MAGA's Reaction to Minnesota ICE Incident: A Call to Skepticism | Vanity Fair

Whatever uncertainties remain about an ICE agent killing Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis on Wednesday, this much is clear: the Trump administration’s accounting of the incident defies credibility.

Tricia McLaughlin, the assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Homeland Security, has claimed that immigration enforcement agents were confronted by “violent rioters,” that one tried to “run over” officials in an act of “domestic terrorism,” and that the agent “fired defensive shots”—killing the “alleged perpetrator.” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem echoed that narrative, saying Wednesday that the deceased was a terrorist who had “rammed [ICE agents] with her vehicle.”

But videos of the shooting—captured from multiple angles by bystanders—undermine the administration’s narrative. The footage shows Good—a 37-year-old mother—sitting in her SUV in the middle of the street. She appears to wave ahead approaching vehicles. One stops. Two agents confront her, with one trying to open the driver’s side door. She reverses slightly, steers the car right, and appears to begin attempting to drive away. A third agent, standing near the left front headlight, draws his gun and fires into the vehicle, which crashes into a pole and parked car. One person taping the scene screams, asking agents if they have a conscience. Another bystander asks if he can approach to check the victim’s pulse.

“No. Back up, now,” an agent responds.

“I’m a physician,” the bystander says.

“I don’t care.”

Good was pronounced dead at a hospital.

Noem claimed Wednesday that the ICE agent who shot Good had been treated at the hospital and released. Donald Trump, in a Truth Social post, said that it was “hard to believe [the agent] is alive” after the incident—though footage reveals that the shooter apparently had only glancing contact with the vehicle, and can be seen walking around afterward, without visible injury. (Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara told CNN that he was told “only the woman” was injured in the incident.) “The situation is being studied,” Trump wrote. “But the reason these incidents are happening is because the Radical Left is threatening, assaulting, and targeting our Law Enforcement Officers and ICE on a daily basis.”

Trump later told New York Times reporters in the Oval Office that the situation was “terrible,” an equivocation that recalled his response to the murder of peaceful protester Heather Heyer at the white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally during his first term. But he stood by his version of events in Minneapolis, even after watching video of the incident in front of reporters: “She behaved horribly,” Trump said of Good. “And then she ran him over. She didn’t try to run him over. She ran him over.”

Trump’s acolytes and enablers have adopted this line, seemingly as a matter of reflex. “The driver of the vehicle weaponized that vehicle against law enforcement,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told a scrum of reporters Wednesday, attributing the incident to “rhetoric against law enforcement.”

“You don’t think there’s any chance the ICE officer did anything wrong?” CNN’s Manu Raju asked.

“I don’t know,” Johnson replied. “I wasn’t there, and neither were you, and it’s wrong for people to jump to these conclusions without a full investigation.”

Yet the administration and its allies have already jumped to their own conclusion—without investigation, and without regard for the reality that is plain to see in the bystander video from the scene. In doing so, they are not only rallying around the agent who killed Good (and put his own colleagues at risk)—they are creating a permission structure for federal agents to commit more violence in the president’s name. “I want every ICE officer to know that their president, vice president, and the entire administration stands behind them,” Vice President JD Vance posted Wednesday night. “To the radicals assaulting them, doxxing them, and threatening them: congratulations, we’re going to work even harder to enforce the law.”

Good’s killing is at least the ninth ICE-involved shooting in recent months. In each instance, as the Times has noted, ICE fired into vehicles. Two shootings occurred in Chicago during Operation Midway Blitz, the immigration crackdown overseen by Greg Bovino—who was also in Minneapolis Wednesday. One man, Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez, was killed in suburban Franklin Park in September; another woman, Marimar Martinez, was shot five times the next month during a raid on the city’s southwest side. As ABC 7 Chicago pointed out, DHS described those two shootings in nearly identical language as Wednesday’s incident in Minneapolis. And, in both instances, the official narrative did not seem to align with reality. (Martinez, who was labeled a “domestic terrorist” by DHS, had all charges against her dropped when her case was brought before a federal judge.)

The administration’s insistence that Good was the aggressor—a “deranged leftist,” in Vance’s telling, whose death was a “tragedy of her own making”—is an insistence that the public disregard what they can see with their own eyes. It also makes plain—to the masked agents deployed to American cities; to the people who might protest their presence—that there is no conduct too heinous for the Trump administration to excuse or endorse. There is no red line for this administration.

Democrats, both local and national, have expressed outrage over the killing and the MAGA response. “What we are seeing is the consequences of governance designed to generate fear, headlines, and conflict,” said Minnesota governor Tim Walz, the former Democratic vice presidential candidate who dropped his bid for reelection days ago amid scrutiny of a large fraud scheme in the state. The MAGA right has used the scandal as grist for bigoted attacks on the Somali community in Minnesota, and the administration cited it in announcing its “largest [immigration] operation to date” in the state.

“We’ve dreaded this moment since the early stages of this ICE presence in Minneapolis,” Mayor Jacob Frey said Wednesday. “They are not here to cause safety in this city. What they are doing is not to provide safety in America. What they are doing is causing chaos and distrust.”

“To ICE,” Frey added, “get the fuck out of Minneapolis.”

Some on the right accused Frey of incitement over his remarks. But they seemed to reflect the anger and frustration in the city: “I’m pretty right-leaning,” one bystander who witnessed the Good killing told MS Now. “But seeing this—this is not what you need to do. It’s not how to do it. This is not how we’re supposed to be doing things around here in America.”

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