If you relied solely on mainstream coverage of the fatal ICE shooting in Minneapolis, the story would read as follows:
An innocent young mother of three, Renee Good, had just dropped off her children and was making a U-turn on a Minneapolis street. She motioned for other cars to pass. An ICE vehicle then approached. Agents exited the vehicle and, amid unclear or conflicting commands, instructed Good to step out of her car.
The New York Times describes the critical moments this way, in language echoed by much of the press:
“One of the agents tries to open the driver’s side door and reaches through the window. A third agent crosses in front of the Honda, as the driver begins to reverse, turning to drive away from the agents.
Immediately after the Honda shifts from reverse into drive and begins to move ahead, that agent at the front of the vehicle, standing near the driver’s side headlight, pulls out a gun and aims at the driver.
The Honda moves forward, turning to the right. The agent aiming the gun fires, and continues to shoot as the vehicle moves past him.”
That conclusion requires readers to disregard what the video itself appears to show. The car’s engine is revving, its tires spin on ice, and the vehicle points and moves toward the agent standing in front of it.
Anyone interested in understanding what happened should watch the footage themselves.
The vehicle, engine revving as the tires slipped on ice, moved toward the officer positioned in front of it.
Below, I try to add context largely missing from the media’s coverage.
The real story
ICE agents approached Good’s vehicle because it was stopped in the middle of the street during an active ICE operation, obstructing traffic. One agent stood directly in front of the car. Protesters and agitators surrounded the scene, taunting officers.
As agents instructed Good to exit the vehicle, she instead attempted to evade them. She straightened the wheels, accelerated, and struck the agent positioned in front of her car, knocking him out of the way. It is impossible to know whether she intended to kill an officer. But her method of escape — driving directly into agents standing ahead of her — made that risk unavoidable.
Reports repeatedly frame Good as a bystander who happened upon an ICE raid by chance while dropping off her children. There is reason to question that portrayal. Her wife was filming from outside the vehicle while it was parked in the middle of the street. Federal officials later accused Good of using the car as a blockade to obstruct ICE operations. Bystanders corroborated this detail, too.
Context also matters. ICE agents have been targeted for months, with assaults, hospitalizations, and deaths. There have been organized efforts to attack them. The officer who fired in this case was reportedly assaulted and hospitalized during a prior ICE raid. On the same day as Good’s death, another ICE shooting occurred involving migrants allegedly connected to the Tren de Aragua gang.
If Good was participating in efforts to interfere with ICE operations — a plausible interpretation — she placed herself in a volatile, dangerous confrontation with armed officers operating under threat. That does not mean she intended to kill anyone. It does mean she chose to escalate a situation where lethal force was a foreseeable outcome.
This is the human cost of months of rhetoric urging confrontation with federal law enforcement. Renee Good, a mother of three, appears to have been drawn into a high-risk political moment. Her death is tragic.
But it is also what the political movement against President Trump has been waiting for. Politicians and media figures are already presenting her death as evidence that President Donald Trump seeks to kill Americans who oppose him. On live television, Jimmy Kimmel held up a shirt reading: “Donald J. Trump Is Gonna Kill You.”
That claim will be incredibly useful, politically, as the midterms approach. But it is not an accurate account of what happened on that icy street in Minneapolis — and the media has made clear it has no intention of correcting the record.
Why this is bad for the country
The media’s coverage of this shooting is once again dividing the country for political ends. Tens of millions of Americans voted for President Trump because of his position on illegal immigration and the open border. They want change, and they support his deportation efforts.
Now, much of the media has handed the other half of the country a new, and deeply dishonest, way to portray those voters: as people who somehow support murder. That framing…
Is bad for the country, damaging to friendships, and destructive to families.
It is the reason so many of us have lost friends and even family over the years, because of divisive politics.
That’s the battle we’re fighting.
