Civil Fear

A few days ago we had a very galvanizing event occur in this country. As most of us have seen in various videos, there was an ICE raid of some sort under way in Minneapolis. The scene was on a snow-covered suburban street where a maroon SUV driven by a 37-year-old white suburban mother was sideways in the street, somewhat blocking oncoming traffic. It is relatively clear that the car was purposefully positioning itself as an obstruction to the goings on, but it was anything but a violent scene, much more like a peaceful protest. It was a version of the Tiananmen Square scene where a student placed himself in front of an oncoming tank as a form of protest. That student presented no serious physical threat to the military action, just like this woman in her SUV posed no serious threat to the ICE agents surrounding the car. Her window was open and she was having civil though heated dialogue with the agents, clearly in protest to whatever it was that they were in the process of doing. It is no surprise that there are people who disagree with the ICE deportation process and are actively wanting to protest and interfere with its proceedings. This is the American right of civil disobedience at its best, a time-honored right to peacefully protest how our American judicial and law enforcement process works. There were other people milling about the scene from both sides, fellow protestors bundled up in their winter woolies and ICE officers bundled up in their tactical battle gear. There were no incendiaries being thrown, no Maletov cocktails being thrown, no sticks or stones in evidence. The most visible sign that something was afoot was that people on both sides of the issue (it wasn’t even an apparent altercation by any visible evidence) were holding their cell phones up as they videoed the events. That video recordation has become a telltale of modern history, but usually its taking place from the protestor side. This time, ICE agents were also taking the time to video the events, a strange turn since normal law enforcement has body cams and car cams to do that job and keep the officers free to do their job rather than capture content.

The minor moment of escalation came when two ICE agents pulled up and calmly approached the car, telling the woman to get out. One tried to open her car door and was starting to reach into her open window…presumably open on that cold day just so she could communicate with her opponents. As that happened, she turned her wheels and started to slowly turn her car to remove herself and drive down the street. As she did so, a third officer, who had been circling the car with his cell phone pulled his gun and shot into the car, once from the front through the windshield and twice as she passed, through the open window. He had struck and killed her and the car sped off fifty feet before ramming into a parked car, obviously caused by her death throws. There was then much screaming from neighborhood bystanders shocked by what had happened and seeking to assist her, something that the ICE agents refused to let them do. While the woman presumably expired in the seat of her car, no medical assistance was allowed to take place until the very unconcerned agents called 911 for help. Meanwhile, the officers involved in the shooting got in their car and sped away from the scene. It was quite amazing to watch and no one with any sense of decency could do so without being shocked that this could happen on the streets of America in 2026.

The other night I rewatched Schindler’s List. The scene’s of the Nazi occupation of Krakow and the manner in which they were cavalierly treating the Jewish and Polish citizenry with violent indifference and denigration were far too similar to what I had just witnessed on the streets of Minneapolis. Peaceful people exercising what they thought were their normal right to disagree with some minor civil action or another, being brutally manhandled, shot and killed with indifference by empowered stormtroopers who were operating in the self-righteous name of whatever “legal” action of the moment that they thought took precedence over these peoples’ civil liberty. We watch those scene’s from 85 years ago and wonder how that could ever have happened. Then we watch these new videos and wonder how the entire nation cannot be outraged by these clearly heinous acts of indifferent brutality. And then it gets worse. Donald Trump, Kristi Noem and, ultimately, J.D. Vance, stand up for the ICE agents and, despite clear video evidence to the contrary, craft a narrative that describes the victim as a domestic terrorist that had harmful intent in interfering with law enforcement agents. They paint this suburban mother as a threat to armed ice agents who weaponized her SUV when clearly she was just trying to extract herself from an escalating situation. And now she is dead in her own car and on her own street while her aggressors walk calmly away with their faces covered so as not to be recognizable for posterity.

I have watched the analysis from all the angles and absolutely nothing supports the administration’s attempted narrative. There was no reason to consider this woman and her car a major threat. Anyone who wanted to get around her car could have. Her window was open and nothing about her was concealed or threatening. She was talking to officers, human being to human being. Her car was not being used as a weapon, it was a normal SUV what was idling and then slowly turning into a traffic lane. It was not even a revved engine, but just a slow turn. There was absolutely no reason to draw a weapon against her or her car. There was ample time and room for any of the agent to get out of the way and not even remotely be in harm’s way…not that any was ever apparently intended by the victim. And yet ICE officer Jonathan Ross chose to pull his gun and fire at point blank range three times directly into Renee Good, sitting in her car. This was a textbook case of the use of unnecessary lethal force followed by callous indifference to human life by ignoring the need to bring to bear medical attention.

What happened? First, ICE has been empowered by Noem and Trump to operate in whatever manner it chooses. These agents are being recruited and minimally trained in all the things we require of normal law enforcement officers…like judgement and restraint. That combination leads to these agents being unable to restrain their sense of empowerment when citizens peacefully protest their actions. They become emotionally invested in their own righteousness and are angered by civil disobedience to the point of resorting to violence and deadly force. We’ve seen it all too many times before…but not so clearly as this time. This time there was no threatening hulkin black man. There was no hidden weapon in the darkness of night. There was no threat and only barely an inconvenience towards law enforcement. There was a pudgy suburban mother in an SUV that was standing near still and turning to remove herself from the scene when the ICE agents became infuriated that they were losing their all-important control and power over the situation. So they shot and killed her and immediately fled the scene. At any other moment in American history, those officers would be behind bars and not getting false narratives from the White House to fabricate a story of denial of wrongdoing. We are now officially living in a Fascist state and in a state of civil fear.