The basic sequence of the Ice shooting in Minneapolis on Wednesday is not in dispute: a Honda Pilot reversed, then moved forward; an Ice agent was close to the vehicle; the agent fired shots. A 37-year-old woman was killed.
But that sequence has been interpreted in radically different ways.
Was the officer struck by the vehicle, as president Donald Trump insists, or did the car pass by or around him? Was he positioned in front of the vehicle or to the side? Did he have a genuine, reasonable fear for his life in that moment, or did he create the very danger he then used lethal force to escape?
Video from the scene appears to show the officer walking in the aftermath. Brian O’Hara, the Minneapolis police chief, confirmed that the woman was not the target of any law enforcement investigation and that “the vehicle began to drive off” before shots were fired.
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None of that stopped political leaders from delivering their verdicts within hours – verdicts that share nothing in common.
What followed was a familiar ritual. From Ferguson to January 6th to the death of George Floyd on a street not far from this one, the pattern holds. The facts are not established, but the first words from political leaders are conclusive and set the frame – and with it, the battle lines.
Trump, posting on Truth Social, described a violent assault on a federal officer. A woman heard screaming at agents in the bystander video was, he wrote, “obviously, a professional agitator.” The driver, he continued, was “very disorderly, obstructing and resisting,” and had “violently, wilfully, and viciously” run over the Ice officer, who “seems to have shot her in self-defence.” The agent, according to the president, was lucky to be alive.
[ Video shows shooting of Renee Nicole Good by Ice agent in MinnesotaOpens in new window ]
Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem, appearing at a news conference in Texas, supplied the official framing. “It was an act of domestic terrorism,” she said. The woman had “attempted to run them over and ram them with her vehicle.” The officer “acted quickly and defensively shot to protect himself and the people around him.”
In Minnesota, the state’s two most prominent Democrats watched the same footage and arrived at the opposite conclusion.
Governor Tim Walz urged the public to reject what he called the federal government’s “propaganda machine.” He noted that Washington had already declared the case closed before investigators had even removed the woman from her vehicle. “It’s beyond me,” Walz said, “that the federal government has already determined who this person was, what their motive was.”
But it was mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis – just days into his third term – who abandoned the measured cadences of elected office altogether. “To Ice,” he said, “get out of Minneapolis,” using an expletive. “We do not want you here.” The self-defence narrative being advanced by the administration? “That is a garbage narrative,” Frey said. “That is not true. It has no truth.”
The vehemence was not incidental. The shooting took place in the same part of south Minneapolis where George Floyd was killed by a police officer in 2020 – a death that convulsed the city and the nation, that made Minneapolis a symbol of police violence and the unfinished work of racial justice.
That the city finds itself at the centre of another explosive confrontation over the use of lethal force – this time by federal agents conducting an immigration raid – helps explain why local leaders responded not with caution but with fury.
Even the car has become contested ground. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson called it a “weaponised vehicle,” language that frames the shooting as a response to a terrorist attack. To the mayor and local activists, it is a Honda Pilot, a family SUV, the kind found in driveways across the United States.
The woman who was fatally shot was Renee Nicole Good. By the time her identity was revealed publicly, she had already been declared a domestic terrorist by one side and a murder victim by the other.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
