The shooting and killing of Renee Good in Mineapolis this past week didn’t ‘just happen.’ No, it’s the official announcement of something ICE/DHS has been ramping up to. Trump has authorized them to engage in Lynchings. Not with ropes, but with guns. Making a big point of a HUGE enforcement effort in a city and state Trump has wanted to target (all those Somalis) the odds were good there would be protesters. WHITE protesters and shooting one of them dead would make the point ICE is now permitted to kill ANYONE it wants to. It wasn’t done with a rope, but Renee Nicole Good was lynched.
Again I say this didn’t simply happen out of the blue. ICE has shot a lot of people this year. In fact, Renee Good isn’t the first one to wind up dead in their shootings. However her death comes during a hugely publicized major federal action in a city and state that’s on Trump sh*t list. It was said by many from the outset to be tragically predictable. Yep. Take a look at this article from Newsweek that lists ICE shootings in 2025:
Trump campaigned on enacting mass deportations and swiftly moved to implement policies upon his January 2025 second term in the White House. Several shootings by ICE agents have occurred over his first year in office. The incidents have raised questions about the use of force by federal agents.
ICE-involved shootings have occurred across the country since Trump’s return to office in places like Chicago, Los Angeles and Minnesota—areas that have notably seen heightened ICE presence.
That part about cities/areas with notably enhanced ICE presence stands out, at least to me. Anyway the linked article goes on to list, working backwards ICE shootings in Trump’s second term. I urge you to look at it for yourself. There’s a certain aspect that’s common to almost all the shootings – those shot were in a vehicle. ICE claims said vehicles were being used as ‘weapons” to attack them and they fired to defend themselves.
Digging into that is a far longer topic that would make one of my infamous (way too long) articles seem like brief as a Japanese Haiku. What matters is unless I’m mistaken none of these incidents were a clear instance of someone doing what the guy in Charlottesville did – see a group, lining up his vehicle and stomping on his gas into the middle of a crowd. No, these seem to be people just trying to get away. I don’t think any of them involved someone maneuvering their car to hit someone head on.
Even Jonathan Ross who wound up with over thirty stiches from an incident six months ago got dragged because he reached into a car from the side and got his arm caught up resulting in bein dragged. Getting back to the shootings, I believe Miller sat down with Noem to work out a long-term strategy to ‘prep the ground’, ‘set the stage’, etc. What happened to Renee Good was the result of a long-term plan. In a series of incidents, agents who likely could have had they followed proper procedure avoided being struck even a glancing blow from a vehicle trying to get away.
Yes, as some experts have pointed out normal LE protocols for approaching vehicles hasn’t been followed – even by DHS/ICE agents who were hired years ago and properly trained. It’s clear they’ve been ordered to be extra aggressive and that increasing risk to the agents as well as others. An appalling ‘pattern’ was developed, one where Team Trump could point to an increasing number of incidents as proof of the danger agents faced. (Again, they usually, by not following long established protocols put themselves in danger!) They used that to justify ever increasing aggression. A vicious cycle that is why so many have said in recent days what happened in Minneapolis was inevitable. That someone was going to get killed in as ugly and tragic way as possible.
Many, including black readers here in the U.S. will object to my use of the term lynching. I understand. The overwhelming majority of lynchings were racists (so often in Klan garb) hoisting black men (usually but not always men) with a rope to hang by the neck from a tree. But sometimes the lynchings weren’t with rope. Some got dragged or just beaten to death but the point was to make it a public killing – to make a statement that certain people could get away with doing whatever they wanted to certain other people.
In Trump’s second term being as cruel as possible has been part of DHS/ICE operations from the start. They want to create fear and outright terror. They are pissed off that so many, including white folks are openly criticizing them. Worse, even some MAGAs are saying in effect ‘Good job locking down the border but this other stuff you’re doing it out of line.’ Worse than that is people have figured out how to organize and throw sand in the gears of their operations.
Without a public in fear of them, the way say news outlets are to varying degrees afraid of Trump it’s harder and harder to meet their quotas. Trump, and probably even Noem probably didn’t think to account for significant public opposition but Stephen Miller I’m sure did. The guy is pure evil, and yes he’d plan for having to do something drastic to terrorize not just immigrants (legal or not) but citizens too. He needed a plan that would allow him to make a HUGE public statement of “Mess with us and we’ll kill you, brag about it, AND get away with it all!’ He needed to kill a white woman in a white city in some white neighborhood. Someone who at first glance would be a classic ‘soccer mom’ in a soccer mom type vehicle.
Team Trump needed to do a LYNCHING of such a person, to tell America (and the world) ‘We can kill any one of you anytime we want if you stand up to us, or even talk about standing up to us so stay as far away from our agents and immigrants as you can because now YOU WHITE PEOPLE are on the list!’ Back in their heyday(s) the Klan sometimes had local or even higher level tacit government approval to go around spreading terror.
Now? The Klan is the government! Instead of white robes and pointy hats they wear tactical gear and masks. Often they wear green, and even full on camo like they are soldiers heading into battle! If they were doing a sweep in hard core gang territory in some densely pack urban neighborhood I could understand it. But most of the time where they go and who they arrest doesn’t require being decked out like SEAL Team 6 on the Bin Laden raid. But these agents do enjoy mixing cosplay with their brutality. However for all their wanting to make a show of how “tough” they are they usually go to great lengths to hide their identities.
The public in general does NOT approve of them. In fact the day of Renee Good was shot and killed a poll had come out that some forty percent STRONGLY disapproved of them! Not many of them want their children asking ‘Daddy – why did you and your friends beat up that person in the courthouse?’ and similar questions. Or their neighbors, or fellow churchgoers. But now, even if they still want to keep their identities hidden they now have clear permission from Trump to shoot and kill when they feel like it. Their butt-hurt (over not being FEARED) egos can now get a boost. They can KILL, MURDRER people who piss them off and the White House will have their back.
The thinking is that killing a WHITE, thirty something woman in a mom van in some whitebread suburban neighborhood would cow the public into submission. From the looks of the protests that have taken place all over the country it could be the whole strategy will wind up backfiring. I just wish people on OUR side had started pushing back sooner. Gutless news outlets/anchors did too much “both sides” coverage and took WAY too long to learn some basic stuff about Renee Good. While Team Trump was pushing (and the news DUTIFULLY repeating) the ‘radical’, ‘domestic terrorist’ narrative no one seemed to be going through her social media. Or talking to people she knew.
A very different picture has emerged. It is of the woman who seconds before her tragic death was waving vehicles in front of her in a I’ll just sit and wait on you guys, manner, smiling to the man who would shoot her saying dude, I’m not mad at you and just wanting to go on about her day. As I wrote the other day she had tried to leave and as often happens on icy streets almost lost control trying to pull out from a parking space into the road. She was in settle down and wait mode. She wasn’t aggressive towards ICE. They were aggressive towards HER!
It was exactly the kind of moment Miller (and Noem) had hoped to engineer. A mild mannered white woman in a soccer mom car in a white neighborhood getting flustered at agents ripping on her and just wanting to get the hell out of there. She turned her wheel to avoid them and didn’t stomp on the gas, but just tried to drive away. And got shot. IN THE FACE. No doubt Kristi GNOME loved that detail.
However as I keep saying this was not only inevitable, but planned. The public, not even his MAGAs have approved of the cruel tactics of his immigration forces. They needed something so shocking as to SCARE the public into silence and obedience. Doing what they did to brown people or even a white guy wouldn’t do the trick they figured. No, they needed someone who looked like a classic soccer mom. Someone ANY white person could say “If that could happen to her, it could happen to ME and just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
So no, I don’t think it’s out of line to say Miller and the rest of Team Trump put effort into setting up a LYNCHING of a white suburban woman. A ‘Don’t f**k with us or else message.” Noem has created a modern KLAN wearing federal badges. Instead of going after n*@@ers and n*@@er lovers they are going after (mostly brown) immigrants and immigrant lovers! They’ve already been shooting people and even killing them sometimes. But just like the old Klan they need WHITE people who might feel some sympathy to be terrorized too.
“Detaining” U.S. citizens, and even grabbing white folks on raids under bullshit pretexts (usually releasing them in a few hours knowing there’s no case that can stand up in court) has been part of the overall message that was ‘announced’ last Wednesday. Team Trump should have just had the guts to say it in blunt terms in a video or written statement. Something like:
This administration is major pissed off that Americans standing up to ICE and by extension all of Team Trump. Their problem is that while they’ve got almost every GOP Congress Critter bullied into submission there are less than 300 of them. There are many tens of millions of US however. More tens of millions in fact who are total Orange Kool Aid drinkers. Over the past year resistance didn’t just start out strong, it got stronger. The GOP kept losing special and off-year elections and by greater than predicted margins. Even the (very) few they’ve one it was by far less than expected. There there was No Kings, and a second even bigger one. Other, smaller protests too. AND people started learning how to legally make things more difficult for ICE to do what they do.
What ICE has been doing has NOT bullied regular Americans into submission. They go around like (as I said) the Klan in Kamo and citizens and legal immigrants (carrying their documentation) aren’t running away. On the contrary. So it’s come to this. Creating the circumstances to do what the Klan did and put on a very public execution – a lynching to let folks know who was in charge. And this time they have approval of the freaking President!
The smear machine was in place, just waiting for an incident in Minneapolis just like we feared would happen. Yet part of the management knew with so many people filming someone might get good footage that would contradict the picture they were ready to paint. The shooter/murderer Jonathan Ross is a resident of that city and ICE was worried enough that while some of them were terrorizing students getting out of a local high school another group had been dispatched to Ross’ home to pack everything up and send it to wherever he’d already been sent. I was being snarky last week when I said Noem would get him into Witness Protection. She didn’t even bother with the FBI. She created her own version!
Once our folks started pushing back the narrative started to change. Still, we need both in the House and the Senate for someone to stand in the well and make a crucial statement called a floor speech. And flat out say ICE is Klan in Kamo and like the old Klan they’ve been given permission by Trump to engage in their version of LYNCHINGS. Because that’s where we are.
Brutality as a feature, not a bug.
That includes the covering of faces. All other L.E. is by people who can and MUST be able to be identified.
That’s the other revealing fact that came out so quickly. Johnathan Ross will always be identified by his actions here. When they want it most I.C.E. has no anonymity. That really shows their real support .
This is leading to a confrontation between ICE and police officers, who will step in to protect citizens from these murderous thugs. It could easily escalate into something much larger.
IMO trump is a sadist. He enjoys hurting people. Impeaching him is the best and possibly only way of preventing widespread violence and saving lives.
In his book “On Freedom” Timothy Snyder calls Trump’s politics sadopopulism in which cruelty is the point. Yes, he is a sadist among so many other terrible qualities.
Isn’t leaving a crime scene a crime anymore? Any cop who fires his weapon is prohibited from leaving the scene, whether anyone was hurt or not. In this case, a murder, that thug behind the mask should never have been driven away by his fellow gansters.
It was a while before I first responded online the day of the shooting but I recall saying that within an hour or perhaps two at most this asshat had been driven outside the city to the closest private airfield and put on a plane, ANY plane to get him the hell out of the state.
We didn’t know his name at the time, and therefore that he was a resident of freaking Minneapolis and lived with his family in a house there. Again, it’s a measure of how much ICE knew from the time he shot and killed the actual victim a whole team of ICE agents had “evacuated” his family and packed up the house. Neighbors who watched said they truly cleared the place out!
ICE has proven really good at ‘losing’ people going all the way back to the first Trump administration. So they have lots of practice now that they have to do it with one of their own!