New Orleans These are the facts. Renee Nicole Good, 37-year-old Minneapolis woman, was shot and killed by an immigration agent in the city in her car. That much is certain. From that point though, the tragedy is compounded by claim after another infected by malevolence and injustice.
Videos seem to show Good driving away from the agent, when he killed her. Poignantly, the last words ascribed to her were “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.”
Typically, Kristi Noem, Homeland Security chief, backed by Trump and VP Vance, have claimed she was a “domestic terrorist” and her car had been weaponized.
The FBI was tasked to investigate the actions of the ICE agent. The Minneapolis and Minnesota police forces have been blocked from participating in the investigation. Noem has claimed that it is outside of their “jurisdiction,” though any of us that have ever watched any police procedural know that one agency leads and the others typically collaborate.
Worse, the administration claims that the Minnesota cops would be biased against the ICE agent. They do this without a shred of irony while Noem, Trump and the gang blame the victim for her own death with one outrageous allegation after another without offering a shred of evidence. Noem claims the agent was acting according to “his training,” while police trainers and security experts argue that no one is trained to stand in front of a car and exacerbate the situation, rather than deescalating the affair, as Good seems to have been doing with her last words.
The administration is so desperate to defend its ruthless strategy and tactics against immigrants that in any other rational world they would have either zipped a lip or recused themselves in order to create the veneer of objectivity. Instead, they have gone out of their way to prejudice any neutral investigation of this killing. They are demanding that the FBI investigate the entire activist community that has assembled in Minneapolis, like Los Angeles and so many other cities, to warn immigrants of ICE raids and overreach. Trump “described Ms. Good and her wife, Becca Good, as being ‘professional agitators,’ adding that the authorities would ‘find out who’s paying for it.’” This is all of a piece with Trump’s witch hunt for antifa and jaw flapping about vast left conspiracies and mobilizations against him and his administration.
At this point, we can forget about justice for Renee Good and maybe for any good in the future. We can see the administration’s whitewash in real time via any news source we consult. We now have to worry about valid, constitutionally protected first amendment rights to protest being criminalized in this so-called investigation. The administration seems to be trying to tar the thousands in Minnesota and elsewhere that have rallied, whistled, and warned immigrants of ICE’s presence in their neighborhoods as involved in illegal or terrorist activity.
We’re living in Alice’s Wonderland where everything is upside down. Trump is threatening to bomb Iran, if that country’s government harms protestors at the same time that in America he is targeting and attacking protestors willy-nilly. Unfortunately, this is not about irony, but one injustice piling on top of another, advancing individual tragedies into collective horror, as our grip on the threads of democracy continue to fray.