Keith Ellison: ICE Wanted to Kill Renee Good

Michelle Goldberg has a new column up about the shooting in Minneapolis. It features some new commentary from Minnesota AG Keith Ellison in which Ellison accuses ICE agents of wanting to kill Renee Good as a way to send a message. The column is titled “By Killing Renee Good, ICE Sent a Message to Us All.”

Keith Ellison, Minnesota’s attorney general, told me that since ICE ramped up its operations in Minneapolis, it’s felt “like we are being inundated with a hostile paramilitary group that is mistreating, insulting, terrorizing our neighbors.” And the residents of Minneapolis have responded: “People have got their whistles, and they’ve got their little alert system to tell people ICE is in the neighborhood. They’ve been protesting. They’ve been out there trying to protect their neighbors.”

Many of these people probably believed that even in Trump’s America, citizens still have inviolable liberties that allow them to stand up to the jacked-up irregulars who’ve descended on their communities. The civil rights of immigrants have been profoundly curtailed; even green card holders are on notice that this government may detain and deport them simply for protesting. But Americans — particularly, let’s be honest, white Americans — might have thought themselves immune from ICE abuses.

The killing of Renee Nicole Good, a mother of three and widow of a military veteran, tests that assumption. ICE, said Ellison, is all but telling people, “‘You want to defend your neighbors, you’re going to do it at the risk of your own life.’ I think that’s the unmistakable message. Just looking at the tape, they could have said, ‘You get out of here,’ right? And then she gets out of there. They didn’t want her to get out of there. They wanted to either drag her out of that car or do what they did. And it was all about teaching lessons.”

This whole thing strikes me as pretty irresponsible for the state’s top law enforcement officer to say but I’m not surprised. This is Keith Ellison after all. But no, ICE is not a hostile paramilitary group, it’s a federal law enforcement agency that is authorized to arrest, detain and eventually deport illegal immigrants. Describing this activity as “terrorizing our neighbors” doesn’t make it accurate. This is just Ellison taking a very far left position, which again isn’t a surprise.

But the last paragraph takes this to another level. Ellison is arguing that ICE killed this woman purely to send a message. He’s just ignoring any evidence that her actions were reckless and threatening to an agent who was standing in front of her car. Essentially, he’s ruling out the possibility that the agent in question was a human being who was reacting to a perceived threat (pulling his gun when the car lurched in his direction). Instead, Ellison is substituting his own intuition about a motive that doesn’t even make any sense.

If ICE agents just wanted to send a message why not just start shooting immediately when they got out of their vehicle? What they did was order her to stop and get out of the car. She chose to ignore them and run for it. And only one of three agents surrounding the car pulled out his gun. It just happened to be the one standing in front of the car.

She wraps up by claiming this is all proof Americans are being ruled by fascists.

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.

This is just stupid, even for Michelle Goldberg. No one thinks life is a “privilege bestowed by authority.” But most sane people recognize that when an armed law enforcement agent orders you to stop and get out of your car, the way to disagree is not to recklessly do the opposite.

I’ve said several times that I don’t think Good intended to kill anyone. I think she panicked and probably didn’t realize in that moment that fleeing would result in bumping an agent with her car. In fact, she may have been looking the wrong direction out her side window at the agent yelling at her to get out of the car. I really don’t see any intent there.

But AG Keith Ellison and Michelle Goldberg can’t extend the same reasonable courtesy to the agent who, get this, also didn’t want to kill anyone. He reacted when he saw a car lurching toward him. I think he also panicked in that moment, thinking he was about to be killed or at least severely injured.

But Ellison can’t admit that possibility, i.e. that both people involved panicked and that’s why we’re here. Instead, he’s literally claiming this was something akin to murder or even assassination, i.e. that ICE wanted to kill this woman to send a message. 

With messages like this going out from our top newspapers and state officials, it’s no wonder some people panic rather than remain calm when confronted by law enforcement.

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