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A House Republican is calling for a congressional hearing after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent shot a woman in Minneapolis last week.
“We need to make sure that people understand what happened and have a full accounting of it,” Rep. Michael Baumgartner, R-Wash., told Fox News Digital on Thursday.
Baumgartner is a member of the House Judiciary Committee, which shares oversight of ICE with the House Homeland Security Committee.
He cautioned people against “jumping to conclusions” about the incident in Minneapolis but said of federal agents, “It is so important for everyone’s safety that they’re able to do their jobs without people interfering.”
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“You certainly never want to see somebody be killed,” Baumgartner said. “When you have a tragedy like this, oftentimes people want to map onto it whatever political partisan view they have on it. We’d like all the facts to come out.”
Renee Nicole Good, 37, was shot and killed in her car by an ICE agent last Wednesday. Varying video angles show Good’s car hitting the agent who shot her, but debate has raged over whether she was deliberately getting in the way or even weaponizing her car, or whether she was trying to drive away.
Federal officials, including Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem, have defended the agent as acting in self-defense while accusing Good of trying to actively impede ICE activity in the Democrat-controlled city.
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Democrats, including Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, have accused ICE and Republican officials of stoking fear and tension in the city while demanding the federal government cease current operations there immediately.
“I’ve heard various reports about people being activists or what happened, but you know, I’d like to let the facts come out before people jump to conclusions,” Baumgartner said.
The Washington state Republican also called Democrats’ rhetoric about ICE, specifically in relation to a hearing on the Judiciary Committee last week, “unfortunate and inflammatory.”
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The shooting has inflamed tensions that had already been boiling across the country, where ICE and other federal law enforcement have been operating in blue cities and states that have refused to work with them.
Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said last week that there would be a “full investigation” into the incident.
He said Wednesday that the video he’d seen at that point appeared to show Good “weaponized” her vehicle and suggested Democrats’ anti-ICE criticism was making matters worse.
“This clearly appears to be the result of this, just, months-long rhetoric against law enforcement and people encouraging that kind of violence,” Johnson said at the time. “And so we call upon all the citizens of Minneapolis to be calm. We don’t want anyone to be hurt. We need law enforcement to be able to do their jobs, and it’s a terrible situation.”
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