The “terrorist” killed by ICE was a mum in her SUV

ON JANUARY 7th agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the agency that carries out deportations, drove down a street in Minneapolis. A video of the incident shows several masked officers approaching Renee Nicole Good in her maroon SUV. One agent told her to “get out of the fucking car”. She reversed, and tried to drive away when one of the officers, standing at the car’s front-left corner, pulled a pistol and appeared to point it at her windshield. At least two shots rang out. The car accelerated and then smashed into parked vehicles. A bystander filming the interaction approached the crash. There was blood spatter on the snow, and Ms Good was dead.

This is not the first shooting ICE agents have been involved in since fanning out across America’s big cities last year. The Trace, a news outlet that covers gun violence, counts at least 14 shootings involving immigration agents since President Donald Trump took office. Yet the shooting in Minneapolis quickly became one of the most high-profile of the bunch. Federal and local officials will investigate the incident to determine whether the officer feared for his life, as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) asserts, and if the use of force was warranted. What brought the agents to Ms Good’s vehicle and her reasons for pulling away are as yet unknown. But the killing fits a pattern of tragic and seemingly inevitable violence arising from tensions between protesters and immigration officers amid assertions by political figures such as Stephen Miller that ICE agents have “immunity” while conducting their duties.

These types of incidents began last summer when squads of immigration agents deployed to big cities such as Los Angeles and Chicago. ICE officers used to conducting targeted immigration raids, and Border Patrol agents trained in aggression on the southern border, were suddenly chasing migrants through city streets and confronting protesters unhappy with Mr Trump’s mass-deportation campaign. Any time a video on social media seemed to show agents using excessive force, DHS was ready with a response similar to the one federal officials put out following the Minneapolis shooting. The protesters are rioters, they allege, who have tried to attack federal agents. The officers, DHS has repeatedly said, are only acting in self-defence.

Mr Trump parroted this claim in a Truth Social post hours after the shooting. “The woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting,” he wrote, “who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense.” Tricia McLaughlin, a DHS spokesperson, called it “an act of domestic terrorism”. The video does not appear to show Ms Good running over an officer but she does seem to have put her car in motion near two of them.

DHS’s assertions in the past have been repeatedly debunked. Witness testimony, social-media videos and body-cam footage shown during hearings in federal court in Chicago last year revealed that Border Patrol agents involved in such confrontations lied under oath and exaggerated the threat from protesters in order to justify their aggression. Yet these revelations did not stop the pattern from recurring once the deportation machine came to Minneapolis. “We’ve dreaded this moment since the early stages of this ICE presence in Minneapolis”, said Jacob Frey, the city’s mayor, in a press conference after the shooting. Like the mayors of Los Angeles and Chicago before him, Mr Frey argues that ICE’s presence is provoking unrest, not making cities safer. “I have a message for ICE,” he said. “Get the fuck out of Minneapolis.”

It will take some time for the facts of the shooting to be clarified. Former ICE officials say that, in the past, allegations of excessive force were usually investigated internally. But Mr Miller’s quip about immunity suggests that this administration is not interested in punishing agents for behaviour that might lead to accountability if local police forces engaged in it. The Supremacy Clause of the constitution, which elevates federal law over state law, can make it tricky for local prosecutors to charge federal agents with a crime they may have committed while on duty. Judges reviewing whether such cases can proceed have recently tended to decide for themselves whether an officer acted reasonably, rather than allowing a local jury to weigh in.

Mr Frey urged Minnesotans to stay calm and peaceful in the aftermath of the shooting. He is no doubt remembering how quickly protests escalated in his city after the murder of George Floyd by police in 2020. For months Mr Trump has seemed to want to provoke protesters to violence in order to justify cracking down even harder on Democrat-run cities. Recent court decisions limit his ability to deploy the National Guard the way he did in Los Angeles, but that is not the only option the president has if things get out of hand. He has long toyed with the idea of invoking the Insurrection Act, which would allow him to send troops to cities. Once again, Minneapolis is at the centre of a storm. ■