On Wednesday, Renee Nicole Good was shot dead in Minnesota by a United States federal agent. There is no doubt or dispute about this central fact. There is video footage of the shooting (please be warned, you may find it distressing) and the circumstances of the killing appear to be plain: she was killed as she drove away from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operatives.
A natural response to this incident is horror and outrage, accompanied by a sense that it is indicative of the wider abuses of power by ICE. It is an example of something that is both shocking and not a surprise.
A second—somewhat artificial—response is to seek further information and to presume innocence until any criminal liability of the agent is established. This second response is against the known facts and the evidence of the footage, but it is just about possible.
But the response of supporters of President Trump and of his administration has been neither of these. Instead, they have rushed to trash the reputation of the woman, depicting her as a “domestic terrorist” who somehow deserved to be summarily executed by an ICE agent who was acting in “self-defense”.
There are also claims that the ICE agents in the footage were injured in the incident but are making “full recoveries”—claims that can be refuted by watching the video. An alternative—and official—false narrative is being created by which the ICE agents did nothing wrong, and everything right, in killing Good.
This dishonest construct is one means by which the federal government wants to evade taking responsibility for what seems to have been an extra-judicial murder of a US citizen. Another means to this end is that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is not cooperating with local police for any investigation.
By spreading falsehoods and hampering any independent investigation by Minnesota police, the federal government is seeking immunity for the violence its agents are inflicting on people in America. These tactics are part of a broader strategy to ensure that those with federal executive power can do exactly what they want, without any remedy to those affected: government outside the law.
In theory and on paper, the US has a constitution that confers on Congress and the Supreme Court the power to check and balance abuses of power by the executive. Those checks and balances are still technically available, but the federal government is confident they will not be used.
And so we are in a situation where the US government can kill people on the high seas, in other lands and on its own streets—and nothing will be done to stop it. The US is now a gangster state at home and a rogue state abroad, just because it can be.
This is not only because of any constitutional or other legal immunity, but also because of the cultural immunity conferred by the willingness of the government’s supporters to push fake narratives about what is being done.
One would think that the US government freely killing people without any lawful basis, both inside and outside its borders, would be enough to rouse legislators and judges from their self-imposed slumbers. And there are some signs of slight movement: the Senate yesterday passed a resolution to prevent further unauthorised military activity in Venezuela.
But a government that blithely ignores the express terms of the Epstein Act and disregards court orders knows it can do as it wants. Yesterday, President Trump told the New York Times that he did not need international law and that his power is limited only by “my own morality”.
Trump believes he has absolute power, and his government acts as if it has his absolute protection. State violence against individuals is, of course, not new—in Northern Ireland, there is a well-documented record of the UK killing and torturing its own citizens. Nor is tarnishing victims as terrorists a novelty: many will remember the police misinformation following the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes in London in 2005.
What is, however, striking is the scale and brazenness of this flouting of norms and the law. But those who seek to create narratives do not always control them; and those who ignore the law can ultimately find it gets them.
The hubris of Trump and his supporters may yet find its nemesis. And when they do fall from power, it may be because of incontrovertible evidence that cannot be gainsaid by knaves and fools. Evidence, that is, like footage of a woman being summarily executed in the street by the federal state.
