\n<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a lot we don\u2019t know about the shooting of Renee Nicole Good, who was killed yesterday by federal immigration agents deployed to Minnesota. But in the chaotic aftermath of the shooting, one thing became immediately clear: The Trump administration was lying about what happened.<\/p>\n
Shortly after news began circulating about the shooting, the Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement on X that \u201crioters began blocking ICE officers and one of these violent rioters weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them\u2014an act of domestic terrorism.\u201d DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and the White House adviser Stephen Miller also described the incident as \u201cdomestic terrorism,\u201d while President Donald Trump posted on his social network that Good \u201cran over the ICE Officer.\u201d<\/p>\n
Videos of the incident, taken by bystanders, show almost every element of McLaughlin\u2019s statement to be false. There were no riots at the scene, and no rioters. The vehicle appears to be driving away from the armed federal agents, not toward them, and no one was run over. And there is no evidence that terrorism of any kind was involved. After the shooting, federal agents then reportedly prevented a bystander who identified himself as a physician from tending to Good. \u201cThey are already trying to spin this as an action of self-defense,\u201d Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey told reporters. \u201cHaving seen the video of myself, I want to tell everybody directly, that is bullshit.\u201d<\/p>\n
A perverse absurdity of American law and culture, however, is that agents of the state empowered to use lethal force are rarely held to high standards for doing so. Good\u2019s reasons for being in the neighborhood are not publicly known yet. What the witness sees, though, is simple: A scared woman is shot dead by an armed agent of the state. The Trump administration\u2019s position is also simple: She deserved it. \u201cDo you think this officer was wrong in defending his life against a deranged leftist who tried to run him over?\u201d Vice President J. D. Vance posted.<\/p>\n
Administration officials\u2019 indifference to facts, to due process, to the dignity of the deceased, and to basic human decency is remarkable. They could have pleaded for patience and said the incident would be investigated\u2014the standard response in such circumstances. They could have even done so while defending the federal agents they have deployed to terrorize areas they perceive as Democratic Party enclaves. Instead, they proceeded to make ostentatiously dishonest statements that they knew would be contradicted by the video evidence available to anyone with eyes to see it. The federal government now speaks with the voice of the right-wing smear machine: partisan, dishonest, and devoted to vilifying Trump\u2019s perceived enemies rather than informing the public. Good\u2019s mother, partner, and children have to cope not only with their unfathomable loss, but with a campaign designed to justify her killing. Their own lives will be subject to invasive scrutiny by the government and its allies, in a search for any derogatory information about Good that might somehow be used to justify her killing. For some, that won\u2019t even be necessary. \u201cI do not feel bad for the woman that was involved,\u201d the Republican lawmaker Randy Fine told the right-wing network Newsmax.<\/p>\n
As my colleague Quinta Jurecic has reported, the Trump administration has made a point of following through on absurd accusations by filing absurd charges. The most relevant example here is that of Marimar Martinez, who survived being shot multiple times by a federal agent in Chicago; DHS claimed that she, too, had rammed them with her car. The agent later bragged to his buddies about his eagle-eyed gunning-down of Martinez, who was\u00a0 unarmed and hadn\u2019t committed a crime. The charges against her were dropped.<\/p>\n
The<\/em> New York Times<\/em> reported that the death of Good was the ninth shooting by an ICE officer since September, all of which officials called self-defense. In at least one of those incidents\u2014the fatal shooting of Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez, a Mexican immigrant\u2014there was video evidence that contradicted DHS\u2019s account. The administration has also charged Newark Mayor Ras Baraka with trespassing and Representative LaMonica McIver with assault, falsely accusing them of storming an ICE facility, when video of the encounter shows nothing of the kind. Baraka is now suing for defamation. Another supposed menace to society was accused of assault for scraping the knuckles of an FBI agent during a scuffle\u2014the grand jury refused to indict over this harrowing example of anti-hand crime. In every one of these incidents, the administration lied about both the events and the civilians involved in them, in an attempt to justify the use of force or subsequent prosecution.<\/p>\n The Trump administration has repeatedly targeted small and politically disempowered populations\u2014Haitians, Somalis, trans people\u2014in order to justify abuses of power. But its abuses of power are not limited to those communities. What the government can do to the most vulnerable among us, it can also do to you.<\/p>\n The blatant lies about Minneapolis serve several purposes. They perpetuate the false narrative that federal agents are in constant peril and therefore justified in using lethal force at the slightest hint of danger. They assure federal agents that they can harm or even kill American citizens with impunity, and warn those who might be moved to protest Trump\u2019s immigration policies of the same thing. Perhaps most grim, they communicate to the public that if you happen to be killed by a federal agent, your government will bear false witness to the world that you were a terrorist.<\/p>\n This approach, of course, is quite familiar to communities that have been dealing with police abuses for as long as there have been professional police forces. In 2000, then\u2013New York City Mayor and future Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani justified the killing of the Haitian American Patrick Dorismond by police by quipping that he was \u201cno altar boy.\u201d Embarrassingly for Giuliani, whose capacity for shame was overestimated even then, it turned out that Dorismond had literally been an altar boy. Dorismond\u2019s mother responded to the campaign to justify her son\u2019s killing with an observation that continues to haunt me decades later.<\/p>\n \u201cThey kill,\u201d Dorismond said, \u201cand after that, they kill him the other way\u2014with the mouth.\u201d<\/p>\n Taking Good\u2019s life wasn\u2019t enough. The moment she died, it became imperative for the administration to also destroy her memory.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There\u2019s a lot we don\u2019t know about the shooting of Renee Nicole Good, who was killed yesterday by federal immigration agents deployed to Minnesota. But in the chaotic aftermath of the shooting, one thing became immediately clear: The Trump administration was lying about what happened. Shortly after news began circulating about the shooting, the Department<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":40876,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[5907,4527],"class_list":{"0":"post-40875","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-lies","9":"tag-shooting"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40875","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40875"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40875\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/40876"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}