Paging Neil Young
About that ICE shooting in Minneapolis comes this from the Marshall Project:
The fatal shooting of 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis on Wednesday was not the first time that federal officers have shot and killed civilians since the Trump administration launched its aggressive immigration enforcement campaign.
Federal officers have fatally shot at least three other people in the last five months, according to news reports reviewed by The Marshall Project. In September, Silverio Villegas González, a father originally from Mexico who worked as a cook, was killed while reportedly trying to flee from officers in a Chicago suburb, WBEZ reported. In December, a border patrol agent killed a 31-year-old Mexican citizen while trying to detain him in Rio Grande, Texas. And on New Year’s Eve, an off-duty ICE agent used his service weapon to shoot a man in Los Angeles, California, according to CBS News. Authorities said the man had raised a rifle at the officer.
Other people have also been shot by agents. The Trace, the nonprofit news organization covering gun violence, has counted more than a dozen such shootings. In some cases, the victims survived, including a woman who suffered multiple bullet wounds in an incident in Chicago in October. The Border Patrol officer who shot her appeared to brag about it in a text message, later presented in court evidence. The message reportedly read, “I fired 5 rounds, and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys.” That shooting happened as part of Operation Midway Blitz, an immigration enforcement campaign in which federal agents fanned across Chicago, similar to what they are doing in Minneapolis now. The administration has also conducted large-scale blitzes in Los Angeles, Portland and New Orleans.
The New York Times counts nine shootings:
In the last four months alone, immigration officers have fired on at least nine people in five states and Washington, D.C. All of the individuals targeted in those shootings were, like the woman killed on Wednesday, fired on while in their vehicles. In each case, officials have claimed that the agents fired in self-defense, fearing they would be struck by the vehicle.
At least one other person died as a result of those shootings.
The Guardian on Sunday listed 32 people who died in ICE custody in 2025, “making it the agency’s deadliest year in more than two decades.”
DHS spokesliar Tricia McLaughlin issued her standard Mad Lib about the woman shot dead on Wednesday. If DHS had secretly replaced @TriciaOhio with an AI programmed to respond to all acts of DHS violence with phrases including “violent rioters,” “weaponized vehicle,” and “domestic terrorism,” would anyone know the difference?
A federal judge saw this Minneapolis killing coming, Law Dork (Chris Geidner) reports:
Tonight, however, I want to highlight the ways in which U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis, in her November 20 opinion in a case over the federal government’s treatment of protesters and press in Illinois, warned us — warned America — that today was coming.
In the 233-page opinion backing up her earlier orders in the case, Ellis, an Obama appointee, noted throughout the opinion how often federal immigration agents were drawing guns in Illinois and ultimately concluded that “agents have used excessive force … without justification, often without warning, and even at those who had begun to comply with agents’ orders.“
In the November 20 opinion, Ellis found — in the case that led to Border Patrol official Gregory Bovino’s deposition — that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed in their claim that the Trump administration’s actions at the protests in front of the Broadview ICE facility outside Chicago and at other places in the area violated the First and Fourth Amendments.
Throughout the opinion — issued less than two months ago — Ellis highlighted how guns were being drawn repeatedly and in questionable-at-best circumstances in Chicago.
Ellis’s opinion (and body of evidence), Dork believes, “stands as a document of clear warning that must be part of our larger understanding as efforts to hold the Trump administration accountable for Wednesday’s fatal shooting and stop more Trump administration violence get underway.”
Soulless ghouls flooded a friend’s Facebook post on the Minneapolis shooting claiming that Good suffered the consequences of her choices. I replied that Derek Chauvin could be reached for comment on his at the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) in Big Spring, Texas. Seems I remember that celebrating Charlie Kirk’s death was detestable bad form just four months ago. I guess it depends on whom is on the downrange end of the bullet’s trajectory.
“Today has been bonkers,” historian Heather Cox Richardson wrote on Facebook in advance of her daily letter. That’s an understatement.