The Brooklyn Rail

Are you going to believe us or your lying eyes? When masked ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot Renee Good at point blank range on January 7, he had been recording the moments before his shot on his own cellphone, and JD Vance thought that releasing Ross’s own video recording on January 9 would justify Ross’s action for Americans who saw it. It did not do that.

The 33% of die-hard Trump supporters, who would still be behind him if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue, saw a radical leftist Trump opponent disrespecting law enforcement and getting what was coming to her. The rest of the country saw an out-of-control ICE agent striking out in rage against a citizen exercising her constitutional right to protest the actions of her government.

In the video footage, it appears that Jonathan Ross was daring Renee Good to try to run into him so he could shoot her, and when she instead steered away from him to get away, he put down his cellphone and shot her three or four times anyway—once through the windshield and two or three times through the side window. Good was struck once in the chest, once on her left forearm, and once in the head. When he was done shooting, Agent Ross snarled “Fucking bitch,” and strode away.

Where you stand on the complicity/complacency scale in relation to these actions influences how you see these images and what you are willing to do in response to them.

The shooting of Renee Good may be our Kent State moment, recalling the time in May 1970, when Ohio National Guardsmen shot and killed four students protesting Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia, and John Filo took a photograph of the slain protestors that ignited massive protests nationwide. Or it may be our George Floyd moment, when in 2020, only a mile away from the Renee Good shooting, Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin pressed his knee into George Floyd’s neck until he was dead, while seventeen-year-old Darnella Frazier recorded the murder on her cellphone camera and released it to the world online.

After the murder of Renee Good, fifty thousand people came out in subzero temperatures in Minneapolis-St. Paul on January 23 to protest the actions of ICE, and much of the twin cities shut down in a general strike called “ICE Out of Minnesota: Day of Truth & Freedom.” Demonstrators demanded the withdrawal of 3000 federal officers sent in by the Trump administration.

As if in response, on January 24, ICE and CBP agents shot 37-year-old intensive care nurse and resident of Minneapolis Alex Pretti ten times, in the back, killing him. The Visual Investigations team at the New York Times put together the six clearest cellphone videos by civilians at the scene that conclusively show that Pretti never made any aggressive moves toward the six federal officers who attacked and beat him, disarmed him, and then executed him as he laid on the ground. The visual evidence clearly shows that what Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem and Gregory Bovino, the official in charge of Border Patrol operations, said about the incident right after it happened—that Mr. Pretti approached officers brandishing a weapon and threatening them—was not true.

People everywhere are now quick to record such events on their cellphones, but people in Minneapolis, after the example of Darnella Frazier, are even more vigilant and exacting. ICE is armed with guns, but the People are armed with cameras.

Trump has now been in power for one year. During that time, he and his minions have opened the files of the US government to giant tech corporations for surveillance, dismantled much of the justice system, bent a portion of the public media and the universities to his will, and formed a large private militia, that is above the law, to be deployed against his political opponents and presumably to interfere with free and fair elections in November. And he has threatened the most powerful military alliance in history (the thirty-two nations of NATO) and begun a series of trade wars with our historical allies.

The speed with which Trump has transformed the US government is remarkable, but what is even more surprising is the way that he has tried to take over the psychic reality of the American People and change the public imaginary. Acts of iconicide now attempt to break down the relation between visual evidence and reality, but it’s not working, and the tide is turning.

The people of Minneapolis have risen up to protect their neighbors and stand up to the predations of ICE and CBP, and the rest of America is paying attention. The Department of Homeland Security is blocking all investigations of the murders and we still don’t know the identities of the murderers of Alex Pretti, but we will. As Jack Smith said, “The rule of law is not self-executing.” It depends on our collective will to demand it.