None of This Should Have Happened
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After an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis last week, forensic examinations of videos of the incident emerged within hours. These meticulous reconstructions were useful for debunking the lies told by Trump-administration officials in the immediate aftermath of the killing, and they show the power of technology, in an age when nearly everyone has a camera in their pocket, to convey a complicated moment.
Sleuths, amateur and professional, pored over each frame to try to guess what Jonathan Ross, the ICE officer who fatally shot Good, might have believed or known in the moment about what she was doing or where her car was heading. But at the core of the tragedy is a larger truth: None of this needed to happen. A series of choices by the administration led to this point—the use of ICE and Border Patrol to menace Democratic-led states and cities; White House pressure on the Department of Homeland Security to make high quotas, which has resulted in shortened training and rushed missions; and the president’s inclination to inflame tensions, all of which created the conditions for the moment that’s now been replayed millions of times.
Under Supreme Court precedent, an officer may shoot at someone fleeing if he reasonably believes that his life or the lives of others are in danger. Prosecutors are often slow to charge officers, because they or juries are hesitant to second-guess officers’ determinations. Ross was also reportedly dragged by a car in June during an attempted arrest, which may have made him more likely to assume the worst about a driver. The shooting might ultimately be legally justified. But Ross also placed himself in front of Good’s car. Many policing experts suggest that this wasn’t tactically justified. How about moral justification? Nothing indicated that Good was trying to hurt anyone before officers began running at her; moments before being shot, Good had said that she wasn’t mad at Ross. In the videos, after Ross fires, a man is heard saying, “Fucking bitch.” With the information we have, a moral defense for the killing is nowhere to be found.
There was no need for the huge deployment of federal agents—including a reported 1,500 deportation officers—to Minnesota in the first place. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem dispatched ICE agents to the Minneapolis area after the White House, inspired by MAGA media, grabbed onto a sprawling fraud investigation involving Somali immigrants and government aid. By all accounts, this is a real scandal, not a partisan invention; charges were first brought by Joe Biden’s Justice Department. But the scandal also presented an opportunity for political grandstanding (especially because Minnesota Governor Tim Walz was on the ticket against Donald Trump and J. D. Vance in the previous election). The president is using the fraud case as an opportunity to demonize immigrants. “THE DAY OF RECKONING & RETRIBUTION IS COMING!” he posted this morning on Truth Social, referring to immigration enforcement in Minnesota. Although DHS does conduct investigations, less obvious is why tactical experts such as Ross were needed on the scene.
Before and after Good’s death, the Trump DHS has sought opportunities to escalate. When citizens called attention to ICE’s presence by making noise and spreading word via social media, DHS falsely claimed that those people were violent rioters. After Good’s death, DHS surged more officers to the area, alleging that the fraud situation merited more agents; officers are now conducting traffic stops and door-to-door operations. But Good’s killing has no obvious connection to fraud, and it does not suggest any elevated threat to officers. Instead, the presence of more officers elevates the threat to civilians, as a Wall Street Journal investigation into ICE traffic stops demonstrates.
Pressure from the White House to meet deportation quotas has meant that ICE agents at best are working hastily and at worst feel unshackled to act with brutality, aware that they are unlikely to face discipline. (Six federal prosecutors in Minnesota resigned today, including the leader of the Somali-fraud investigation, because of the Justice Department’s direction to investigate Good’s widow but not Ross.) This, too, increases the likelihood for mistakes and abuses of power.
The Minnesota actions are, of course, only the latest in a string of similar Trump-administration actions targeting cities that vote Democratic: Los Angeles; Washington, D.C.; Chicago; Portland, Oregon; Memphis; Charlotte, North Carolina; New Orleans. The administration has used DHS personnel, the National Guard, and, in L.A., Marines. Trump and his aides have argued that these raids are essential for controlling crime and illegal immigration, but sometimes enforcement seems incidental to performative brutality. In one midnight raid at a Chicago building, for example, the federal government flew a Black Hawk helicopter and turned people out of bed with flash-bang grenades, yet ProPublica found that not a single one of the people arrested was charged with a crime afterward.
Trump ended National Guard deployments in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Portland late last year, bowing to repeated federal-court rulings, in lawsuits brought by cities and states, that establish that he had exceeded his powers. The first two weeks of January suggest that the administration will simply use DHS to serve the same function of punishing and intimidating cities and states that diverge from Trump politically. Minnesota and Illinois officials sued to block some immigration enforcement yesterday, but because immigration enforcement is a standard federal power, these suits may face longer odds.
Even unfettered, however, the White House is unlikely to achieve its goals of deporting all unauthorized immigrants—in part because they are based on wild overestimates of how many people are in the United States illegally. But Trump and the top aide Stephen Miller’s obsession with the issue means more incidents like Renee Good’s killing. A one-off tragedy is horrifying. What’s worse is when policy choices make it likely to happen again.
Related:
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- How the Supreme Court broke Congress
- A breathtaking week of pure Trump id
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Today’s News
- President Trump spoke to business leaders in Detroit today about the economy, hours after new data was released that showed inflation holding steady at 2.7 percent annually. The report showed pressures easing in some areas but grocery costs, airfares, and electricity costs rising.
- As protests continue in Iran, Trump posted on Truth Social this morning that demonstrators should “KEEP PROTESTING - TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS” and that “HELP IS ON ITS WAY.” He announced yesterday a 25 percent tariff on countries doing business with Iran and warned of possible further U.S. action in the country.
- Bill and Hillary Clinton refused to comply with House Oversight Committee subpoenas to testify in the committee’s investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, arguing through their attorneys that the subpoenas are invalid and politically motivated. Committee Chair James Comer said that the panel will vote next week on whether to hold Bill Clinton in contempt of Congress; a similar vote is possible for Hillary Clinton if she does not appear tomorrow.
Evening Read
Who Gets to Be Indian—And Who Decides?
By David Treuer
To be an enrolled member of a tribe is almost entirely contingent on “blood quantum”—the percentage of one’s lineage that can be traced to tribal ancestors.
I don’t qualify for enrollment in my tribe. To be enrolled in the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, you need a quantum of one-quarter Minnesota Chippewa Tribe blood, as well as one parent who is an enrolled member. (Chippewa is a French corruption of the original Ojibwe.) Even though my mother grew up on Leech Lake and devoted her life to the tribe, first as a nurse and then as a lawyer and tribal-court judge, her official blood quantum is only one-quarter. Her grandmother was recorded as half Ojibwe, even though she was full, and her father was on the rolls as a quarter when he was really half. I should be enrolled. The fact that I should be but am not turned the idea of Native blood into an obsession for me, at least for a while, because it was a measure of my Indianness that I couldn’t change.
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Culture Break
Watch. Black Swan, released 15 years ago, offers a sharp social critique of the pitfalls faced by ambitious women, Faith Hill writes.
Read. Gideon Leek explores the unhappy literary families of the internet age.
PS
New tidbits continue to emerge from The New York Times’ lengthy interview with Trump, and one in particular caught my eye. In my December cover story about how Trump and his allies could seek to subvert the midterm elections, I reported on the danger of the executive branch attempting to seize ballot boxes. This isn’t just catastrophizing: Some Trump allies proposed such a plan after the 2020 election, but it was rejected. In the Times interview, the reporter David Sanger asked Trump about that. “Well, I should have,” Trump replied. Americans should be prepared for him to try again when he has a chance.
— David
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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
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