A deadly Minneapolis shooting puts the White House on defense
WASHINGTON— When a 37-year-old mother of three was fatally shot by an immigration agent as she drove through a Minneapolis neighborhood Wednesday morning after dropping her son off at school, the Trump administration’s response was swift. Authorities said the victim was responsible for his own death, possibly acting as a “professional agitator,” a “domestic terrorist” trained to use his car against law enforcement.
This was an uncompromising response, without any suggestion that management would rely on independent investigations into the incident; The video spread quickly on the Internet and took the whole country by storm.
“You can acknowledge that this woman’s death is a tragedy,” Vice Mayor J.D. Vance wrote on social media, defending the shooting of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer just hours after her death, “while also acknowledging that this was a tragedy of his own making.”
shooting Renee Nicole GoodAn American citizen, ICE has put the administration on the defensive as one of President Trump’s signature policy initiatives has exponentially expanded ICE’s ranks to outnumber most the military and dispersed its agents to modest communities across the United States.
ICE had recently announced it would launch its “largest immigration operation ever” in the Minnesota city, allegedly targeting Somali residents involved in fraud schemes. But Good’s death could be a turning point. The conflict revealed a souring of public opinion, including from a majority of Americans, about Trump’s immigration enforcement. I do not approve now The administration’s tactics, according to Pew Research.
Despite the backlash, Trump’s team vowed Thursday to send more agents to the Midwestern state.
It was not immediately clear whether Good placed his car to deliberately obstruct law enforcement or to protest their activities in the neighborhood.
Witnesses to the shooting said ICE agents told him to move his vehicle. Initial footage of the incident showed Good briefly shifting his car into reverse and then turning its front wheels and leaving the scene.
He was shot three times by a police officer standing near the front left headlight, who the Department of Homeland Security said was shot by Good, who fired in self-defense.
Only Tom Homan, the president’s border czar, urged lawmakers and the public to exercise caution in responding to the incident, telling people to “take a deep breath” and “reserve your judgment” for additional footage and evidence.
He distanced himself from the Department of Homeland Security and its secretary, Kristi Noem, who spent just a few hours charging the deceased with domestic terrorism. “The investigation has just begun,” Homan told CBS in an interview.
“I’m not going to pass judgment on a video,” he said. “It would be unprofessional to comment.”
Homeland Security Kristi Noem said Renee Nicole Good was engaging in “domestic terrorism” when she was fatally shot by a federal immigration agent.
(Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
But when asked why DHS felt compelled to comment, Homan replied: “That’s Homeland Security’s problem.”
It wasn’t just the department. Trump also wrote to X that the victim was “obviously a professional agitator.”
“The woman driving was very erratic, obstructing, and resisting, and she then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who appeared to have shot her in self-defense,” Trump wrote.
Noem was clear in her assessment of the incident in calls with the press on Wednesday and Thursday.
“This was an act of domestic terrorism,” Noem said. “A woman attacked them and those around them and tried to crush them.”
However, local officials and law enforcement officials expressed concern about the incident, warning federal officials that the deployment unnecessarily increased tensions in the community and expressing support for residents’ rights to peacefully protest.
“I think what everyone knows about what’s been going on here over the last couple of weeks is that there’s a group of people exercising their 1st Amendment rights,” Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said in an interview with MS NOW. “They have the right to observe, livestream and record police activities, and they also have the right to protest and object.”
“The issue is that people should be able to legally exercise their 1st Amendment rights and do so safely,” O’Hara said.
On Thursday, Trump administration officials told local law enforcement that the investigation into the matter would be in federal hands.
Vance told reporters at the White House on Thursday that both the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security would investigate the incident, saying without evidence that Good “pointed his car at a law enforcement officer and stepped on the gas.”
“While I can believe that his death was a tragedy, I also recognize that it was both a tragedy of his own making and a tragedy of the far left, which is driving an entire movement that is a crazy group against law enforcement,” Vance said.
