In the wake of the killing of Renee Good by ICE officer Jonathan Ross on Jan. 7, the Trump administration, Republican lawmakers and ICE officers have adopted the position that the American people must either accept Trump’s rule by force or face death. Their unofficial motto: Live unfree or die.
“It was highly disrespectful of law enforcement,” President Donald Trump said on Sunday when asked about whether Ross used appropriate force when he killed Good. “The woman and her friend” — Trump here seemed to be referring to Good’s wife — “were highly disrespectful of law enforcement. … Law enforcement should not be in a position where they have to put up with this stuff.”
Good’s death, in Trump’s view, didn’t result from the threat she may have posed to Ross, as others in his administration initially argued. Instead, Trump says, she was killed because she was disrespectful.
Some GOP lawmakers echoed this message in far more explicit language.
“The bottom line is this: when a federal officer gives you instructions, you abide by them and then you get to keep your life,” Rep. Wesley Hunt (R-Texas) said on Newsmax on Jan. 7.
“If you impede the actions of our law enforcement as they seek to repel foreign invaders from our country, you get what’s coming to you,” Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) said on Newsmax on Jan. 8. “I do not feel bad for the woman that was involved.”
Expressing a position that differs from the government’s also justifies further violence by law enforcement, in this worldview.
Illustration: Kelly Caminero/HuffPost; Photo: Getty Images
“There will be more bloodshed unless we decrease the hateful rhetoric,” White House border czar Tom Homan said on Fox News on Sunday. The hateful rhetoric he referred to was not, apparently, the officer calling Good a “fucking bitch” after shooting her in the head. “Saying this officer is a murderer is dangerous,” Homan said.
This message has clearly trickled down to ICE officers on the ground in Minneapolis — and enabled, over the past week, ever-escalating threats against residents.
“Did you not learn from what just happened?” an infuriated ICE officer screamed at a legal observer following his vehicle in the days after Good’s death.
In another incident, an ICE officer approached a woman filming ICE officers pulling someone over and also asked: “Have y’all not learned from the past few days?” He proceeded to knock her phone out of her hand, placed her in handcuffs and brutalized her until she passed out, according to video and an interview with the woman on KCCO radio.
“Is this how you want to die with a fucking bullet in your skull?” she said the officer told her when she was handcuffed.
Patty O’Keefe, a U.S. citizen arrested and detained after following an ICE vehicle, which is not a crime, said that officers taunted her with Good’s death.
“The ICE agent who had pepper sprayed into the vents of my car said ‘you guys gotta stop obstructing us, that’s why that lesbian b***h is dead,’ verbatim, speaking of Renee Good. Which filled me with absolute rage and shock that you could say that to one of her neighbors,” O’Keefe told Minnesota Public Radio.
It goes without saying that it is not illegal to protest, follow, film or insult a law enforcement officer. The basic right is quite literally enshrined in the Constitution. But the message coming from the top of the federal government all the way down to the officers on the ground is clear: comply or die.
This rhetoric from the Trump administration, its allies and federal immigration enforcement officers aims to define the new boundaries of who is protected by the law and who is not ― who is excluded from the body politic and who is not.
Adam Gray via Associated Press
Exclusion has played a role in defining American democracy since its dawn. From the beginning, Black people and Native Americans were excluded from the rights and privileges of the Constitution and the political community, whether by law or by custom. This exclusion anchored and defined the freedoms enjoyed by white men. The Constitution also explicitly aimed to exclude certain issues ― specifically, slavery ― from consideration at a national level.
But in the 1960s, those exclusions began breaking down with the success of the Civil Rights Movement and the subsequent rights movements for women, Native Americans, Latinos, immigrants and the LGBTQ+ community. Suddenly, all issues were on the table.
A backlash to this opening of the political community is at the heart of the conservative movement that found, in Trump, its Caesar.
Trump even recently publicly disparaged the Civil Rights Act, which in the 1960s barred discrimination for marginalized groups. “White people were very badly treated,” he told The New York Times this week in response to a question about the landmark legislation. “I think it was also, at the same time, it accomplished some very wonderful things, but it also hurt a lot of people — people that deserve to go to a college or deserve to get a job were unable to get a job. So it was, it was a reverse discrimination.”
What we are seeing in Minneapolis, and throughout the policies of the Trump administration, is an attempt to reinstate exclusions on who is part of the American community and who is not. But this time around those excluded are not solely defined by their identity, but by their political affiliation. If you are a Democrat, a liberal, a progressive, a socialist, a leftist or otherwise oppose Trump, you are not complying and, therefore, are subject to abuse, harassment, extortion and, in extreme cases, death.
Jose Luis Magana via Associated Press
A person like Good, then, is not worthy of her humanity or her life. Instead, she is a “paid agitator,” a “domestic terrorist,” a “deranged leftist,” a person “with pronouns in her bio,” part of the “organized gangs of wine moms” impeding ICE officers or an “Affluent White Female Urban Liberal (AWFUL).” The far-right influencer Matt Walsh made the connections between past racial exclusions and why Good should be subject to arbitrary force very clear.
“This lesbian agitator gave her life to protect 68 IQ Somali scammers who couldn’t give less of a shit about her,” Walsh said. “The most disgraceful and humiliating end a person could possibly meet.”
In other words, she was a race traitor.
All of these dehumanizing and othering identifiers seek to cast Good and all those protesting Trump’s occupation of the Twin Cities into a state of exclusion. They get what they deserve because of what they believe and who they defend.
Some Trump allies were clear on this even before he won reelection. Conservative propagandist Jack Posobiec published a book in 2024 called “Unhumans,” which defined liberals and the left as uncivilized barbarians bent on murder. The message is clear: conservatives must violently repress this threat. Vice President JD Vance enthusiastically endorsed Posobiec’s book.
At the height of the 2024 election campaign, Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that led the Project 2025 plan for the second Trump administration, made the same argument Trump and his allies now make about on-the-ground interactions with immigration enforcement officers in grander terms.
“We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” Roberts said.
The problem for conservatives is that their effort to impose unfreedom at the barrel of a gun is unpopular. It may feed their too-online enthusiasts, but the broader American public is not buying any of this.
That doesn’t mean they will stop. Failing authoritarian governments sometimes see further repression as the only way out of their potential downfall. But the people of Minneapolis are showing that the people still have the power to claim their freedom.
To take the words of one person protesting in Minneapolis immediately after Good’s death: “You can’t kill us all.”