What did Donald Trump do today?

He trashed a woman murdered today by an ICE agent and her grieving widow.

Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother, was shot to death in Minneapolis by an ICE agent this morning as she was attempting to move her car out of the way of the path of an ICE vehicle. The agent, who has not yet been identified, fired several shots at her vehicle as she was moving away. Good's SUV rolled a short distance until it collided with a parked car.

Video of the event (see below) shows her SUV maneuvering slowly away from the scene. There is a clear separation between it and any law enforcement officer near it. At no point as Good tries to drive away is there ever any person in front of her SUV. The closest any person comes to the vehicle is when the agent who shot her comes up from behind the driver-side window and reaches out with his gun. As he does so, at least one other nearby law enforcement officer is recording the scene with a phone, not showing any sign of alarm. 

A detailed description of the whole event, and links to video from several different angles, is available here. A frame-by-frame analysis showing that neither the shooter nor any other person was in the path of the SUV is available here.

As a senior DHS official admitted today, it is extremely dangerous to fire at vehicles, and law enforcement officers who have actually been trained know never to do it except as a last resort, especially when there are crowds of people nearby. Because the Trump administration is concealing the name of the shooter, it's not immediately clear whether he had any training at all. Trump has been trying to massively expand the size of ICE, and has been aggressively deploying it high-profile politically-motivated raids. But even with $50,000 signing bonuses and vastly lowered entry standards—much lower than for entry-level police work or even private prison guards, and with officials turning a blind eye to what background checks are turning up—recruiting has been sluggish. 

The videos and still images in the link above make completely clear what happened. But within hours of Good's death, Trump was on his private social media site lying about what that video showed and saying that Good was a criminal who was killed in self-defense.

In his post, Trump claimed that the ICE agent was "violently, willfully and viciously [run] over" and that it is hard to believe he is alive." In reality, video shows the agent completely unhurt, and the video above shows he was never anywhere near being run over.

Trump also said that Good's partner was "a professional agitator" because she was screaming. In fact, she was screaming because she had witnessed Good being shot at point-blank range and was desperately trying to get her medical attention. ICE agents on the scene blocked an ambulance and turned away a physician who tried to help.

Trump claims that the ultra-aggressive tactics that ICE now uses, including against American citizens carrying valid documents proving their citizenship, is to "fight crime." In reality, immigrants both documented and undocumented commit crimes at much lower rates than American citizens do, and the emphasis has forced federal law enforcement to abandon actual criminal threats like child sex trafficking and drug smuggling. 

Good's killing at the hands of ICE is the only homicide Minneapolis has seen so far in the new year.

Renee Good's six-year-old daughter, whose father died in 2023, was at school during the shooting. Stuffed animals and children's toys were visible in the car.

 

Good's mother, Donna Ganger, said of her daughter that "she was extremely compassionate. She’s taken care of people all her life. She was loving, forgiving and affectionate. She was an amazing human being." Ganger also said that Good was not part of any organized groups protesting ICE.

Thousands of people in Minneapolis turned out in freezing weather tonight to hold a vigil for Good.

Why does this matter?

• This kind of indifference to human life and suffering is completely depraved. 

• Defaming a dead woman and her grieving family for propaganda purposes is evil.  

• Deliberately telling obvious lies and demanding that people ignore what they can see with their own eyes is so basic to fascism that it's a plot point in 1984. 

• This is what unaccountable secret police deployed to stir up political trouble always do.