Minnesota Burning
What the killing of Renee Nicole Good—and the scandal that preceded it—tell us about the state of the nation.
Let’s talk about a very 21st century scene. There’s an incident somewhere in the United States. The incident slots itself in neatly along the lines of preexisting ideological divisions. As the incident is unfolding, witnesses pull out their cell phone cameras to record it and those images are soon plastered across the web. Everybody sees essentially the same scene and everybody draws drastically different conclusions, depending on what their prior political convictions happen to be. And the result is a society split almost perfectly in two—disagreeing not only about underlying principles but even about which camera angles of an event, and which speed of playback, and which audio track, it prefers to focus on.
A textbook instance of this phenomenon occurred with the shooting death of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis this week at the hands of ICE agents. To some extent, the incident followed a familiar script—cell phone videos posted almost instantly online, with online sleuths carefully litigating the sequence of events. What was distinct about the Good shooting was that different governmental bodies, depending on their own inclinations, swiftly drew contrasting conclusions from the available footage, creating almost entirely different realities out of the same event and further exacerbating a schism between federal and local government.
Speaking a few hours after the shooting and before Good had been publicly identified, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem described it as an “act of domestic terrorism,” in which Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers were carrying out an enforcement action and “a woman attacked them and those surrounding them and attempted to run them over and ram them with her vehicle”—at which point one of the officers “acted quickly and defensively shot” her.
President Donald Trump, in a Truth Social post, wrote, “I have just viewed the clip of the event which took place in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It is a horrible thing to watch … 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.”
The attached clip Trump was referring to was taken from well in front of Good’s vehicle. It did show an officer quickly moving out of the way, and appearing to make contact with Good’s car, while gunshots can be distantly heard. The view of the shooting itself was obscured by Good’s car.
Much of the rest of the internet was treated to a different clip and, with it, a very different interpretation of the incident. A cell phone video from behind Good’s vehicle showed her maroon Honda Pilot parked perpendicularly across a Minneapolis street, in an apparent attempt to obstruct the ICE operation, and three masked ICE agents approaching the vehicle. One agent pulls on the driver’s side door handle and appears to shout, “Get out of the fucking car,” at which point the driver backs up and starts to drive away. An ICE agent who had been standing in front of the vehicle moves to the driver’s side and fires multiple times into the driver’s seat. The video shows the vehicle, with the driver now evidently no longer in control, careening off the road.
That was the clip that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey both clearly seemed to have in mind as they responded to the incident. “I’ve seen the video. Don’t believe this propaganda machine,” wrote Walz on X in a reference to Trump and Noem’s interpretations. Frey, in a press conference, said, “[ICE is] already trying to spin this as an action of self-defense. Having seen the video myself, I want to tell everybody directly: that is bullshit.” Trump himself seemed well aware of the existence of this clip. He wrote on Truth Social, “The woman screaming was, obviously, a professional agitator,” an evident reference to a bystander heard shouting in that clip, even as Trump chose to post the video from the front angle.
It’s easy enough to understand why. In the rear-angle clip, the officer standing in front of the car never appears to be in any particular danger. He has time to put his phone down, draw his gun, and take aim as the car is moving towards him. As the car turns right, he pivots to the side of the vehicle, firing three times into the driver’s seat, twice as the vehicle has already moved past him, and then calmly reholsters his gun before slowly walking to the scene of the crash. What it looks like is an execution.
There is also very little in DHS guidelines to justify the actions of the officer. DHS’ department policy on the use of force holds that “Deadly force shall not be used solely to prevent the escape of a fleeing subject,” while stipulating that “deadly force is authorized to prevent the escape of a fleeing subject where the LEO [law enforcement officer] has a reasonable belief that the subject poses a significant threat of death or serious physical harm to the LEO or others and such force is necessary to prevent escape”—a circumstance that it would be a real stretch to apply here, especially to the officer’s second and third shots.
All of that sets up a nasty jurisdictional dispute, with Walz, on behalf of the state, stating, “To Minnesotans, know that our administration is going to stop at nothing to seek accountability and justice,” even as the agent who fired the shots, masked throughout the incident and subject to a federal chain of command, retains his anonymity. It’s also far from clear that the incident is isolated. The shooting occurred as part of a federal deployment of around 2,000 agents to Minneapolis, which ICE’s acting director has called the agency’s “largest federal immigration operation ever” and which Walz, contrastingly, described as “a war that’s being waged against Minnesota.” In the aftermath of the shooting, Frey was blunt. “I have a message for ICE. Get the fuck out of Minneapolis,” he said.
In other words, it is not easy to imagine a state of greater polarization—or of federal and local authorities more at odds with one another.
It’s grimly fitting that the incident followed from another disputed piece of video footage—which was also, as The New York Times put it of the Renee Nicole Good video, “a political Rorschach test.’”
Minnesota has for several years been dealing with a swirling fraud scandal related to abuse of social services handouts by, in large part, members of the state’s Somali community. A 2022 federal prosecution of a nonprofit called Feeding our Future led to the discovery that fraud—including organizations submitting invoices to the state for non-existent services—was widespread. Federal prosecutors, to date, have charged 98 individuals and convicted 62 in fraud schemes totaling over $1 billion—with 85 of those charged of Somali origin.
In an op-ed for the Minnesota Reformer, Kayseh Magan, who is Somali-American and formerly worked as a fraud investigator for the Minnesota Attorney General, argued that fraud schemes in the Somali community are an open secret and abetted by flawed state policy. “Minnesota’s public programs don’t adequately guard against organized fraud,” he wrote. Ryan Pacyga, the attorney for one of the defendants in the fraud cases, likened the state’s lenient approach to endlessly refilling a cookie jar no matter how many times it was stolen from.
The story reached national prominence in December with the release of a viral YouTube video by 23-year-old Nick Shirley, who visited Somali-run daycare centers, autism treatment centers, and home healthcare centers and discovered barren storefronts, shoddy signage, and recalcitrant employees with very few services apparently on offer. Shirley’s main gag was to pretend to try to enroll his fictitious son Joey in daycare only to be met with blank looks and slammed doors. His video—which has now been viewed over 3 million times on YouTube—complemented reporting by Christopher Rufo and Ryan Thorpe in the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal that millions of dollars of stolen funds had ended up back in Somalia, in some cases financing the terror group Al-Shabaab.
But, again, what you saw in Shirley’s video depended largely on what you wanted to see. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune visited all ten of the facilities featured in Shirley’s video and claimed that at least four appeared to be viable businesses. “It’s not possible to see the children from the door where Shirley stood, but just down the hallway—painted with Disney characters—were three toy-lined rooms filled with sleeping Somali babies, toddlers and preschoolers,” the Star-Tribune reported of one of the daycare centers. “A middle-aged woman watched over the children as a Somali lullaby played softly in the background.”
CBS News in Minnesota reported that, of the daycare centers Shirley visited, one opened after the time of his visit, and another, as security camera footage demonstrated, actually did have children inside that day. Meanwhile, Magan, the former fraud investigator who had written on fraud in the Somali community, argued in a separate op-ed that the fraudsters tended to be motivated by greed not ideology, and that no real evidence had emerged of fraud money reaching Al-Shabaab.
Wherever the truth lay, it likely was somewhere between the complaisance of Democratic authorities and the hysteria of right-wing media outlets.
But whatever questions there might be about the reporting by Shirley and City Journal, it was enough for the Trump administration, which froze $10 billion in social services funds for five Democratic-run states, Minnesota included. The scandal appeared also to persuade Walz to forgo his effort to run for a third term as governor—a decision for which Shirley promptly took credit. “I ended Tim Walz,” he wrote on X.
Critically, the focus on Somalis in Minnesota spurred Trump to send federal agents to the state this month in an operation intended to root out abuses within the Somali community and which, within a day of its launch, resulted in the shooting death of Good.
The result is a spiraling situation that could hardly be more dangerous—with Minnesotans aggrieved by the presence of federal agents, and the agents, as the Good incident demonstrated, perfectly willing to engage in violence when crossed.
This is not only a jurisdictional or a political issue. The thing to do in this situation is to call for cool heads to prevail, to deescalate tensions, to remember all the points that Americans have in common, but, honestly, there are many miles to go before healing can take place. At this point the two tribes in American life are so deeply hostile to each other that it’s impossible for them even to look at a video of the shooting of a woman and to see the same thing.
Sam Kahn is associate editor at Persuasion, writes the Substack Castalia, and edits The Republic of Letters.
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As with many things, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. I viewed the videos several times and am of the opinion that yes Renee did try to run over the ICE agent but he had plenty of time to step aside if he was so inclined. So this comes down to sort of a “stand your ground “ issue. Was the agent obligated to try to avoid the vehicle coming at him or was he obligated to stand his ground and not allow the vehicle to pass. I don’t know the answer but both parties were in the wrong and the exact legal standard will determine whether the agent will go to jail for murder / manslaughter.
"The result is a spiraling situation that could hardly be more dangerous—with Minnesotans aggrieved by the presence of federal agents, and the agents, as the Good incident demonstrated, perfectly willing to engage in violence when crossed. "
F*ck no. ICE is law enforcement tasked with a legal job to apprehend people in this country illegally. It is not "Minnesotans" aggrieved by the presence of federal agents, as federal agents have primacy to enforce federal law and most Minnesotans understand this and behavior appropriately. It is a minority of agitators and their immoral political leaders that are stirring up the trouble. It is a left media that throws more gas on the fire.
I go agree that it is a spiraling situation, but it has a one-sided cause. It is Democrat malice. And if you disagree, then explain how Obama and Biden could apprehend and deport more illegal immigrants without this spiraling situation.
Frankly, ICE needs to travel with paddy wagons and water cannons, and everyone that impedes them should get the announcements that ICE will use deadly force over any perceived threat.
Given that the left as engaged in such violence including assassinations, there is every justification for ICE officers to be extra committed to their own safety.