No law enforcement officer is under an obligation to let himself potentially get run over by a vehicle.
That was the basic principle at work in the tragic shooting in Minneapolis yesterday by an ICE officer of a 37-year-old woman who accelerated her car toward the officer.
There are conflicting reports over whether she wandered into the scene or was part of a contingent shadowing and obstructing ICE vehicles, a pattern of harassment we’ve seen around the country. She blocked the road with her car, and, when an ICE officer approached the vehicle and pulled on her door handle telling her to get out, she instead apparently tried to make an escape. She backed up and then accelerated ahead rapidly, making contact with another officer standing right in front of her car.
Believing he was in mortal peril, the officer fired three times, killing the driver, Renee Good. This was obviously an act of lawful self-defense, even if, in retrospect, the officer could have jumped out of the way and the car was probably attempting to turn down the road rather than run him over. There was no way for him to know that as the car jumped toward him (he got dragged by an escaping car last year), and the legal analysis here will focus on the snap judgment made in real time.
The officer never would have had to decide in a split second whether he was in mortal peril if Good hadn’t created the predicate for the tragedy in the first place. She decided to defy a lawful order by an officer and, then, decided to operate her car with reckless disregard for the safety of the officers around her. If she had chosen differently, this never would have happened.
While we don’t know the full circumstances of Good’s presence at the scene, we do know that protesters have been egged on by progressive politicians who have been smearing ICE in the most lurid terms over the last year. Governor Tim Walz referred to ICE as the Gestapo last year and called for “a firewall” against it in Minnesota. Activists have indeed set up an anti-ICE network in Minneapolis.
Rather than drawing the conclusion that anti-ICE agitation is hazardous for everyone involved and calling for it to end, progressives are accusing the ICE officer of murder. Tim Walz has implied he might have to call out the National Guard to resist ICE, a frankly insurrectionary sentiment that we would say is unworthy of him, if he weren’t such a buffoon. Mayor Jacob Frey has been just as incendiary. They clearly want to spin the tragedy into a George Floyd–style moment of reckoning, this time regarding immigration enforcement.
For its part, the Trump administration hasn’t been content simply to say that the ICE officer feared for his life and acted in self-defense. Instead, they have called the incident domestic terrorism and suggested Good deliberately tried to run down the officer, which seems to be contradicted by the video evidence. ICE’s mission is an important one; it deserves a serious, factual defense and shouldn’t be a platform for Kristi Noem to constantly perform for the cameras.
As a practical matter, ICE patrols may need to be beefed up and more efforts made to arrest drivers of obstructing vehicles to discourage this lawless activity. No one should want ICE officers faced with the split-second choice that led to the tragedy in Minneapolis.