Yesterday [January 7] an American citizen in Minneapolis was gunned down by her own government. Think about that for a moment. 

The 37-year-old woman, Renee Nicole Good, was unarmed, trying to turn her car around from the armed and masked agents. Yet the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent fired three shots into this innocent victim’s face. A physician tried to assist her at the scene but he was turned away by ICE. 

Secretary of Homeland Security Noem quickly called it an act of “domestic terrorism” on the part of the victim. She said there were “rioters” and a “mob of agitators” at the scene. Noem said the victim was “weaponizing” her vehicle. She showed no remorse as to the death of a U.S. citizen. 

None of what Noem said is remotely true. I know that because the video shows exactly the opposite. The woman was simply trying to turn her vehicle around when the officer killed her. No matter how much the administration tries to gaslight us, tapes don’t lie.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Waltz also saw the video and said “Don’t believe this propaganda machine…We have been warning for weeks that the Trump administration’s dangerous, sensationalized operations are a threat to our public safety.”

Following the shooting Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said Noem’s account of the shooting was “bullshit,” and told ICE to “get the [expletive] out of Minneapolis. People are being hurt. Families are being ripped apart.”

The DHS is in the middle of what it calls its “largest operation to date” in Minnesota with 2,000 agents targeting its large Somali population who President Trump has referred to as “garbage.”

With the president’s inflammatory words concerning not only Somalis but migrants in general, is it any wonder that these ICE agents are so juiced up and trigger happy? The New York Times reported that “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.”

This horrible event today in Minneapolis triggered a fifty-year memory of another time in our history when a ruthless and out-of-control president showed his insensitivity following a national tragedy.

In 1971, one year after the killing of four students at Kent State University by Ohio National Guard troops, another Republican president of dubious character, Richard Nixon, in remarking on the uprising at Attica Prison invoked those students’ deaths. 

“They can talk all they want about the radicals. You know what stops them? Kill a few,” said Nixon. “Remember Kent State? Didn’t it have one hell of an effect, the Kent State thing?”

“Sure did,” answered Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman. “Gave them second thoughts.” 

One can almost hear them cackling.

Nixon liked to label the anti-Vietnam war protestors as “outside agitators,” almost the exact words Noem used yesterday to describe peaceful citizens exercising their First Amendment rights. This is how Trump and his loyalists view those of us pushing back against a heartless immigration policy that is tearing our nation to shreds and dragging us into an authoritarian police state.

Will there be an independent, fully transparent investigation into this latest shooting of an American citizen? Not at the federal level. We cannot trust anyone in the Department of Justice. Attorney General Pam Bondi does not represent our interests, nor does she adhere to the Constitutional oath she swore to uphold. She is only beholden to her one client: Donald J. Trump. Her slavish subservience ensures that this administration can do anything—even murder its own citizens—and not be held accountable.

We are under siege. Our neighbors being snatched from their homes and work places. They are being disappeared into detention centers like Alligator Alcatraz in Florida, or shipped off to the hellish Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in El Salvador. Meanwhile, ICE is on a hiring spree, doling out hefty sign-on bonuses and only doing cursory training of its new agents. We are witnessing the results in real time.

Not even a full year into his presidency, Donald Trump’s actions are reshaping the United States into a callous country that promotes aggression, violence and lies. 

Is this how it felt in Germany in the 1930s?

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