Santa Barbara’s Beth Goodman Speaks Out After Being Pepper-Sprayed by Masked ICE Agent: ‘I Just Couldn’t Do Nothing’

Soft-spoken and definite of purpose, soccer mom and real estate agent Beth Goodman notes with a laugh how lightning has a habit of following her around. Last Wednesday morning, at about 7:15 a.m., lightning struck again, this time with a blast of pepper spray right in Goodman’s face.

Three ICE agents showed up for early morning action at the Eastside intersection of Carpinteria and Salinas streets, a place where many parents pass while taking their kids to nearby Franklin Elementary. At the same time, Goodman was on mom-squad patrol, passing out flyers notifying residents about what resources might be available should they be stopped by ICE, when she stumbled onto a noisy, honking, shouting, whistling scrum of ICE agents, protesters, neighborhood residents, and city cops.

Goodman had just gotten out of her car when she saw a masked ICE agent walking straight toward her. She was armed with her cell phone camera and hit the video button. “Move,” he shouted. “Get out of my way.” Goodman didn’t budge. It was a public street. If he wanted to get in his car, nobody was stopping him. “Take off your mask!” she shouted back. She shouted that three times. How loud? “I yell in soccer matches,” explained Goodman, who has four adult soccer-playing kids. “I wasn’t yelling.”

Most of the agent’s face was obscured by a clingy knit fabric tube called a gaiter. His eyes were masked with mirror sunglasses. He wore no name tag. It’s an ominous look. It’s designed to be. It screams “secret police.” On the back of his shirt, the word “Police” was stenciled.

Goodman, a real estate agent given to casual elegance, is quick to express respect for what she terms “legit police.” But for these federal agents, she is open with her scorn. “If these people were showing up and taking away real criminals, serious criminals, I’d say, ‘Yes, please.’ But only if there was due process. Instead, they show up in our neighborhood and steal people of color off our streets. With no due process. None. They terrorize children; they capture parents as they take their kids to school. Maybe they’ll never be reunited. We don’t know. This is so reminiscent of all kinds of historic tyranny. I can’t be quiet.”

So, she held her ground. She kept videoing. “I wasn’t going to allow them to steal anybody if I could help it,” she said. “He’s saying, ‘Back up,’ but like he’s scared,” she remembered. At some point, he grabbed her arm and moved her abruptly out of his way. “I didn’t feel any anger toward him. But I have no respect. He’s a human being but with a piece of his soul missing.”

Then his arm shot up and he squirted her with pepper spray. He drenched her face. Her eyes burned. It was over in seconds. “Initially, I thought, ‘I can shake this off.’ I’m holding my ground; people around me are screaming.”

“Get her out of here,” the agent shouted.

After that, it’s a little blurry. For about an hour, Goodman thought she might throw up. People cared for her. A Santa Barbara city cop — a woman — sat alongside her. Her presence was quietly comforting.

Goodman said she’d like to thank the department. It took about 12 hours for one of her eyes to recover enough to open up and see. It took the other one a lot longer. The next day, Goodman went to urgent care. Her doctor turned out to be a client she had helped as a real estate agent. Santa Barbara — it’s a small town.

Beth Goodman is no screaming radical. She talks of love and kindness. She speaks openly about her support for law enforcement. But she’s never been one to color inside the lines that other people drew.

At age 38, for example, she famously found herself single and pregnant with quadruplets thanks to the interventions of in-vitro fertilization. It wasn’t necessarily what she planned for, but it’s what she got. And it’s what she was going to do. Lots of people thought she was irresponsible and were happy to tell her so. She became the subject of a broader conversation, national in scope. No less than Bill O’Reilly, then the reigning über-voice of the Fox News empire, weighed in with his customary scorn. Goodman would wind up on welfare, he predicted. She didn’t have a man or the means not to. Then Oprah invited Goodman onto her show. All that was a lot to carry.

It wasn’t easy. But parenthood is never easy, no matter how perfect the circumstances. From the outside looking in, Goodman appears to have pulled it off, raising four thriving academically and athletically accomplished adult children, now all in college. They had all graduated from Santa Barbara High School in 2022, where Goodman also graduated in 1982. “Once a Don,” she says with a laugh. One of her three sons called afterward to check in. His reaction? “Oh, fuck yeah, Mom!”

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Video credit: Courtesy La Casa de La Raza

But it should come as no surprise to anyone that Beth Goodman — soft-spoken and as deliberate with her words as she is — was not going to budge just because some masked man told her to do it.

Goodman is just one of many hundreds of people in Santa Barbara — immigrants and native born — looking for ways to make a difference in the face of so unprecedented an onslaught of federal might. “I just couldn’t do nothing,” Goodman said. “I needed to move the needle.”

Yes, but didn’t she think of Renee Good or Alex Pretti, who were shot dead by ICE agents in Minneapolis in recent weeks? Didn’t that give her pause? “In the moment, it was scary. I don’t want to have that experience ever again. I don’t want to test how far our bravery has to go. I don’t want to die. I don’t have a death wish. But if we don’t risk anything, we will lose much more than we can afford to live without,” she said. “And if I can help at all, I’d like to make a start in my 10-block radius.”

According to 805 UndocuFund and State Senator Monique Limón’s office, ICE has arrested 1,400 people in Santa Barbara County since Trump’s second term of office started. While no official statistic exists documenting how many of these have criminal histories, TRAC Immigration states that 73.6 percent have no criminal history. Of the 150 arrested in Santa Barbara County during the last week of 2025, only 11 had criminal convictions. And of all those arrested in the last year, less than one percent had judicial warrants.