WASHINGTON (TNND) — The fatal shooting of a woman by an immigration officer on the first day of a crackdown in Minnesota has resulted in partisan finger-pointing and division as frustrations in a longstanding feud between the state’s leadership and the Trump administration risks boiling over.
State and local leaders were quick to call on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to leave the city in the aftermath of 37-year-old Renee Nicole Macklin Good was shot by an officer on Wednesday. The Trump administration was just as quick to say the operation that brought some 2,000 officers to the area wasn’t slowing down and issued warnings the next day warning protesters about obstructing law enforcement.
Minneapolis Public Schools canceled classes for the week “out of an abundance of caution” and “due to safety concerns related to today’s incidents around the city.” Gov. Tim Walz instructed the National Guard to be ready to deploy. Protests were formed around the site of the shooting, near federal buildings and elsewhere in the city.
Videos of the shooting making the rounds on social media show an ICE officer approaching a Honda Pilot stopped in the road and demanding the driver open the door while grabbing a door handle. The vehicle pulls forward, when another officer standing in front of it jumps aside and fires two shots. None of the videos show whether the vehicle made contact with the officer or had a previous altercation with agents earlier.
Many details on the deadly incident remain to be seen with little investigation done so far, but that hasn’t stopped officials on both sides of the aisle from making definitive statements about the turn of events that has put the city on edge in a politically charged environment in a country that has struggled with addressing political violence.
Mayor Jacob Frey had a pointed message to federal law enforcement after the shooting: “Get the f*** out of Minneapolis.” He also rejected the administration’s description of events as “bulls**t.”
“They are not here to cause safety in this city. What they are doing is not to provide safety in America. What they are doing is causing chaos and distrust,” Frey said at the news conference.
Walz has also dismissed the administration’s description of events as “propaganda” and said the federal government has already “determined who this person was, what their motive was.” Even as frustrations with the administration boiled over after the shooting, both Walz and Frey asked protestors to be peaceful.
“They want a show,” Walz said. “We can’t give it to them.”
Meanwhile, the White House has described the incident as a violent assault on federal law enforcement that is becoming more common because of “radical leftists.” President Donald Trump said Good “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self-defense.” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said, “It was an act of domestic terrorism.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a public warning to protesters in Minnesota to not cross a “red line” of obstructing, impeding or attacking federal law enforcement. She said peaceful protests are a “sacred American right” but that anyone interfering with federal officers or damaging property “will be prosecuted.”
“Do not test our resolve,” she added.
Protests in reaction to the shooting were quick to form while leaders from both sides of the aisle were quick to retreat into their corners that reflected whether they supported the deployment of federal law enforcement to the city in the administration’s crackdown on immigration. Few leaders are asking the public for patience and calm while investigations play out and the facts come to light, and the wide accessibility of the videos showing an incomplete version of events circulate online spurring debates over what happened and whether the use of deadly force was justified.
“As our collective attention span shrinks to be the size of a grape nut, this is the kind of discord we’re gonna get,” said Alison Dagnes, a political science professor at Shippensburg University and the author of “Super Mad at Everything All the Time.” “It really is, to me, the fault of us. It is the fault of the public who refuses to slow down, get more information, and not from a TikTok or YouTube video, but from actual legitimate journalism and information in order to make up their minds.”
The response to the shooting is a familiar pattern in recent American history as the country also struggles to contain outbursts of violence that have increasingly held political motivations.
A wave of politically motivated or politics-adjacent violence and threats for more has spurred some leaders to call for cooling the rhetoric around the nation’s political debate and condemnations of troubling incidents that continue to pop up. But even that plea is subject to bitter partisanship with Republicans and Democrats pointing figures across the aisle over who’s to blame for the country’s erratic political environment in a dynamic is also permeating among Americans whose attitudes toward the government and opposing political parties get more hostile.
“Americans are just so primed for cognitive dissonance that they will, in their brains, come up with any single rationalization for something that does not comport with their worldview, so that it does end up fitting neatly into their preconceived notions,” Dagnes said.
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