19 hours ago

ICE agents have killed – again. The Trump administration blames the victim | Moira Donegan

A woman in Minneapolis has died as her neighbors fought Donald Trump’s mass deportation operation. On Wednesday morning, a group of local civilian protesters gathered around a site where several ICE agents were attempting to abduct migrants. The agents were part of a surge of roughly 2,000 deportation officers who have been sent to Minneapolis as part of Trump’s effort to persecute the Somali community there. In a disturbing incident caught on video by multiple onlookers, a woman driving in an SUV covered in bumper stickers blocked traffic on the residential road – perhaps as part of an effort to keep ICE vehicles from passing. In the videos, an ICE agent approaches the SUV, yelling: “Get out of the car. Get out of the fucking car.” He stands at the driver’s side, with his feet clear of the vehicle, and reaches into where the woman is driving. She begins to drive away, and an officer fires three shots, the last from behind the vehicle as the car pulls away from him. The SUV then crashes into a parked vehicle as onlookers scream in distress. “You did a murder, for what?” one of the protesters calls out to the agents.

The driver, a US citizen who was described by Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar as a “legal observer”, was declared dead. She died less than a mile from where George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in 2020. Her name was Renee Nicole Good, and she was 37.

Good is not the first person to be slaughtered by deportation agents in the course of their raids. In September, ICE agents in Chicago shot Silverio Villegas González, a Mexican-born father and cook, in the neck at “close range” as he allegedly fled a migrant abduction operation. He died, too.

Non-fatal shootings by ICE agents have also disfigured American citizens and residents and warped their lives. Marimar Martinez, a 30-year-old citizen in Chicago, allegedly tailed DHS agents in her car during that same Chicago operation in October, shouting “la migra”, a common Spanish slang term for immigration agents that advocates yell out as a warning. A DHS agent shot Martinez five times before allegedly driving off, leaving her bleeding in her car. Miraculously, she survived. Federal prosecutors tried to criminally prosecute Martinez for the incident, but the case against her quickly fell apart, and charges were dropped. Altogether, a report by the Trace found that immigration officers opened fire in 14 known incidents in the course of their operations since July.

As they were in Martinez’s case, federal authorities seem eager to respond to the death in Minneapolis by demonizing the woman they had shot. On Fox News, homeland security secretary Kristi Noem said of the incident: “It was an act of domestic terrorism.” She was referring to Good, the woman who was killed. “Officers got stuck in the snow. They were attempting to push out their vehicle, and a woman attacked them, and those surrounding them, and attempted to run them over.” This is untrue, and contradicted by videos of the incident, which show the officers not stuck in the snow, but screamingly approaching the woman in her own parked vehicle, and then shooting her at point blank range as she attempted to drive away.

In another video from just after the incident, a crying woman sitting on the ground outside the crashed SUV screams: “They killed my wife. I don’t know what to do.” Later, she says: “We stopped to film and they shot her.” Her grief will now alter the course of her life. It will be vast, and it is needless. Will anyone be held accountable for it? The man who killed Good has so far not been identified. At the time he shot her, he was wearing a mask.

The mass deportations spearheaded by the Trump regime are an ethnic cleansing effort. Immigration officers target peaceful working people on the basis of their race. They kidnap them, and funnel them into detention centers where they endure horrible conditions, and are given few rights and even less due process. They are taken away from their jobs, their families, and their communities. With violence like what the immigration agent chose in Minneapolis today, the government is looking to tell Americans that resistance to this injustice is not worth it; it will only be punished.

This is not true. The assaults on immigrants have created a righteous moral outrage on the part of those born in America and others protected by the rights of citizenship, and everywhere ICE and the DHS have embarked on their sadistic and racist kidnapping sprees, they have met resistance from Americans who hate tyranny and love their neighbors. These protesters are among the best of America, ragefully and rightfully facing down the armed forces of a would-be autocrat in an effort to protect the innocent. Though we do not yet know much about her, or about her presence on that Minneapolis street – Good’s mother says she believes her daughter was not involved in the protest, though videos of the incident make it seem as if she was – what we do know suggests that Renee Nicole Good represented the spirit of the movement: a hatred for injustice, a desire to protect the innocent, a sense of responsibility to those around her. Now, she has become a martyr to the cause.

It is easy, as the Trump administration attempts to consolidate authoritarian power and to rearrange the US into a formal white nationalist autocracy where power is defined by displays of violent domination, to think that the moral degeneracy represented by the immigration agents and those who command them represents a core truth of the American spirit – that ours is a country diseased in mind and soul, incapable of fulfilling the lofty goals of dignity and equality for all that have so long animated our national myths. There is some truth in this dark thought.

But there is another truth, too: that everywhere ICE goes, they have been met with ridicule, resistance, and contempt from ordinary Americans, unarmed and unbending, who have faced down the kidnappers and bullies in persistent protests and street actions – sometimes even succeeding in freeing a kidnapped neighbor or bullying the thugs out of their neighborhoods. This, too, is a truth of this country: that people like Martinez, and like Good, are more numerous than the racists and the autocrats.

On social media, Jon Collins, a reporter for Minnesota Public Radio, shared video of ICE agents in Minneapolis being surrounded and confronted by protesters in the immediate aftermath of Wednesday’s shooting. In the clip, regular Americans, bundled up against the midwestern winter, surround the armed agents in a tight, angry circle. “Are you going to shoot someone else and kill them? Are you going to murder someone else?” one man taunts. It’s not an idle question: the protesters, civilians and ordinary people, are facing down armed men who have shown themselves capable of bigotry, brazenness, and murder. A moment later, someone shouts: “You can’t kill us all, Nazis. You can’t kill us all.”