Renee Good Was a Casualty of Trump's Order Against 'Political Violence'
The administration's written policies make it likely that more people like Renee Good will be targets, and victims, of ICE.
Last week in Minneapolis, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Good, who had been blocking traffic with her car. Right away, federal officials claimed Good had tried to run Ross over, characterizing her as a terrorist and implying she got what she deserved.
The video evidence, at the very least, casts doubt on the idea that Ross was in any immediate danger. The FBI is investigating the shooting, even preventing Minnesota police from doing so.
But Good's death is a perfectly foreseeable result of the current presidential administration's written policies, which treat left-wing protesters akin to terrorists and deserving of violent crackdowns.
"Heinous assassinations and other acts of political violence in the United States have dramatically increased in recent years," according to a National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM-7) that President Donald Trump signed in September. The order described a "pattern of violent and terroristic activities under the umbrella of self-described 'anti-fascism.'"
Last month, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a memo to federal prosecutors and law enforcement agencies, containing directives on putting the order into practice. "To fully implement NSPM-7," Bondi directed "all federal law enforcement agencies" to, among other tasks, "compile a list of groups or entities engaged in acts that may constitute domestic terrorism."
To define terrorism, both Trump's order and Bondi's memo conflated violence with activity protected by the First Amendment. Trump listed, as markers of anti-fascist terrorism, ideological beliefs like "anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity." Bondi, on the other hand, gave examples of "domestic terrorism" that included "organized rioting, looting, doxing," and "conspiracies to impede or assault law enforcement."
Assaulting law enforcement deserves little leeway, but "impeding" could be completely nonviolent, and it certainly doesn't rise to the level of terrorism. And yet within hours of Good's death at the hands of a government agent, federal officials—including Vice President J.D. Vance and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem—jumped to the conclusion that Good was a terrorist, seemingly based on nothing more concrete than that she was impeding an ICE operation.
"People who conspire to engage in actual criminal behavior should be investigated, arrested, and prosecuted," Adam Goldstein, an attorney with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), wrote in December about Trump's order and Bondi's memo. "But these memos aren't narrowly focused on groups that exist for the purpose of ideologically motivated violence, which act to bring about violence; they broadly condemn particular viewpoints and lay a foundation for a government watchlist of American groups which share those viewpoints."
Trump's order and Bondi's memo set up the exact scenario playing out, in which federal law enforcement officers treat nonviolent protesters as terrorists and expand their dragnet past what the Constitution allows.
As Reason's Jacob Sullum noted this week, the FBI's inquiry into the shooting seems focused on Good's anti-ICE activism—which, Sullum notes, "seem[s] irrelevant" in determining whether the shooting was justified: "At the time, Ross knew nothing about Good's background, so that information could not possibly have influenced his perception of the danger she posed."
In recent days, in fact, six Department of Justice prosecutors resigned over both the government's refusal to investigate Ross and its insistence on instead investigating Good and her widow.
The administration's written policy on left-wing protesters makes it more likely not only that more people like Renee Good will become victims of ICE, but that nonviolent activists will be ensnared in federal prosecutors' investigations.
"It remains unclear whether the [FBI] inquiry in Minnesota will include allegations of domestic terrorism," The New York Times wrote this week. "But if it does, Ms. Bondi's memo could give investigators latitude to move beyond the customary practice of focusing such investigations only on people engaged in or plotting violence."