Today, Explained - An ICE shooting in Minnesota

Episode Date: January 8, 2026

First there was a fraud scandal involving the Somali community in Minnesota. Then, Trump sent in ICE. Now a woman is dead and people want answers. This episode was produced by Miles Bryan and Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Jolie Myers, fact checked by Andrea López-Cruzado and Ariana Aspuru, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Bridger Dunnagan, and hosted by Noel King. A protestor at the scene where an ICE officer shot a woman in her car in Minneapolis, MN. Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Trump administration and Minnesota officials are giving conflicting accounts of what happened on a street in Minneapolis yesterday when a woman in an SUV was shot at close range by an ICE agent. President Trump told the New York Times last night, quote, it's a terrible scene. No, I hate to see it. But he said, quote, you're supposed to listen to law enforcement. Minneapolis mayor, Jacob Frye, meanwhile, took aim at ice. To ice? Get the fuck out of Minneapolis. When CNN told Fry that Republicans were calling his remarks divisive, he said this.

I'm so sorry if I offended their Disney princess ears, but here's the thing. If we're talking about what's inflammatory, on the one hand, you got someone who dropped an F-bomb, and on the other hand, you got someone who killed somebody else. ICE is in Minnesota in the first place because a fraud scandal drew the Trump administration's attention. What happened there is coming up on Today, Explained. This is, today, explained. My name is Max Nestrach. I'm a reporter and editor for a Minnesota reformer.

Over the past couple of weeks, a fraud scandal in Minnesota has consumed the American right. That scandal led to the government deploying a bunch of ICE agents to your area, to Minneapolis. Yesterday, one of those officers shot and killed a woman. What do we know about that shooting? So yesterday morning around 10 a.m., ice officer fatally shot a 37-year-old Minneapolis resident named Renee Nicole Good. I spoke with witnesses and received a video of the incident, and what we see is that the witness I talked to said she was out for a walk and saw an ice vehicle stuck in the snow. And then more ice vehicles arrived, and bystanders were blowing their whistles in protest

to get people's attention as part of these patrols and ice watch that people throughout Minneapolis, the Twin Cities, are doing to document the arrests. Then we see Good in her Honda pilot parked perpendicular in the middle of the street. And an ice agent, she waves one by, then another ice agent pulls up, gets out of his car, and yells at her to get out of the car,

And we see her back up and then pull forward. And that's when an officer who's near the front of the vehicle fire three shots fatally killing her. Dude, you did a murder for what? Even though the video of this encounter is out there from multiple angles, people do not agree on what they're seeing. President Trump yesterday spoke first. What did he say happened?

He echoed what we heard at a news conference yesterday, Christy Nome accused good of stalking and impeding ICE operations. That is completely different than what many people see in the video and what we're hearing from Democratic leaders. U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar, who represents Minneapolis, accused ICE of terrorizing neighborhoods. I mean, ICE has been carrying out state-sanctioned violence in our communities. And she called their actions reckless and callous. And that ICE needs to be held accountable.

And your mayor, Jacob Fry, what is he had to say? Well, he gave a very impassioned news conference saying very bluntly for ICE to get out of Minneapolis. Having them there was only causing more chaos. Having them there was only making a difficult situation even more problematic. And one that, yes, they created themselves. And that's something that has been repeated by the governor and members of Minnesota's congressional delegation is that they don't want ICE conduct. this enhanced enforcement operation in Minnesota. A few weeks ago, DHS began ramping up immigration enforcement operations in Minnesota.

And on Sunday, we received reports that about 2,000 more officers and agents were coming to the state and what DHS is calling its largest operation ever. And so this has really created a standoff between Democratic leaders who say they are not getting any coordination or communication from the Trump administration and federal agencies who are carrying out these operations. All right. So as all of this is happening in the streets, Minnesota's Governor Tim Walls announced this week that he's not going to run for re-election.

I came to the conclusion that I can't give a political campaign my all. Every minute that I spend defending my own political interest would be a minute I can't spend defending the people of Minnesota against the criminals who pray on our generosity and the cynics who want to prey on our differences. That announcement was tied to the scandal that I mentioned. Can you explain what happened here? Yeah, so this goes back a number of years with the prosecution of people for stealing funds

intended to feed hungry children during the pandemic. The story has reached the national news and the Oval Office just in recent weeks, but it really began in 20, 2022, when U.S. Attorney Andy Lugar, a Biden appointee, charged nearly 50 people with stealing $250 million from this pandemic-era program. Before long, the scheme that began with a simple idea in March of 2020 grew to become the largest pandemic fraud in the United States. And so now this has been known as defeating our future scandal after one of the nonprofits

It's at the center of it. It now includes more than 90 indictments across multiple social service program. So the fraud is no longer contained just to this meals program, but to other programs aimed at serving the most vulnerable Minnesotans. And there is a very important detail here, which is that a majority of the people charged and convicted are of Somali descent. That's right. And now we're seeing the Trump administration use that to justify very. attacks on the entire Somali-American population, Minnesota, roughly 91,000. Most of whom

are American citizens. If local media have been on this story since 2022, why did it boil over in late 2025? So Christopher Rufo, a conservative journalist, writes a piece in City Journal with this bombshell quote from a confidential source that the largest funder of al-Shabaab is the Minnesota taxpayer. And al-Shabaab is a U.S. designated terrorist organization that runs parts of Somalia. And days later, President Trump calls Somali immigrants garbage and unleashes a torn of other attacks on Somalis and draws national attention to Minnesota. We're going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country. Ilan Omar is garbage. She's garbage. Her friends are garbage. I should note that prosecutors have said that greed has been the motivating factor for

these fraudsters, not ideology. Prosecutors say they don't have evidence of people intentionally funding terrorist groups. That said, al-Shabaab controls parts of Somalia. So if people send money home, that money likely, some of it likely ends up in the hands of al-Shabaab because they charge taxes or rather extort people. All right. So Chris Rufo, who is an activist journalist, went out on a limb with the funding terrorism claim. However, in his article, he points out that there was massive fraud and that local officials, most of whom, as I understand it, were Democrats, did not root it out. This happened on their watch.

Yeah, that's right. You know, Democrats have always condemned the fraud, and Governor Tim Walz has said they take strong action against people accused and those people go to jail. If that is happening, those people should go to prison. They should go to jail. But I have to say the sheer scope of it is really an indictment of the Walls administration's ability to steward public resources. And I think it's underscored that all of these social service programs have really been run on the belief that everyone is honest.

And I think that goes back to a tradition here in Minnesota of a Scandinavian style, high tax, high services government that is trusting and doesn't have the checks in place to, prevent abuse. How do we get from Chris Rufo's expose, which included some truths as well as some unproven stuff, to Tim Walz resigning? So pressure has been mounting for months. The House Republicans

created a committee, a fraud oversight committee. It became clear that Republicans were going to run on this issue. When I try to get a good night's rest, it's hard because I think about the billions of dollars that have been stolen for Minnesotans. This is absolutely.

Unbelievable. This was going to be their signature issue in trying to win back the governorship in 2026. The New York Times publishes a big piece in November that makes it even harder to ignore. And then it gets the attention of a young independent YouTuber named Nick Shirley, who posts a 40-minute video on December 26 showing himself going around to Somali-run daycares and demanding to see children and not seeing any children. Once again, another child daycare center.

We have a bus out here. No one's inside. So he claims to uncover more than $100 million in fraud. I should note it's maybe not so unusual that a random person with a video camera who demands to see children in a daycare doesn't see any. I know at my child's daycare, they have a passcode to get in. But yeah, I would expect that my daycare center would not let in any random YouTuber off the street. In the wake of this, reporters have been crawling all over Minnesota trying to fact-check Nick Shirley. Was any of what he reported accurate?

I think we're still trying to figure that out. So I should say there's definitely problems with his reporting, not just the tactics, but the fact that one that he visited has been closed since 2022, according to state officials. State officials also visited and found nine operating normally with children. Still, four of them are the subject of an ongoing investigation. by the Department of Children, Youth, and Families, according to the Star Tribune. Reporters at the Star Tribune also visited those 10 facilities and were able to go inside for where they found children.

I should also note that local reporters have also made the connection that some of those daycare centers were also meal sites for feeding our future, which was tied to that giant fraud. But it's important to note the owners have not been charged in that case. All right, so here we sit on Thursday morning, and you may have seen there are some dark jokes circulating online about everything happens in Minnesota. You guys had George Floyd's murder in the summer of 2020, Tim Walz's ups and downs. You had a Democratic lawmaker murdered in her home last summer. And now, again, you have, you know, Twin Cities really on edge. How are people there doing? I think all of us here are tired of feeling like everything happens

in Minnesota. I was at the vigil for Renee Good yesterday, and the atmosphere was just anguish at her killing and certainly resolve people saying we have to continue turning out to stand up for our neighbors, and so there's a sense of defiance, but also just sadness. So we're all tired of Minnesota being the center of attention, but it doesn't seem like it's going to let up, right?

Like the DHS says it's running the largest operation ever in the state right now. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstie Knoem said yesterday that ICE operations did not stop after the killing that they will continue as planned. So there's a sense on both sides that there's a fight to be had here. And so I think people are digging in for a continued standoff between the state and federal government. Max Nestorak of the Minnesota reformer.

Thanks so much, Max. Thanks for having me. Coming up, Nick Shirley's daycare investigation went viral and drew the feds to Minnesota. Who is Shirley? And what's he doing? This is Today Explained. I'm Noel King with Jay Caspian Kang.

He's a staff writer for The New Yorker, and he recently wrote about Nick Shirley, the 23-year-old citizen journalist, who knocked on daycare doors in the Twin Cities and claim to have uncovered empty buildings. Jay, what is Nick Shirley's style? What do his videos look like? On one hand, it kind of looks like the, you know,

like action news at five live investigation that you probably grew up watching on your local news where like a reporter will go into a business and they'll say, will you stop payment to the contractors that are under investigation? How are you, sir? We'd just like to ask you about why you don't want to fly commercial.

You said that it's like getting into a tube with a bunch of demons. Why do you think that? And then the business owner will kind of respond. And the whole drama is watching the business owner respond, right? That type of like gotcha moment is the core, I think, of what he's doing. But he's also melding a lot of things that are more native to the internet, which is sort of this man on street reporting that was popularized by streamers like Sneako or whoever,

where they go out and they say like, What would you rate this girl on a scale of one to ten? Top's four. Hey, excuse me, your car is awesome. What do you do for a living? Excuse me? I ask people who are really fit what they do for their workouts, and you were jacked. Excuse me, sir.

I have a question. You're being ambushed. Would you stop supporting Trump as president if you knew that he had unconsensually purved on naked women and girls in their dressing rooms against their will? Like it sort of like runs a gamut of innocuous to kind of toxic. So he was doing a little bit of that, right? Like a man on the street going to people. And then I think a little part of it formally was also sort of a descendant of Michael Moore, right?

film, Roger and Me. What do you think about General Motors? What do you think about General Motors closing up this factory? This is a very private, emotional family time, and we would not let any outsiders in the plant. We're not outsiders. We're all from Flint. And I found the similarities to be so interesting where a lot of Roger and Me takes place

in the wintertime in a Midwestern city, and it's about, like, exposing corruption, right? My mission was a simple one. To convince Roger Smith to spend a day with me in Flint and meet some of the people who were losing their jobs. And that was what Nick Shirley, I think, was sort of positing himself as. I am this every man, and I'm here because nobody else will be here. We're going to go from these people. We're going to go to these daycare centers.

We're going to see what's actually happening. There are indeed no windows. All the windows are blacked out right here. All right, let's go in. And the child care center is locked. The media is covering this up because they're in the pockets of whatever. Like, I think Nick Shirley would say Tim Walls and like the woke agenda or whatever like that. We want to be able to trust, but fraud is fraud, so why should we be enabling fraud to happen here?

No, I don't think anybody is enabling fraud to happen. No, why don't you hold Governor Walls accountable for this? Okay, sir. I'm just a guy here trying to figure this out, right? That's the way that he presented himself. Hello. How are you? I would like to see if I could bring a little Joey, my son, little Joey here.

Is there a paperwork or can kind of check out the daycare? No. I think some of the reporting that has come out since has suggested that this definitely wasn't just a random happenstance. Like, one of the heads of the Minnesota State GOP came out and said that they had been working with him. Our caucus has been working to expose fraud for years, including working with Nick Shirley. Which obviously does make you question the whole, like, I'm just a guy who showed up here and started asking questions, right? But, like, I think that if you're being fair, like, the nature of that relationship has not really been explained yet. One of the reasons that we're talking about him, of course, is that the video, and I was watching as the video appears on Twitter.

and then regular people are retweeting it, and then Elon Musk is tweeting about it, Cash Patel is tweeting about it, Vance is tweeting about it, the Department of Homeland Security. Why do you think all of these powerful people and powerful agencies were so into his content? Well, I think that from their perspective, right, and this is something that I've been thinking about quite a lot,

which is that, like, how does propaganda function in 2026. Does the state produce its own propaganda? And the answer to that would be sure, right? Like the DHS or Trump himself or whoever will create AI videos or they'll stitch together some sort of video about people being deported or something like that and say adios or something like that.

We've all seen that, right? Yeah. But for the most part, like, there's no official state media right now. And so the question is, how do you create a state media? And my theory is that what is happening now, and it's not just happening on the right, is definitely happening on the left as well, is that when you have millions of content creators

and you have like five billion podcasts and you have all these YouTube channels and everything like that, right? And all of them have, you can pick any type of political argument you want and you can find somebody who is presumably independent who is making that argument. I just want to let you all know right now.

Like, I'm in neither one of your cults. Okay, if you want me being your cults, you can go, I'm not on the damn cult. I'm not a Republican cult. Free speech? You mean free speech, brother? What the fuck are you talking about? Your administration,

has eroded what remained of the limited constitutional protections around free speech. Hi, I'm your Republican congressman. It's your body my choice. All you kind of have to do is point them to that person and be like, hey, here's just a guy who's saying something. We're not influencing him. He's just a guy out there figuring this stuff out. And then that person becomes, in some ways, an authentic and pure version

that doesn't feel like propaganda. And I think that's why people like J.D. Vance and Cash Patel and the administration are interested in these types of YouTube creators. The thing you're pointing to is compelling, because once upon a time, yes, you would love to see that on your local news. And today, I could be wrong about this. I'm certainly not watching the local news on TV anymore. Right. I think I'm probably not alone in that, right? And so it makes me wonder whether you think what Nick Shirley is doing is, is actually journalism? Yeah, I think so, you know,

but I have a pretty capacious view on this. I think that it counts. He definitely made the public more aware of this story right now, whether he was right about all these things where he was picking the right targets, whether his methods were sound are completely different question, right? Like, I think that I would object

to almost every single one of those, right? I don't think it is proper to just go once to a place and say, there are no kids here, therefore they must be frauds. So what do you think about this daycare center? They spelled learning wrong. They've received over $1.9 million this year alone, and they're supposed to have 99 children here.

I don't see it. And do you think Tim Walts should go to jail for all the fraud that he's enabled here in his state? That's him doing this? Wapah, heck yeah. Nobody would accept that. They would just say, why don't you pick the phone and call them again, right?

Now, I think that some of the stuff that he did in the video is pretty classic journalism. Like, he went to a, you know, state assembly meeting, I think, I believe it was some government function. He went to an elected official. and he followed them around asking them questions about this. And do you think this fraud crosses... My name's Nick Shirley.

Do you think this fraud is Republican or Democrat or just facts that fraud is happening? Like, I've done that. I've worked in TV news for a little bit. I did that, you know? How? Like, that's just stuff that you do. Like, you need to get an answer. And so, and if the person is unwilling to give you an answer,

then you follow them around, you ask them the question until they give you an answer. Like, that's just classic journalism. So by those standards, sure, it's journalism. Now, does that mean everything he said was true? Does that mean that he was presenting himself in good, faith, does that mean that he was not weaponized or that maybe he wasn't even acting on behalf of people like the Minnesota state GOP? That's, you know, that's the thing that we do have some evidence that he was doing. Then those are just separate questions, right? But I don't know. I think

that, sure, it's journalism. So in the first half of the show, we talked to a local reporter in Minnesota. His outfit has been covering this, you know, for since 2022, right? So three and a half, four years. And it strikes me that we have Nick Shirley's video land, kind of like a 10-ton bomb, and then President Trump, who has already been upset about Minnesota, since Chris Rufo published his thing, then says, we are sending ICE agents into Minneapolis, right? Right. And today, I'm sure you've seen this, one of the ICE agents shot and killed a woman in Minneapolis. And now Minneapolis looks like it is, as we speak at this moment, on the brink of something potentially terrible here.

Right. So let me ask you about the stakes of somebody like Nick Shirley just asking questions, knocking on doors and then putting it on YouTube and getting all the way to the President of the United States. How do you make sense of the chronology of events here? Well, I think it's too early right now, to be honest, to peg any of this on Nick Shirley. Like, I don't think it's fair to say that this is the reason why this person, and it up being shot. Now, I think that the question that people should be asking about this is

when you are trying to fulfill certain quotas in terms of deportations, you don't have enough officers to do it, who are you bringing on, you know? What training are they receiving? I think that sort of talking about a YouTube video and a moment of what I believed was like a little bit overblown moral panic and what I thought was, you know, had for many people pretty xenophobic and racist. And Santa is behind it. Like, I don't know if that's the thing to talk about at a moment like this.

I think what we should be focusing on is why did this guy see the need to fire into a car that was going away from him? New Yorker staff writer Jay Caspian Kang. Miles Bryan and Hadi-Mawakdi produced today's show. Jolie Myers is our editor. Patrick Boyd and Bridger Dunnigan are our engineers and Andrea Lopez-Crisado and Ariana Aspuru fact-checked.

I'm Noelle King. It's today explained.