Bluesky

For weeks after Renee Good’s murder, the MAGA right trained Zapruder-grade forensic attention on the video footage of her last moments in Minneapolis, hoping to convince Americans that they can’t trust the plain evidence before their eyes. This effort yielded obscene derangements of the truth, such as “border czar” Tom Homan’s contention that Jonathan Ross, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who gunned down Good, had “feared for his life”—a claim that’s hard to square with his decision to position himself in front of her car, and yet more of a whopper in view of her last words, directed to Ross: “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.” Never to be outdone in the shameless recitation of official lies, Vice President JD Vance defiled bedrock norms of honest public discourse to smear Good as a “deranged leftist” responsible for her own death. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, the sadist who gloried in the detention and torture of immigrants at El Salvador’s CECOT prison, dubbed Good a “domestic terrorist” hours after her murder and just kept going, announcing a fresh deployment of hundreds more ICE agents to Minneapolis in mid-January.

Noem’s escalation, which nonsensically vows to mobilize more rogue ICE agents to pacify a crisis sparked by rogue ICE agents, perpetuates the lie that the Trump administration’s rolling sieges of cities governed by political opponents are a legitimate use of peacekeeping force. But it also supplies an inadvertent reminder that the whole ICE mission in Minneapolis is founded on a racist lie. President Trump authorized the agency’s initial operation there in the wake of a video released online by MAGA influencer Nick Shirley purporting to document widespread fraud in federally subsidized daycare centers run by Somali immigrants in Minneapolis. Shirley’s investigations yielded no real evidence—several of the centers he tried to depict as empty of kids and hence hotbeds of graft were simply leery about giving a random man and his film crew access to their charges. (Grim irony alert: At one center, employees thought that Shirley’s masked-up crew could have been ICE agents intending to round up preschool children.) Another daycare center appears to have been in the midst of an employee shift change when Shirley’s crew showed up.

It’s true that state watchdogs have found some evidence of fraud in Minnesota daycare facilities, some run by Somalis in Minneapolis. In 2019, state prosecutors filed charges against a dozen centers and individuals; in response, Minnesota created a new agency to oversee licensing for the centers. After Shirley’s video went viral, the agency conducted unscheduled compliance visits at nine of the 10 centers featured in it (one had been shuttered several years ago). Eight of the centers that the inspectors dropped in on showed no irregularities, and one had yet to open for the day. State regulators say they’re still monitoring the facilities.

Shirley’s video relies mostly on charges floated by David Hoch, a lobbyist and former right-wing candidate for Minnesota attorney general. As The Intercept’s Jacqueline Sweet has reported, Hoch had posted anti-Somali broadsides on his since-deleted Instagram account: “EVERY Somali in MN is engaged in fraud. ALL of them,” one read; “Even the Blacks have had enough of the demon Muslims,” declared another. This is the narrative that the Trump administration has glommed on to, which is why Vance has anointed Shirley’s video as Pulitzer-caliber investigative journalism. Trump has also suggested, again without evidence, that Somali immigrants have committed widespread fraud involving Covid relief and nutrition assistance; he’s called them “garbage” and said he doesn’t “want them in our country.” In another two-minute tirade, Trump said that Somalia is “not even a nation. It’s just people walking around killing each other. Look, these Somalians have taken billions of dollars out of our country. Billions and billions. They have a representative, Ilhan Omar, who they say married her brother. It’s a fraud.” The president’s White House apparatchiks have gleefully echoed these sentiments and rushed to lend credence to the bogus cause of the Minneapolis ICE deployment; Noem and FBI Director Kash Patel said that the feds would be stepping up fraud investigations as part of ICE operations there. (Though, in another twist, the Trump regime’s fascist narratives are now collapsing upon one another—the two federal attorneys assigned to Somali fraud duty were among the six Minnesota-based prosecutors who resigned after the Justice Department instructed them to launch a McCarthyite investigation into the activist history of Renee Good’s widow, Becca Good.)

It’s important to recall the racist moral panic underwriting the original ICE deployment to Minneapolis, a reminder that none of this has ever been about the cut-and-dried enforcement of immigration law. ICE was turned loose on Minneapolis residents to stage a spectacle of racialized predation, proceeding solely on the imputation of criminal traits to a population group based on national origin, ethnicity, and religious affiliation. This is the far-from-subtle message that Noem now has emblazoned on her podium at press events: “One of ours, all of yours.” (The slogan can be traced in substance, if not in precise phrasing, to the fascist movements of the 20th century, which endorsed the idea that the life of one of their loyalists was worth those of all of their enemies.) After Good’s execution in Minneapolis, the Trump White House again sought to steer MAGA outrage toward Somali immigrants, announcing the suspension of temporary protected status for thousands of them and effectively compelling them to leave the country by March 17.

It took no great leap for ICE agents, emboldened by this explicit mission, to apply the same brutal and inhuman logic to anyone who got in their way—especially if the offender in question were deemed insufficiently deferential to their self-aggrandizing shows of force. Once a crusade of state violence targets one vulnerable population, it has no incentive to stop there.