The Guardian view on ICE and Renee Good’s killing: Trumpism’s brutal tactics don’t end with migrants | Editorial
IIn Minnesota, armed and masked officers are tearing families apart. They grab parents while they wait with their children at a bus stop, go door to door looking for undocumented migrants and smash car windows to force people out. Last Wednesday, a police officer shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old American citizen. His murder is a tragedy for all those who loved him, and especially for the three children left without a mother. It also marks his country’s crossing of the Rubicon.
Where Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) once preferred to keep a low profile, it now seeks publicity and confrontation – fueled by billions of dollars in funding, the administration’s aggressiveness and audacity, and the enablement of bigotry.
As statistics show violent and property crime rates have fallen since the 1990s, Mr. Trump has spoken of a threat of American carnage and a responsible enemy: undocumented immigrants — and, increasingly, those who support them. Fear is a tool. The administration will struggle to meet its goal of deporting 1 million undocumented immigrants a year unless people are afraid to self-deport and supporters are afraid to offer support. Most Americans – and the majority of independent voters – think Mr. Trump’s deportation campaign is excessive. But Republican voters disagree, and a third of them think he didn’t go far enough.
Undocumented migrants are afraid to leave their homes, fearing they will never see their families again. U.S. citizens of color are increasingly being affected, with a September Supreme Court ruling apparently interpreted by ICE as allowing detention solely on the basis of race and ethnicity. Racism, militarization, and law enforcement impunity are familiar themes: Police killed 1,379 people in the United States in 2024, and the victims were almost three times more likely to be black than white. But this trend is all the more shocking because being an undocumented immigrant is a civil offense, not a criminal offense, and ICE agents have limited detention powers. It is unclear whether they even had the authority to demand that Ms. Good leave her car.
By calling her a “deranged leftist” and a “domestic terrorist,” investigating her widow and claiming there is “absolute immunity” for the officer who shot her, the administration is not only willing to vilify the seemingly unlikely Republican target of a white, middle-class mother, but it is also exposing its broader political agenda. Whether the videos expose the lies doesn’t matter. Opponents don’t need to believe – they just need to comply.
In Trumpism, rules and restraint are portrayed as a corruption of the will of the people rather than the essence of American democracy. A man who pardoned his supporters for a full-blown insurrection seeking to keep him in power is now threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act to quell protests. In October, the president told the generals: “This is a war from within. » ICE has been transformed into a paramilitary force that seemingly answers only to Mr. Trump. Imagine its potential uses in the future.
It’s no wonder Minnesotans say it feels like an invasion, and the state’s governor, Tim Walz, describes it as an occupation. Communities now standing up for and supporting each other are not only opposing the demonization, mistreatment, and deportation of undocumented migrants. They oppose the fear that Trumpism feeds on and the fabrication of a crisis that would claim many more victims.
