The shooting was just one of several fatal incidents since ICE ramped up its mass deportation effort last year and raises questions about how officers are trained, especially as DHS has dodged questions about this process while more than doubling its number of agents since 2024. Recruitment efforts have been juiced by massive funding from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, as taxpayers have found themselves funding an unprecedented swelling of immigration enforcement hiring.

Federal officers have also killed at least three other people, according to The Marshall Project, and have shot at least nine people since September, according to The New York Times. 

While ICE has ballooned to more than 22,000 agents—more than double from early 2025—the “wartime recruitment” tactics it has employed could be attracting combat-hungry or inexperienced people to the job, experts warn.

Recruitment tactics led to over 200,000 applications

DHS announced last summer its plans to hire 10,000 deportation officers, using what they internally called a “wartime recruitment,” according to an internal document reviewed by The Washington Post. 

ICE officials planned to spend $100 million over a one-year period to recruit gun rights and military support through influencers and geo-targeted advertising campaigns, according to The Post. The funding is part of the $1.7 billion allocated for border and interior enforcement, including $75 billion for ICE, to be spent over four years. 

The department’s strategy dedicated $8 million to influencers, including “former agents, veterans and pro-ICE creators,” with Gen Z and millennial audiences, according to internal documents reviewed by The Post. DHS planned to work with creators across traditional social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and X as well as platforms with more conservative users such as Rumble. DHS anticipated that their influencer would bring more than 5,000 applications. 

In addition to a salary ranging from $49,739 to $89,528 a year, DHS offers up to a $50,000 signing bonus split over three years, up to $60,000 in student loan repayment and forgiveness options, and retirement benefits. 

ICE also uses a marketing strategy called “geofencing” to send ads to the phone web browsers and social media feeds of anyone located near military bases, NASCAR races, college campuses, or gun and trade shows, according to The Post.

“The recruitment initiative utilized data-driven outreach efforts to recruit qualified patriotic Americans from across the country. As a result, ICE was able to exceed its hiring surge target while maintaining rigorous standards for training and readiness,” the agency wrote in the Jan. 3 statement. 

ICE did not respond to a request for comment.

Sarah Saldaña, former director of ICE, recently told The Post she was concerned that the speed of recruitment and the framing of jobs as a war effort in marketing campaigns increased the risk of attracting people seeking combat experience. 

The department received over 220,000 applications and hired 12,000 new officers in four months. Despite reaching their personnel goal, DHS is still recruiting more officers.  

“We continue to call on American patriots to serve the homeland because we know that there’s still more work to do — and we will not stop until every community in this nation is safe,”” said ICE Deputy Director Madison D. Sheahan in a statement.

Officer training questioned 

Renee Nicole Macklin Good was shot in her car as ICE agents approached her vehicle and demanded she open the door, according to video filmed by bystanders. An ICE officer shot her at close range and was briefly hospitalized after the vehicle hit him. 

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem defended the officer who killed Macklin Good, saying that the officer “followed his training.” President Donald Trump doubled down on Wednesday, calling the video of the shooting “horrible to watch,” but said Macklin Good had “behaved horribly” and ran the agent over, even though video evidence disputes that claim. 

All new ICE agents are required to undergo the 8-week Basic Immigration Law Enforcement Training Program, during which they train 6 days a week at a facility in Georgia and learn to find, arrest, and deport people. In the past, ICE officials underwent a five-week Spanish-language training program and 16 weeks of basic training, according to the ICE website. 

The shooting comes after months of allegations of unprofessionalism and misconduct from advocacy groups. Even after a federal judge ordered ICE officers to wear individual badges, officers were seen without badges, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. Some new recruits showed up to training without full vetting, having failed drug tests, physical, or academic standards, and without disclosing criminal backgrounds. 

A senior DHS official told NBC News on Wednesday that ICE officers are trained to never approach a vehicle from the front and not to shoot at a moving vehicle because it will not stop it from moving towards the officer.

Representative Robin Kelly (D-IL) filed articles of impeachment against Noem on Wednesday. 

“Secretary Noem wreaked havoc in the Chicagoland area, and now, her rogue ICE agents have unleashed that same destruction in Minneapolis, fatally shooting Renee Nicole Good,” Kelly wrote in a statement announcing the move. “ It’s one thing to be incompetent and dangerous, but it’s impeachable to break the rule of law.”

The Future of Life Institute’s latest AI safety index found that major AI labs fell short on most measures of AI responsibility, with few letter grades rising above a C. The org graded eight companies across categories like safety frameworks, risk assessment, and current harms.

Perhaps most glaring was the “existential safety” line, where companies scored Ds and Fs across the board. While many of these companies are explicitly chasing superintelligence, they lack a plan for safely managing it, according to Max Tegmark, MIT professor and president of the Future of Life Institute.

“Reviewers found this kind of jarring,” Tegmark told us.

The reviewers in question were a panel of AI academics and governance experts who examined publicly available material as well as survey responses submitted by five of the eight companies.

Anthropic, OpenAI, and GoogleDeepMind took the top three spots with an overall grade of C+ or C. Then came, in order, Elon Musk’s Xai, Z.ai, Meta, DeepSeek, and Alibaba, all of which got Ds or a D-.

Tegmark blames a lack of regulation that has meant the cutthroat competition of the AI race trumps safety precautions. California recently passed the first law that requires frontier AI companies to disclose safety information around catastrophic risks, and New York is currently within spitting distance as well. Hopes for federal legislation are dim, however.

“Companies have an incentive, even if they have the best intentions, to always rush out new products before the competitor does, as opposed to necessarily putting in a lot of time to make it safe,” Tegmark said.

In lieu of government-mandated standards, Tegmark said the industry has begun to take the group’s regularly released safety indexes more seriously; four of the five American companies now respond to its survey (Meta is the only holdout.) And companies have made some improvements over time, Tegmark said, mentioning Google’s transparency around its whistleblower policy as an example.

But real-life harms reported around issues like teen suicides that chatbots allegedly encouraged, inappropriate interactions with minors, and major cyberattacks have also raised the stakes of the discussion, he said.

“[They] have really made a lot of people realize that this isn’t the future we’re talking about—it’s now,” Tegmark said.

The Future of Life Institute recently enlisted public figures as diverse as Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, former Trump aide Steve Bannon, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, and rapper Will.i.am to sign a statement opposing work that could lead to superintelligence.

Tegmark said he would like to see something like “an FDA for AI where companies first have to convince experts that their models are safe before they can sell them.

“The AI industry is quite unique in that it’s the only industry in the US making powerful technology that’s less regulated than sandwiches—basically not regulated at all,” Tegmark said. “If someone says, ‘I want to open a new sandwich shop near Times Square,’ before you can sell the first sandwich, you need a health inspector to check your kitchen and make sure it’s not full of rats…If you instead say, ‘Oh no, I’m not going to sell any sandwiches. I’m just going to release superintelligence.’ OK! No need for any inspectors, no need to get any approvals for anything.”

“So the solution to this is very obvious,” Tegmark added. “You just stop this corporate welfare of giving AI companies exemptions that no other companies get.”

This report was originally published by Tech Brew.

Abigail Disney, one of the heiresses to the Walt Disney fortune who said in 2019 she’s worth about $120 million, shared her feelings about how much of their wealth billionaires should be willing to share.

“I am of the belief that every billionaire who can’t live on $999 million is kind of a sociopath,” Disney told the Guardian in an interview published in April. “Like, why? You know, over a billion dollars makes money so fast that it’s almost impossible to get rid of.”

Disney has begrudgingly disclosed her net worth in the past only to make a point about how important it is to her to give away the vast fortune bestowed upon her by being a part of one of the major family dynasties in the U.S. The Financial Times even called her a “class warrior” for how vocal she’s been about how much the wealthiest should be taxed. 

“The need to tax rich people like me has never been so dire,” Disney wrote in a 2024 op-ed titled, “World leaders have a chance to raise taxes for rich people like me. I’m begging them to take it,” published by the Guardian. “Extreme wealth concentration in the hands of a few oligarchs is a threat to democracy the world over.”

Disney was also behind a 2019 letter signed by financier George Soros and Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes calling for a “moderate wealth tax on the fortunes of the richest one-tenth of the richest 1% of Americans—on us.”

The Disney heiress and filmmaker in 1991 also founded the Daphne Foundation, a New York City–based nonprofit that invests funds for causes like fighting poverty, violence, and discrimination. The organization had donated about $70 million as of 2019.

Although Disney has said she’d given away about a third of her net worth, it came “back to me as quickly as I’ve given it away,” referencing how investments can grow wealth.

“By just sitting on your hands, you become more of a billionaire until you’re a double billionaire,” Disney told the Guardian. “It’s a strange way to live when you have objectively more money than a person can spend.”

Billionaires who have given away their wealth

Other ultrawealthy people have been giving vast amounts of their fortunes away. One prime example is MacKenzie Scott, who’s donated more than $19 billion of her $34.3 billion fortune. In September, she made one of her largest gifts: a $70 million donation to historically Black colleges and universities. The five-year donation spree by the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has been “transformational” for nonprofits, according to a study by the Center for Effective Philanthropy. 

“It could take decades to truly understand the effects these gifts have had on nonprofits and the sector at large,” according to the report. “However, after five years of giving, the reported effects of her gifts on recipient organizations…remain overwhelmingly positive.”

Bill and Melinda French Gates have also been major philanthropists, have given away more than $100 billion since founding the Gates Foundation in 2000. 

“I believe that people who are financially successful have a responsibility to give back to society,” Bill Gates wrote on his blog Gates Notes. “In the 1990s, as Microsoft became successful, I decided I would eventually give away virtually all of my wealth. The goal of my philanthropy is to reduce inequity.”

Although French Gates resigned from the Gates Foundation in 2024, she put out an open call for nonprofits related to the betterment of women and girls to apply for grants through her organization, Pivotal, pledging to donate $1 billion during the next two years. French Gates’ net worth is about $16.8 billion, according to Bloomberg.

By “using my own personal resources to put substantial investments behind women or minorities,” she told NPR in October 2024, “I am pointing in a direction, I hope, for other philanthropists or even other governments.” Fortune reported in May The Gates Foundation will end in 2045.

And Warren Buffett, the sixth-richest man in the world with a $155 billion net worth, also pledged in 2010 to give away more than 99% of his wealth to philanthropy during his lifetime or at his death. In June, Buffett donated another $6 billion in Berkshire Hathaway shares—with the lion’s share going to the Gates Foundation.

“Measured by dollars, this commitment is large. In a comparative sense, though, many individuals give more to others every day,” Buffett wrote. “In contrast, my family and I will give up nothing we need or want by fulfilling this 99% pledge.”

A version of this story originally published on Fortune.com on April 7, 2024.

More on philanthropy:

Indian-Canadian billionaire Prem Watsa has responded to allegations by short seller Muddy Waters firmly standing by his company’s track record of returns to investors amidst charges of accounting abuse against Fairfax Financial Holdings, a Toronto-listed investment giant that he founded four decades ago.

Fairfax has invested $7 billion in India.

“We are neither Berkshire Hathaway, nor GE, as Muddy Waters suggests”, said Watsa, who earned the moniker of Canada’s Warren Buffet because of his hugely successful track record as an investor.

Muddy Waters has alleged that Fairfax was “The GE of Canada” and not the Berkshire Hathaway that it was touted to be in a report on 8 february that sent Fairfax’s shares tumbling 12% . Its shares had pared half the losses in early trading in Toronto on 12 February. Muddy Waters reference to GE has to do with the company settling $200 million in penalties from US stock market regulator in 2020 for alleged accounting violations.

“Over 38 years, our book value per share has compounded by 18.9% and our stock price at 18% per year. Out of 6000 companies listed in the US in 1985, less than 20 companies have a similar record”, said Watsa strongly refuting the claims of the short seller.

Fairfax owns multiple companies in India including Thomas Cook, CSB Bank, Bangalore International Airport, Quess Corp and Digit Insurance.Fairfax termed allegations of the short seller ‘false and misleading’.“Muddy Waters has never attended our conference calls and never asked a question, called us or written to us, but instead went to CNBC during our quiet period with these one-sided, ill-informed allegations and insinuations in a transparent attempt to profit by short selling our stock”, Fairfax said in the statement.

Meanwhile, shares of all listed Fairfax group companies in India – Thomas Cook, CSB Bank and Quess Corp – recorded losses between 2-6% in trading on Monday.

Muddy Waters has alleged that Fairfax, which has total assets of $84 billion, largely comprising investments in companies, inflated the fair value of certain investments to boost its book value by $4.5 billion.

It has also alleged that Fairfax’s investment in India-listed Quess Corp was assigned a fair value in its books that was 87% higher than the company’s stock price in September 2023. This it claimed had led to notional profits and accounting gains for the parent company that boosted its book value.

Fairfax will hold a conference at its earnings announcement on 16 February to answer queries .regarding the allegations.

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