ICE's killing in Minneapolis shows American empire has come home

ICE's killing in Minneapolis shows American empire has come home Submitted by Azad Essa on Thu, 01/08/2026 - 14:37 Renee Nicole Good's death reflects the fusion of militarised policing, xenophobia and post-9/11 security measures into a domestic enforcement arm of US imperial violence A picture of Renee Nicole Good is displayed near a makeshift memorial for Good, who was shot and killed at point-blank range on 7 January by a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent (Charly Triballeau/AFP) Off On Wednesday, an ICE agent fatally shot a 37-year-old white woman, Renee Nicole Good, a US citizen and mother of three, during a federal immigration raid in Minneapolis. In a widely circulated video online, Good is seen in the driver's seat of her SUV as ICE agents approach her. She had reportedly just dropped off her youngest child at school and was headed home when she drove into a street ICE had blocked off as part of its operation. Witnesses say agents shouted contradictory commands - some telling her to get out of the car, others telling her to move - as they closed in around the vehicle. When they order her to step out, she tries to flee. As she steps on the accelerator and turns the wheel, an agent pulls out a handgun and, at close range, fires three shots through the driver's side window. Good's vehicle lurches forward, striking a lamppost before crashing into a parked car further down the road. Bystanders immediately rush towards her. A man who identified himself as a doctor also tries to reach Good, but ICE agents block his access. She dies at the scene. But the terrain on which Good, newly settled in Minnesota with her family, was killed was never neutral: the state had become a flashpoint for police accountability after George Floyd's 2020 killing, and its Somali communities have long been the target of heightened suspicion in national political rhetoric and federal policy. Those long-simmering tensions - inflamed in recent months by US President Donald Trump's repeated dehumanising language about Somalis, including calling them "garbage" and fuelling a climate of xenophobic panic, and amplified by a recent manufactured Somali daycare fraud scandal circulated by national rightwing figures - helped set the stage for the federal enforcement frenzy in Minneapolis. And as though on cue, the feverish gaslighting we have come to expect from US authorities after police killings of unarmed Black people followed almost immediately after Good's death. From Trump himself to Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, government officials tried to dissuade our eyes from what the footage visibly captured. "Our officer followed his training and did exactly what he was taught to do in that situation and took actions to defend himself and defend his fellow law enforcement officers," Noem told reporters. Much of the US mainstream media followed suit. Journalists rushed to cite "multiple accounts" even in the face of clear video evidence and eyewitness testimony. Coverage fixated on camera angles and whether individual frames truly conveyed the full story. Then came the familiar appeals to the "poor training" of ICE agents and the split-second decision-making of a thankless job of rounding up "illegals" in historically hostile liberal zones. In a country whose mythos is inseparable from militarised superhero narratives - symbolic shorthand for American exceptionalism, militarism and self-justified force - the spectacle of state violence has gone past impunity and entered open-season cruelty, a caricature of power so on-the-nose that an actual TV Superman can boast about trading in his cape for an ICE badge. Indeed, just days after US forces descended on Caracas to abduct Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife in a show of unrestrained coercive power, on the suburban streets of Minnesota, American empire and belligerence had come home for the holidays. Rise of the occupier state The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency was created in the shadow of the so-called Global War on Terror that followed the attacks of 11 September 2001.  It became a key pillar of the architecture of repressive surveillance and militarised tactics that emerged during the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Americans outraged after ICE agent kills Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis Read More » ICE itself was specifically designed to pursue "national security threats" within the United States, granting agents sweeping discretion over who could be deemed to "pose a threat to public safety or national security". Since then, it has come to represent a rogue operation, its reputation clouded by harrowing stories of abuse, impunity and a near total lack of oversight. Its close association with Palantir, a surveillance firm accused of helping generate kill lists for Israel, has also further embedded it within the US military-industrial complex. Scalawag Magazine described Palantir's partnership with ICE as "one of the many links comprising the military-industrial surveillance connections between ICE and Israel Defense Forces".  These links, it wrote, illustrate the ideological and practical ties between the two bodies, as they work to advance the militarisation of policing through the weaponisation of surveillance technology. ICE has also participated in several exchanges with the Israeli military, and during the student protests for Gaza, it lifted names from the blacklisting website Canary Mission to identify and arrest protesters. The murder of Good in Minneapolis may appear as a single tragic incident. But what we are really witnessing is the expansion and consolidation of the occupation apparatus in the metropole. Since Trump began his second term, immigration agents have been involved in at least a dozen shooting incidents. This "spike" is directly related to policy. In 2021, the Center for Civilians in Conflict (Civic) detailed how military equipment and tactics had seeped into domestic law enforcement. "Terms such as 'battlespace', 'urban warfare', and 'insurrection' have no place in a government's policy for managing public safety during protests and demonstrations… The public is not an armed opposition group," Civic's executive director, Federico Borello, said. It is no secret that American counterinsurgency tactics used in faraway places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and as practised by Israel in the occupied West Bank, are being transplanted into the US. The country has been turning into a quasi-war zone in which laws are purposely ambiguous and, therefore, frightening and overwhelming. Despite its limited workforce of about 21,000 agents - proportionally smaller than the Gestapo, for example - ICE has, through its aggressive tactics, menacing posture and relentless unpredictability, cultivated an omnipresence far larger than its actual size. We saw glimpses of this in 2020 when Trump deployed the National Guard to suppress Black Lives Matter protests. It continued last June when protests erupted in Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington DC over ICE operations, all in the name of "public safety".  "We're going to take our capital back," Trump said at the time, vowing to "get rid of the slums". Mind control In July, The Intercept reported that a review of more than a dozen joint operations in Los Angeles showed that agents used force not only against those they "presumed to be undocumented immigrants", but also against US citizens who protested their actions. "There's a pattern of reacting violently and excessively against people that aren't interfering or otherwise causing harm to law enforcement," attorney Matthew Borden told the outlet. And even as many of these actions have been proven illegal, the deluge of violations has rendered them normal, becoming simply "the way things are" in the US today. Consider the executive summary of the State Department's Counterinsurgency Guide of 2009, which states: "Strategies will usually be focused primarily on the population rather than the enemy and will seek to reinforce the legitimacy of the affected government while reducing insurgent influence."  The manual also outlines five components to counterinsurgency tactics, including the "information function", which it explains is carried out in constant competition with insurgents' own information operations. This is information warfare, which helps explain the agency's aggressively curated messaging. "ICE officers and agents are on the streets every day, prioritising public safety by locating, arresting and removing criminal aliens and immigration violators from our neighbourhoods," the agency declares. Put another way, the US government, through agencies like ICE, increasingly treats civilians as enemy combatants, their deaths rendered justifiable under the rubric of "self-defence". Counterinsurgency, as deployed globally under the heel of military occupation, is defined by the management and disciplining of civilian life: everything from mobility to basic dissent becomes subject to scrutiny and approval. State-sanctioned violence To wit, the American empire has always been present.  Ask the mothers of young Black men who live in terror each time their sons go out to play, to school or for a walk down the wrong street.  Cornel West on Black Lives Matter protests and US imperialism Read More » Ask the congregations at mosques who endured years of surveillance and harassment after 11 September. Ask Mahmoud Khalil or Rumeysa Ozturk, abducted by ICE for their pro-Palestine activism.  Better still, consider Selma in 1965, the MOVE bombing in Philadelphia in 1985, or Ferguson in 2014. Or the political prisoners, from the Holy Land Five to Mumia Abu-Jamal, the former Black Panther and journalist imprisoned in a case riddled with irregularities. ICE's actions have routinely elicited comparisons with the Gestapo. That the agency was reclassified as a "security/sensitive" agency in 2020 has reinforced perceptions that this is an organisation that operates under its own set of opaque guidelines at a distance from public oversight. In this sense the agency has been tasked with asserting dominance over, and extracting compliance from the broader public in service of Trump's vision of America. What happened to Renee Nicole Good, a beloved mother, poet and neighbour, was an undeniable tragedy. But in an era where brute force is celebrated and state violence goes unchecked, it is unlikely to be the last. The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye. Trump Opinion Post Date Override 0 Update Date Mon, 05/04/2020 - 21:29 Update Date Override 0