A 37-year-old mother was shot dead during a Minneapolis immigration enforcement operation on Wednesday, and legal analysts said the killing wasn’t an isolated incident, but rather the inevitable result of a Supreme Court decision that handed the president sweeping immunity powers.
Video footage showed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jonathan Ross using what authorities called justified force against Renee Nicole Good as she tried to drive away. The Trump administration immediately blamed her for her own killing and labeled Good a “domestic terrorist.” They also made the stunning claim that Ross enjoys “absolute immunity” and has since obstructed the state’s investigation into the slaying.
Slate legal experts Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern discussed the saga this week, noting the Trump administration’s defense mirrors its broader theory that the president enjoys unchecked executive power. Officials have claimed the president can unilaterally invade foreign nations, deport anyone, and arrest virtually anyone without congressional limits.
Lithwick and Stern assert that the Supreme Court’s Trump v. United States presidential immunity decision directly enabled this expansion of presidential authority.
“The first and clearest sign we got about this came in March, when the Justice Department said that Judge James Boasberg’s investigation into unlawful deportation must yield to ‘the mandate of the electorate.’ As if Trump’s election bestowed upon him a kind of sovereign power, not just as head of the executive branch, but as the personification of the American people’s will,” said Stern.
He added that while Americans know this doesn’t give Trump a license to deport, bomb, or murder just because he was elected as president, that is “how the Supreme Court seemed to imply that law might work in its immunity decision.
The bombshell ruling basically gave the green light to presidential lawlessness by stripping away the facts and shielding “official acts” from any real consequences, wrote Stern.
“And I believe that’s the key source of this administration’s extralegal logic,” said Stern. “I remember Justice Neil Gorsuch saying, during those arguments, that he didn’t much care about the details of Trump trying to steal the 2020 election, because the court was writing ‘a rule for the ages.’ And how that rule for the ages cashes out is Renee Good getting shot in the head, her blood splattered over her kid’s stuffed animals in the family car. That’s how the ‘rule for the ages’ ends up transforming our country into a place where Hispanic people have to carry proof of citizenship and any protester can be executed for no reason.”
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