Police agencies in the United States kill more than 1,000 people each year. After many of those deaths, the agencies involved put out statements. Those statements often use what’s known as the exonerative voice to minimize officers’ involvement. The first statement from the Minneapolis Police Department after George Floyd’s death, for example, said that the officers at the scene “noted that he appeared to be suffering from medical distress.” Quite the understatement. These communications often cast events in a light most favorable to the officers involved, sometimes to the point of deception. Too often, they’ll try to smear the deceased by citing a criminal record or suggesting a drug addiction or gang affiliation.
I have been covering policing for more than 20 years and have read and parsed a lot of these statements. The Department of Homeland Security’s response after the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis this month is something else entirely.
For all their flaws, typical communications from police officials usually include a modicum of solemnity. There are assurances that there will be a fair and impartial investigation, even if those investigations too often turn out to be neither. There’s at least the acknowledgment that to take a human life is a profound and serious thing.
The Trump administration’s response to Ms. Good’s death made no such concessions. There were no promises of an impartial investigation. There was no regret or remorse. There was little empathy for her family — for her parents, her partner or the children she left behind. From the moment the world learned about her death, the administration pronounced the shooting not only justified but an act of heroism worthy of praise and celebration.
It isn’t just the lying; it’s that the lies are wildly exaggerated and easily refutable. All the evidence we’ve seen so far, including a meticulous Times forensic analysis of the available footage, makes clear that at worst, Ms. Good mildly obstructed immigration enforcement, disobeyed ambiguous orders or perhaps attempted to flee an arrest. None of those are capital crimes, nor do law enforcement officers get to dole out punishment in such cases. At one point, President Trump justified her shooting by claiming she’d been “very disrespectful” to immigration officers. That isn’t a crime at all.
The lies this administration is telling about Ms. Good aren’t those you deploy as part of a cover-up. They’re those you use when you want to show you can get away with anything. They’re a projection of power.
For the past decade or so, since the protests in Ferguson, Mo., America has engaged in a high-stakes dialogue about police abuse and accountability, the militarization of law enforcement and the push and pull between public safety and civil liberties. Those discussions, while occasionally heated, have been based on a shared understanding that the primary job of domestic law enforcement is to serve the public. What Mr. Trump is doing with federal immigration forces has rendered those debates obsolete.
The surge of federal forces into Minneapolis (like smaller, earlier surges into Los Angeles; Portland, Ore.; Washington; and Chicago) isn’t about law enforcement at all. It is about an administration declaring — explicitly, at times — that the purpose of federal law enforcement isn’t to uphold the rule of law or promote public safety but to enforce the will of a single man.
We started to see this in the way the Trump administration responded to previous shootings by immigration officers, including of Carlitos Ricardo Parias in Los Angeles and Marimar Martinez in Chicago. Administration officials quickly declared those shootings justified — and righteous — with hyperbolic language similar to that used after Ms. Good’s killing. Those claims would also later be disproved by witnesses’ accounts and other evidence. The government eventually dropped the charges against Ms. Martinez. A judge dismissed Mr. Parias’s charges with prejudice, meaning they can’t be brought again.
In fact, nearly all of the administration’s responses to deaths in custody, shootings or other accusations of abuses have used maximalist language to venerate immigration officers, dehumanize their victims and villainize anyone who doesn’t support the Trump administration. There are no disinterested parties. No innocent bystanders. People are either criminal immigrants or radical leftists who deserve what happens to them, or they are heroic, patriotic federal cops incapable of mistakes. There is no humanity for the civilians and no humility for the officers.
Last week, after federal agents dragged Aliya Rahman, a U.S. citizen, from her car and arrested her, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson referred to her as an agitator who was obstructing immigration operations. She was trying to get to a doctor’s appointment at the Traumatic Brain Injury Center. When immigration officers used pepper spray and possibly flash grenades on a vehicle with a family inside, sending three children to the hospital, the department posted to social media, “It is horrific to see radical agitators bring children to violent riots. PLEASE STOP ENDANGERING YOUR CHILDREN.” The family was headed home from a child’s basketball game.
In addition to such language, the administration has embraced fear tactics long associated with totalitarian regimes. Until now, law enforcement officers in the United States rarely masked their faces, save for during specialty operations like SWAT raids. For most agencies, this isn’t a written policy; it’s just been accepted that masked policing isn’t consistent with a democratic society. We want law enforcement officers to see themselves as accountable to the community. And we want community members to see officers as approachable, so they’ll cooperate. Masks undermine both. They instill fear in the community and encourage a menacing aura of infallibility among officers.
Instilling fear is a drawback only if your goal is public safety. This administration has made clear that it doesn’t want marginalized communities — immigrants, Somali U.S. citizens, residents of Latino neighborhoods and so on — to feel safe. It wants them living in fear. This is why they mask. It’s why they shatter car windows. It’s why Stephen Miller, the architect of Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda, went on cable news to assure federal immigration officers, incorrectly, that they have complete immunity from criminal or civil liability and why, after Ms. Good’s death, Department of Homeland Security social media accounts reiterated Mr. Miller’s claim.
The administration has resurrected tactics that professional policing groups have deemed dangerous or counterproductive. ProPublica recently reported on 40 incidents over the past year in which federal immigration officers used potentially fatal chokeholds that are banned by most police agencies. Federal agents have shot into cars at least 10 times since September. This, too, is prohibited by most big city police agencies, in part because it’s too easy to mistake a driver’s intent.
Videos from cities where Mr. Trump has sent federal agents have shown agents attempting to stop fast-moving vehicles with techniques that most police departments prohibit or reserve for rare confrontations involving exceptionally dangerous people. They’re now being used against people suspected of immigration violations or who are irritating officers with their protest. Mr. Ross was involved in a previous incident in which he reached into a car and used a stun gun on a person while the car was in motion — reckless tactics that should have gotten him fired.
It’s clear that immigration officials are routinely breaking the law. There’s persuasive evidence that they’ve been explicitly racially profiling people in Minneapolis and elsewhere. (The Supreme Court effectively permitted profiling people by race and other factors in a September ruling.) They’ve been requiring U.S. citizens to produce proof of their citizenship on demand — also a violation of federal law. And we’ve seen U.S. citizens dragged from their cars, homes and workplaces, then arrested or detained.
We’ve seen the unlawful arrest and incarceration of Somali refugees who have legal permission to be here, warrantless raids on private homes and reports that detainees are being denied access to lawyers. And we’ve seen routine excessive force against protesters, from casual use of chemical irritants to physical violence to firing less lethal munitions at them from close range. These are all violations of the law. Not only is there no indication that the administration has investigated any of this, but the videos it posts to social media even seem to celebrate it.
All of which brings us back to Ms. Good. Over the weekend, the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, said on Fox News that there will be no federal investigation into her killing. The administration has already said the F.B.I. will not share the evidence it collected with the local police so they can conduct their own investigations, either. This is the very definition of a cover-up. It’s just being done in plain sight.
There are still important, unanswered questions about what Mr. Ross and other agents did in the moments leading up to Ms. Good’s death and whether he was legally justified to use lethal force. Those questions will now be much more difficult to answer.
We conduct these investigations not just to determine whether an officer should be charged with a crime. We also conduct them to determine if a shooting was necessary — and if it wasn’t, if there are policy changes that could prevent similar shootings.
In refusing to investigate Ms. Good’s death, the Department of Justice is, at a minimum, indicating that it doesn’t believe that preventing similar deaths is all that important. But the real explanation may be more sinister. Since she was killed, we’ve seen multiple videos in which immigration officers refer to her death to threaten people lawfully observing or recording them. The real motivation appears to be to make all the other Renee Goods out there, the liberal “wine moms” watching over immigration raids, to wonder if they might be next.
The Department of Justice instead opened a federal investigation into Ms. Good’s partner, specifically into whether she obstructed federal agents in the moments before the shooting and if she has any ties to activist groups. This prompted six federal prosecutors to resign. The administration then announced it had opened criminal investigations into whether Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota and Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis obstructed immigration enforcement. The department subpoenaed them and three other Minnesota leaders on Tuesday.
It’s one thing to tank or slow-walk an investigation. It’s quite another to publicly declare that no investigation will happen on any level and then announce that you’ll be investigating the victim’s partner and supporters instead. Both paths are unethical and corrupt. Undermining an investigation at least pays lip service to the idea of accountability and public trust. The administration’s actions in Ms. Good’s case are a declaration that there will be no accountability and that it would prefer to instill fear rather than trust.
We can still stop these abuses of power, but we need to be clear about what we’re facing. This is no longer a conversation about law enforcement or immigration policy. This is about authoritarianism.
Radley Balko is the author of “Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces” and the criminal justice newsletter The Watch.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post I’ve Covered Police Abuse for 20 Years. What ICE Is Doing Is Different. appeared first on New York Times.
