Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Sunday that hundreds of additional armed immigration agents were deploying to the Twin Cities area of Minnesota, in the wake of the murder of 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good by an ICE officer last week.
Noem appeared on both CNN and Fox News Sunday morning to defend the killing of Good by Jonathan Ross, a veteran ICE officer, who fired three shots into the victim’s head at point-blank range. She repeated as though by rote the lies spouted by top administration officials even before they knew the identity of Good, a mother of three who was participating with her partner in monitoring the activities of ICE agents in Minneapolis.
Large numbers of federal agents began arriving Sunday, with initial deployments outside ICE facilities in Minneapolis and St. Paul. The dispatch of several hundred more ICE and Border Patrol officers brings the total number of federal agents mobilized across the Twin Cities to well over 2,000, the largest such deployment ever carried out by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Noem made the astonishing claim that Minnesota state and local officials were responsible for inflaming public opinion over the ICE murder, as if the actions of ICE agents had nothing to do with the mass popular revulsion over the summary execution carried out in broad daylight.
“We need our leaders to turn down their rhetoric,” she said on CNN, but she defended her own vilification of Renee Good as a “domestic terrorist” and President Trump’s claim that Good was a “paid agitator.”
She told interviewer Jake Tapper that “law enforcement officers every day in this country are in difficult situations where they have to make split-second decisions to protect themselves, the public and their colleagues, and that they have to rely on their training. That’s exactly what this officer did. And I know that the left and I know the crazy activists in this country that are trying to undermine our way of life will attack and try to destroy a law enforcement officer to do that.”
Tapper then showed Noem a video of fascist Trump supporters storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021, overwhelming, beating and trampling officers of the Capitol Police. “Those are law enforcement officers being physically attacked,” he asked her. “By this standard, would any of those officers been justified in shooting and killing the people causing them physical harm?”
Noem sought to evade the question and lapsed into meaningless babble when Tapper pointed out Trump had pardoned all the January 6 attackers. He concluded: “There’s a different standard for law enforcement officials being attacked if they’re being attacked by Trump supporters. We just saw that.”
Another top official in the Trump persecution of immigrants, White House adviser Tom Homan, combined slanders of Renee Good with threats of even more police violence. Speaking on NBC’s Meet the Press, he told interviewer Kristen Welker, “You’ve got to put yourself in the mind of the officer, right? You’re in a city where there’s protest, interference, impediment, like these two ladies were doing before this instance occurred.”
He said there needed to be a full investigation of the killing. “But while we’re doing that, we’ve got to stop the hateful rhetoric. Saying this officer is a murderer is dangerous. It’s just ridiculous. And it’s just going to infuriate people more, which means there’s going to be more incidents like this …”
He concluded with a further slap at the victim: “Let’s remember, what she did was a crime. It’s illegal to interfere and impede ICE law enforcement officers.”
The following exchange then took place:
WELKER: Just to be clear, is anyone who protests ICE a domestic terrorist in the eyes of the administration?
HOMAN: I can’t say that. You know, it’s a case-by-case basis. But, you know, if you look up the definition of terrorism, is there violence, is there a threat of violence based on an ideology that wants to change the way the government does what we do? Look on the definition of terrorism.
After this declaration that anyone protesting ICE could potentially be charged with terrorism—or summarily executed for that “crime”—Homan went on to blame the media and members of Congress for characterizing ICE agents as racists, Nazis or secret police, making clear that they too could become targets of the Trump administration’s violent rampage.
DHS Secretary Noem has already taken action along these lines, issuing an order that members of Congress who wish to inspect an ICE detention facility must give seven days advance notice. As a result, three Democratic members of Congress, including Ilhan Omar, whose district includes Minneapolis and the neighborhood where Renee Good was killed, were barred from entering an ICE detention facility just outside the city on Saturday.
Last month, a federal judge in Washington D.C. issued a court order against any DHS actions to restrict congressional oversight visits to ICE facilities. But when Representative Angie Craig tried to show a copy of the court order to ICE agents at the detention center outside of Minneapolis, “they refused to look at it,” she said on MS NOW. “I informed them that they were violating the law. They said they didn’t care.”
Afterwards, Omar said, “What happened today is a blatant attempt to obstruct members of Congress from doing their oversight duties.” But appearing Sunday on the CBS program Face the Nation, Omar made no reference to the DHS action in barring access to the congressional visit.
Instead, she repeated her calls for ordinary citizens to record the actions of ICE agents “to create the level of accountability and transparency that we need.” This is, of course, exactly what Renee and Rebecca Good were doing when Renee Good was murdered by ICE agent Jonathan Ross. Omar made no suggestion that Congress or the Democratic Party should take any action in response to ICE lawlessness, which has the full backing of the Trump administration.
One Democrat appearing on Meet the Press, Senator Chris Murphy was asked directly about impeaching Trump. Kristen Welker pointed out that former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi—who pushed through Trump’s impeachment over withholding arms shipments to Ukraine—said in December that Trump had not yet crossed the line justifying impeachment in his second term.
Murphy replied cynically, “Well, as you know, I would be a juror in an impeachment trial. So I don’t generally give advice to the House on whether or not they should impeach. But listen, I have common sense. And so I know that this president has committed 10 times more impeachable offenses in his second term as he did in his first term.”
Notably, Murphy did not suggest that Trump should be impeached for illegal actions or defiance of the Constitution, or his mobilization of troops and federal agents to invade American cities, let alone acts of mass murder like the air strikes against Venezuela, Yemen or Iran.
Instead, he continued, “He is stealing from the American people. The amount of corruption that he is involved in, taking a luxury private jet from Qatar, trading national security secrets to a foreign nation in exchange for a $2 billion investment in his cryptocurrency. That is wildly corrupt.”
This is a transparent evasion. The Democrats do not call for Trump’s impeachment, nor do they plan to campaign for it in the 2026 elections, because they want to dampen down the growing popular hostility to this government. They fear that it will develop into an explosive political confrontation that would threaten the foundations of the capitalist system as a whole.