly starting to view as almost routine from federal agents, like casually tear-gassing and pepper spraying peaceful protesters, or regularly detaining US citizens, which is unambiguously illegal. And this is all happening despite polls showing that ICE’s actions have caused the agency to become deeply unpopular with the US public, with more Americans now favoring abolishing ICE, thanks to a massive uptick in that sentiment since a year ago.

The fact that all of this is not leading ICE and other deportation forces to show restraint but to escalate and actually advertise their own violent, illegal behavior as an intimidation tactic is deeply disturbing. It suggests that ICE and other deportation forces are transforming from bodies tasked with the narrow responsibility of enforcing immigration law to a hostile, ideologically driven police force that sees the American people themselves as the enemy and its job as bullying them into compliance with the president, and that has no legal or political restrictions on what it can do to achieve that.