Officer-Induced Jeopardy

Here's what you need to know about how federal agents are trained to kill people and call it self-defense.

In February 2013, the Police Executive Research Forum delivered a report to Customs and Border Protection that should have ended careers. Instead, CBP tried to bury it. The nonprofit had reviewed 67 use-of-force incidents from January 2010 through October 2012 that left 19 people dead along the southern border. What they found was a pattern so egregious it read like a training manual for manufacturing justifiable homicide.

Border Patrol agents were stepping directly into the paths of moving vehicles, then shooting the drivers and claiming they feared for their lives. The report stated it plainly: agents "intentionally put themselves into the exit path of the vehicle, thereby exposing themselves to additional risk and creating justification for the use of deadly force."

They weren't defending themselves. They were creating the conditions that would let them pull the trigger.

When Congress asked for the report in fall 2013, CBP sent them sanitized summaries with the damning parts edited out. The Los Angeles Times got their hands on the full document and published it in February 2014. Eight days later, Border Patrol Chief Michael Fisher suddenly remembered that agents probably shouldn't stand in front of cars. The ACLU had to sue to get the report released publicly. That was May 2014. Eight days after filing, CBP coughed it up while still refusing to release their internal response.

The new policy explicitly said that agents were not to position themselves in front of vehicles. They were not to manufacture lethal situations. They were to move out of the way.

Fast forward to January 7, 2026. Minneapolis. A residential street where kids walk to school. ICE agent Jonathan Ross approaches a burgundy Honda Pilot stopped in the road. Behind the wheel is Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three. Ross has his phone out, filming. Good has both hands on the steering wheel. She tells him calmly, "That's fine dude. I'm not mad at you."

Ross walks directly in front of her vehicle.

Good reverses briefly, then moves forward. Her steering wheel turns right, away from where Ross is standing. He fires three shots in less than a second. The first bullet goes through the windshield and kills her. The Honda keeps rolling down the street until it crashes.

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem tells reporters Ross was hit by the vehicle. Four separate videos say otherwise. Criminology professor Geoff Alpert wants to know what kind of training teaches an officer to shoot with one hand while filming with a phone in the other. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey watches the footage and calls Noem's version "bullshit" on camera.

Jonathan Ross is a firearms instructor. An active shooter instructor. A SWAT team member. An FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force member. Before ICE, he spent years with Border Patrol in El Paso during the exact timeframe the PERF report covered. His career thrived during that era, and that policy. Agents don't get tapped for firearms instructor and SWAT by making mistakes. Those jobs go to agents who demonstrate exactly what the agency values.

The PERF report warned specifically that shooting at vehicles "is rarely effective and presents extreme danger to agents and bystanders alike." A bullet can't stop a 4,000-pound vehicle. Killing the driver turns the car into a guided missile. The tactics were stupid, dangerous, and avoidable. Border Patrol agents did it anyway because the tactic worked. Step in front of car, shoot driver, claim self-defense, get cleared.

CBP changed the policy in 2014. Twelve years later, Ross positioned himself in front of Good's vehicle and opened fire when she accelerated. The 2013 report had a term for this: officer-induced jeopardy.

Renee Good leaves behind three children and a 6-year-old from her previous marriage. She's never coming home. Ross, however, remains on administrative duty while the FBI investigates. Even if he faces consequences for his actions, he knows his job comes with a severance package called immunity. Not only has no Border Patrol or CBP agent ever been successfully convicted for an on-duty killing in the agency's history, but the institutional memory of how to walk away clean runs deeper than any revised handbook.

Ross learned something during his Border Patrol years that served him exceptionally well. He carried it with him to ICE. And on a January morning in Minneapolis, he used it.

@Santitos

@salinasmariasantos

Copyright © 2026 Maria Santos Salinas for FRONTeras.