ICE Agents shoot US Citizen in the street

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They are spending more time attacking protesters, than going after the criminal immigrants. Shouldn't the local police try to control protesters and not ICE?

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Judge J. Michael Luttig Substack

"“The lesson didn’t end with Good’s killing — the administration had to smear her afterward. As The New York Times reported, bystander footage filmed from several different angles shows that the agent who shot Good wasn’t in the path of her S.U.V. when he fired on her. That did not stop Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem from accusing Good of trying to run agents over in “an act of domestic terrorism.” Vice President JD Vance called her a “deranged leftist.”

In the imagination of some on the right, Good quickly came to stand in for all the grating Resistance moms they’d like to see crushed. Fox News sneered that Good was a “self-proclaimed poet” — she’s the winner of a prestigious poetry award — “with pronouns in her bio.” The conservative radio host Erick Erickson described her as an “AWFUL,” or “Affluent White Female Urban Liberal.”

It’s entirely possible that had Good lived, the Trump administration might have tried to prosecute her. That’s essentially what happened to Marimar Martinez, a U.S. citizen in Chicago, in October. Martinez was in her car trying to warn people about ICE when she collided with a Border Patrol vehicle. Federal officials claimed she “rammed” a car driven by the agent Charles Exum, while her lawyers say he sideswiped her. Exum then got out of his car and shot her five times.

Martinez survived, only for the Justice Department to charge her with assaulting a federal officer. Her lawyers soon discovered that Exum had been boasting about the shooting in text messages. In one, he wrote, “I fired 5 rounds, and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys.” In another, he said, “Sweet. My fifteen mins of fame. Lmao.” The Justice Department ended up dropping the case before even more messages could be revealed.

Exum’s giddy sadism shouldn’t have been surprising; it reflects the culture the administration is encouraging among its immigration enforcers. In one ICE recruiting ad, an agent mans a mounted gun atop some sort of militarized vehicle, with the words, “Destroy the flood.” It was a reference to the video game Halo, where players must kill a flood of hostile space aliens. Another shows sword-wielding knights with the words, “The enemies are at the gates.”

Homeland Security’s social media feed is an unending stream of demented propaganda and bellicose Christian nationalism. An image posted on New Year’s Eve shows a classic car on an idyllic beach with the slogan, “America after 100 million deportations.” Homeland Security has added the words, “The peace of a nation no longer besieged by the third world.” One hundred million, it’s important to note, is almost twice America’s entire immigrant population. They are telegraphing the creation of a far-reaching police state.

In such a system, the relationship between every citizen and their government is transformed by the constant demand for submission. Since Good’s death, Republicans have been lining up to threaten those who don’t immediately comply with ICE’s orders. “The bottom line is this: When a federal officer gives you instructions, you abide by them and then you get to keep your life,” Representative Wesley Hunt of Texas said on Newsmax.

All of us, citizens and immigrants alike, are being ruled by people who think life is a privilege bestowed by authority, and death is a fair penalty for disobedience.”

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The videos capture the shooter walking away from the vehicle, he wasn't hit. He was harmed in June when he got his arm stuck in a car when it pulled away to flee.

[mister_coffee]

[mister_coffee]

Bullets went into the vehicle from someone shooting from the side of the vehicle (a Honda Pilot going about 6mph) so there can't be a serious argument that anyone was in danger of being run over.

So any argument about an officer's life being in danger from a Honda Pilot going 6mph are just crap.

This whole action went against both federal policy about suspects in fleeing vehicles and what you do about them and officer training.

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"Here are some things happening in Minneapolis which you won't read about in the news:
- churches, schools, and legions of volunteers are funding and organizing drives to purchase and deliver food to immigrant families too fearful to leave their homes.
- volunteers are posting at schools to watch for ICE especially when kids are released.
- because Minneapolis schools are closed today and tomorrow out of fear for the safety of students and staff, neighbors are offering free day care, snacks, games and supplies to assist families.
- immigrant businesses are keeping their doors locked and only admitting people on an individual basis, but people are patronizing these businesses to support them. Businesses closed yesterday out of respect for the killing of Renee Good.
- neighbors are distributing free alert whistles and literature to one another in case of ICE sightings.
- thousands of people are taking "upstander" trainings to better support people attacked by ICE.
- nonprofits are mobilizing to protect communities, and donors are stepping up to invest in these efforts.
- we are checking in on one another.
Minnesotans are not rolling over in fear. We are acting from a place of being caring, protective, and just humans. We are doing what we can to forge on despite this attack on our community. This is what fighting for right looks like." NC

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[dorankj]

Ashley Babbit DIDN'T have a weapon mor*n! A 4000# vehicle is.

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https://www.facebook.com/share/v/19fQwLxf61/ She was a mother not a terrorist threat

[mister_coffee]

Two additional shootings in Portland, OR this afternoon...

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[mister_coffee]

Please explain to me why killing Ashley Babbit was wrong and killing Renee Nicole Good was okay? I suspect it takes years of indoctrination and brainwashing to come to that conclusion.

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[dorankj]

Ashley Babbit, oh that's right wrong politics! Despicable hypocrites.

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[mister_coffee]

I kind of hope the do try to declare Martial Law and invoke the Insurrection Act. Largely because it would be a total joke and a sh**show and demonstrate the utter futility of ruling America by force.

There are too many streets and not enough tanks.

The least stupid way to go about it would be to show overwhelming force in a select few locations along with a lot of very effective PR. The problem with that is whereever they were would end up more or less sullenly peaceful while anyplace they weren't would be burnt to the ground. And they quickly would be forced into a 100 percent reactive mode and would cede the initiative to the opposition.

[EDMD]

If Trump goes nuclear and invokes the insurrection act then he loses his leverage. Suppose we had "martial law" Who is going to obey any federal officer? At that point it will be a matter of if and when army officers tell soldiers to disobey "illegal" orders. Are soldiers going to start shooting their civilian neighbors? Or is Trump going to find himself powerless at that point? It looks more and more like that's where we're going.

[mister_coffee]

ICE officers are also instructed that firing at a vehicle will not make it stop moving in the direction of the officer.

My head just exploded.

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Feds are denying access to records for the Minnesota state investigators
https://apnews.com/live/minneapolis-ice ... dium=share

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Video analysis
https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000 ... d=fb-share

it adds fleeing the scene of the crime to the event

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[/img][/img]https://scontent-sea1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/ ... e=6965B0C4

[mister_coffee]

If you watch and listen to the video closely, Ms. Good was given contradictory instructions. One goon was ordering her out of her Honda Pilot while others were ordering her to drive her vehicle away and get it out of the way.

A competent law enforcement agency would have let her peacefully leave and perhaps follow up and arrested her at her home later if they felt the need. But because being a psychopath is now apparently a requirement for Federal Law Enforcement we couldn't have that.

I'd also point out that the shooter is probably looking at a murder charge, even if that is years in the future. Yes, they could pardon him but that would only be for federal charges.

[mister_coffee]

https://joycevance.substack.com/p/you-g ... dium=email

“You gonna murder someone else? You can’t kill us all, Nazis.”

Renee Good is dead, and she shouldn’t be. Her death, at the hands of ICE agents, was completely unnecessary. She was shot in her own car and denied the medical assistance of a man at the scene who identified himself to agents as a physician. He was turned away. If agents thought they had reason to stop Good, or even arrest her, they had plenty of options. They could have gotten her car tag. They didn’t have to kill her.

But this administration excuses, condones, and even encourages this sort of aggression. This is what Donald Trump and Kristi Noem seem to want. Instead of ensuring federal agents operate within constitutional boundaries, they seem to revel in abuses. Before today, ICE’s rampage across the country had drifted off of the front pages of newspapers and the top of the hour on TV news. But ICE was still busy implementing Trump’s “mass deportation” policy, even as we were distracted from it by the Epstein Files and Venezuela. It’s been a constant since he returned to office.

DHS was created in 2002 as part of a major government reorganization after 9/11. ICE followed in March 2003. Congress gave the new agency a range of civil and criminal authorities and a mission of protecting national security and public safety.

During the first Trump administration, and even more over the last 12 months, the agency’s personnel and its mission have morphed in an accelerated, alarming fashion. There have been too many incidents involving disregard for people’s rights and well-being for it to be coincidence.

For the past months, I’ve been paying attention to those incidents. I realized early on that there were far too many to capture them all. But focusing on just a few is illustrative of the persistent pattern of abuses and how little concern this administration has about them. I’ve been collecting stories for months, so I could write about them, and finally got to work on that column last weekend. In my notes, I wrote that my plan was to publish the “column at some point, on a news day with a little space in it. But that day never came, and this is too important to wait any longer.” After events today in Minneapolis, that seems woefully inadequate.

I wrote this as I continued to work on the column this morning before the news of Renee Good’s death:

“Those issues have dropped out of the 24-hour news cycle for the moment, but courts are still considering them. And ICE is still—we need to avoid any understatement in this regard—trampling on the rights of American citizens and migrants alike, behaving in ways that in any other administration would’ve resulted in firing and criminal prosecution. Now, it appears to be the desired result. With so much happening all at once, it is very difficult to keep hold of any one particular point. But even as we focus on the National Guard and Trump’s desire to militarize American streets, ICE’s lawless behavior in repeated incidents should be deeply concerning to everyone who wants to live in a free country.”

As part of its campaign against Minnesota Governor and former Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz, the Trump administration has been inundating Minnesota with federal officials and federal agents. This was DHS’s offering this morning:

Then, the video and eyewitness testimony to the shooting emerged on social media. Minnesota Senator Tina Smith tweeted: “A US citizen has apparently been shot by ICE agents in Minneapolis. I’m gathering information, but the situation on the ground is volatile.” Reports that she had died followed quickly.

It’s only possible for incidents like this to happen with leadership that creates a permissive environment for it. Every unpunished incident creates the prospect that something worse will happen. That’s how we ended up here.

It’s important to obtain all of the available photos and video footage, including law enforcement body cameras, following an incident like this and to talk with eyewitnesses. Agents can only use deadly force when they reasonably believe their lives or the lives of others are threatened if they don’t act. Sometimes, different perspectives show different things, but the video we’ve seen so far appears to show an agent who had other options, but chose to fire on an innocent woman instead.

When you listen to this video, shot moments afterward, you can clearly hear a bystander screaming, “You gonna murder someone else? You can’t kill us all, Nazis.”

There is every reason for Americans to be out on our streets protesting against ICE’s actions. The federal judiciary has repeatedly condemned the administration's detention policies, with 309 out of the 323 judges that cases have been brought before ruling against ICE. Mostly recently, a federal judge in New Hampshire ordered the release of an immigrant being held unlawfully in custody.

DHS continues to amp up ICE’s presence in cities across the country. Minnesota has become, for the obvious reason, a special focus. On Tuesday, DHS tweeted: “The largest DHS operation ever is happening right now in Minnesota. @POTUS Trump and @Sec_Noem have rallied DHS law enforcement personnel to keep Americans safe and ERADICATE fraud. We’re not leaving until the problem is solved.” The post was accompanied by video of a man being easily taken into custody. But ICE’s operations in Minnesota have not been picture perfect, even before today.

There was an incident Christmas week where ICE detained a U.S. citizen, demanding that he prove his citizenship. Video of the incident shows he knows his rights and calmly tells the agents, “I’m a United States citizen.” The response is, “You have to prove that to us.” It’s only after an agent notices they’re being filmed that they let the man go. We’ve skipped over putting yellow stars on people and gone straight to deportation for anyone unlucky enough to be arrested anonymously and disappeared without due process—let’s underscore what that means: even if you’re a U.S. citizen, you’re at risk.

The stories that become public are bad. In September, a journalist, Steve Held was taken into custody while reporting on an ICE protest in Broadview, Illinois. He was detained and released without being processed, what prosecutors sometimes refer to sarcastically as “unarrested,” as in it was a mistake to take him in the first place.

In early October, federal agents with Border Patrol, the FBI, and ATF arrested 37 people in a raid on a Chicago apartment building. They banged on residents’ doors during the night according to the Chicago Sun Times, “pulling men, women and children from their apartments, some of them naked, residents and witnesses said.” A witness saw “agents dragging residents, including kids, out of the building without any clothes on and into U-Haul vans,” and said that “kids were separated from their mothers.” DHS claimed the neighborhood was “frequented” by Tren de Aragua gang members, but never offered any proof.

In three separate incidents, agents sprayed Christian ministers, in clerical collars, with pepper balls while they were peacefully protesting ICE. The Rev. Jorge Bautista was “struck in the face with a pepper round” fired by a federal agent in Oakland, California in October. That same month, the Rev. David Black was hit with a pepper shot outside of an ICE facility in the Chicago area. And in Rogers Park, Chicago, the Rev. Hannah Kardon, a United Methodist pastor, said she’d been shot multiple times with pepper bullets, “including while she was praying with her eyes closed and hands lifted, wearing a clerical collar.”

There are undoubtedly other stories out there too, the ones we don’t hear about. The ones where a kind neighbor didn’t stop to take video, where people didn’t pay attention. Standing together matters more than ever right now. It’s a moment for people of good conscience to stick together.

In Louisiana, David Courvelle, a detention officer, was fired and prosecuted for sexually abusing a woman in custody and under his authority in an ICE facility. He had sex with the Nicaraguan detainee for months until he was seen leaving a janitorial closet. It’s a federal felony for a person with authority over someone in custody to have sex with them, because of the inherently coercive nature of the situation; too much for even this administration to ignore.

The conditions ICE keeps detainees in are notoriously inhumane. A Judge appointed by Donald Trump in 2019 lambasted ICE in a case where a man was detained in a New York facility, in a poorly heated 6x6 feet cell designed for a single person, for more than two days. He was forced to sleep “near an open toilet with eight others, as the temperature outside dropped to 21 degrees. The lights were kept on at all hours.” The Judge wrote that “After nearly 35 years of experience with federal law enforcement in this judicial district, encompassing service as a prosecutor and a judge, I have never encountered anything like this,” and that ICE gave him false information about the arrest and refused to bring him to court as ordered and provide photographic evidence of conditions in the cell. The Judge suggested, as other judges have, that the agency might be held in contempt.

Whether it’s conditions in detention or the way ICE agents parade on American streets, shooting and killing instead of protecting and serving, it happens because of the people at the top. It’s those “leaders” who are responsible for ICE’s excesses, as responsible as the agent who fired his gun today.

It’s difficult to prosecute federal law enforcement agents in state courts, because DOJ can remove those cases to federal court. A Justice Department intent on giving agents a pass would be able to kill the cases once that happened. But that doesn’t mean state prosecutors shouldn’t try, even crafting arguments for keeping the cases in state court if the federal government refuses to operate in good faith. It wouldn’t be a certain path forward, but the moment calls for it. The statute of limitations for murder and other civil rights violations will likely extend beyond this administration’s time in office, making future prosecutions a possibility, but ICE needs a course correction now.

In 2022, the Supreme Court made it virtually impossible to sue ICE or other federal agents civilly for violating people’s constitutional rights. That case, Egbert v. Boule, holds that Congress must clearly establish a person’s right to sue, and they have not. In light of today’s shooting and other incidents, it’s time for Congress to act, although that will likely require midterm victories and Democratic majorities in Congress. Right now, with the administration condoning misconduct and no risk of personal accountability, agents are free to continue acting unlawfully. The risk that they might be held personally liable and forced to pay significant monetary judgments with their own funds could be the best ways to force them to stop and think.

But none of that will help Renee Good. The warning signs were all there, but this administration doesn’t care. Ask the people around you who support Donald Trump if this is what they voted for.

We’re in this together,

Joyce

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