There’s a lot we don’t know about the shooting of Renee Nicole Good, who was killed yesterday by federal immigration agents deployed to Minnesota. But in the chaotic aftermath of the shooting, one thing became immediately clear: The Trump administration was lying about what happened.
Shortly after news began circulating about the shooting, the Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement on X that “rioters began blocking ICE officers and one of these violent rioters weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism.” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and the White House adviser Stephen Miller also described the incident as “domestic terrorism,” while President Donald Trump posted on his social network that Good “ran over the ICE Officer.”
Videos of the incident, taken by bystanders, show almost every element of McLaughlin’s statement to be false. There were no riots at the scene, and no rioters. The vehicle appears to be driving away from the armed federal agents, not toward them, and no one was run over. And there is no evidence that terrorism of any kind was involved. After the shooting, federal agents then reportedly prevented a bystander who identified himself as a physician from tending to Good. “They are already trying to spin this as an action of self-defense,” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey told reporters. “Having seen the video of myself, I want to tell everybody directly, that is bullshit.”
[Read: Lethal force on a frozen street]
A perverse absurdity of American law and culture, however, is that agents of the state empowered to use lethal force are rarely held to high standards for doing so. Good’s reasons for being in the neighborhood are not publicly known yet. What the witness sees, though, is simple: A scared woman is shot dead by an armed agent of the state. The Trump administration’s position is also simple: She deserved it. “Do you think this officer was wrong in defending his life against a deranged leftist who tried to run him over?” Vice President J. D. Vance posted.
Administration officials’ indifference to facts, to due process, to the dignity of the deceased, and to basic human decency is remarkable. They could have pleaded for patience and said the incident would be investigated—the standard response in such circumstances. They could have even done so while defending the federal agents they have deployed to terrorize areas they perceive as Democratic Party enclaves. Instead, they proceeded to make ostentatiously dishonest statements that they knew would be contradicted by the video evidence available to anyone with eyes to see it. The federal government now speaks with the voice of the right-wing smear machine: partisan, dishonest, and devoted to vilifying Trump’s perceived enemies rather than informing the public. Good’s mother, partner, andchildren have to cope not only with their unfathomable loss, but with a campaign designed to justify her killing. Their own lives will be subject to invasive scrutiny by the government and its allies, in a search for any derogatory information about Good that might somehow be used to justify her killing. For some, that won’t even be necessary. “I do not feel bad for the woman that was involved,” the Republican lawmaker Randy Fine told the right-wing network Newsmax.
As my colleague Quinta Jurecic has reported, the Trump administration has made a point of following through on absurd accusations by filing absurd charges. The most relevant example here is that of Marimar Martinez, who survived being shot multiple times by a federal agent in Chicago; DHS claimed that she, too, had rammed them with her car. The agent later bragged to his buddies about his eagle-eyed gunning-down of Martinez, who was unarmed and hadn’t committed a crime. The charges against her were dropped.
The New York Times reported that the death of Good was the ninth shooting by an ICE officer since September, all of which officials called self-defense. In at least one of those incidents—the fatal shooting of Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez, a Mexican immigrant—there was video evidence that contradicted DHS’s account. The administration has also charged Newark Mayor Ras Baraka with trespassing and Representative LaMonica McIver with assault, falsely accusing them of storming an ICE facility, when video of the encounter shows nothing of the kind. Baraka is now suing for defamation. Another supposed menace to society was accused of assault for scraping the knuckles of an FBI agent during a scuffle—the grand jury refused to indict over this harrowing example of anti-hand crime. In every one of these incidents, the administration lied about both the events and the civilians involved in them, in an attempt to justify the use of force or subsequent prosecution.
[David A. Graham: A deadly shooting in Minnesota]
The Trump administration has repeatedly targeted small and politically disempowered populations—Haitians, Somalis, trans people—in order to justify abuses of power. But its abuses of power are not limited to those communities. What the government can do to the most vulnerable among us, it can also do to you.
The blatant lies about Minneapolis serve several purposes. They perpetuate the false narrative that federal agents are in constant peril and therefore justified in using lethal force at the slightest hint of danger. They assure federal agents that they can harm or even kill American citizens with impunity, and warn those who might be moved to protest Trump’s immigration policies of the same thing. Perhaps most grim, they communicate to the public that if you happen to be killed by a federal agent, your government will bear false witness to the world that you were a terrorist.
This approach, of course, is quite familiar to communities that have been dealing with police abuses for as long as there have been professional police forces. In 2000, then–New York City Mayor and future Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani justified the killing of the Haitian American Patrick Dorismond by police by quipping that he was “no altar boy.” Embarrassingly for Giuliani, whose capacity for shame was overestimated even then, it turned out that Dorismond had literally been an altar boy. Dorismond’s mother responded to the campaign to justify her son’s killing with an observation that continues to haunt me decades later.
“They kill,” Dorismond said, “and after that, they kill him the other way—with the mouth.”
Taking Good’s life wasn’t enough. The moment she died, it became imperative for the administration to also destroy her memory.
The post The Smear Machine appeared first on The Atlantic.
