Roaming Charges: In ICE Cold Blood - CounterPunch.org Roaming Charges: In ICE Cold Blood Many of the people who have spent the last five years denouncing the killing of Ashli Babbitt for raiding the Capitol in an attempt to overturn an election are celebrating the murder of Renee Nichole Good, a terrified mother killed by masked men from unmarked cars who chased her down a neighborhood street and shot her in the face. At 9:30 on Wednesday morning, Renee Good was sitting in her Honda Pilot, with her life partner and dog, on Portland Avenue in the Central neighborhood of Minneapolis, when two unmarked cars approached her. Good waved her hand, signaling for the unmarked cars to go around her. Instead, they stopped. Masked men got out. Good told them: “I’m pulling out.” As two of the men advanced near her maroon Pilot, one of them told her to “Move, move, move,” while the other shouted, “Get out of the fucking car.” These contradictory instructions are a frequent tactic, since, however you respond, you violate one of the orders, and offer an excuse for escalation. One of the masked men tried to open the passenger door and reach through the window toward Good. Meanwhile, the other agent grabbed the side door. Good put her car in reverse, backed up a little, then pulled forward slowly, turning away from the masked ICE agent who was slightly in front of her. He moves out of the way, almost casually. As the officer who would kill her seconds later stood outside the window of her Honda, Good said, “That’s fine dude, I’m not mad at you. Then the officer dropped his cellphone, grabbed his gun, fired three shots into Good’s car, hitting her in the face, and grunted, “Fuckin’ bitch.” As she slumped forward, her foot reflexively pressed down on the accelerator and the car lurched forward, hitting a parked car and a light pole a few yards down the street, where it came to a rest. Her partner was heard screaming, “They’ve killed my wife! “They killed my wife. I don’t know what to do. They shot her in the head.” A bystander who witnessed the shooting rushed forward to help, but was stopped by an ICE agent. The man said he was a doctor and could render medical aid to the woman who was shot. The ICE agent responded brusquely: “I don’t care,” and ordered him to stay back. Fifteen minutes passed until an ambulance pulled onto Portland Avenue. But it was blocked from coming to Good’s aid by ICE vehicles. Finally, two paramedics trekked through the snow to the scene of the shooting, where they tried to treat Good’s fatal wounds. She was later pronounced dead at Hennepin Hospital. Before her blood was even dry, the President and his henchmen had smeared this bright young woman, this mother and poet, as a domestic terrorist, as an attempted assassin, as a leftist thug. They smeared her before knowing anything about her, what she’d done that day, how she lived her life, who she loved and cared for, what her friends and neighbors and colleagues thought of her. To Trump and his minions, she was an obstacle, someone standing in the way and, therefore, someone who deserved whatever she got, even if it was a bullet in the face. Now the FBI is blocking Minnesota law enforcement officials from analyzing evidence from the shooting. You wonder why they bother. What is there to hide? The murder of Renee Good happened in plain sight. We’ve all seen it from various angles. There was no one in front of Good’s car when she pulled out. No one was run over. The shots were fired from the side, not the front of her Honda. The ICE agent shot her and he walked away. He didn’t limp. He didn’t flinch in pain. He simply walked away. He didn’t seek treatment from the paramedics on the scene. Or show any wounds to his fellow agents. He just walked away. He walked around the scene for three minutes. Then he got in a car and left. (The Intercept identified the alleged shooter as Jonathan Ross, an ICE agent based in St. Paul.) Renee Good was denied medical care and left to bleed out in her car. There’s nothing left to cover up. And perhaps that’s how ICE and the Trump administration want it.
Renee Nicole Good. Photo: Old Dominion University English Department/Facebook. ICE’s rules of engagement are to intimidate, to terrify. And not just its targets, but entire neighborhoods, communities and cities. They brutalize the innocent not by accident but by tactic. They offer the security of fear. They want you so afraid of them that you’ll snitch your neighbor out, turn in the women who clean your toilets and take care of your kids, denounce the men who mow your lawn, rake your leaves and clean your gutters. They want you to stay inside with your doors locked when you hear a familiar voice scream, as masked men raid your block. Like the cascading violence of the raids themselves, the smearing of the victim is strategic. It’s meant to frighten and paralyze those who might otherwise object. Stand in the way and you will be blamed for whatever happens to you. You will be slimed and slandered beyond all recognition. If you survive, your life will be made hellish, your reputation splattered with lies and calumnies by your own government. ICE has killed before and will kill again. In the last year, ICE agents have fired shots at least 15 times, killing four people. They shot at people trying to warn them of children in the area of their raids and they shot people running away from them. They shot people in a very similar way that they shot Renee Good: while they were in their cars, driving away and then blamed them for trying to run over ICE officers. On September 3, an ICE agent shot and killed Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez, a Mexican national, after dropping his daughter off at pre-school. ICE originally said that Villegas-Gonzalez was shot after he tried to run over an ICE agent, who DHS claimed had been severely wounded. Then, a video of the incident recorded the voice of the officer grazed by Villegas-Gonzalez’s car saying his injury was “nothing major.” Another video showed that Villegas-Gonzalez was driving away from the ICE officers, not toward them. DHS tried to smear Villegas-Gonzalez as a dangerous criminal with a “history of reckless driving.” But a new report by NBC News Chicago shows that he had never been convicted or even charged with a crime. On October 4, an immigration agent shot Marimar Martinez five times while the 30-year-old teaching assistant and US citizen was driving around the Brighton Park neighborhood of Chicago, warning residents of an impending ICE raid. The Border Patrol officer who shot Martinez pulled up beyond her car and shouted, “Do something, bitch!,” as he aimed his assault rifle at her. He later bragged about the shooting in a text message to fellow agents: “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys.” The agents falsely claimed that Martinez had tried to ram them with her car and arrested the seriously wounded woman. The charges against her were later dismissed. A day after the Minneapolis shootings, Border Patrol agents in Portland shot two people, a man and a woman, during a traffic stop in the parking of a medical center complex. Once again they claimed they had tried to use the vehicle as a weapon, although both of them couldn’t have been driving at the same time. DHS also claimed both were members of the Tren de Aragua gang, though they offered no evidence to buttress the charge. The couple, who are reportedly married, escaped on foot and were later taken by Portland to a hospital. The man was shot twice and the woman suffered a gunshot wound to the chest. Portland’s Mayor, Keith Wilson, called for ICE and Border Patrol to leave the city, saying “Portland isn’t a training ground for militarized agents.” So in the course of two days, Trump’s immigration shock troops shot a mother of three and a married couple. These kinds of raids, while shocking to most Americans, are familiar to many immigrants from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, countries still haunted by the death squads funded, armed and trained by the CIA. Horrors that they fled and have now reappeared like ghosts from the past here on the streets of Chicago and Minneapolis and Los Angeles. They know all too well that collateral damage is a feature of all paramilitaries. With the murder of Renee Good, ICE has now advanced from scaring the hell out of American citizens to killing them. Jeffrey St Clair -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#40112): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/40112 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/117199911/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
