Minneapolis is once again the focus of debates about violence involving law enforcement after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother, in her car.
The shooting will also likely prompt renewed scrutiny of training and policy of officers and the question of them shooting at moving vehicles. There has been a recent trend in law enforcement toward policies that prohibit such shootings. It is a policy shift that has shown promise in saving lives.
Debates over deadly force are often contentious, but as I note in my research on police ethics and policy, for the most part there is consensus on one point: Policing should reflect a commitment to valuing human life and prioritizing its protection. Many use-of-force policies adopted by police departments endorse that principle.
Yet, as in Minneapolis, controversial law enforcement killings continue to occur. Not all agencies have implemented prohibitions on shooting at vehicles. Even in agencies that have, some policies are weak or ambiguous.
In addition, explicit prohibitions on shooting at vehicles are largely absent from the law, which means that officers responsible for fatal shootings of drivers that appear to violate departmental policies still often escape criminal penalties.
In the case of ICE, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, its policy on shooting at moving vehicles – unlike that of many police agencies – lacks a clear instruction for officers to get out of the way of moving vehicles where feasible. It’s an omission at odds with generally recognized best practices in policing.
ICE’s policy on shooting at moving vehicles
ICE’s current use-of-force policy prohibits its officers from “discharging firearms at the operator of a moving vehicle” unless it is necessary to stop a grave threat. The policy is explicit that deadly force should not be used “solely to prevent the escape of a fleeing suspect.”
That point is relevant for evaluating the fatal shooting in Minneapolis. Videos show one officer trying to open the door of the vehicle that Good was driving, while another officer appears to be in front of the vehicle as she tried to pull away.
Shooting to prevent the driver simply from getting away would have been in violation of agency policy and obviously inconsistent with prioritizing the protection of life.
ICE’s policy lacks clear instruction, however, for its officers to get out of the way of moving vehicles where feasible. In contrast, the Department of Justice’s use-of-force policy makes it explicit that officers should not shoot at a vehicle if they can protect themselves by “moving out of the path of the vehicle.”
Notably, President Joe Biden issued an executive order in 2022 requiring federal law enforcement agencies – like ICE – to adopt use-of-force policies “that are equivalent to, or exceed, the requirements” of the Department of Justice’s policy.
Despite that order, the provision to step out of the way of moving cars never made it into the use-of-force policy that applies to ICE.
The rationale for not shooting at moving vehicles
Prioritizing the protection of life doesn’t rule out deadly force. Sometimes such force is necessary to protect lives from a grave threat, such as an active shooter. But it does rule out using deadly force when less harmful tactics can stop a threat. In such cases, deadly force is unnecessary – a key consideration in law and ethics that can render force unjustified.
That’s the concern involved with police shooting at moving vehicles. It often is not necessary because officers have a less harmful option to avoid a moving vehicle’s threat: stepping out of the way.
This guidance has the safety of both suspects and police in mind. Obviously, police not shooting lowers the risk of harm to the suspect. But it also lowers the risk to the officer in the vast majority of cases because of the laws of physics. If you shoot the driver of a car barreling toward you, that rarely brings a car to an immediate stop, and the vehicle often continues on its path.
Many police departments have incorporated these insights into their policies. A recent analysis of police department policies in the 100 largest U.S. cities found that close to three-quarters of them have prohibitions against shooting at moving vehicles.
The gap between policy and best practices for protecting life
The shooting in Minneapolis serves as a stark reminder of the stubborn gap that often persists between law and policy on the one hand and best law enforcement practices for protecting life on the other. When steps are taken to close that gap, however, they can have a meaningful impact.
Some of the most compelling examples involve local, state and federal measures that reinforce one another. Consider the “fleeing felon rule,” which used to allow police to shoot a fleeing felony suspect to prevent their escape even when the suspect posed no danger to others.
That rule was at odds with the doctrine of prioritizing the protection of life, leading some departments to revise their use-of-force policies and some states to ban the rule. In 1985, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional for police to shoot a fleeing suspect who was not a danger.
This history suggests that clear bans in law and policy on questionable tactics have the potential to save lives, while also strengthening the means for holding officers accountable.
Ben Jones is Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Research Associate in the Rock Ethics Institute at Penn State. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Last week, we wrote about how ICE agent Jonathan Ross murdered Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old poet and mother, on a Minneapolis street in broad daylight. We wrote about how the Trump administration immediately began lying about it despite multiple video angles showing exactly what happened. We wrote about how the media called documented murder a “dispute.”
This week, we’re writing about how career Justice Department prosecutors—people who’ve spent their careers putting away fraudsters, drug dealers, and actual criminals—looked at how the administration is handling this case and said: we want no part of this.
Because apparently the DOJ’s response to an ICE agent murdering an unarmed American citizen wasn’t to investigate the agent who pulled the trigger. It was to investigate the victim and her widow.
A federal agent shot an unarmed woman multiple times in the head at close range. Video evidence directly contradicts every administration claim about what happened. And the Justice Department’s priority is figuring out what activist groups the dead woman might have been associated with?
Really?
According to reporting from the New York Times, at least six federal prosecutors in the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office resigned on Tuesday over this approach:
Joseph H. Thompson, who was second in command at the U.S. attorney’s office and oversaw asprawling fraud investigationthat has roiled Minnesota’s political landscape, was among those who quit on Tuesday, according to three people with knowledge of the decision.
Mr. Thompson’s resignation came after senior Justice Department officials pressed for a criminal investigation into the actions of the widow ofRenee Nicole Good, the Minneapolis woman killed by an ICE agent on Wednesday.
Mr. Thompson, 47, a career prosecutor, objected to that approach, as well as to the Justice Department’s refusal to include state officials in investigating whether the shooting itself was lawful, the people familiar with his decision said.
Read that again. Senior DOJ officials pressed for a criminal investigation into the widow. The woman whose wife was just murdered by a federal agent. That’s what prompted career prosecutors to walk out the door.
And Thompson wasn’t alone. The Times reports that Harry Jacobs (Thompson’s deputy on the fraud cases), Melinda Williams (who ran the criminal division and successfully prosecuted sex traffickers and fentanyl dealers), and Thomas Calhoun-Lopez (chief of violent and major crimes) all quit as well.
The Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office wasn’t the only place seeing an exodus.
According to MS Now, at least six leaders of the Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division—the unit that’s supposed to investigate police killings—also resigned in protest:
Top leaders of the criminal section of the Civil Rights Division have left their jobs to register their frustration with the department after the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon decided not to investigate the ICE officer’sfatal shooting of Renee Goodlast week.The criminal section of the division would normally investigateany fatal shooting by a law enforcement officer and specializes in probing potential or alleged abuse or improper use of force by law enforcement.
The departures – including that of the chief of the section, as well as the principal deputy chief, deputy chief and acting deputy chief – represent the most significant mass resignation at the Justice Department since February.
So we potentially have twelve or more DOJ officials walking out the door because of how this administration is handling a single case. Career prosecutors who spent years working for the DOJ and at least a year under this administration. People who had no apparent problem with everything else this DOJ has been doing. But investigating a murder victim while protecting her killer was apparently the line they couldn’t cross.
Let me say it plainly: when career prosecutors who’ve stuck around through a year of this administration’s chaos decide this is the moment to quit, it tells you something important about just how far outside normal law enforcement practice this has gone.
Also, remember why ICE supposedly flooded Minneapolis in the first place? Daycare fraud. A viral video from a small-time MAGA grifter claiming day cares were running scams, which the administration used to justify what it called “the largest immigration enforcement operation in history.”
And who was the lead prosecutor on those fraud cases? Joe Thompson. The same guy who just quit because the DOJ would rather investigate a murder victim’s activist connections than the agent who killed her.
As Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara put it to the NY Times:
“When you lose the leader responsible for making the fraud cases, it tells you this isn’t really about prosecuting fraud,”
No shit.
If you want evidence of just how upside-down the Justice Department’s priorities have become, look no further than what they’re actually investigating. A separate Times report from Sunday laid out how the FBI’s inquiry into the shooting is focused not on the agent’s actions, but on Good’s “possible connections to activist groups“:
The decision by the F.B.I. and the Justice Department to scrutinize Ms. Good’s activities and her potential connections to local activists is in line with the White House’s strategy of deflecting blame for the shooting away from federal law enforcement and toward opponents they have described as domestic terrorists, often without providing evidence.
Let’s summarize again: an ICE agent murders a woman in broad daylight. The division specifically designed to investigate when cops kill people has decided not to investigate the murderer. Instead, the DOJ is being told to investigate the dead woman and her widow’s social media connections.
And long term DOJ officials are rushing out the door, wanting absolutely nothing to do with any of this nonsense.
Meanwhile, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon was busy on social media retweeting posts warning people not to “ram ICE officers” because they’ll use deadly force—you know, completely prejudging the case she’s supposed to be overseeing. As former DOJ domestic terrorism counsel Thomas Brzozowski put it to the NY Times:
“It’s not appropriate for officials to characterize this incident as domestic terrorism before the investigation is complete,” said Thomas E. Brzozowski, the former counsel for domestic terrorism in the Justice Department’s national security division. “There used to be a process, deliberate and considered, to figure out if behavior could be legitimately described as domestic terrorism.”
“And when it’s not followed,” Mr. Brzozowski said, “then the term becomes little more than a political cudgel to bash one’s enemies.”
“There used to be a process.” Past tense. That’s where we are now.
The administration’s approach makes sense only if you understand that the goal was never justice—it was narrative control. The White House needs Good to be a terrorist, not a victim, because acknowledging that an ICE agent murdered an unarmed American citizen for no reason undermines everything they’ve been saying about their immigration crackdown. So they investigate the victim. They investigate the widow. They investigate the “activist groups.” Anything but investigate the guy who actually pulled the trigger.
Former Trump attorney and current Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche’s statement was revealing: “there is currently no basis for a criminal civil rights investigation into the ICE agent.”
No basis. A federal agent shot an unarmed woman multiple times in the head. Video shows her trying to drive away, not toward officers. And there’s “no basis” for investigation. There’s a reason why every time a Trump legal move is flailing around, Blanche seems to show up and wave his arms theatrically yelling “nothing to see here folks.”
What would constitute a basis, exactly? Does the agent need to announce “I am now violating this person’s civil rights” before pulling the trigger?
Minnesota officials aren’t buying it. Governor Tim Walz called Thompson “a principled public servant” and added that his resignation is “the latest sign Trump is pushing nonpartisan career professionals out of the justice department, replacing them with his sycophants.” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey called the resigned prosecutors “heroes” and the people pushing to prosecute Good’s widow “monsters.”
Drew Evans, superintendent of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension—the state agency that normally investigates police shootings and which the DOJ has deliberately excluded from this investigation—put it simply:
“We’re losing a true public servant,” said Mr. Evans. “We really need professional prosecutors.”
The absence of a credible and comprehensive investigation into Ms. Good’s killing stands to “undermine trust in our public safety agencies,” Mr. Evans added.
We’re well past that point. When the Justice Department investigates murder victims while shielding their killers, “trust” has already been destroyed.
The mass resignations tell us something crucial: there are still at least a few people inside the system who know the difference between law enforcement and state-sanctioned murder. Though, it raises the question of whether there’s anyone left who knows that distinction.
Thompson and his colleagues apparently decided they’d rather walk away from careers they spent decades building than participate in the investigation of a grieving widow while her wife’s killer walks free.
But their departures also mean the fraud cases—the ones the administration claimed justified this whole Minneapolis operation—are now in serious jeopardy. The prosecutor who knew every defendant, every transaction, who’d built those cases from the ground up over years, just walked out the door. If the administration actually cared about prosecuting fraud in Minnesota, they’d be begging Thompson to stay. Instead, they drove him out because protecting an ICE agent from accountability matters more to them than the stated reason they sent ICE to Minneapolis in the first place.
Renee Nicole Good was murdered by her own government. And the Justice Department’s response was to investigate her.
If you support the protests, you should tell everyone you know that you support them.
Some of us have jobs, commitments, health conditions, or other circumstances that prevent us from marching with our fellow citizens in the streets. But for those of us who cannot march out of love for our country and to protect our fellow citizens from the criminal bullies who have stolen our federal government, we must feel free to tell everyone that we support the marchers.
Tell your boss at work. Tell your coworkers. Tell your neighbors. Tell your family. Let everyone know you support the marchers.
This does not make you a radical. It makes you part of the human race.
The marchers are defending constitutional government. They’re defending the rule of law. They’re defending your rights and mine. They’re standing up to criminals who wage unconstitutional war, who shoot citizens in the streets, who violate every principle this country was founded on.
Supporting them isn’t extreme. Silence is extreme. Silence is collaboration. Silence is choosing the side of the criminals.
You don’t have to march to matter. You don’t have to risk arrest to resist. You just have to stop pretending neutrality is an option when your government is killing people.
Say it: I support the protests.
Say it to everyone. Say it at work. Say it at home. Say it to strangers.
This is how majorities recognize they’re majorities. This is how isolated people realize they’re not alone. This is how the criminals learn there are more of us than there are of them.
I support the protests. So should you. And you should say so.
Out loud. To everyone.
That’s not radicalism. That’s citizenship.
Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. Originally published at his Notes From the Circus.
The murder of Renee Nicole Good by ICE officer Jonathan Ross has certainly created quite the divide between the reality-based majority of the population who doesn’t want masked unaccountable federal law enforcement goons invading cities they have no business being in and shooting people for saying “dude, I’m not mad at you” and trying to drive away… and the fantasy-land MAGA folks who are bending over backwards to justify the murder.
Late last week the video from Ross’s phone was released (why Ross was filming Good is a whole separate issue, but shows how Homeland Security is much more focused on producing memes, not doing actual law enforcement), which MAGA cultists pretended exonerated Ross. It did no such thing. It made him look way, way worse.
He deliberately placed himself in front of the vehicle. He walked around the car filming Good and her partner. As can be clearly seen in the video, Good turned steering wheel of her car all the way to the right such that the car was not heading towards Ross and could not hit him. And he shot her three times anyway, once through the windshield and twice through the open driver-side window. Even if you could (and you can’t) argue the first should was potentially justified if he thought the car was coming towards him, the fact that he easily stepped aside and then continued firing shows that it was not justified at all.
And, of course, his first words after murdering a woman in broad daylight in the middle of the street was: “fucking bitch.”
So her last words: “Dude, I’m not mad at you.” His first words after murdering her: “fucking bitch.”
And then, of course, there’s what was discussed last week: how the MAGA faithful immediately began lying and claiming she was a “domestic terrorist” with multiple people trying to twist the story to claim she somehow “deserved” this.
One of the leaders of the goons, “border czar” Tom Homan, (who appears to have gotten away with taking $50,000 in a paper bag from federal officials pretending to be business owners seeking favors from Donald Trump) went on Meet the Press on Sunday and talked about how Democrats need to stop calling ICE murderers or they’ll have no choice but to murder again:
Homan: "We gotta stop the hateful rhetoric. Saying this officer is a murderer is dangerous. It's just ridiculous. It's gonna infuriate people more which means there's gonna be more incidents like this."
The transcript is as ridiculous as it is chilling:
We gotta stop the hateful rhetoric. Saying this officer is a murderer is dangerous. It’s just ridiculous. It’s gonna infuriate people more which means there’s gonna be more incidents like this, because the hateful rhetoric is not only continuing, it’s gonna be double down or triple down.
It’s the classic abuser’s lament: if you didn’t want me to hit you, why were you so mean to me.
First of all, the ones ramping up the “hateful rhetoric” have been the MAGA faithful. They’re the ones spreading baseless conspiracy theories, insisting that Good was a “domestic terrorist” or a “paid agitator.” This is the same thing Homan, Gregory Bovino, Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, and Donald Trump have been doing for months, encouraging ICE to see the public as enemies to be fought, not a public they are supposed to be protecting.
Second, if federal agents are so fragile that people calling them names means they’re going to murder people, they shouldn’t be federal agents at all. They shouldn’t be allowed to handle firearms, frankly.
This is textbook authoritarian blame-shifting: create the conditions for violence through dehumanizing rhetoric, then blame the victims when violence inevitably occurs. And it’s not just Homan. The entire MAGA ecosystem is working overtime to justify this murder and preemptively excuse the next one.
Case in point: Fox News columnist Dave Marcus, who wrote this weekend that “wine moms” protesting ICE’s occupations, invasions, and law breaking is somehow a criminal conspiracy of “wine moms.”
Say what?
Marcus’s piece is transparently absurd—he’s claiming that citizens exercising their First Amendment rights to criticize federal agents constitute a criminal conspiracy—but he gives away the real game a few paragraphs in. Good and these other “wine moms'” actual “crime” wasn’t obstructing justice. It was mocking ICE agents in a manner that hurt their feelings:
The video of Good and her partner heckling and, let’s be honest, goading ICE officers with an obnoxious smugness that makes most people’s skin crawl, is just one of many.
It’s difficult to think of something more “obnoxiously smug” than a Fox News columnist insisting that after an ICE agent murdered a woman in broad daylight for protesting ICE’s actions… we should blame protesting women.
We see these self-important White women doing it in video after video after video, taunting cops, insulting journalists or even bystanders, often with a weird and disturbing glee.
The inclusion of “journalists” in that list is also telling in multiple ways. First off, the MAGA world is way more famous for “insulting journalists.” Hell, it’s part of Trump’s daily activities to insult and taunt journalists. I can’t find any example of Marcus complaining about that. But it sounds like if wine moms make fun of him for his journalism, well, that just means they deserve to be shot in the face?
But, more to the point: obnoxious smugness, heckling, and even goading federal officers is textbook First Amendment-protected speech. Criticizing government officials, even obnoxiously, is perhaps the core function of the First Amendment. Marcus seems to have confused “speech that annoys federal agents” with “criminal conspiracy.” And he’s using his own confusion to justify murder.
All of this, of course, is coming straight from the top. Late yesterday, Donald Trump told the press gaggle on his plane that murdering Good was acceptable because “the woman and her friend were highly disrespectful to law enforcement” and that “law enforcement should not be in a position where they have to put up with this stuff.”
Q: "Do you believe that deadly force was necessary?"Trump: "It was highly disrespectful of law enforcement. The woman and her friend were highly disrespectful of law enforcement…Law enforcement should not be in a position where they have to put up with this stuff."
Yes, he is literally justifying murder by his personal police force by claiming that being “highly disrespectful” (i.e., engaging in First Amendment-protected speech) makes the use of deadly force “necessary.”
Also note how Trump himself reveals that all the retconning nonsense by his MAGA faithful that the shooting had nothing to do with how Good spoke to Ross was all pretext. This was always about whether or not you kiss the boot in front of you. If you don’t—if you are “highly disrespectful”—Trump and his cronies think they can shoot you. And if you complain about it, they can shoot more people.
The state sponsored murders of wine moms will continue until morale improves.
You can see how fragile and pathetic these men are. They are so desperate to subjugate and suppress people who disagree with them politically. They seemed to think that once they were in power, the public would love and admire them for their power. Instead, the vast majority of Americans see them for what they are: pathetic, insecure man-babies in way over their heads.
So, now their only recourse is to ramp up the threats. To say that if you actually call out their criminal actions, such as murder, for what they are, they’ll just be forced to murder more critics and protestors.
They will never take responsibility for their own actions. They will never reflect on their own culpability. Because to reflect would require admitting what everyone already knows: they have no argument. They have no legal justification. They have no constitutional authority for what they’re doing.
All they have is the authoritarian’s playbook: dehumanize your critics, commit violence, blame the victims, and threaten more violence if the criticism doesn’t stop. It’s the logic of every tinpot dictator in history, now being deployed by federal law enforcement on American streets.
There is no question that they’ll murder again. Homan has already promised they will. And it’s why we need to keep exercising our First Amendment rights to speak out against this authoritarian nonsense, rather than capitulating and letting them win.
Renee Nicole Good was a 37-year-old award-winning poet, a mother of a six-year-old, and a wife who had recently moved to Minneapolis. That all ended yesterday when a masked ICE agent murdered her in broad daylight, shooting her multiple times at close range in the head. She had stuffed animal toys in the glove box of her SUV that rammed into another car after she’d been killed for no reason at all.
We have video of what happened. Multiple angles. The Trump administration is lying about every single detail anyway.
Donald Trump kicked off with a blatant lie, claiming that Good “viciously ran over the ICE officer.”
Known liar, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin, called Good a “violent rioter” who “weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism.”
Kristi Noem made up a complete fantasy:
It was an act of domestic terrorism. What happened was, our ICE officers were out in enforcement action, they got stuck in the snow because of the adverse weather that is in Minneapolis, they were attempting to push out their vehicle, and a woman attacked them and those surrounding them and attempted to run them over and ram them with her vehicle.
Not a single one of them is telling the truth. They are flat out lying.
Here’s what actually happened. The folks at Bellingcat put together a top down view showing the murder, pieced together from multiple videos:
Using imagery online of the shooting by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, we’ve created an animated sequence which highlights the approximate positioning of officers and vehicles at the scene. The red dot represents the agent who fired the shots. Yellow dots are other agents who arrived at the scene.
This morning (after equivocating all day yesterday, as I’ll discuss below), the NY Times put out a video using multiple bystander videos, showing that the ICE agent (1) was not hit (2) was not in the path of the vehicle and (3) was absolutely fine afterwards (contradicting claims from the administration that he was run over and in the hospital). See it here:
From all the evidence, it’s clear that Good had stopped and when ICE agents started demanding she move, she started to pull around the ICE vehicle in front of her. She paused to let another vehicle drive by her. As that happened (for no apparent reason) the ICE agent who eventually murdered her walked around the right side of her car to the front. As he does that two other ICE agents approach the car, with one telling her to exit the car while another yells for her to move. She then proceeds to try to drive away from the ICE agents. The one who had stepped in front of her car steps aside and then just starts madly firing at her head.
He murdered her. And Trump and his cronies are lying about it with video evidence directly contradicting every word.
This isn’t the first time ICE has killed someone. This is actually the ninth such shooting by an ICE agent since September, every single one of which involved an ICE agent blatantly violating policy by firing into a vehicle. This is at least the second outright murder, as opposed to attempted murder.
While ICE conveniently took down its page describing this (got something to hide?), the official policy is that “firearms shall not be discharged solely to disable moving vehicles.” Also, “discharging a firearm from a moving vehicle is prohibited.” There are some limited exceptions, but they appear to apply solely to a case where the car is driving directly at an ICE agent.
ICE shouldn’t even be in Minneapolis. It shouldn’t be anywhere. It shouldn’t exist. Nor should it ever have existed, as many of us have warned for many, many years. When we first started writing about ICE over 15 years ago, it was already a lawless organization.
This murder of an American citizen on a quiet street—someone who was just there to observe and monitor ICE agents kidnapping people—exemplifies why ICE is fundamentally incompatible with a free society. We’re talking about a masked federal police force, operating in secret, with no apparent limits, no meaningful rules, and no consequences for violence. They’re engaging in lethal force against anyone—citizens and non-citizens alike—because they’ve been given implicit permission by the White House to do whatever they want. MAGA folks mock the Gestapo comparison, but what else do you call an unaccountable secret police force that operates with impunity, murders citizens in broad daylight, and then lies about it with the full backing of the state?
Further, as detailed in the Court’s factual findings, agents have used excessive force in response to protesters’ and journalists’ exercise of their First Amendment rights, without justification, often without warning, and even at those who had begun to comply with agents’ orders…. While the Court acknowledges that some unruly individuals have been present during these gatherings, their presence among “peaceful protestors, journalists and legal observers does not give Defendants a blank check to employ unrestricted use of crowd control weapons,” and, in many of the instances in which agents deployed less lethal munitions, they did not direct the force anywhere near such bad actors…. Agents’ “use of indiscriminate weapons against all protesters—not just the violent ones—supports the inference that federal agents were substantially motivated by Plaintiffs’ protected First Amendment activity.”
Judge Ellis also called out DHS’s systematic lying—the same pattern we’re seeing now:
While Defendants may argue that the Court identifies only minor inconsistencies, every minor inconsistency adds up, and at some point, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to believe almost anything that Defendants represent
And yes, they will lie in the face of directly contradictory video evidence. Judge Ellis again:
Presumably, these portions of the videos would be Defendants’ best evidence to demonstrate that agents acted in line with the Constitution, federal laws, and the agencies’ own policies on use of force when engaging with protesters, the press, and religious practitioners. Buta review of them shows the opposite—supporting Plaintiffs’ claims and undermining all of Defendants’ claimsthat their actions toward protesters, the press, and religious practitioners have been, as Bovino has stated, “more than exemplary.”
A federal judge warned us six weeks ago that DHS and ICE would likely kill people and lie about it even when video proved them wrong. Yesterday proved her right. Again.
I had a few other stories I planned to write up on Wednesday, not to mention taking care of some other work, and I spent most of the day just unable to do anything, feeling sick to my stomach.
Yes, this happens in America (and elsewhere), but it shouldn’t. This is fucked up.
As 404 Media points out, this has become the standard course of action by the Trump admin these days.
This is a pattern. Some event happens as part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign, DHS rushes out a misleading, wrong, or incendiary statement that does not reflect reality, and it becomes another piece of ammo for the X.com grifters, right wing media ecosystem, or people who just love the idea of others being hurt.
And, again, why the fuck is ICE even in Minneapolis anyway? Because a small-time MAGA grifter YouTuber made a misleading video a few weeks ago claiming day care centers in Minneapolis were running a scam. His “evidence”? The day cares had locked doors and wouldn’t let him in with his cameras—which is what day cares do when random people show up demanding entry.
Noem is claiming that ICE had to be in Minneapolis based on her lies that the city is “dangerous” and full of “criminals” who don’t belong there. But as multiple people have pointed out there has been only one murder in Minneapolis in 2026.
It was the one committed by this ICE agent yesterday.
The Trump MAGA DHS position is that if you don’t immediately submit in every possible way, they will frame you as a “threat” who they can kill with impunity. Defector’s summary is exactly right:
Now that the Trump administration has shown it will immediately make up a flagrant lie in an attempt to justify the summary execution of a U.S. citizen, on video, in broad daylight—and will outright valorize the ICE agent who drew his pistol and killed a civilian for the crime of moving her vehicle a few feet—the message is clear, to ICE agents and everyone else: Nothing constrains these agents except whatever inhibits any individual one of them, personally, from brutalizing and murdering any person who disobeys them….
In the eyes of the state and its agents, all of the rest of us are walking around with a standing presumption, not just of guilt, but of murderous intent. Anything but total and immediate submission is domestic terrorism. It’s punishable by whatever the masked and unidentified government agent pointing a gun at your face decides to dish out.
And, of course, the compliant media is playing its part. Both the NY Times and the Washington Post initially embraced the view-from-nowhere approach of claiming the events around the shooting are “disputed.”
Come the fuck on. Five hours later and the headline is still about a disputed shooting. Just a basic lack of courage to acknowledge the obvious.
The old journalism joke is that if one person tells you it’s sunny outside and the other says it’s raining, you don’t report that the weather is disputed. You go the fuck outside and check. We have the video here. Multiple angles. It shows exactly what happened. But the Times and Post were treating the administration’s obvious lies as equally valid to the documented evidence because… why? Because acknowledging that a federal agency will murder a citizen and then lie about it in the face of video evidence is too uncomfortable? This isn’t neutral journalism—it’s active complicity in state violence. When the media treats documented murder and transparent lies as a “dispute,” they’re telling every ICE agent that there will be no accountability, no matter how clear the evidence.
Yes, eventually, this morning, both the NY Times and the Washington Post published more thorough investigations, showing that the administration is lying. But they let the “dispute” stand for 24 hours, allowing the administration to set the narrative that will live on. And even now they’re using equivocal language. The Post’s story talks about how the video evidence “raises questions about” what the admin is saying, rather than just coming out and saying that they’re LYING.
And I won’t get into how state media like Fox News is reporting on this: focusing on whatever it could dig up about Good to mock her, as if anything in her personal life or views somehow justifies her being murdered. Or all the GOP elected officials going on TV trying to pretend that she might have deserved to have been murdered in the street.
Yes, I know that in these tribal times so many people are playing the team sports thing of just immediately defending their cult leader. Going on X and looking around, you see just an overwhelming flood of absolute bullshit from MAGA folks cracking jokes (remember when they wanted people fired for joking about Charlie Kirk’s murder?) and trying to spin the story, knowing full well it’s all bullshit.
But some are seeing through it. A neighbor near where the murder happened, who identified himself as “right leaning,” admitted that the situation shook him, as “this is not how we’re supposed to be doing things in America.”
Really worth watching this interview with a bystander who witnessed the ICE shooting in Minneapolis: "I'm pretty right-leaning. But seeing this, this is not how we're supposed to be doing things in America.”
He’s right. And it is beyond disgusting that so many powerful forces in our government and the media are trying to twist and manipulate the story to justify an out of control ICE.
The only appropriate response here is to shut down ICE. Shut down DHS. Yes, there are important and necessary roles in DHS, but they existed without DHS before it was formed two decades ago, and we can redistribute those roles elsewhere in the federal government. But we don’t need ICE. We don’t need a secret federal police that goes around in masks kidnapping and murdering people.
It’s about as un-American as you can imagine.
This murder has at least appeared to wake some politicians from their slumber. We’ve seen multiple Democratic politicians, especially in Minnesota, speak out as forcefully as I’ve seen politicians speak out in years, telling ICE to get the fuck out of Minneapolis and calling out the administration’s lies directly. That matters. When officials with actual power are willing to name the truth—that ICE murdered a citizen and the administration is lying about it—it creates space for others to do the same.
But also thousands came out to memorialize Renee Nicole Good, in the freezing cold in a Minneapolis January. Hundreds turned up at a training session for legal observers, even as hundreds more are already patrolling Minneapolis, observing ICE’s illegal actions, and doing so knowing that ICE and DHS won’t hesitate to shoot them dead.
That’s what a movement looks like when institutions fail. Not waiting for someone to save us, but showing up in the freezing cold to say: you will not do this in our name. You will not kill our neighbors without witness. You will not lie about it unchallenged.
I’m going to leave this post up for a while before we post anything else. This matters more than the usual tech policy stories right now.
There are plenty of things going on that are infuriating. Ever day this administration finds new ways to spit on the Constitution. We’re still dealing with the illegal invasion of Venezuela, and apparent plans to attack multiple other nations around the Western Hemisphere.
But Renee Nicole Good’s murder cuts through all of that noise. A masked federal agent murdered an American citizen in broad daylight for no reason at all. The administration lied about it with video evidence directly contradicting every word. The media called it “disputed.” And thousands of people said no.
The institutional guardrails have failed. The courts warned us this would happen and it happened anyway. The media won’t hold power accountable. So the work falls to us—to show up, to document, to refuse to accept the lies, to make the cost of this violence too high to sustain.
ICE must be abolished. This cannot stand. And anyone who makes excuses for what happened yesterday has chosen a side, and it’s not the side of America or freedom or anything resembling justice.
Renee Nicole Good was a poet, a mother, and a citizen murdered by her own government for the crime of existing near an ICE agent having a bad day. Remember her name. Remember what they did. And remember that they lied about it even with the cameras rolling.
