The fatal Minneapolis ICE shooting

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1:05No matter your goals or appetite for investing, Schwab has everything you need all in one place. Visit schwab.com to learn more. There's little I can say, again, that'll make this situation better. But I do have a message for our community, for our city. And I have a message for ICE. Too ice? Get the f*** out of Minneapolis. The mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, speaking after a US immigration agent shot dead a woman in the city of Minneapolis. The whole thing filmed by many, many people. There have been protests in that city, more planned across the United States. The White House, though, very much pushing back, suggesting that the officer was acting in self-defence.

1:52Who will the public believe? What is the politics of this, never mind the horror of the event itself? Immigration, remember, got Donald Trump elected. Is it now going to lead to his downfall? Welcome to AmeriCast. AmeriCast. AmeriCast from BBC News. When Donald Trump calls, they say, yes, sir. Right away, sir. Happy to lick your boot, sir. We are the sickest country in the world. Oh, dear. Are you worried that billionaires are going to go hungry? Of course the president supports peaceful protests. What a stupid question. Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?

2:34Hello, it's Sarah here in the BBC's Washington Bureau. That's Justin in the worldwide headquarters of AmeriCast in London, England. And it is Mariana sitting opposite Justin in the worldwide headquarters of AmeriCast as well. And Justin, Mariana, I think before we go any further into discussing what the consequences of what's happened in Minneapolis are, We should go through exactly what happened and the facts that are not in dispute, because a lot of what we're going to discuss here is different interpretations of what people have seen. But these are the things that we know absolutely to be true, which is that a US immigration agent shot dead a 37 year old woman in Minneapolis.

3:10and that there are a number of videos of this incident, many of which have been shared on social media. And they show immigration agents approaching a maroon car that's blocking a street in Minneapolis. And you can see the agents pull up in their own vehicle, emerge from a truck, go and approach the woman's car, tell her to get out of the car. And one of the agents tugs at the driver's side door handle as he's telling her to get out of the car. She doesn't. the car attempts to drive off. It reverses very slightly and then she turns the wheel to the right and is looking to drive away when one of the agents points his gun at the driver and you can hear two shots being fired.

3:52And at that point, you can see the car loses control, shoots ahead and crashes into a car that's parked along the street. And actually, we can play the audio of some of these videos that show everybody online what's happened.

4:21it's one of those incidents where the videos in particular obviously they don't show that they capture a moment in time they can't show everything that happened in the build-up nor do they show absolutely everything that happened afterwards. But the videos are being analysed and poured over across social media. And we'll get into that in a minute. First, though, I think it's probably important to talk about what we know about the woman who was shot, who was called Renee Good. And we know that she was 37 years old. She was white. There are a few clues that exist across social media, across the internet about who she was.

4:56it suggested that she had three children that she was living with her partner in Minneapolis that she'd moved there fairly recently if you looked on her Instagram which is now private but was public before she describes herself as a poet and a writer a wife and mum and guitar drummer from Colorado experiencing Minneapolis and her mum has actually spoken to one of the local papers to describe Renée as quote one of the kindest people I've ever known she was extremely compassionate she's taken care of people all her life She was loving, forgiving and affectionate. She was an amazing human being. She has been called a domestic terrorist by some members of Donald Trump's administration.

5:34And there's a suggestion that she was there in the capacity to sort of oversee what some of the ICE, that she was a kind of legal representative, someone who would see what ICE agents were doing and observe them. The suggestion was that she was disrupting their work. That's what the administration said. Other people's accounts of that very much vary. And of course, that is where you get into the whole business of disputes about what happened. So we've outlined what the facts are that you can see in the video. And as both you and Sarah made plain, what you see in the video is a snapshot in time.

6:04You can't necessarily see everything about it, but there are quite a few videos and you can sort of put it together. in terms of what people are saying about it we heard already the mayor of minneapolis pretty intemperate just before we started our discussion making it plain what he thought the immediate consequence should be which is that the immigration officers ought to get out of minneapolis the mayor of new york the newly elected mayor of new york has also used the word murder to describe it on On the other hand, you go across the Trump administration and they're saying anything but that.

6:41In fact, Donald Trump posting on Truth Social that Rennie Goode had run over the ICE officer who then shot her in self-defense. And the Homeland Security Secretary is worth listening, actually, to what she had to say. So this is Kristi Nguyen, the Homeland Security Secretary, reiterating that message from Donald Trump at a press conference that she held on Wednesday. ICE officers and agents approached the vehicle of the individual in question who was blocking the officers in with her vehicle, and she had been stalking and impeding their work all throughout the day. ICE agents repeatedly ordered her to get out of the car and to stop obstructing law enforcement, but she refused to obey their commands.

7:23She then proceeded to weaponize her vehicle, and she attempted to run a law enforcement officer over. This appears as an attempt to kill or to cause bodily harm to agents, an act of domestic terrorism. The ICE officer fearing for his life and the other officers around him and the safety of the public fired defensive shots. He used his training to save his own life and that of his colleagues. And just to reiterate, so that was Kristi Nguyen, the Homeland Security Secretary. I mentioned Jacob Frey, the mayor of Minneapolis. It's worth listening in a bit more detail to what he had to say, because he was also speaking on Wednesday at his own press conference in Minneapolis.

8:05They are already trying to spin this as an action of self-defense. Having seen the video of myself, I want to tell everybody directly that is bull. This was an agent recklessly using power that resulted in somebody dying. There's little I can say, again, that'll make this situation better. But I do have a message for our community, for our city, and I have a message for ICE. To ICE, get the f*** out of Minneapolis. We do not want you here. Your stated reason for being in this city is to create some kind of safety, and you are doing exactly the opposite. People are being hurt. Families are being ripped apart.

8:53Long-term Minneapolis residents that have contributed so greatly to our city, to our culture, to our economy, are being terrorized. And now somebody is dead. That's on you. And it's also on you to leave. It's on you to make sure that further damage, further loss of life and injury is not done. So you can hear that the politicians on different sides are not just disagreeing about the rights and wrongs of this. they're disagreeing about what actually happened on the ground. These are two almost entirely opposed narratives that were being spun really quickly on Wednesday after this event happened and as people were discovering the videos online that they could watch for themselves at the same time.

9:38And so I was actually watching it all play out on CNN, MS Now, which is called what MSNBC is called now, and Fox News simultaneously. And even there, the journalism, the coverage was completely different about whether this was an outrageous act where the officer had no reason to shoot a woman who wasn't doing anything wrong or whether she had been genuinely trying to kill or injure him and it was an act of domestic terrorism, as the administration is saying. That's the thing about when these kinds of incidents occur now. Different people can watch the same thing and actually come to, like you say, Sarah, quite different conclusions about what might have unfolded.

10:17But it also depends on who has shared that clip, where they're seeing it, where it's pushed to them, as you can imagine. I mean, these clips have gone uber, uber viral. And then the other elements, you know, the other bits of content you see as well. So you don't really see anything in the build up. There's not much video evidence around that shows what was happening earlier on in the day or before the incident. You do, though, see some quite graphic content afterwards. afterwards there's a particularly viral video that shows someone who is claiming to be a physician a doctor who wants to go and help the woman who's been shot and and is not permitted to and that sparked quite a lot of outrage certainly from people who feel like actually hang on a second should we not be able to offer medical assistance to someone in that situation and so on and so forth so you've got different people who through their own echo chambers on social media are responding to this but then also actually there are just people who are your average person viewing that video which is and like lots of americasters will have probably seen it is like quite a shocking video really i guess because it's kind of in a suburban street and it's sort of like looks quite normal and then someone just gets shot and and you can see why there's this kind of quite visceral reaction that a lot of people are having online and in real life yeah i think i think it also matters that she's white which you know shouldn't matter but i kind of does actually to because she's a white woman in a honda and that just conjures up it's a sort of epitome of yeah and there are toys in the back and apparently she had a child or kids and it conjures up a picture of normality and safety and non-threat i think that's it and to whatever extent that may be itself something that is either false or not false is is neither here nor there the fact is for a lot of americans just the sight of that particular car um her biography as a person who she was her identity as a person all of it conjuring up this thought in people's minds that actually hang on a second this is someone who would not necessarily have been a threat now i'm not saying that she wasn't a threat i'm not saying there was all sorts of behavior that we didn't see but it's people's But it's people's stereotype and it's always the stereotypes in these things.

12:32The other thing I think, Sarah, really matters, if this presumably does come to a court case, is where the bullet entered the car. Because if the officer was by the side and shot her through a side window, that seems to me to make it much more difficult for that officer to claim that he was under immediate threat. If he was actually in front of the car when he shot her and the car was suddenly lurching towards him, then it seems to me he's got more of a case. Now, I mean, that's months down the road, but it seems to me that those details, Sarah, will eventually matter. Yeah, and I've seen an image of a bullet hole in the side of the front windscreen, but that doesn't necessarily tell us exactly what the sequence of events that happened was.

13:14And that is something that I think is quite important about this. before anyone had had time to work out what the true sequence of events really was, before the mayor of Minneapolis or the Homeland Security Secretary or the president could possibly have all of the facts, everybody was leaping to have a take on it. Like at the speed of the internet, as soon as something is up online, politicians feeling that they have to respond with really partisan takes on what happened because they're trying to define the narrative very, very quickly. And when you move at that kind of speed, talking about an incident that necessarily is going to be complicated, whatever the rights and wrongs of it are, it simply cannot be the case that people are talking with accuracy about everything that they're discussing as they've suddenly leapt to a decision about whether this was absolutely the right thing or absolutely the wrong thing to have done.

14:05I'm sure you've read in the New York Times, both of you, Justin and Marianne, it's really interesting that the New York Times had four reporters in the Oval Office for a couple of hours last night with Donald Trump, talking about all sorts of things from Venezuela to Greenland to Colombia. But they did bring up the shooting in Minneapolis. And he told them that he thought the driver had behaved horribly and that she nearly tried to run over the ICE agent. And so they said, but have you seen the video? So he got a staff member to come in and hold up a laptop and play the video for them. It was, in fact, Natalie Harp, who we've talked about on the podcast before, who often follows Donald Trump around with a printer so that he can read what's being said on the Internet about her.

14:44But in this case, she came in with a laptop. They all watched the video together. And after seeing that, the reporter said to him, look, it doesn't appear as though this car is running over an ice age. And he said it was a terrible scene. I hate to see it, but still implied that Renee Goode had brought this on herself because he said, I watched one woman screaming. The one woman in the car before she got caught, I heard she was unbelievably bad, badly behaved. You're supposed to listen to law enforcement, he said. So, I mean, that was an example of a group of people all watching that same video together and still coming to different conclusions that seem to have been informed by what they want the case to be.

15:21I think as well that actually when we talk about the identity of the woman who was shot here and what's at play there, this absolutely is also unfolding through that kind of prism of identity politics because there are various people both on social media and then in the media as well who are picking up on certain sort of biographical facts or things that may or may not be true about Renee Goode to suggest that she's of a particular political view or that she's of a particular kind of group of people or that she's woke or that she's this or she's that. And already it's unfolding in that way. And that's kind of interesting because like you pointed out, Justin, you've obviously got the kind of issue of race at play here, which is that she's a white woman, sure.

16:00But then also the way that she's being portrayed, certainly in some very sort of like hardcore MAGA circles on social media is that she's a kind of woke white woman who isn't sort of the enemy, quote unquote. There are other people who are not posting things like that. And I think that that feels particularly pertinent when we think about other protest movements that have been sparked by killings in almost exactly the same place. The George Floyd killing by police officers, which triggered this huge movement, particularly about racism in the United States and protests, some of which became really quite violent.

16:37And that George Floyd was killed, wasn't it? It was just a few blocks away from where this happened in Minneapolis. Looking at social media, I would say it doesn't feel the same as when George Floyd was killed in so much as it feels like because this is not about race, it's much more so about people who are very frustrated and upset with the administration and with Donald Trump. It's kind of a different sort of protest to what that was at the time. I don't know what your sense is, Justin, Sarah, about whether this could trigger a movement of that scale or sort of ferocity that we saw. There were big protests last night and more are being organised in different cities across America for this evening.

17:14So I think it remains to be seen. But people learned a lesson, I would imagine, from what happened in Minneapolis after George Floyd, which was that it didn't help their case when the protests turned violent and there was a lot of damage done and looting across Minneapolis. And in fact, there was a plea from Tim Walz, who was the governor at the time, I think, wasn't he, when George Floyd was killed and is still the governor of Minnesota. And he was appealing to Minnesotans to protest peacefully. I mean, he was perfectly happy for people to come out on the streets and make their feelings known, but very keen that they do it without there being any kind of violence or disturbance.

17:48We've been warning for weeks that the Trump administration's dangerous, sensationalized operations are a threat to our public safety, that someone was going to get hurt. Just yesterday, I said exactly that. What we're seeing is the consequences of governance designed to generate fear, headlines and conflict. It's governing by reality TV and today that recklessness cost someone their life To Minnesotans I say this I feel your anger. I'm angry They want to show we can't give it to them. We cannot if you protest and express your first amendment rights Please do so peacefully as you always do We can't give them what they want We can't give them what they want he said there Yeah, because there has for a long time been a sense hasn't there Justin that that actually the Trump administration is really eager to have confrontations on the streets with these ICE agents because they went in first to Los Angeles months and months ago.

18:43And there was a sense then that they were hoping to spark some kind of confrontations in the streets that would justify their presence. And there was a fear for a long time in Portland, Oregon, that the same thing might happen. And that's why protesters have been dressing up in very amusing costumes and they're going out to protest and things like inflatable dinosaur outfits to try and make themselves look less threatening. so that it doesn't give ICE and the rest of the National Guard, when they've been sent into these cities, an excuse to start tackling them in the streets. And I guess when you see something like what happened on Wednesday in Minneapolis, that is, of course, the kind of event that could spark something that people think that the Trump administration has been waiting for for months.

19:24The politics of it are finally balanced, aren't they? Because on the one hand, there is, and we've discussed it in previous pods, particularly Anthony and I did a whole episode on it, There is this issue of crimes being committed, particularly by members of the Somali community in Minnesota. And there's no doubt that crimes have been committed, quite large, widespread fraud, to the extent that Tim Walz, who we've just been hearing from, is not going to run for a third term. He's decided he wouldn't get in or it'd be too much effort to make. So he's been effectively brought down by what has been going on in his state.

20:00And there is definitely some feeling both within Minnesota, but also more widely as well, that is against people coming into America and bilking the system and stealing money. On the other hand, the last research that I looked at from YouGov suggested that the actions of the ICE agents in support of getting rid of people who are not meant to be in the United States are actually increasingly unpopular. And a majority of Americans now think that they have overstepped the mark. So that thing that got Donald Trump elected, it's probably not going too far to say, well, certainly one of the key issues, wasn't it, that won in the election in 2024, this feeling that the southern border was wide open, that there were millions of people coming into America who shouldn't be there, that the Biden administration had completely lost control.

20:52It was a winning issue for Donald Trump. He started off by using that issue to go after those who he promised he would go after. And particularly, they said they would start with criminals. But actually, now they've gone much further. And if ICE agents are regularly seen to be, never mind on this occasion, whether the law was broken or not broken, but if they're regularly seen to be more violent than other law enforcement people are in the United States, it just seems to me that the immigration issue that was so good for Donald Trump and so awful for the Democrats could easily be flipped, couldn't it?

21:28It depends, I think, Justin, on whether people really genuinely believe that the ICE agents are acting not in self-defence, but are going beyond what they ought to be doing. This is not the first time somebody has been shot in a vehicle in circumstances that appear to be relatively similar. I think this is the fifth at least time this has happened. And there There was one case in Los Angeles where it happened a few months ago. Somebody was being told to move their vehicle. Same kind of thing was happening. And the ICE agent ended up shooting a man in his car who was injured, not killed. And that man was prosecuted for what he was doing.

22:02The prosecutor said he was trying to impede the work of the ICE agents. And that case was completely thrown out of court last month. The judge dismissed all of the charges and dismissed them with prejudice so that prosecutors could not attempt to try him again. because the judge was so annoyed, actually, with how the law enforcement had gone about presenting their evidence and how the prosecutors had behaved. So this has been a controversial issue for some time. But yeah, I mean, once somebody has been killed in these circumstances, it turns it into a whole different ballgame. I suppose a big question, Sarah, is whether this changes anything when it comes to the Trump administration.

22:37And number one, in the small sense, what they're doing with immigration and the sending of ICE officers right around the country and the use of really tough tactics, to put it mildly, or whether actually just doubles down on it and carries on. It just seems to me that at the moment, Donald Trump is even more disinhibited than normal. I mean, you think what he's doing around the world. And this kind of sense as well, I suppose, that in the run-up to the midterms next year, next November, and he's been talking about that recently, hasn't he, that in his mind is this kind of double down on everything mentality.

23:16What Susie Wiles, his chief of staff, referred to as the alcoholic's personality, although, of course, he doesn't drink in that interview, that interview she gave recently to Vanity Fair, that actually there's a sense of danger about him and wanting to take on all comers, but also never in any sense back down. Because there was this meme, wasn't there, Sarah? Trump always chickens out the taco trade, which was the thing about tariffs at one stage. And actually, with tariffs, he hasn't really chickened out. Tariffs are still much higher now than they were when he came into power. And in all sorts of other places, in Venezuela, obviously with Iran, where he attacked or went along with Israel in attacking in Iran, in all sorts of areas of the world, the Greenland thing.

24:03He's not standing down at all. And I just wonder in this as well, whether we see someone who is emboldened and has a sense actually that the only way out for him is to carry on and double down. Yeah, emboldened is the word I've been thinking all week, actually, about Donald Trump ever since the raid in Venezuela, which really does seem to have galvanized him into thinking that he can just move further and faster, certainly in foreign affairs and probably makes him feel the same way about domestic affairs. I mean, I don't think there's any way he will back down on his immigration agenda, sending ICE agents in or in defending what happened in Minneapolis.

24:41And if something similar happens again and doubling down on it, that's always been his political response to something like that. And he'll see that as as politically useful because immigration is his signature issue. What I wonder, though, is whether law enforcement will learn lessons from this, because for all the rhetoric that we had from Donald Trump, from Christine Noem, from other people in the administration saying that this was an act of domestic terrorism and the ICE agents were fully justified in shooting that woman, the person who didn't play that game was the White House boarders are Tom Homan.

25:14He said, let the investigation play out and hold people accountable based on the investigation. I mean, it's the sort of thing you used to have every politician and law enforcement officials say, but he's the only person who had said that. I do wonder if there's pause for maybe rethinking how the agents are supposed to behave on the street without admitting any wrongdoing here, without backing away from the political stance that's being taken. maybe try and make sure that this doesn't happen again or too often on the streets of America because maybe the White House can see the political danger even if they won't admit to it publicly.

25:51Right, before we go, we want you to get in touch because between now and the midterms, we want to find AmeriCasters from all across the United States so we get a better sense of what's happening across the whole country. And this week actually is a good example. Huge global stories about Venezuela, Greenland dominating the news. We don't want to lose sight of what's actually happening in individual states across the United States, including those states that we don't hear from very much. So we are hereby launching our very own United States of AmeriCast.

26:28I pledge allegiance to the United States of AmeriCast.

26:38I'm not even sure that's legal. But anyway, we've done it. So wherever you are in the US... Whose voice was that? Whose voice was that? Bob from Minneapolis. It's Bob from Minneapolis. Oh, brilliant. We love Bob from Minneapolis. We do. And we would use him even if we could have got... What's his name? He used to do the CNN jingle. Oh, I know who you mean. You know who I mean. Anyway, Bob's our man and he's done it very well. Anyway, so tell us about what's happening in your state or indeed where you live. It doesn't have to be your forever home state, but wherever you are in the states, big or small, why does it matter what is going on?