On Wednesday in Minneapolis, masked government agents apparently representing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) surrounded a stationary vehicle stopped in the middle of a residential street. One of them demanded that the driver "get out of the fucking car," and yanked violently on the driver's-side door handle; another, stationed near the left headlight of the vehicle, drew his pistol. The driver, after briefly reversing, swerved away from the agents, apparently attempting to drive away. As the vehicle moved forward, the agent with the drawn pistol stepped aside while firing three shots directly at the windshield and open driver's-side window, killing the driver.
That's a straightforward and blandly factual description of the incident, based on perfectly clear video recorded by eyewitnesses and posted online shortly afterward: The shooting occurred at the site of an ICE sting where local citizens had gathered to observe and protest against the agency's presence in the city, with plenty of smartphone cameras around. Anyone with broadband internet access in the United States can see it for themselves. The side details of the shooting provided by law enforcement—the driver reportedly was a U.S. citizen and reportedly had stationed her vehicle there intentionally, to block the road—change nothing about its basic facts: A masked government agent shot a woman and killed her, from a couple of feet away, for disobeying an order to get out of her vehicle and instead moving it a few feet.
Here is how Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin described the incident, in a statement posted to Twitter:
Today, ICE officers in Minneapolis were conducting targeted operations when rioters began blocking ICE officers and one of these violent rioters weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism.
An ICE officer, fearing for his life, the lives of his fellow law enforcement and the safety of the public, fired defensive shots.
He used his training and saved his own life and that of his fellow officers.
The alleged perpetrator was hit and is deceased. The ICE officers who were hurt are expected to make full recoveries.
That is straightforwardly false. Either McLaughlin hadn't seen the video when she posted it and somebody who did lied to her, or she is straight-up lying. The claim that the driver "weaponized her vehicle" is preposterous on its face; moreover, even to the extent that a reasonable observer could believe it was true, the shooter had averted any danger to himself by the time he'd finished taking a single step to his right, out of the vehicle's path. No other agents were even vaguely endangered by anything except his frenzied spray of bullets.
This kind of amateur forensic analysis is ludicrous and obscene in any case, and from either direction. What the driver was or wasn't doing with her vehicle is irrelevant; so are the ICE agent's feelings about it. The agents never had to be clustered around the woman's vehicle in the first place. They never had to try to extract her from it. Spraying bullets at a civilian's head is not a reasonable or defensible response to a brief feeling of danger on the part of someone entrusted by the government to carry deadly weaponry and enforce laws. Moreover the ICE agents' very presence in Minneapolis is an outrage. If this agent's highest priority is to feel safe, he ought to have stayed at home.
The topline factual description of the event overwhelms any frame-by-frame analysis. ICE agents surrounded a woman's stationary vehicle on a Minneapolis street, pointed a gun at her, and tried to yank her out. When the car moved, one of them shot her in the head.
Here is how U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, wearing a ten-gallon cowboy hat, described the incident in a press conference in Texas on Wednesday afternoon:
It was an act of domestic terrorism. What happened was, our ICE officers were out in enforcement action, they got stuck in the snow because of the adverse weather that is in Minneapolis, they were attempting to push out their vehicle, and a woman attacked them and those surrounding them and attempted to run them over and ram them with her vehicle. An officer of ours acted quickly, and defensively shot to protect himself and the people around him, and my understanding is that she was hit and is deceased.
The only truthful part of this statement is "it was an act of domestic terrorism," although Noem is referring to the wrong party and the wrong act. Otherwise, this is not even remotely accurate as a description of the shooting, which, again, any person with access to the internet can see, in full, whenever they want to. Which I suppose raises the question of why DHS is even bothering to tell this obviously fictitious and self-serving story, and of what exactly the department hopes to accomplish by contradicting so flamboyantly what anyone could see with their own eyes.
The answer, I think, sits precisely in the wide and irreconcilable disjunction between the incident itself and McLaughlin and Noem's descriptions of it. Now that the Trump administration has shown it will immediately make up a flagrant lie in an attempt to justify the summary execution of a U.S. citizen, on video, in broad daylight—and will outright valorize the ICE agent who drew his pistol and killed a civilian for the crime of moving her vehicle a few feet—the message is clear, to ICE agents and everyone else: Nothing constrains these agents except whatever inhibits any individual one of them, personally, from brutalizing and murdering any person who disobeys them. The agents' individual reasons, whatever they are, and without even the flimsiest of due-process theater—without, indeed, anybody in a position of power apparently even feeling it necessary to ask what those reasons are—are good enough for the highest levels of the federal government. The people and institutions charged with accountability for this will instantly, invariably find a way to justify any action; it all runs backward from that.
Here is another lesson that can be drawn from this: In the eyes of the state and its agents, all of the rest of us are walking around with a standing presumption, not just of guilt, but of murderous intent. Anything but total and immediate submission is domestic terrorism. It's punishable by whatever the masked and unidentified government agent pointing a gun at your face decides to dish out.
