Hundreds of people have taken to the streets of several cities in the United States to protest the death of a woman at the hands of agents of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service (ICE) in Minneapolis, in the state of Minnesota, an incident that has led to harsh accusations by local authorities against this organization and against the White House itself, which has defended the actions of these troops.
The town of Minneapolis itself has been the scene of a vigil in honor of the deceased, identified as Renee Nicole Good, 37 years old and a widow with a six-year-old son. The concentration took place near the point where she was shot by the agent, while she was inside her vehicle during an operation.
The mayor asks ICE to “go away”
The city’s own mayor, Jacob Frey, has been especially harsh against the White House and its policy of militarization of several cities with the deployment of ICE and federal troops. In a press conference, he demanded that ICE officers “get out,” while stating that “they are not here to create security.”
After watching the video of the agent’s actions, Frey understands that he has used “power recklessly, which caused the death of a person.” The councilor thus made reference to the video published on social networks, in which the woman is seen trying to reverse after several agents approach the vehicle and turns the steering wheel to get away from them and move forward when one tries to open her door by force, at which time another fires several shots at her.
They are tearing apart families, they are wreaking havoc on the streets and, in this case, literally killing people.
Frey has promised the population that they will do “everything possible to get to the bottom of this, get justice and make sure there is an investigation” and has highlighted that residents and local authorities “feared this moment from the early stages of ICE’s presence in Minneapolis.”
At this point he has denounced that ICE agents “are not here to generate security in the city. They are not generating security in the United States. They are causing chaos and mistrust.”
“They are tearing apart families, they are wreaking chaos in the streets and, in this case, literally killing people. They are already trying to present this as an act of self-defense,” he added before stating that local security forces had to intervene after the incident to secure the scene and remove “dozens, if not hundreds, of ICE and federal agents” from the scene.
In this sense, the mayor has said that these forces “were only causing more chaos and generating a difficult situation into a more problematic one, one that they created themselves.”
We don’t want you here
“We don’t want you here. The stated objective of their presence here is to generate security and they are doing just the opposite,” said Frey, who has gone so far as to affirm that “the Trump Administration’s agenda is to create chaos.”
Asks the population “to live up to it”
Despite this evident anger, the mayor of Minneapolis has asked the population to “rise up” and respond “with the best version of ourselves.” “We are better than a group of ICE agents deployed in cities across the country, tearing apart families and communities. We are going to confront that hatred with love; that despair, with hope; and injustice with constitutional justice,” he claimed, while asking “not to take the bait.”
“To be clear, this is what the federal government wants. They want us to respond in a way that creates a military occupation in our city. They want an excuse to come in and show force that will create more chaos and desperation. Let’s not allow it,” he added.
Trump and Noem defend the agent
For her part, the Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, has acknowledged that the death of Renee Nicole Good “was avoidable”, although she has defended the actions of the agents and blamed the incident on “a mob of agitators”, before stating that the woman tried to run over the officers, in what she has described as a case of “domestic terrorism”, despite the fact that this version has also been discredited by witnesses to the event.
For his part, US President Donald Trump has noted that the deceased “behaved very aggressively, obstructing and resisting.” “Then he violently, deliberately and cruelly ran over an ICE agent, who appears to have fired in self-defense,” he maintained, before stating that it was “horrible” to watch the video.
This event once again exacerbates tensions between federal and local authorities around this type of deployment, which for now has focused on cities controlled by Democrats and which have led to complaints, in the case of ICE, about actions that could involve violations of Human Rights and the US Constitution itself, especially in the case of apparently indiscriminate raids against people due to their appearance.
