The fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good shows that the people who have been resisting President Trump’s mass deportation push are risking their lives. However, waves of protests in the aftermath of her death show the threat is not stopping anyone from showing up. This dynamic was clear as Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem visited New York City on Monday and was met with defiant demonstrations.
More than 2,000 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are on the ground in Minnesota in what President Donald Trump’s administration officials have called the “largest immigration operation ever.” Deployed just days ago by Trump, one agent has already shot and killed a person and federal law enforcement has deployed tear gas and pepper spray against protesters.
I remember not so many months ago wondering if I was pushing the envelope a bit by writing that the Justice Department was being run out of the Trump White House. Since those quaint times, evidence has continued to amass that that is exactly how things are being run, but both the White House and Justice Department preferred to maintain the fiction that they were separate entities. Until today.
Here’s what Vice President JD Vance announced midday in a White House press appearance (emphasis mine):
The social media platform X has been flooded with AI-generated sexualized images of women and children in recent weeks — months before a new law aiming to ban the spread of nonconsensual intimate imagery goes into effect.
Elon Musk, the owner of X, announced a new feature with a post on Christmas Eve encouraging users to try editing images and videos with Grok, the app’s chatbot. Then, a few weeks later, as the new year began, many women noticed something disturbing online: a flood of AI-generated sexualized images of them on the social media platform X. Users on X were able to ask Grok’s latest feature to digitally remove clothing from posted photos and recirculate them.
I want to try to reframe yesterday’s shooting in Minneapolis to highlight the dire situation in which we find ourselves with the Justice Department — including the FBI — being run out of the Trump White House.
In the past, the following things would have been generally, albeit imperfectly, true:
The FBI taking over the federal side of the investigation would have offered a reasonable chance of a vigorous, independent investigation.
The local U.S. attorney’s office, with help from expertise at Main Justice, would have been in a position to make an independent charging decision based on the FBI’s investigation.
Politicized comments about the shooting from the president, his White House, and other administration officials — while inadvisable and unhelpful — would not have represented a true threat to the independence of the investigation or of the charging decision.
I could spend another 1,000 words caveating those assertions — noting for example that prosecutors have always had wide-ranging discretion which political considerations can infiltrate, that the law on police shootings has long been stacked heavily in favor of law enforcement, and that law enforcement investigating law enforcement has always created difficult to resolve conflicts of interest — but I don’t want to let the imperfections of the old system trip us up as we try to be clear-eyed about the new system.
The top officials at the Justice Department and the FBI have shown themselves again and again to be beholden to the president, spending most of their days fawning over him and trying to stay in the good graces of his White House. They have demonstrated no independence of thought or action from this president. They do not have their employees’ backs. They have eviscerated the expertise within their ranks, decimating crucial units like the Civil Rights Division.
Meanwhile, President Trump has repeatedly asserted his full and direct control over the DOJ and FBI. He has publicly and unabashedly ordered investigations and prosecutions, most famously in the case of former FBI Director James Comey. Trump has undermined successful prosecutions by his own DOJ by commuting sentences and issuing pardons, in some instances within weeks of conviction. He enjoys immunity from prosecution for his corrupt abuse of the executive powers of policing and prosecution.
And yet despite those familiar facts, I’m not sure we’ve collectively internalized fully the implications of the dependent and compliant Justice Department. The aftermath of yesterday’s shooting only reinforced how dire the situation is. Trump didn’t just comment on the evidence. He and his administration lied about it, twisted it, and propagandized about it. They publicly reached ultimate conclusions about guilt and innocence. They repeatedly savaged the woman killed, calling her a “domestic terrorist“:
@chrislhayes.bsky.social: “A 37-year-old American citizen, the mother of a young child is dead tonight. She was shot in the face by an agent of the federal government, and that government has spent the day telling despicable lies about her.”
Contrast Trump with the Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, who expressed righteous anger — calling the already-emerging administration narrative of the shooting “bullshit” and telling ICE to “get the fuck out of Minneapolis” — but has no authority over the state investigation or prosecution. The state’s investigation is being conducted by the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.
At the same time, Trump and his administration did nothing to offer assurances that an independent investigation would be conducted, that the FBI would be left alone to do its work, that prosecutors would abide by the facts and the law and not be subject to political pressures from Trump or appointees. They didn’t even spout niceties in that direction. There was no rhetorical pretense of independence or acknowledgement of the conflicting interests that must balanced.
Nothing is stopping Trump from kneecapping the FBI investigation, or political appointees from self-kneecapping. Similarly, even if DOJ political appointees don’t also self-kneecap, there can be little confidence in how the investigation was conducted or the righteousness of the prosecution. Trump could order any putative prosecution ended before it begins, derail it, or use his pardon power after conviction. All of it will, and should be, suspect given the deep structural corruption that Trump has already achieved.
Since there can be no true federal accountability for the shooting of a U.S. citizen — who, the evidence increasingly suggests, may have been a mere bystander to an immigration enforcement action targeting the vilified Somali community — we’re left to rely on the parallel state investigation and possible charges under state law. There is some precedent for states charging federal officers for violations of state law, but the broader historical pattern has been for the feds to be a legal backstop against insufficient or compromised state action against abusive police and policing practices. Trump has firmly steered DOJ away from that role.
None of this even gets into the clear signals investigators and prosecutors already had from the Trump White House before the shooting about which side the bread is buttered on. You can’t have an independent law enforcement agency when it is under constant political siege. Trump and political appointees spent the day yesterday broadcasting those same signals even more directly in the Minneapolis case.
Late Update: It gets even worse. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension says the FBI has ousted it from what had been a joint investigation, Minnesota Public Radio reports. In a statement, the BCA said:
[T]he FBI informed the BCA that the U.S. Attorney’s Office had reversed course: the investigation would now be led solely by the FBI, and the BCA would no longer have access to the case materials, scene evidence or investigative interviews necessary to complete a thorough and independent investigation.
Without complete access to the evidence, witnesses and information collected, we cannot meet the investigative standards that Minnesota law and the public demands. As a result, the BCA has reluctantly withdrawn from the investigation.
Not Just Bad Policing
Videos from targeted cities over the past few months have shown such reckless conduct by immigration agents that it understates it to call it bad policing. It’s just not policing at all. It occupies a new realm of use of force, with outside federal units detached from local communities and with tenuous cooperation from local law enforcement coming in to knock heads, often while masked and driving unmarked civilian vehicles.
Incidents like the shooting in Minneapolis were not just foreseeable, but were foreseen and warned about, local officials angrily noted. Reckless conduct by immigration agents was already documented by a federal judge in Chicago, Chris Geidner reminds us. Two similar incidents occurred in Chicago involving vehicles, where the feds brought charges against the drivers, but the cases quickly fell apart and the charges were later dropped. Nationwide, it was the ninth ICE shooting since September.
One policing expert who reviewed video of the Minneapolis shooting told the NYT, “This is what we call officer-created jeopardy.”
Schools Closed
In the face of the chaos unleashed by the Trump administration — including an immigration enforcement action at a local high school after the shooting incident — Minneapolis has closed schools for the rest of the week.
Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.
In the immediate aftermath of an ICE agent killing a woman in Minnesota on Wednesday, officials urged residents of the state to not take the “bait” and give the Trump administration the justification if wants to create a “military occupation.”
After a masked federal ICE agent shot and killed a Minneapolis woman on Wednesday, Trump administration officials began to blame her for her own death.
At least three videos have appeared online that purport to document the shooting.
Not long after I first moved to Washington, D.C. more than 25 years ago, I was at a foreign policy event and my friend, who was the moderator, talked about “high trust” versus “high fear” international orders. The concept is simple: trust and fear each build on themselves and tend to create their own equilibria. A high-trust environment encourages trustworthy and predictable behavior. A high-fear environment makes trust foolish and dangerous. It makes rapid resorts to violence and force logical and common. What is most important about this observation is the way each environment is self-perpetuating, how each creates a logic which participants are foolish not to follow, even if they wish they were in a different international order altogether.
I’ve been watching the various debates about what the U.S. is doing in Venezuela, and may possibly do in Greenland, Cuba or other Latin American states. Most of them, as I’ve noted, seem wildly overdetermined. You have different factions pushing for various military adventures, often for different reasons. If they can pique Trump’s interest, there’s a good chance the adventure will happen. What the reason is depends on which faction you decide was most important. Whatever you find out from that analysis is probably an illusion. There’s a more general pattern that helps understand this current moment, one that has little to do with formal ideology and quite a lot to do with his business practices before he entered politics.
The new year dawned with a shock. After months of saber-rattling against Venezuela and illegal attacks on alleged drug-running boats throughout the Caribbean, the U.S. military swept into Caracas on Jan. 3 and abducted President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores.
As TPM’s David Kurtz put it, by ordering the stunning strike, “President Trump is claiming and exercising an unbridled form of executive power not heretofore seen in the United States, unconstrained by a pliable GOP-controlled Congress that has abdicated its constitutional powers.” David has been chronicling Trump’s trampling of the rule of law in his flagship Morning Memo newsletter, and on Thursday Jan. 29, you can hear him break it all down live with an A-list lineup of panelists.
