ICE murder in Minneapolis: Trump’s war comes home

Socialist Equality Party

The murder of Renee Nicole Good by an agent of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Wednesday morning in Minneapolis was a deliberate, daylight execution. The unnamed agent, one of thousands deployed in the city, fired three shots at point-blank range into the face of the 37-year-old woman—a poet, US citizen and mother of three—as she tried to drive away from a mob of federal agents on Portland Avenue on the city’s southside.

Video evidence shows that Good was gesturing for federal vehicles to pass and was not obstructing any operation. When agents approached her vehicle, she backed up and attempted to drive away. An ICE agent stepped in front of the vehicle and fired a shot through the windshield. As Good steered away, the same agent fired two more shots through the driver’s side window at point-blank range.

After the shooting, agents refused to allow a physician to administer aid, blocked the ambulance from accessing the scene, and violently suppressed community members and journalists who had gathered.

The site of the murder was barely a mile from the location where George Floyd was choked to death by a Minneapolis cop in May 2020, touching off mass international protests against police violence. Like Floyd’s death, the killing of Renee Good was recorded by dozens of bystanders, who screamed in shock and outrage and denounced the ICE thugs as “murderers.”

Trump administration officials have responded with a torrent of lies aimed at denying what millions of people know from watching the videos on social media. The fascist Stephen Miller and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem denounced Good as a “domestic terrorist.” Trump issued a statement claiming that the killing was an act of “self-defense,” asserting, in direct contradiction to the video footage, that Good “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer.”

The gang of criminals in the White House speaks of the population of the United States with open hatred and contempt. Everyone knew that at some point ICE would kill someone; this was only a matter of time. And Renee Nicole Good will not be the last. Indeed, her death is the intended consequence of the massive paramilitary mobilization that the Trump administration has unleashed in cities across the country, the spearhead for the broader conspiracy for dictatorship.

The state murder in Minneapolis comes only four days after US commandos stormed into Caracas, Venezuela, seizing the country’s President Nicolás Maduro and his wife and killing scores of Venezuelans in the process. There is a direct connection between the international gangsterism of the Trump administration and the murder of an American citizen in the streets of a major city.

The World Socialist Web Site wrote in its statement on the attack on Venezuela, “To impose neocolonial domination abroad, the administration must also overcome mass opposition at home. The inevitable disasters flowing from this strategy will be met with even greater violence, both internationally and within the United States.” This warning is now confirmed in the streets of Minneapolis. 

The Trump administration is seeking to use the Western Hemisphere as the base for projecting military force against the major rivals of American imperialism around the world: China, Russia, Iran and the European imperialist powers as well. Trump tweeted, only hours after the murder of Renee Good, that he wants to raise the military budget by 50 percent this year, to $1.5 trillion. That will require even more drastic cuts in social benefits, from education and healthcare to Social Security.

Such policies cannot be imposed democratically. That is why Trump is pouring money into the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its Gestapo-like paramilitary forces, ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), with plans to double the capacity of migrant detention facilities that are concentration camps in all but name. And such measures will be taken not just against immigrants but against all opposition from workers and youth.

The United States is in the midst of an unfolding coup organized by the sitting president to establish a dictatorship. Responding to the ICE murder, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey described the justifications of the Trump administration as “bullshit” and said that the White House is seeking to establish conditions in which they can “create a military occupation in our city.” 

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz acknowledged the danger of a full-scale federal military intervention into the state. He said he had notified the Minnesota National Guard to be ready for a deployment order in the event that the more than 2,000 federal agents sent into his state were not removed, while declaring, “We’ve never been at war with our federal government.”

But he clearly implied that the federal government was at war with Minnesota. He urged those outraged by the ICE murder to avoid violence, saying, “Minnesotans, don’t take the bait… Do not allow them to invoke the Insurrection Act. Do not allow them to declare martial law.”

But this is what the Trump administration is doing. The Democrats counsel “restraint” in the face of a developing dictatorship, as if the White House will stop its criminal conspiracies if only the population does nothing to provoke it. 

Walz himself announced this week that he was abandoning his own reelection campaign, capitulating to and indeed promoting the slanders and lies directed at Somali immigrants in the Twin Cities. The Democratic Party will do nothing to defend the democratic rights of the American people. It refused to hold Trump accountable for his first attempted coup d’etat on January 6, 2021, and its right-wing, pro-corporate policies opened the door for Trump to return to power four years after he sought to shred the US Constitution.

There are clear class reasons for this impotence: The Democrats, like the Republicans, are a party of the capitalist ruling elite, upholding the global interests of American imperialism and the domestic rule of the financial oligarchy.

Anger is mounting throughout the country, and protests have already been organized throughout the US against the ICE murder in Minneapolis. The aim of protests cannot be to appeal to the very gangsters who are orchestrating these crimes to change their policies. The fight to defend democratic rights must be rooted in the working class—the social force that has the power and whose class interests correspond to oppose the oligarchy and its rampage against democratic rights. 

The Socialist Equality Party proposes the following demands and program for the protests against the murder of Renee Nicole Good:

• The immediate arrest and prosecution of all those responsible for the murder of Renee Nicole Good
• The withdrawal of all ICE, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) forces from Minneapolis and every other city
• The abolition of these Gestapo agencies that terrorize immigrant communities
• The immediate release of all detainees held in ICE custody and an end to all raids, renditions and deportations
• Full legal rights and protections for all immigrant workers and their families

These demands cannot be realized except through mass social struggle. The logic of events is moving inexorably toward a general strike against the Trump regime: a mass, coordinated intervention by workers across every industry to bring the machinery of repression and exploitation to a halt.

It should be recalled that Minneapolis was the site of the historic 1934 general strike, in which workers confronted and defeated a brutal campaign of corporate and state repression. When police opened fire on striking Teamsters, killing Henry Ness and John Belor, workers responded by organizing armed defense squads, sweeping the streets and forcing back the police. The general strike sparked a wave of class battles throughout the country, including the sit-down strikes three years later. Led by socialists, and particularly those in the Trotskyist movement, these struggles created the mass industrial organizations of the CIO.

The unions like the Teamsters, built in those great class battles, have long since decayed into nothing more than bureaucratic shells, which serve the corporations, not the workers. But the great class divide in American society not only remains, it has widened to unprecedented dimensions.

The working class requires new forms of organization to provide a base for mass resistance to the ruling class program of dictatorship and war.

The Socialist Equality Party proposes the systematic development of working class rank-and-file committees—in factories, workplaces, logistics hubs, schools, hospitals and neighborhoods. Such organizations can break the grip of the corporatist union bureaucracy, unify struggles across industries, regions and national borders, and defend immigrants and other groups targeted for political repression.

Trump has said he will rule as a dictator, and his government acts as a criminal Mafia against both the people of Venezuela and other countries overseas and against the American people at home.

The Trump administration acts and speaks as the political representative of a capitalist oligarchy that has elevated Trump to power precisely because its interests can no longer be secured through legal or democratic means.

The fight to defend democratic rights cannot be separated from the fight against this oligarchy and the capitalist system it defends. Every basic right—freedom of speech and protest, the right to live and work without fear of state violence or deportation, the right to healthcare, housing, education and a decent standard of living—stands in direct conflict with a social order based on exploitation and private profit. The only viable path forward is the building of an independent political movement of the working class for socialism.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/01/08/vcxb-j08.html

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SEE ALSO: https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/when-it-comes-to-violence-against-protesters-this-administration-has-a-track-record-of-lies-20260109-p5nspm.html