On Jan. 7, Renee Good, a married mother of three, was shot three times in her Honda Pilot by Jonathan Ross, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer, in a residential neighborhood in Minneapolis. In response, Gov. Tim Walz announced that his state “doesn’t need any further help from the federal government” and issued an executive order activating the Minnesota National Guard.

Later that day, Gov. Joe Lombardo announced that he’s leading a petition to amend the Nevada Constitution to keep transgender athletes out of girls’ and women’s sports.

The next day, schools in Minneapolis were closed after armed U.S. Border Patrol officers tackled people, handcuffed two staff members and released chemical weapons at a local high school.

To Lombardo’s credit — no, I’m not being facetious here — he allowed a bill to pass in the most recent special session that prohibits ICE from deploying to schools as it did in Minnesota. That said, to the best of my knowledge, no transgender athletes have ever nonconsensually tackled, handcuffed or used chemical weapons on anyone in Nevada — certainly not at a high school, at any rate.

Since Good was shot in her stuffed animal-filled midsized crossover SUV, multiple videos of her shooting have been posted online. The first, posted by the Minnesota Reformer, can be watched on YouTube. Ross, meanwhile, was apparently filming the shooting himself as he opened fire. The New York Times, The Washington Post and investigative collective Bellingcat have put together several detailed breakdowns of the videos, the direction of Good’s steering wheel and the position of Ross as he opened fire. Bellingcat, for example, synced all available videos into one video, put together a top-down view of where Good, Ross and his colleagues were located and analyzed the position of Ross’ gun on a frame-by-frame basis.

They all paint a consistent picture. And, unless you’re the vice president or a member of President Donald Trump’s cabinet, it’s not a picture that reflects well on the training given to ICE agents before they’re deployed to America’s neighborhoods.

Meanwhile, no Nevada volleyball players were harmed, much less killed, by playing San Jose State’s team after the Spartans added an alleged trans woman to its roster in 2022. That, however, didn’t stop UNR’s volleyball team from earning some national notoriety for boycotting a game against the Spartans in 2024. Given that the Wolf Pack had only posted three winning records since 2006 (the 2024 season wasn’t one of them), it’s probably safe to assume that its efforts on the court that year didn’t warrant frame-by-frame analysis by anyone other than the team’s coaching staff.

According to a recent investigation by The Wall Street Journal, immigration agents have fired at or into civilian vehicles at least 13 times since July, injuring at least eight people and killing two. Of those shot, at least five were U.S. citizens. Only one of the civilians who was shot was armed — and that civilian’s concealed weapon was never drawn. The cause of these shootings, according to the report, is ICE’s adoption of aggressive and intrusive tactics that are normally reserved for high-risk felony stops. Additionally, the report detailed multiple instances of immigration officers firing at retreating vehicles in violation of Department of Homeland Security policy.

To the best of my knowledge, none of the agents involved in the shootings were transgender athletes participating in women’s sports.

The ostensible reason ICE is combing through Minneapolis’ neighborhoods is to somehow combat alleged fraud by allegedly immigrant-run day care centers that received federal funding during the coronavirus pandemic. Fraud is also the ostensible reason given behind the Trump administration’s decision to block federal funding, including funding for food stamps, small businesses and child care (which was recently restored following a court order), for Minnesota and other states — all of which just happen to be governed by Democrats.

Which makes one wonder: What would life in Nevada be like if Lombardo had lost in 2022 and Steve Sisolak won re-election? Unemployment fraud was certainly not unheard of here during the pandemic, the state just wrote off bad debt for Medicare fraud and the state’s financial reporting system has serious issues. If more Nevadans had voted for Sisolak instead of Lombardo, or Kamala Harris instead of Trump, would Las Vegas be more than just a convenient way station for deportation flights?

Perhaps if Trump’s administration was a team of transgender athletes, I might believe transgender athletes are a sufficient threat to Nevadans to warrant a constitutional amendment defending ourselves from them.

Walz — who’s fighting like mad to protect Minnesotans without somehow antagonizing state and local law enforcement — recently announced that he will not seek re-election in 2026. 

Lombardo’s petition banning transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports is likely designed to increase Republican turnout to support his re-election. Or it’s a favor to his fellow colleague from the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, Lt. Gov. Stavros Anthony, who’s decided to make banning trans athletes his signature issue.

Or perhaps his support of the petition is just meant to ensure that Joey Gilbert — who extracted hundreds of thousands of dollars from a rural school district that’s now in financial collapse by promising board members that his firm could defend legally indefensible anti-transgender student policy — doesn’t run another quixotic primary against the incumbent governor.

Whatever his motivation, I’m left with questions.

Where did Lombardo’s supporters stand when Bureau of Land Management (BLM) officials faced off against rancher Cliven Bundy’s well-armed family and friends in the desert outside Bunkerville in 2014? Did they applaud the BLM’s restraint for not shooting anyone? Or did they object to the bureau’s heavy-handed handling of a grazing permit dispute? 

Did they cheer when the case against the Bundy family was dismissed for prosecutorial misconduct? Or do they sincerely and consistently believe, as Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL) claims he believes, that, “if you get in the way of the government,” we should “end up just like that lady did”?

When the government starts investigating female athletes — without telling them or their parents, as happened to an athlete in Utah — for being transgender, will Lombardo’s supporters permit violent, badly trained agents to look for themselves? Or will they and their daughters resist — and end up just like Renee Good?

David Colborne ran for public office twice. He is now an IT manager, the father of two sons, and a recurring opinion columnist for The Nevada Independent. You can follow him on Mastodon @[email protected], on Bluesky @davidcolborne.bsky.social, on Threads @davidcolbornenvor email him at [email protected]. You can also message him on Signal at dcolborne.64.