It was clear after the killing of Renee Good on Jan. 7 that the Trump administration’s pretextual immigration crackdown in Minnesota was a failure. Far from cowing the people of Minneapolis, Good’s death at the hand of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer stiffened their resolve and led even more Minnesotans to join the fight against the president’s masked paramilitaries.
A less fanatical White House might have used that moment to stage a tactical withdrawal. But in the actually existing Trump administration, they met Good’s death with insults, slander and the promise of further repression.
Kristi Noem, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said that Good was engaged in “domestic terrorism.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called Good a “deranged lunatic.” Vice President JD Vance said her actions were “an attack on law and order” and “on the American people.” He also said the officer who shot Good was protected by “absolute immunity.” (He later backtracked from this claim, insisting instead that he said the opposite, video evidence notwithstanding.)
We know what happened next. On Saturday, officers with Customs and Border Protection detained, beat, shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse who had been observing and filming ICE and CBP operations. Like Good’s death, Pretti’s was caught on camera, and like Good’s death, it was egregious. Before the White House could even respond there were protests on the ground, demands for accountability, calls to abolish ICE and palpable discontent from across the political spectrum.
“This individual went and impeded their law enforcement operations, attacked those officers, had a weapon on him and multiple dozens of rounds of ammunition, wishing to inflict harm on these officers, coming, brandishing like that,” Noem said, as if video of the confrontation did not exist. Stephen Miller, the president’s homeland security adviser, called Pretti a “domestic terrorist” and accused Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota of “flaming the flames of insurrection for the singular purpose of stopping the deportation of illegals who invaded the country.”