US Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem speaks during a press conference in New York.Yuki Iwamura/AP
Kristi Noem spent Sunday defending the actions of ICE agent Jonathan Ross, who shot and killed Renée Nicole Good in Minneapolis last week. The Trump administration, she asserted, was fully committed to ensuring that laws are enforced evenhandedly.
But it quickly became clear that wasn’t true.
During the Sunday interview on CNN’s State of the Union, the Secretary of Homeland Security reiterated the Trump administration’s position on the shooting, insisting that Good had supposedly been “breaking the law by impeding and obstructing a law enforcement operation.” Noem repeated the extremely dubious allegation that Good had “weaponized” her vehicle to “attack” Ross in “an act of domestic terrorism.” And she said that Good had “harassed” law enforcement at additional locations throughout the morning.
“These officers were doing their due diligence—what their training had prepared them to do—to make sure they were handling it appropriately,” Noem insisted.
But when anchor Jake Tapper played video of the January 6 insurrection, Noem struggled to explain how Trump’s mass pardons for the Capitol rioters could be reconciled with the administration’s current support for federal law enforcement.
“Every single situation is going to rely on the situation those officers are on,” she said, without directly mentioning the Capitol attack. “But they know that when people are putting hands on them, when they are using weapons against them, when they’re physically harming them, that they have the authority to arrest those individuals.”
As Tapper pointed out, Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of every single January 6 defendant on his first day back in office—suggesting that the president is willing to tolerate some assaults on federal law enforcement. But Noem, improbably, maintained that the Trump administration was consistent. “When we’re out there, we don’t pick and choose which situations and which laws are enforced and which ones aren’t,” she said. “Every single one of them is being enforced under the Trump administration.”
“That’s just not true,” Tapper responded. “There’s a different standard for law enforcement officials being attacked if they’re being attacked by Trump supporters.”
Later in the show, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey rejected Noem’s allegation that Good was intentionally attacking Ross and said that the Trump administration’s portrayal of Minneapolis as an unsafe city that requires more federal law enforcement is unfounded.
“You know how many shootings we’ve had this year? Two. And one of them was ICE,” Frey said. “ICE and Kristi Noem and everything they’re doing is making it far less safe.”
According to an analysis of Minneapolis crime data by the Minnesota Star Tribune, gun violence peaked during pandemic lockdown, but shootings have declined since then in all but one of the city’s five police precincts.
As Noah Lanard reported on Thursday, immigration agents across the country have shot at least nine people since September. All of them were in cars, despite cops being trained not to shoot at moving vehicles and, instead, to get out of the way. Noah spoke with Seth Stoughton, a professor of law and criminal justice at the University of South Carolina and a former Florida police officer, who cited the long history of people getting hurt when police shoot at moving vehicles.
Meanwhile, many Democrats have called for new rules to curb abuses by federal immigration officers, including a requirement to show warrants prior to making arrests. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) is expected to introduce legislation to push these changes.
“In many ways they’ve become lawless at this point,” one House Democrat said Friday, according to the Hill. “No search warrants. Masks. Refusing to tell people why they’re being picked up. Deporting people to places without telling their family. You can’t have that.”
On Sunday’s Meet the Press on NBC, Murphy said that his proposal is not a “sweeping” reform but simply aims to return to when ICE “cared about legality.”
“It’s reasonable for Democrats, speaking on behalf of the majority of the American public who don’t approve of what ICE is doing, to say, ‘If you want to fund DHS, I want to fund a DHS that is operating in a safe and legal manner,’” Murphy said.
