A toy unicorn with a turquoise tufted mane in the passenger well.
An open university folder.
An airbag deployed from the steering wheel, designed to instantly protect the driver on impact.
The airbag’s nylon cover stained with the blood of 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good, mother of a six-year-old boy who had already lost his father and has now become an orphan.
A bullet hole in the windshield of a maroon Honda Pilot, one of three shots fired on Wednesday morning by a uniformed ICE agent at East 34th Street and Portland Avenue in a middle-class neighborhood in Minneapolis.
Not in the post-shooting photo of the Honda’s interior, but standing nearby, was the ICE agent who had suddenly drawn his service weapon and fired three fatal shots. Video by a civilian witness shows the agent was uncommonly calm. He was right to be, with regard to how his boss would react.
Cosplaying Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem wasted no time in telling the press at a Texas news conference that the now-dead mom had “weaponized” her vehicle and sought to kill or seriously injure the agents.
“An act of domestic terrorism,” Noem said from under a cowboy hat. “An officer of ours acted quickly and defensively, shot, to protect himself and the people around him.”
More than one witness video appeared to contradict Noem’s account, and she held a second-degree conference, this one in Minneapolis, after a costume change.
“Our officer followed his training, did exactly what he’s been taught to do in that situation,” Noem said from under a Homeland Security baseball cap.
If that is so, then ICE training on firing at a moving vehicle is at odds with what is taught elsewhere. She repeated the allegation that the incident was “domestic terrorism” when the only actual domestic terrorism is that routinely perpetrated by ICE’s masked goons.
In immediately defending the shooting and repeatedly slandering a slain mom, Noem unmasked her whole department as an extension of what is the worst in our president. The surge was preceded by Trump describing Somalis as “garbage” who allegedly stole huge sums of money in social services funds. Trump voiced outrage after a young right-wing YouTuber posted a video supposedly documenting some of the “stealing” by Somalis in Minnesota. Never mind that Trump has pardoned numerous fraudsters, including a Floridian convicted of a $1.3 billion Medicare fraud, the biggest in history.
Either in reality or just on YouTube, Somali fraud was big enough that Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz was left looking like a bumbling buffoon and he announced he would not be running for re-election. But in the wake of the shooting, he knew just what to say to those who were defending a shooting he recognized as ”preventable” and “unnecessary.”
“Do you have no decency?” Walz asked.
Walz was echoing a question that U.S. Army lawyer Joseph Welch posed to Republican U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin during a 1954 hearing. McCarthy had just branded an attorney as a communist because he belonged to the nation’s first integrated bar association.
“Have you no sense of decency, sir,” Welch asked.
The question ruined McCarthy. His chief counsel was Roy Cohn, who went on to become a mentor to Donald Trump. Cohn had taught Trump to never back down and never apologize, and to simply have no decency.
In response to Wednesday’s shooting, Trump once again proved himself to be a Cohn creation. He posted a video clip and wrote in part, “The woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense. Based on the attached clip, it is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital.”
None of the agents were run over. But that was just another falsehood posted by Trump on the social media platform he named Truth.
And now, because of the actual domestic terrorists, we have an orphan whose unicorn with a tufted turquoise mane was left in the family Honda with an airbag stained by his mother’s blood.
The post Opinion: How Trump’s Cowardly and Callous ICE Betrayed American Decency appeared first on The Daily Beast.
