Call it recency bias, personal interest, or perhaps just a general concern for society's trajectory right now, but as I followed Wednesday's news of an ICE agent killing 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, then watched the federal government flatly lie about the sequence of events, the indignant language and informational smokescreens felt nauseatingly familiar. You don't have to leave the city, much less the state or country, to find precedent of law enforcement slaughtering the people they're supposed to protect. It's an American tradition already illustrated by many devastated families and callous police union presidents. But for years now, both in Gaza and the West Bank, the Israeli government has modeled how to act with both viciousness and total impunity. That in turn has affected the efficacy of public pressure in other parts of the world.
Typically, when an American police officer kills a person for no reason, the department identifies the killer, places them on some kind of administrative leave, and waits for a trial to acquit them of charges, before a civil suit delivers a diminished form of justice which doesn't include accountability for the perpetrator due to qualified immunity. The official police statements are so convoluted and passively worded that it's difficult to tell what happened, and generally it's left to the media to dig into the victim's background and smear them. Describing this gruesome cycle is not an endorsement of it, but an attempt to emphasize that it's getting worse. In this instance, the aggressive obfuscation is being handled by the Trump administration itself. It's been over 24 hours since a masked ICE agent shot Good in the face as she tried to drive away, a killing caught on video from multiple angles, and the public still doesn't know who the shooter is. We don't even know what his entire face looks like. Update (2:59 p.m. ET): The Minnesota Star Tribune reported that the agent's name is Jonathan Ross.
Instead of transparency, the Department of Homeland Security has retroactively crafted a baseless narrative to make a mother in a car containing stuffed animals appear as a threat. Secretary Kristi Noem described a series of events that clearly did not happen on video, claiming Good committed "an act of domestic terrorism." Spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin claimed that Good "weaponized her vehicle" by trying to drive away. Vice President JD Vance called her "a deranged leftist." None of this can justify what that ICE agent did, and they know it, but as my colleague Albert Burneko wrote, it is done to reassure ICE that the only limits are what they are willing to do. Lie immediately and forcefully, and by the time the public can scrutinize the details, move on to the next act of brutality.
