ICE officer who shot woman in Minneapolis was dragged and injured in traffic stop last year
By Holmes Lybrand, Allison Gordon, Jeff Winter, Casey Tolan, Isabelle Chapman, CNN
(CNN) — Last summer, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent found himself in a perilous situation.
His arm was pinned into the back window of a car as a suspect sped away, dragging him across the pavement for about 100 yards, according to court documents. The agent, who suffered injuries to his arm and hand, fired his Taser at the man during the encounter, records show.
Roughly six months later, the same officer faced another driver who hit the gas as he tried to stop her vehicle. This time, he fired with his service weapon – killing 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good.
The officer in the June case is identified in court documents as Jonathan Ross. A senior Department Homeland Security official confirmed that case involved the same officer who fired the shots that killed Good this week.
As authorities and lawmakers nationwide seek to untangle the circumstances behind the fatal shooting, Ross’s actions during the incident last summer and his professional background are facing renewed scrutiny.
A transcript of Ross’s testimony from the June case reviewed by CNN adds new detail to his experience, which includes a tour of duty with the National Guard in Iraq as a gunner from 2004 to in 2005. In his testimony he describes performing “hundreds” of traffic stops in his career over nearly two decades in Border Patrol and then ICE – including encounters with drivers seeking to flee.
“They do erratic behaviors, they take great risks, and they seem to not be aware of other people driving on the road,” Ross told the jury. “They usually – they make just extreme movements with their vehicles.”
Trump administration officials have cited that June case as evidence that ICE agents face deadly threats that compel them to react with extreme force.
“That very ICE officer nearly had his life ended, dragged by a car, six months ago,” Vice President JD Vance told reporters on Thursday. “You think maybe he’s a little bit sensitive about someone ramming him with an automobile?”
But local lawmakers and some experts say that this week’s situation was far from life-threatening to the ICE officer, as Good appeared to be swerving away from him as he began shooting.
“To use deadly force… the elements of that have to be so concerning to open up fire on an individual,” said former Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo, adding in a CNN interview that the agent should simply have gotten out of the way of Good’s car.
Michael Harrigan, a retired FBI agent who now consults on law enforcement practices and tactics, said it’s not unreasonable to believe that the prior car dragging case may have been on the ICE officer’s mind as he pulled the trigger. But Harrigan said agents are trained to evaluate every incident individually.
“The fact is every incident has to stand alone,” Harrigan said. “It doesn’t really matter what they went through before. It’s never going to be a justification for something else. They know that.”
Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin, who declined to name Ross, citing violent threats to ICE agents, said he “is a longtime ICE officer who has been serving his country his entire life.” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has defended the officer’s actions.
“This is an experienced officer who followed his training, and we’ll continue to let the investigation unfold into the individual and continue to follow the procedures and policies that happen in these use of force cases,” Noem said at a news conference.
Ross served in Iraq from 2004 to 2005 with the Indiana National Guard, he testified in court, and then joined Border Patrol in 2007. He said he worked with the agency near El Paso, Texas, where he worked on intelligence about “cartels and drug smuggling,” before joining ICE in 2015.
With ICE, he said, he works in fugitive operations in the Minneapolis area and regularly collaborates with other federal agencies. “I target higher value targets,” he testified.
The agent’s experience in ICE included a selection to a Special Response Team, McLaughlin said, which requires 30 hours of tryouts, continuous training and expert marksman qualifications.
His violent encounter with a suspect last June began when federal officials moved in to arrest Roberto Carlos Muñoz-Guatemala, an undocumented immigrant who had been charged with sexually abusing a teenage relative in 2022, according to a court affidavit written by an FBI agent involved in the case.
At the time, ICE had requested local officials hold him in jail, but that request was denied, the affidavit said. The affidavit refers to Muñoz-Guatemala as being from Guatemala, while a DHS press release described him as being from Mexico.
On June 17, 2025, federal officials tracked Muñoz-Guatemala to his home in Bloomington, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis, and conducted a traffic stop as he started to drive away.
Ross, who was one of several federal agents involved in the arrest, initially drew his service weapon, but holstered the gun after Muñoz-Guatemala stopped his car and raised his hands, according to the affidavit.
The affidavit does not name Ross, only referring to him as an officer for ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division, but other court documents including an exhibit and witness list make clear that it is Ross.
Muñoz-Guatemala handed Ross an “identification document,” but refused to follow Ross’s commands to lower his window and open the door, the affidavit says. Ross pointed his Taser at Muñoz-Guatemala, used a “spring-loaded window punch” to break the car’s rear passenger door window, and put his arm through the window to try to open the door.
Muñoz-Guatemala responded by driving the car onto the curb and accelerating away “at a high rate of speed,” according to the affidavit, and Ross was pulled along by his right arm. A door-camera video posted by news channel WCCO shows Muñoz-Guatemala driving away quickly across a lawn, with several officers running after him.
“I was fearing for my life,” Ross testified during the trial.
Ross said he discharged ten rounds of his Taser, hitting Muñoz-Guatemala, and yelled for him to stop “over and over and over again at the top of my lungs.”
Muñoz-Guatemala swerved the car down the street and dragged Ross about 100 yards, according to the affidavit, before the agent was knocked away from the vehicle. Muñoz-Guatemala then drove with the Taser hanging out of the car window, and was arrested about a mile away by local police officers.
Ross suffered a cut to his right arm that required 20 stitches, as well as a cut to his left hand that required 13 stitches, according to the affidavit, which includes photos of Ross’s bloody limbs.
“Some of the wounds they couldn’t close. There wasn’t enough skin to close it with stitches,” Ross said.
Ross also said in court in December that ICE’s field office in the Twin Cities didn’t have a body-worn camera policy. Body-worn cameras were “rolled out to certain offices throughout ICE, and ours was not one of them that was rolled out at that time,” Ross said. As a result, he said, immigration agents in the Minneapolis area “cannot wear them.”
Muñoz-Guatemala was charged with assault on a federal officer with a dangerous or deadly weapon and resulting in bodily injury, and was convicted by a jury in December after a three-day trial. His sentencing is pending.
Ross’s deadly encounter with Good began on Wednesday as ICE agents worked in Minneapolis. Video shows that Good’s vehicle was partially blocking a road that agents were attempting to drive down.
As two other agents rushed toward her window, gesturing at her and trying to open the vehicle’s door, Ross walked to the front of her vehicle.
Good briefly put the vehicle in reverse, then shifted into drive and hit the gas, with the wheels seemingly turned to the right instead of directly ahead toward Ross. It’s unclear whether her vehicle made significant contact with the agent as he began firing, striking her. Her vehicle accelerated down the road, crashing into parked cars nearby. She was later pronounced dead.
In the minutes after the shooting, Ross is seen in witness videos approaching Good’s crashed vehicle, before walking away and telling other officers to call 911. He and at least one other agent then drove away in another vehicle.
Experts in law enforcement questioned Ross’s actions in the shooting, telling CNN that the agent appeared to violate several key rules for engaging with suspects in vehicles.
ICE’s own general policy is that agents should not chase vehicles or fire at them unless there is imminent danger, said John Amaya, a former deputy chief of staff for the agency during the Obama administration. He said that many agents are not trained in crowd control practices or interacting with residents, adding that that can make certain interactions “a recipe for disaster.”
Charles Ramsey, a former Philadelphia police commissioner, told CNN that many law enforcement agencies around the country have restricted officers in their interactions with suspects in vehicles.
“You don’t reach into cars – that’s how you wind up getting dragged down the street,” Ramsey said. “You don’t stand in front or behind a car with the engine running… Policies around the country have pretty much prohibited firing at a moving car.”
Some of Ross’s actions could be legally justified, Ramsey noted. “But just because you can doesn’t mean you should,” he said. “Use of deadly force is an absolute last resort when you don’t have other options. He had other options. Don’t stand in front of the freaking car – that’s option number one.”
CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez and Scott Glover contributed to this report.
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