There’s a lot we don’t know about the shooting of Renee Nicole Good, who was killed yesterday by federal immigration agents deployed to Minnesota. But in the chaotic aftermath of the shooting, one thing became immediately clear: The Trump administration was lying about what happened.
Shortly after news began circulating about the shooting, the Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement on X that “rioters began blocking ICE officers and one of these violent rioters weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism.” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and the White House adviser Stephen Miller also described the incident as “domestic terrorism,” while President Donald Trump posted on his social network that Good “ran over the ICE Officer.”
Videos of the incident, taken by bystanders, show almost every element of McLaughlin’s statement to be false. There were no riots at the scene, and no rioters. The vehicle appears to be driving away from the armed federal agents, not toward them, and no one was run over. And there is no evidence that terrorism of any kind was involved. After the shooting, federal agents then reportedly prevented a bystander who identified himself as a physician from tending to Good. “They are already trying to spin this as an action of self-defense,” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey told reporters. “Having seen the video of myself, I want to tell everybody directly, that is bullshit.”
A perverse absurdity of American law and culture, however, is that agents of the state empowered to use lethal force are rarely held to high standards for doing so. Good’s reasons for being in the neighborhood are not publicly known yet. What the witness sees, though, is simple: A scared woman is shot dead by an armed agent of the state. The Trump administration’s position is also simple: She deserved it. “Do you think this officer was wrong in defending his life against a deranged leftist who tried to run him over?” Vice President J. D. Vance posted.
Administration officials’ indifference to facts, to due process, to the dignity of the deceased, and to basic human decency is remarkable. They could have pleaded for patience and said the incident would be investigated—the standard response in such circumstances. They could have even done so while defending the federal agents they have deployed to terrorize areas they perceive as Democratic Party enclaves. Instead, they proceeded to make ostentatiously dishonest statements that they knew would be contradicted by the video evidence available to anyone with eyes to see it.
The federal government now speaks with the voice of the right-wing smear machine: partisan, dishonest, and devoted to vilifying Trump’s perceived enemies rather than informing the public. Good’s mother, partner, and children have to cope not only with their unfathomable loss, but with a campaign designed to justify her killing. Their own lives will be subject to invasive scrutiny by the government and its allies, in a search for any derogatory information about Good that might somehow be used to justify her killing. For some, that won’t even be necessary. “I do not feel bad for the woman that was involved,” the Republican lawmaker Randy Fine told the right-wing network Newsmax.
As my colleague Quinta Jurecic has reported, the Trump administration has made a point of following through on absurd accusations by filing absurd charges. The most relevant example here is that of Marimar Martinez, who survived being shot multiple times by a federal agent in Chicago; DHS claimed that
The Trump administration has repeatedly targeted small and politically disempowered populations—Haitians, Somalis, trans people—in order to justify abuses of power. But its abuses of power are not limited to those communities. What the government can do to the most vulnerable among us, it can also do to you.
TheNew York Times reported that the death of Good was the ninth shooting by an ICE officer since September, all of which officials called self-defense. In at least one of those incidents—the fatal shooting of Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez, a Mexican immigrant—there was video evidence that contradicted DHS’s account. The administration has also charged Newark Mayor Ras Baraka with trespassing and Representative LaMonica McIver with assault, falsely accusing them of storming an ICE facility, when video of the encounter shows nothing of the kind. Baraka is now suing for defamation. Another supposed menace to society was accused of assault for scraping the knuckles of an FBI agent during a scuffle—the grand jury refused to indict over this harrowing example of anti-hand crime. In every one of these incidents, the administration lied about both the events and the civilians involved in them, in an attempt to justify the use of force or subsequent prosecution.
The Trump administration has repeatedly targeted small and politically disempowered populations—Haitians, Somalis, trans people—in order to justify abuses of power. But its abuses of power are not limited to those communities. What the government can do to the most vulnerable among us, it can also do to you.
The blatant lies about Minneapolis serve several purposes. They perpetuate the false narrative that federal agents are in constant peril and therefore justified in using lethal force at the slightest hint of danger. They assure federal agents that they can harm or even kill American citizens with impunity, and warn those who might be moved to protest Trump’s immigration policies of the same thing. Perhaps most grim, they communicate to the public that if you happen to be killed by a federal agent, your government will bear false witness to the world that you were a terrorist.
This approach, of course, is quite familiar to communities that have been dealing with police abuses for as long as there have been professional police forces. In 2000, then–New York City Mayor and future Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani justified the killing of the Haitian American Patrick Dorismond by police by quipping that he was “no altar boy.” Embarrassingly for Giuliani, whose capacity for shame was overestimated even then, it turned out that Dorismond had literally been an altar boy. Dorismond’s mother responded to the campaign to justify her son’s killing with an observation that continues to haunt me decades later.
“They kill,” Dorismond said, “and after that, they kill him the other way—with the mouth.”
Taking Good’s life wasn’t enough. The moment she died, it became imperative for the administration to also destroy her memory.
Something that’s got me thinking about Pro-Palestinian activists (and this is not being dismissive of the situation in Gaza. I’m talking about activists in the rest of the world)
There have been global, mass demonstrations for pro-Palestine/anti-Israel. So much time, energy, resources, attention put into this. However I don’t see people putting in a fraction of that effort for the genocides in places like Sudan, Nigeria, and Republic of Congo. Where children are kidnapped by the hundreds and massacres so horrific happen that the blood can be seen from space. Or for the slavery still being practiced in places like Saudi Arabia. Hundreds of thousands of people enslaved in that country alone. Or the horrific abuse of LGBT+ people in places like South East Asia. People savagely beaten for holding hands in public. Not many people talk about Ukraine anymore. They’ve been left to their own devices. There’s a full scale rebellion happening in Iran, and again nothing from the human rights activists. A few years ago people were talking about the crimes against humanity committed against women, when there was a tiktok dance to go with it. Then a new tiktok trend started and the women in Iran were forgotten, and continued to be abused. I just find it curious that in the face of so many atrocities, wars with far higher body counts, and human rights violations that have been going unheard for so long, the majority of activists focus their attention on the only situation that involves…the only jewish majority country on planet earth.
This is not to say that all activists have bad intentions or bigotry. Nor to suggest that civilians in Gaza are any less deserving of support. But ask yourself, why does the genocide of people in Sudan, the kidnapping of hundreds of children in Nigeria, and child slave labour in Lithium mines, not garner the same rage and activism?
yeah so it turned out the 2024 election was actually about deciding who would run the federal government–a liberal woman or a raping white supremacist who’d previously tried to overthrow the government–and not about Sending a Message regarding your laundry list of personal grievances and your poser, radical identity. That’s why there have been devastating consequences to letting the insane rapist win and Trump 2.0 isn’t, in fact, just a continuation of the stability you took for granted under Biden with the added bonus of owning da libs like you thought it’d be. womp womp.
