Donald Trump's border czar, Tom Homan, spoke to CBS News' Camilo Montoya-Galvez after Renee Good's family filed civil lawsuits over her shooting death involving Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
Page T2From§Eachthe noon edition — 2 October 2026
Mother voted for ICE to protect Americans, it killed her daughter; border czar wishes she were alive.
As it ran on the front
By September 19, The Intercept reported that the decision on whether to charge Good's and Pretti's killers was still open, hanging over the Minneapolis district attorney's race instead of over a courtroom. Four days later, on September 23, Renee Good's mother, Donna Ganger, told The Hill she had voted for Donald Trump because she believed the officers he was sending into American cities would protect Americans. She called it "torture" that, as a mother, she could not protect her own daughter from the agency she had trusted to do the protecting.
Then, on October 2, the case moved from grief into paperwork. Good's family filed civil lawsuits against the federal government, and those lawsuits describe the agency's conduct as creating "an unprecedented environment for state-sponsored violence" — not one bad shooting, but lawsuits, plural, alleging a pattern inside one agency's operations in one city. That phrase sits inside the federal complaint like a stone in a shoe, the kind of thing a reader keeps noticing is still there two paragraphs later.…
…(cont) The same day, CBS News asked Trump's border czar, Tom Homan, what he had to say about it. He said he wished Renee Good was alive today.
That is the whole official response on the record: a wish, offered to a reporter, about a woman whose mother cast a ballot specifically so an agency like his would keep her safe. Not a finding. Not a policy. Not, as far as the receipts show, anything that changes what the agency does tomorrow morning.
Line it up in the order it happened and the arithmetic does itself, no embellishment required. A citizen votes for protection. The protection kills her daughter. Her family sues, calling it state-sponsored violence. The receipts don't connect themselves into a circuit because we arranged them that way. They were already wired. Vote in, body out, lawsuit filed, wish issued — and at no point in that sequence does the word "accountability" show up in anyone's actual quote.
“She voted for the agency to keep her safe, and the receipt for that vote is a body and a federal lawsuit. Homan didn't send back a policy change or a finding, he sent back a wish, like wishing settles a dead American citizen. That's the whole con: they sell you protection, bill the family for the funeral, and file the apology under feelings instead of accountability.”
“These are split-second calls agents make every day to keep communities safe, and one tragic outcome doesn't indict an entire operation — though I'll grant "unprecedented environment for state-sponsored violence" is not the phrase you want showing up in your own case file. Homan said he wishes she were alive, and that's compassion, that's not nothing. It's also not a policy, but you can't legislate a feeling, so — did I just defend a wish as a substitute for accountability? That doesn't sound like me.”
Earlier in this story
- She voted believing ICE would protect Americans; it killed her daughter instead, so her family is suing it. By Lou · the breakfast edition, 2 October 2026
The receipts
Republicans' reconciliation package puts $70 billion into ICE's department NBC News, May 2026
Border czar Homan responds to lawsuit by family of Renee Good, American killed by ICE agentRenee Good, an American citizen, was shot and killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis last winter. Now her family is suing the U.S. government.
· Mother of Renee Good says she voted for Trump, calls for ICE accountability from the morgue, 23 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.