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President Donald Trump and other administration officials are pushing a false narrative regarding the horrific killing of a woman in Minneapolis by an ICE agent on Wednesday morning.
The woman, identified as Renee Nicole Good, had parked her car in the middle of a residential street as demonstrators were taking part in a protest against the agency. Video of the incident shows Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents approach her van, at which point she attempts to drive off. An ICE agent near the front-left side of her vehicle then pulls out a gun and opens fire as she drives away from him, shooting her in the face.
Good’s vehicle then crashes into another one further down the road. Additional video appears to show that ICE agents on the scene refused to allow onlookers to give Good medical attention, and denied a man who identified himself as a physician from treating her.
Hours after the shooting, Trump met with reporters from The New York Times for a scheduled interview. At one point, the interviewers asked Trump his thoughts about Good’s killing.
The president described the incident as a “vicious situation that took place.” He then blamed Good, not the ICE agent who shot her, for her death.
“She behaved horribly. And then she ran him over,” Trump said, peddling an account of events that is contradicted by video footage of the incident from multiple angles.
Trump doubled down on that falsehood: “She didn’t try to run him over. She ran him over,” he insisted.
When the interviewers told Trump that video of the incident didn’t show what he claimed, he continued with the lie. “I’ll play the tape for you right now,” he said, signaling his aides to bring him a laptop.
As Trump and the reporters watched a slow-motion video of the shooting, the reporters told him the angle they watched didn’t appear to show that the agent was run over at all.
“Well, the way I look at it…it’s a terrible scene,” Trump said in response, refusing to acknowledge his errant descriptions of the incident from moments before.
Trump also referenced the shooting twice on Truth Social on Wednesday, both times blaming Good for her own killing.
In his first post published in the afternoon, Trump wrongly said Good had “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense.”
“It is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital,” Trump added. (The ICE agent in question suffered no apparent injuries, and was seen walking around the scene after the shooting happened.)
In his second post, which was published late on Wednesday evening (possibly after the Times interview had ended), Trump doubled down on his assertions. “When a vehicle is coming at you and is being used as a weapon, deadly force is justified,” Trump wrote, citing comments from Fox News contributor Nicole Parker.
Other members of the Trump administration echoed the president’s lies about the incident.
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem, for example, described Good’s actions as a “domestic act of terrorism,” wrongly claiming the Minneapolis resident tried “to kill law enforcement officers.”
Vice President JD Vance also pinned the blame on Good in a post on X.
“Every congressional democrat and every democrat who’s running for president should be asked a simple question: Do you think this officer was wrong in defending his life against a deranged leftist who tried to run him over?” he wrote.
Multiple analyses and witness accounts contradict this account.
An examination of the killing by The New York Times noted that the ICE agent who shot Good “crosses toward the left of the vehicle and grabs his gun.”
“He opens fire on the motorist and continues shooting as she drives past,” the analysis states, adding:
The moment the agent fires, he is standing to the left of the SUV and the wheels are pointing to the right away from the agent. This appears to conflict with allegations that the SUV was ramming or about to ram the officer.
One witness, who went only by the name “Betsy,” told ABC News that Good was not intending anything harmful when she drove her van away.
“It appeared to me that she was endeavoring to kind of adjust her car so that it was facing more south,” Betsy said. “And then it was clear at one point that she started to accelerate, trying to move her vehicle out of the cluster of cars south on Portland Avenue.”
Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar, who represents parts of Minneapolis, called out the administration for its blatantly false characterizations of what transpired.
“We’ve all seen the video… you can see, no ICE agent falls to the ground, no one is run over,” she said on CNN Wednesday night. “So, to rewrite something that is still so visibly available, that people can see, just shows how disturbingly delusional our president has become.”
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