I’ve seen some comments that whatever the hideousness of it, President Trump’s and the GOP’s insistent defense of Minneapolis shooting is actually good politics — the thinking being that it pulls the public conversation away from Jeff Epstein and the cost of living and refocuses it on to protestors and blue cities, things that feel like they’re in the GOP’s comfort zone. I don’t buy this. It is in their comfort zone. But comfort zones don’t equal good politics.

If you’ve been watching reportage and viral videos of immigration raids over the last six months, you’ll remember that often there will be law enforcement officers or agents with uniforms that simply say “DHS Police.” Not Immigration and Customs Enforcement or Customs and Border Patrol, just “DHS Police.” As far as I know, there is no such agency under DHS. DHS employs some 80,000 law enforcement officers spread across nine agencies and offices. So I think that the uniforms just provide a general designation that these are law enforcement officers from within the Department of Homeland Security. That’s a vast amount of coercive power concentrated in this one department, notwithstanding the fact that most of these offices and agencies exist for fairly narrow areas of enforcement, administering points of entry into the U.S., inspecting persons and luggage getting on to commercial passenger jets, protecting federal officials and federal installations.

But what was clear from DHS’s creation was that that power could all be directed and concentrated toward some corrupt or illegitimate purpose. And that, among many other things, is what we’ve seen over the last year.

People who don’t like Donald Trump are kinda gun-shy talking about turning points. Turning points of course can mean very many things. But as I watched first the videos of the murder of Renee Nicole Good and even more the official reactions to it I’ve started to think that we’re in the process of seeing one. I don’t mean Donald Trump is doomed politically, though perhaps he is. I mean a turning point in the public perception of ICE (and the Border Patrol) and their newly hyper-militarized role in American cities beginning last summer.

What we see in the videos of Good’s shooting is some mix of a moment of confusion or perhaps minor panic on the part of Good as the driver. And we see this ICE agent draw his weapon in a fairly calm and methodical way and fatally shoot Good in the face.