A 37-year-old mom’s murder could open Americans’s eyes, but who will control the story?
Winston Smith, a low-level staffer in the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s “1984,” muses to himself: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
Now, Americans who have seen the videos of an ICE agent’s murder of an unarmed woman in Minneapolis are being asked to do the same. Despite Renee Nicole Macklin Good’s attempt to move her car at the direction of ICE agents, one pulled out a gun and shot her in the head.
President Donald J. Trump swiftly claimed it was self-defense, that the agent feared for his life. His PR minions called her a “violent rioter,” and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem claimed she was “stalking and impeding” officers and trying to “weaponize her vehicle.”
And, tragically, gullible Americans are likely to swallow the claim that this 37-year-old mother of three — a poet and amateur guitarist – was committing an act of “domestic terrorism,” as Noem claimed.
Indeed, some in my own family seem to be falling for a refinement of such propaganda. This is the argument by Vice President JD Vance that Good was illegally interfering with federal officers and that her death was “a tragedy of her own making. If she weren’t bothering ICE officials legitimately doing their duty, this Party line goes, she’d be alive today.
In other words, don’t believe your own eyes and ears.
If there is to be any justice for Good, however, the agent needs to be charged and tried for murder, plain and simple. At his trial, the full context should come out. State authorities, such as Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, are mulling that over, despite stonewalling by federal officials.
They do have the right to pursue such a case. And we all have the need to see the full picture of what happened.
Beyond the video of what on its face is an unjustified shooting, there is much we don’t know. Why was Good, the widow of a now-deceased Air Force veteran of Afghanistan, on that street? Was she part of an ICE resistance effort? Or was she a “legal observer” of federal actions, as local officials called her?
An earlier ex-husband of Good’s told the Associated Press she was no activist and that he had never known her to participate in a protest. Instead, he called her a devoted Christian who took part in youth mission trips to Northern Ireland when she was younger.
Was Good, in fact, just a mother who had just dropped her 6-year-old off and wound up on the street where ICE agents were operating?
Good’s current spouse, Rebecca, asked her to drive to the site where the ICE agents were, the New York Post reported. Rebecca had been outside their car when the shooting occurred. “I made her come down here; it’s my fault,” Rebecca said, her face covered in blood after having attempted to help Renee. “They just shot my wife.”
Even if Good was intentionally interfering with ICE operations, why would an agent fire on her as she was moving her car away, as ordered? Are such agents not trained, as police are, to pull their weapons only when in life-or-death situations?
For now, the most sympathetic cast one can put on the shooting is one that Vance sought to paint about the veteran agent ,Jonathan D. Ross. Vance said the agent had suffered substantial injuries last June when he was dragged off by a car driven by a man he was trying to arrest. “So you think maybe he’s a little bit sensitive about somebody ramming him with an automobile,” Vance argued.
But, should such an officer still be on the job if he is suffering from PTSD that might make him gun-happy? And just how well trained was he?
Just how fully — and truthfully — these questions will be answered remains to be seen, since federal officials appear to be freezing out local investigators. Already, the Trump Administration has fashioned a narrative and is closing ranks around it. While a more sober-minded leader might just await the results of an impartial probe, the president and his minions have already prejudged any investigation.
Will FBI officials commit career suicide by contradicting Noem and Trump?
Minnesota State Attorney General Keith Ellison has offered unsettling insights on how troublesome justice will be in this killing.
“And the one thing that I don’t want to do is to be like Trump or Noem. I want to be – I want to maintain my professional conduct as I look at this case,” he told NPR. “So, at this point, I think there must be a robust investigation. It should be independent. It should be independent. Nobody from this agent’s agency should have any role in the investigation at all. And it should be – and then we make a prosecutorial decision. That’s what should happen…. I can tell you that I think the local FBI agents are professional people. I also know that they have a boss in Washington who is extreme partisan, and that matters.”
Still, a few things are clear already. ICE agents – some 2,000 of whom have been deployed to harass Somalis in Minnesota – are “spreading terror throughout our communities,” as Ellison has also said. And, as Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said, they need to get out of the city (and the state). “People are being hurt,” he said. “Families are being ripped apart.”
Is there really a need for such ICE agents in Minnesota? Or is this the action of racist president hungry for the optics of looking tough on Black immigrants on Fox News? Is he just feeding his base and punishing Democrats who lead the state?
“It’s clearly a hostile act,” said Ellison. “It’s clearly unwarranted. It clearly is injecting fear. It is injecting terror. And it is really – at the end of the day, Leila, we can talk like lawyers about whether the force was reasonable or unreasonable, as I believe there’s facts to support. But the real problem here is the decision from the chief executive of this country, the president, to escalate ICE agents in Minneapolis and all over the country. We’ve seen this in LA, Portland, Illinois, and it has done no one any good. And now it has cost somebody their life.”
Beyond the details of what seems like an unjustified shooting – the eyes and ears part — consider the broader context. As in “1984,” a sociopathic totalitarian leader, aided by sycophants, is persecuting literally millions of people. Recall that in 2023 there were 14 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. and that Trump and his minions claim now to have expelled or driven out 2.5 million of them.
Sadly, Good’s death is hardly the first that can be blamed on Trump and his operatives. At least 32 people died in ICE custody last year. As The Guardian reported, they died of seizure and heart failure, stroke, respiratory failure, tuberculosis or suicide. As of mid-December, the agency was holding 68,440 people; nearly 75 percent of them without any criminal convictions. December was also the deadliest month in ICE custody – six people died.
Beyond the in-custody deaths, federal agents have been involved in at least 15 shootings since Trump took office, according to The Trace. Among these are the shootings of three people observing or documenting ICE raids and the shootings of five people driving away from traffic stops or evading an enforcement action. At least four people have been killed and five others injured.
Good’s death may well prompt action by Americans horrified by the battlegrounds that their streets and neighborhoods are becoming. Hundreds came out in protest in Minneapolis and others did so in similar demonstrations in many cities across the U.S.
For her death to mean more than just a family loss, however, it will likely take an electoral upheaval in November and again two years hence. Trump and his followers most likely will double down on their efforts, making more such deaths likely. With each, it might tougher to keep up the Orwellian spin.