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It didn’t take long at all for videos to emerge from the scene of the fatal shooting by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer during a raid in Minneapolis on Wednesday. And, just as quickly, the videos became a kind of Zapruder film, weaponized by people desperate to misinterpret events everyone can see with their own eyes to justify an innocent woman’s death.
It’s more critical than ever to trust what you’re seeing with your own eyes. The Trump administration’s spin of these events — of a brutal terrorist attack by a 37-year-old mom against a federal agent just out there doing his job to make us safer — is quite plainly not backed up by these videos. Who are you going to believe, they seem to be asking us: Our official version, or your own lying eyes?
The Trump administration’s spin of these events is quite plainly not backed up by these videos.
Here’s what the videos show to anyone able to think critically and with a conscience: Renee Nicole Good, a mother of three, was in the driver’s seat of a red car. Good appears to be waving vehicles to pass her, as if she’s directing traffic to proceed past her in an orderly way.
As immigration agents approach the driver’s side door, one can be heard telling her, “Get out of the fucking car.” It’s hard to tell which agent is speaking, given their propensity for masking their faces to avoid public scrutiny or the consequences of their actions. One of the agents then starts pulling at the door handle of Good’s car, and she starts to pull away.
At this point, another agent, whom The Intercept identified as Jonathan Ross, can then be heard firing multiple shots at close range, killing her.
In another video taken in the aftermath of the shots, a woman sits on the snow-covered ground, howling in unimaginable pain, saying, “They killed my wife.” She adds, “They shot her in the head.” She can also be heard saying they have a 6-year-old at school.
A man can be seen in a separate video, identifying himself as a physician, pleading with the officers to be allowed to check Good for a pulse. An officer responds, “I don’t care,” and the doctor is prevented from approaching the victim.
There is real truth in these videos if you trust your own eyes and ears.
The preferred video “angle” for conservatives, however, was published by local news station ABC 5. On Truth Social, President Donald Trump pointed to “the attached clip” as evidence that “the woman screaming” — Good’s apparent wife — was a “professional agitator.”
“The woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense. Based on the attached clip, it is hard to believe he is alive,” Trump wrote. “The situation is being studied, in its entirety.”
Vice President JD Vance hopped on the bandwagon on Twitter. He reposted someone else’s declaration that the angle of the ABC video “settles it.” “Correct. You can accept that this woman’s death is a tragedy while acknowledging it’s a tragedy of her own making,” Vance chimes in. “Don’t illegally interfere in federal law enforcement operations and try to run over our officers with your car. It’s really that simple.”
In establishing the administration’s official narrative, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem laid out “the facts,” saying Good proceeded to “weaponize her vehicle, and she attempted to run a law enforcement officer over. This appears as an attempt to kill or cause bodily harm to agents, an act of domestic terrorism.”
Noem also said the ICE officer was treated at a local hospital and released, which would seem to indicate that whatever injuries he apparently sustained as he killed a civilian were far from life-threatening.
That is simply not what the ABC video, which is low resolution and shot at a greater distance than the others, shows. As the New York Times — which ran the classic both-sides headline “One Video of a Fatal ICE Shooting, Two Opposite Views” — found in its analysis of the videos, Ross was not in the vehicle’s path. He was not struck by the vehicle. Even if you interpret the ABC video in the most generous-to-ICE way, which fewer and fewer Americans are inclined to do, you do not see Ross dragged by Good’s car. You don’t even see him knocked down by the alleged impact of the car.
But we’re being told not to trust our lying eyes.
This is all part of a coordinated campaign to distort what we know when we refuse to look away from state-sanctioned violence. It’s an effort to misconstrue where the violent act actually resides in the videos. “Sure, a lady was killed,” the Trump administration is telling us, “but first she tried to kill one of our guys, the people who really matter, with her car.” In other words, the ends always justify the means.
The bad actors pushing this alternate version of events couldn’t have more of a vested interest in seeing ICE’s campaign of terror continue at any cost. Violence is inherent in these raids, and the deportation machine is functioning as intended by consuming anyone in its path.
Good is not the first person to lose her life to this anti-immigrant regime, but it’s only by being honest about what we’re seeing on the streets in our own communities and demanding its end can we make sure she’s the last.
