Editor’s note: After we recorded this, The New York Times published a frame-by-frame video analysis of the shooting that further debunks the Trump administration’s version of events.
On Wednesday, an ICE agent shot and killed a woman in her vehicle on the streets of Minneapolis. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem immediately accused the woman of committing an act of domestic terrorism. Then President Trump posted a misleading video of the affair and blamed it on the victim in truly vile terms. Officials in Minnesota are flatly disputing the official federal government account of the shooting, calling it a reckless act by out-of-control ICE agents. We think the danger of this moment is hard to overstate. There are now heavily armed government militias roaming the streets of U.S. cities, they’ve been given free rein by Trump and Noem, and they appear unbound and unaccountable. So we’re working through all of this with New Republic contributing editor Felipe De La Hoz, who writes well about the need for ICE accountability. Felipe, good to have you on.
Sargent: It’s pretty fucked. So as of this recording, the authorities haven’t released this woman’s name. The government is saying she weaponized the vehicle against ICE agents and that they killed her in justified self-defense. But videos of the event that are floating around online seem to show that the agent in question fired into the vehicle from the side at close to point-blank range after the vehicle had driven past him. And it was going pretty slowly. Felipe, can you bring us up to date on what we know here?
And so this was part of that broader operation. And it seems that the woman in question, the person who was shot, was either a legal observer or somehow involved in some of the of the protest movements there and had been responding to a raid that was happening in the community.
Sargent: Yeah, I think one thing that’s not clear from the videos I’ve seen—maybe you’ve seen something to help clarify this—the agent who fired the gun might have been standing in front of the car when it first backed up and started to move. But even if that were the case—and again, I don’t know if it is—we’re still in a situation where the car was really kind of visibly turning down the street, not looking like it was trying to ram a guy. And again, he fired into the driver’s side window at close to point-blank range from the side after the car was clearly posing no danger to him whatsoever. This, at an absolute minimum, looks like extraordinary recklessness, right?
Sargent: Yes, and I want to underscore that in Minnesota, police officials and elected officials are describing the event the way you and I are, and they’re strongly contesting the account being offered by the government. I want to read what Trump said on Truth Social about this: “The woman driving the car was very disorderly obstructing and resisting who then violently willfully and viciously ran over the ice officer who seems to have shot her in self-defense Based on the attached clip it is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital.”
De La Hoz: The administration, Trump, Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin could have spun a much more plausible story here than they did. But the thing is this administration treats brazen lying as kind of an assertion of power in itself. And so I think they really can’t help themselves. And it’s very evident from the videos, from the eyewitness accounts that precise details of what they’re describing did not happen. Nobody was run over. It’s very evident in the videos that nobody was actually struck by the car, right?
I want to point something out too, by the way, Greg, which is that there was a similar incident in Chicago in October when ICE agents fired on a woman and similarly claimed that she was kind of battering officers with her car. That woman survived, fortunately. But they brought criminal charges against her and those charges were ultimately dismissed with prejudice in part on the request of the Department of Justice itself, which chose to dismiss the charges. And so I think this is an MO at this point for the federal government to kind of use this as a catchall circumstance to explain their conduct and these exact kinds of allegations have fallen apart in the past.
And I actually went and looked at the language of that statement from back in October and compared it to the language of Department of Homeland Security’s statement just today about what happened. And it was weirdly, weirdly similar.
De La Hoz: Yeah, I mean even sort of giving them sort of the benefit of the doubt, any law enforcement agency, I think, in a shooting conducted by one of its officers, would wait to some extent to sort of clarify the facts before they started making public statements about what exactly happened.
It’s always more or less the same language about their officers being at risk, attacked. The use of the phrase “domestic terrorism,” it gets bandied about quite a bit. And so I think they’ve settled on this as the language that they perhaps have adjudged is most likely to get them off the hook when they are kind of using excessive force in this way.
Kristi Noem (voiceover): It was an act of domestic terrorism. What happened was our ICE officers were out in enforcement action. They got stuck in the snow because of the adverse weather that is in Minneapolis. They were attempting to push out their vehicle and a woman attacked them and those surrounding them and attempted to run them over and ram them with her vehicle. An officer of ours acted quickly and defensively shot to protect himself and the people around him. And my understanding is, is that she was hit and is deceased.
De La Hoz: Yeah, I mean, I think that the Department of Homeland Security under Noem has kind of envisioned itself, has conceptualized of itself, not only as a law enforcement department, an agency, but as a kind of a propaganda, you know, agency to some extent. Which is why Noem herself sort of oftentimes appears at operations, you know, in full blowout and glam makeup and an ICE vest. Why there are ICE videographers and photographers often at these raids themselves.
Sargent: Well, let’s listen to what Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said about this.
Sargent: So Felipe, I find that striking because in one instance after another the story has been that local officials simply don’t want this ICE presence in their cities. And in just about every conceivable way, these ICE invasions of local regions are really making everybody a lot less safe. What do you think of what Frey said there?
It’s because the administration itself knows that these are destructive operations, that they are not primarily about public safety. They are an attempt to intimidate and to sort of harm the local populations, right? If this was really about engendering public safety, I would assume that there would be sort of an ICE presence of a similar aggression and size in all sorts of kind of red areas, but there are not. Right.
And I think that the mayor sounds very frustrated because this is an instance where somebody is dead—and I think somebody is dead in a circumstance that at least as of now appears to be clearly unjustified. Right. And so I think that this is channeling a certain level of anger that is present in the Democratic base right now. And I think that elected leaders are beginning to see that and embrace it to a greater extent.
They’re diverting enormous amounts of law enforcement resources away from serious crimes and into this. That puts us in more danger and it creates highly combustible situations that are, as we see here, killing people, including U.S. citizens. And I don’t understand why every single Democrat is not out there shouting this fact about the situation. What do you think?
And so I think incidents like this may begin to kind of break that sort of facade of regularity or decorum, right, that has kind of held some of these officials back. But, you know, I think it is the combination of the fear that if they sort of face off against the administration they might lose. I wrote something about this a few weeks back that I think that there is a certain calculus that’s being made by some members of Congress, for example, where they sort of retain some level of political power and influence and they’re actually afraid that they might actually kind of lose in a showdown over the rule of law with the administration.
Sargent: Again, we don’t know the full set of facts. There may be exonerating things for the officer that we don’t know about. We should be fair. I assume there will be body-cam footage potentially. Maybe that’ll show something a little different. But if this does end up showing that this was something close to murder or extraordinary recklessness to the point of, you know, extreme dereliction, what should happen? And sort of more broadly, are there prospects for the states and localities to be doing more to rein in what is clearly a rogue, out-of-control militia force at this point?
I wrote relatively recently for The New Republic about the prospect of states prosecuting federal officials who are acting outside the bounds of the law. And I think there’s a sort of a misinterpretation that there’s a kind of blanket immunity for federal officials. But there is not. I mean, there is a Supreme Court precedent dating back over 100 years that states that states cannot prosecute a federal agent for carrying out their duties. However, agents who are acting in excess of their duties, who are using unreasonable force, who are breaking the law are not as categorically immune from state prosecution.
Sargent: Right, I think at an absolute minimum what we need is a clear sign from some of these state leaders that they are looking seriously at the range of options at their disposal along the lines you’re talking about. And it’s at least possible that this is a case that could push that along in a major way. Felipe De La Hoz, thanks for coming on with us, man. Really good to talk to you.
De La Hoz: Thanks, Greg. Hope to talk again, perhaps in brighter circumstances.
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