Good Suits vs DHS Badly Needs Smoking Gun?

Letter to Romans: Renee Good’s suing female “partner” & brother want justice. But must they overcome FTCA-waiver hurdles while their gov’t conspiracy allegations must prove a direct causal link between ICE-evading Good’s shooting death & senior Trump officials?

The two-count case sounds simple at first. No. 1 seeks to hold the US responsible for an agent’s fatal shots during the Operation Metro Surge which brought thousands of federal agents to Minnesota last winter; the suit alleges the agent (who is NOT sued personally under the FTCA) violated DHS “use of deadly force” policy & the 4^th Amendment’s unreasonable search & seizures lingo. Normally, the federal govt enjoys sovereign immunity, but Congress’s FTCA can waive it for extreme torts committed by its employees, especially law-enforcement officers. And yet, the same statute can still protect the gov’t when its officers use deadly force but in the midst of reasonably believing the plaintiff is the one who put THEM in imminent danger of serious harm. So, a jury may have to decide whether, as DHS claims, Good was trying to run over ICE officers & not just blithely avoiding being stopped, as the family maintains, when agent Jonathan Ross fired the fatal shot.

The other suit’s claim is also legally vulnerable while taking a wider look at the ICE surge. It alleges Good’s killing was part of a discrimination conspiracy that targeted the state’s Hispanic & Somali residents. This second complaint names Ross & 6 Trump Administration officials individually, including Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller & Thomas Homan. The alleged conspiracy among them seems based largely on public comments made to the press during the lead up of Operation Metro Surge & before the fatal shooting itself. True, there’s a substantial factual, if not statistical controversy over the surge’s legality as seen in a separate pending if not muckraking suit alleging unconstitutional DHS enforcement policies & practices that may support the underlying claim of discrimination. But, proving such a conspiracy actually aka directly caused Good’s death would normally require a smoking gun with Ross’s, Noem’s, Miller’s & Homan’s name on it and preferably in quotes.

Davd Soul