Yuki Iwamura/AP
“She behaved horribly.”
That’s how President Donald Trump described Renée Good, the 37-year-old woman who was repeatedly shot and killed by an ICE officer on Wednesday, roughly one mile from where a police officer murdered George Floyd nearly six years ago. Speaking to the New York Times, the president then pushed the spurious narrative that Good had run over the officer, prompting him to shoot. “She didn’t try to run him over,” he said without evidence. “She ran him over.”
The remarks are consistent with the administration’s impulse to defend, often with cruel vociferousness, the conduct of ICE officers as they detain, terrorize, sometimes with gunfire, and then brag about it. But the same impulse, by the president and his allies, now that a woman in Minneapolis is dead, is taking on new levels of impunity.
“This vehicle was used to hit this officer,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told reporters in New York on Thursday, where she had been addressing ICE operations in the city. “It was used as a weapon. The officer felt like his life was threatened.”
As federal agents stood behind her, Noem appeared unmoved as reporters repeatedly referred to the multiple video angles that have essentially proven the outright falsehoods of the administration’s smear campaign. As for Good, who, by all accounts of those who knew her, was an exceedingly kind woman, Noem continued to charge her with “domestic terrorism,” just as Stephen Miller did on Wednesday when news of the shooting was only just unfolding.
Then there’s JD Vance, who, speaking from the White House podium on Thursday, puffed his chest and went even further: “Ramming an ICE officer with your car, that’s what justifies being shot.”
“Everybody that is repeating the lie that this is some innocent woman who was out for a drive in Minneapolis, you should be ashamed of yourselves.”
Together, the administration’s pervasive and reflexive disdain for facts—what can literally be seen without dispute—and the reflex to taint a woman now dead, crystallize a new level of ugliness for an administration that shamelessly admits: Violence is us.
