John Wall (18:59)
All right, that is it for what the left and the right are saying. Which brings us to my take. Renee Goode was 37 years old, the mother of three children, a poet, a wife, a woman, a human being is needlessly dead. For me, this is most of what matters. At the same time, this shooting provokes genuine political and legal debates, and it is my job to start with them, even on days like today when that feels increasingly difficult. As preventable as her death was, it was also bound to happen. This is the totally horrific, tragic, obvious outcome of enforcing immigration laws this way. And it was predictable. It was so predictable that I actually predicted it. Right after Trump was elected. I warned multiple times that mass deportation efforts will lead to civil disobedience and clashes with law enforcement. After the arrests of Newark Mayor Ross Baraka, I warned that confrontations with immigration officials were getting dangerous and would inevitably end with a major, major violent event that would then be used to justify more law enforcement being deployed on X. I shared clips of confrontations between citizens and ICE and warned that they were incredibly dangerous, stressing that most people would react defensively if they saw someone dressed like the way ICE agents are dressed trying to arrest their neighbor. This is America. Distrusting government force is in our national DNA. Heavily armed mass federal agents with unclear levels of police authority and training cannot reasonably expect to just traipse through our neighborhoods as if they were war zones, kicking down doors or descending from helicopters and snatching people off the streets en masse, and then think everyone will placidly accept it. That, thankfully, is not a circumstance of life we are built to accept. Each tense interaction, filmed and posted and dissected in the media makes it increasingly clear that these ICE agents are not prepared for these kinds of confrontations. Trump has put these officers in dangerous positions, demanding a kind of enforcement that is bold, aggressive and confrontational. Interacting in this manner with American citizens and noncitizens alike is not what these officers are trained to do. Of course, this is America. So also, the incident just jumps straight from the phones of observers into the partisan ringer, with everyone lining up on their respective sides with their respective polarized takes. Many Democrats and political observers particularly but not exclusively on the Left, see a woman shot to death while driving away from the mass agents with guns. The president, DHS and some Republicans in Congress have begun framing Renee Goode as a domestic terrorist who tried to run over and kill an ICE agent. Some think the situation was simply dangerous enough that an ICE agent could fear for his life and was justified in using force. Reasonable people whom I respect, like National Review's Andrew McCarthy, under what the Right Is Saying, come to this conclusion honestly and for better or for worse. I think there is a decent chance our legal system absolves this agent of any wrongdoing, but I have some pushback. First, setting aside the legal question, let's state plainly that government officials are selling a narrative that is not attached to reality, one that is fundamentally different from what we can all see in the numerous videos available to the public. This event was filmed from several angles, and it has been broken down at several different speeds with audio. While I loathe going over the available evidence like it's instant replay in a football game, I also think this use of force was clearly not necessary. And to make my point most strongly, I have to start by playing the game everyone else is. So here is what I can see and hear. Renee Goode's car is in the street. The videos we have show her trying to wave ICE agents past her car as they pull up in a vehicle with police lights flashing. Two ICE agents exit and approach her vehicle and she is told to get out of the car and she says audibly, I'm pulling out. At least one agent begins yelling at her to get out of her vehicle while one puts his hand on the driver's side door. She puts the car in reverse with two ICE agents on the left side of her, while third circles around the car to the front left side. She then drives forward and turns her wheels all the way to the right. The third agent moves to get out of the way and fires a shot through the windshield. One angle appears to show the officer actually leaning on the front of the vehicle as she drives past, and though it's blurry and from a distance, that video looks as if the car pushes the officer's body out of the away. As this is happening, the officer has pulled out his weapon and he then discharges it. As Good's car passes him, he fires two more shots. Photos of the vehicle after the event show one bullet hole in the front windshield, making it likely the other shots were through the driver's side window, which was down. As far as I'm concerned, everything after the guns are fired, the speed of the car, where it goes, etc. Is a moot point since by then Good has been shot and may have been killed instantly. A man identifying himself as a doctor on scene begged to treat her, but the ICE agents refused to let him, claiming they had their own medics, even though none were visible on the scene. In the video shot by eyewitnesses, did Renee Goode make a mistake? Yes, she did. When someone working for law enforcement tells you to do something, barring the most extreme extenuating circumstances, it is a good rule of thumb to do it. Why? Because respecting and listening to law enforcement is the best way to keep yourself safe. Just or unjust, and in this case, I think it is clearly unjust, this outcome is a distinct possibility when you don't cooperate. At the same time, Goode was not the only person with agency here. Even if we concede that she did not respond to clear orders to get out of her car, that she should not have driven away, and that an officer could reasonably construe her actions as a lethal threat, hers are not the only actions we should judge. The ICE agents are the ones with the guns and the authority who are supposed to be in control. So let's talk about their choices. One eyewitness said ICE agents gave Good conflicting instructions, with some telling her to leave while others told her to get out of the car. The video backs this up. You can hear a lot of yelling and barking orders, and the officers aren't approaching her car with uniform calm, control or clarity. Also, officers are never supposed to position themselves in front of a vehicle or approach it from the front for precisely this reason. DHS officers are generally prohibited from discharging a firearm at a moving vehicle unless someone is using their car as a deadly weapon and no other objectively reasonable means of defense is available. DHS also has use of force rules, which are relatively straightforward and include a baseline respect for human life and the communities we serve, emphasizing de escalation tactics as a core component. It seems pretty clear to me from the available video evidence that several of these officers violated each of these rules. The agent who approached her car and grabbed the door handle needlessly escalated the situation. The agent who killed Goode positioned himself in front of the vehicle with one hand on the hood and the other on his firearm. He then discharged his weapon into a moving vehicle. As a group, the officers did not display basic respect for human life or the communities they served and they did not attempt to deescalate the situation. Remember, Renee Goode looked to be trying to wave officers past her and said explicitly and clearly I'm pulling out, before they surrounded her vehicle and demanded she get out of a car on a street packed with law enforcement officers and civilians. It would have been safest to allow her to drive past them and then pursue her in their own vehicles if they wanted to detain her. At the risk of speculating too much, I think the videos clearly show that the ICE agent scared Goode and that she simply tried to leave. The idea that a deadly use of force here is justified seems farcical to me, even for the agent toward the front of the vehicle who is at most risk of being hurt. McCarthy, for his part, argues, emphasis mine, that Goode may not have intended to run him over, but she sure didn't appear to be trying to avoid running him over if that was necessary to escape. What I see actually is the complete opposite, that she very clearly turned her vehicle away from them. Now, I know people are looking to me for a measured, dispassionate analysis of these contentious debates, but when I ask myself about what should be happening, what appeals to my moral center, I really don't feel conflicted at all. At the end of the day, what are we really debating? Ice shot and killed an American citizen, a 37 year old mom whose glove box was stuffed with children's toys and who, prior to being confronted at the absolute worst, committed the crime of blocking traffic to try to obstruct an immigration enforcement. When Charlie Kirk was assassinated, one of the things that struck me was that I could see myself in him. A young dad, a political commentator, a podcast host, someone who does public events. As a result, I did my best to emphasize his humanity. Here again, this killing hits home. My wife is a mom in her 30s and a public defender in Philadelphia. In the last few months, some of her clients have been snatched up by ICE while attending scheduled immigration hearings. What if she got caught in the middle or responded with fear in a way that police viewed as resisting or interfering? Would millions of people jump to the conclusion that she deserved to be killed for the crime of standing between ICE and an immigrant alleged to be here illegally? These feelings are tough for me to shake. Why did an ICE agent pull his firearm on a 37 year old woman who looked like she was trying to leave the scene in her car? What threat did she reasonably pose to him? What immigration enforcement are they conducting in preventing her from leaving? Would we have had a better outcome if they simply let her leave, what are we even doing here? An American citizen has been killed by immigration officers, and for what? Who was made safer? What community benefited from her child being an orphan? What community benefited from the very beginning, the idea that mass immigration agents roaming the streets of American cities would be empowered to this degree has been worrisome and frightening. Precisely for this reason, they are not adequately trained for these interactions. More to the usual point, their authority and jurisdiction are at best murky. In situations like this, they typically cannot detain legally a citizen of the United States without reasonable suspicion. They are in the country illegally. They are not the police, they are not the military, they are not the National Guard, they are not the FBI. Yet they behave like they are all of the above and are egged on by the President, his Cabinet, and members of Congress. Regardless of the minute details which we could debate and interpret in all kinds of partisan ways, what's very, very plain to is that this woman was not a domestic terrorist trying to kill ICE agents with her car. Nor is it a miracle they survived when the video shows not a single one on scene was injured and the one in the most danger was barely touched by a vehicle moving at a speed of a few miles per hour. These are lies from the President, from dhs, from sitting members of Congress. If you believe this account from the government, then we are beyond the Rorschach test on use of force. You are not attached to the reality of this moment. As one neighbor and eyewitness who self identified as right leaning told reporters, this is not how we're supposed to be doing things in America. We'll be right back after this quick break.
