Woman shot by ICE in Minneapolis | Officer’s phone video made public

A never-before-seen video showing the perspective of the Immigration Enforcement (ICE) agent who fatally shot a woman in Minneapolis on Wednesday was released Friday.

The video, published by the American media Alpha News, shows a tense exchange between a demonstrator and the ICE agent who is filming with his phone, near an SUV stopped in the middle of a residential street. An officer is heard stopping the driver and asking her to get out of the vehicle.

We then see Renee Nicole Good turn the steering wheel of her vehicle, which backs up about a meter before moving forward slightly. The officer then appears to lose his balance and the camera suddenly changes angle to film the houses lining the street. It was then that we heard gunshots ring out, followed by the horrified screams of witnesses to the scene.

The video was shared on X by Vice President JD Vance. According to him, it shows that the police officer’s life “was in danger and that he fired in self-defense. »

But other images released since Wednesday by witnesses, with other angles, appear to show that Jonathan Ross was not in the path of the car’s wheels when he fired.

Democrats fear impunity for federal agent

Democratic officials in Minneapolis say they fear Friday that the federal immigration agent who killed Renee Nicole Good will benefit from impunity, after this event which provoked strong emotion and demonstrations calling for the departure of these police officers.

The elected officials of this large city in Minnesota, already shaken by the death of George Floyd in 2020, deplore that their local investigators have been excluded from the investigation into the circumstances of the death of Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old American.

The procedure is currently in the hands of the federal authorities, who have insisted since Wednesday that the police officer acted in self-defense while the victim tried to run him over by car.

In the streets, demonstrators have been contesting this official version since Wednesday and attacking ICE, the federal immigration police at the center of the large-scale expulsion policy of Donald Trump’s government.

“ICE must get out of Minnesota, we don’t need them here,” Eleanor, a Minneapolis resident who did not wish to give her last name, told AFP on Friday, with many residents describing a climate of fear created by these federal police operations.

There, in front of a federal building far from downtown, a few dozen demonstrators and federal police officers in military uniforms faced each other in a tense atmosphere, while a handful of pro-Trump demonstrators came to defend the ICE action.

At least five people were arrested, noted an AFP photographer.

Local Democratic elected officials strongly contest the version of the federal authorities. “The fact that Pam Bondi’s Department of Justice and this government have already reached a conclusion on this matter is very worrying,” Mayor Jacob Frey said at a press conference Friday.

The local prosecutor, an elected Democrat, said Friday that the FBI had the car involved and the shell casings, but was not sharing this evidence with her services. Mary Moriarty, who says she wants a “full investigation” to be carried out at the local level, also called on possible witnesses to come forward to her services.

The police officer involved was injured last June, dragged about a hundred meters by the car of a fleeing suspect.

Portland

At the scene of Wednesday’s shooting, an improvised memorial was set up with flowers of all colors, lit candles, a few stuffed animals and balloons. Small words are sometimes attached to it.

It was less than two kilometers from there that African-American George Floyd was killed by a white police officer in 2020, triggering weeks of anti-racist protests, sometimes violent, across the country.

According to the American media The Trace, specializing in gun violence, Renee Nicole Good is the fourth person killed by federal immigration agents since the launch of the Trump administration’s large-scale expulsion policy, and seven others were injured.

In a separate incident, two people were injured Thursday in Portland, Oregon by federal Border Patrol fire during a car stop.