ICE is not the victim

In the days before an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agent, named by the Minneapolis Star-Tribune as Jonathan Ross, shot and killed Renee Nicole Good in the Twin Cities, MAGA world was consumed with yet another fake outrage. This time, they were pretending to be mad about the alleged victimization of the deportation forces that have been bombarding Minnesota communities. To hear the right’s version of the story, no one has ever been more victimized than these beleagured ICE agents, who were subject to the unspeakable horror of temporarily being denied lodging. A single Hilton-affiliated hotel in the Minneapolis area canceled the reservations of agents, who were in town to intimidate and arrest local residents suspected of being immigrants. Even though Hilton immediately cut ties with the hotel and apologized in an embarrassing manner to the Trump administration, ICE and the White House were not going to pass up the opportunity to once again play the victim. 

The Department of Homeland Security accused Hilton of a “coordinated campaign in Minneapolis to REFUSE service to DHS law enforcement.” But one hotel does not a coordinated campaign make. No matter: MAGA never allows truth to get in the way of their self-pitying narrative. On the contrary, it was darkly funny how much the self-appointed tough guys of the right whine like spoiled brats.

“Conservative journalists are quite far behind enemy lines when we’re anywhere remotely close to Minneapolis,” bragged propagandist Nick Sorter on X in response to his fellow MAGA influencer Matt Von Swol posting, “Dude this is actually extremely dangerous work.” (The “work” in question is Sorter yelling at a Hilton employee after allegedly scoping the hotel out “for almost four hours prior to actually going in” — you know, because of all the scary, violent leftists hanging out at the Hilton.) Whatever these men think they’re proving, what they are actually demonstrating is they are the softest, saddest boys alive, incapable of understanding what real courage looks like.

This attitude has been endemic with ICE and their supporters since Donald Trump took office. The agency’s recruiting materials lure would-be agents with heavy-handed language; agents are “brave” and “resolute” men fighting “criminals and predators.” (And in case they were worried, the top of the page reassures applicants, “You do not need an undergraduate degree.”) When interfacing with the public, however, ICE and their supporters inevitably come across as whiny babies playing dress-up.

Border czar Tom Homan claims that agents need to wear masks because they don’t want to be “doxxed on social media” — in other words, have their identity known to the people they’re supposedly serving. Videos of ICE arrests spread rapidly on social media, showing that the “criminals and predators” are instead unarmed health care workers, day care workers tending small children and a 71-year-old citizen accused of pushing an agent. Only the weakest people on earth could be afraid of these arrestees, but ICE agents come at them in huge numbers, like they’re trying to take down an NFL player hopped up on PCP. The agency’s pity party has grown so ridiculous that Fox News ran multiple outraged segments because a Boston-area church displayed an anti-ICE nativity scene. One host, Harris Faulkner, insisted that merely posting an anti-ICE sign at a church is “cruel rhetoric” that “helps to endanger” the “agents on the ground.”

Heaven forbid any of these people stub a toe. We’ll never stop hearing about how it was like their entire leg was amputated.

Needless to say, the true courage on display in this country is plenty visible in the video of Good’s killing. Not from the cowardly ICE agents that swarmed her car and shot at her as she appears to be driving away. But from the 37-year-old Good, her wife and the other ordinary citizens in the video who are yelling “shame” and standing up to masked, armed ICE agents in their streets. Like so many of us, Good could have stayed tucked safely away in her house, looking the other way while a bunch of hastily hired wannabe warriors terrorized her neighbors. But while much needs to be learned about what happened, it appears that Good died doing what so many other ordinary Americans have in recent months: standing up to the bullies that Trump unleashed on their communities.

The ICE victim complex goes deep. As Good’s killing showed, it’s deadly. By relentlessly and falsely portraying agents as a beleaguered group terrorized by day care workers, nativity scenes and hotel employees, MAGA has preemptively justified violence against unarmed civilians as an act of self-defense. Barely minutes after her death, a tidal wave of disinformation painting ICE as the real victims came pouring out of the Trump administration and their legions of self-appointed propagandists.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem insisted that Good, a mother and poet, was part of “coordinated” effort to commit “domestic terrorism.” (This from someone who wrote a book in which she described shooting a trusting puppy in the head as practically an act of self-defense.) Trump posted that Good “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE officer,” which is immediately disproved by watching video of the killing, as well as of the offending officer walking around afterward. All of MAGA, really, fell in line, painting the man who shot a woman three times as the real victim and continuing to deny the evidence witnessed by our eyes and ears.

It’s a waste of effort getting into a frame-by-frame “debate” over this video. As historian John Ganz wrote in his newsletter response to this shooting, “The administration comes up with totally absurd lies,” but “what I find much more insidious and insulting is the demand on the part of some that we take them seriously or pretend that they are a government like any other.”

The correct response came early from Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey in the hours after the shooting: Efforts to “spin this as an act of self-defense” are “bulls**t.” Trump and members of his administration lie all the time, so there is no obligation to offer the benefit of the doubt to this preposterous spin.

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What is relevant here is the narrative being spun by the lies: that the same men who claim to be big, strapping defenders of Western civilization are also the most vulnerable people imaginable, under constant threat from suburban moms in SUVs, working-class immigrants fleeing poverty or gang violence overseas, hotel managers canceling reservations and liberals calling them “thugs” on social media. To create the moral authority to kidnap and kill people at will, ICE and their propagandists have framed themselves as the ultimate victims. It’s a complete inverse of reality.

The self-pitying nonsense got so out of control so quickly that, by nightfall on Wednesday, the actual victim of the fatal shooting was being painted not only as a threat to ICE agents, but also to straight white men everywhere. Jesse Watters of Fox News complained that Good had “pronouns in her bio” and “leaves behind a lesbian partner and a child from a previous marriage,” conveniently leaving out that the husband he’s referring to passed away in 2023. (Watters himself is on his second marriage, to a woman he cheated on his first wife with, but since he’s a man, it’s OK with the Fox News audience.) Erick Erickson, who bills himself a “Christian broadcaster,” was even more explicit, calling Good an “AWFUL (Affluent White Female Urban Liberal)” and declaring, “Progressive whites are turning violent.” Good’s ex-husband confirmed that she had just dropped off her 6-year-old son at school before she was killed in a video that shows no evidence of this “violence.”

MAGA self-victimization isn’t just beneath contempt. It’s also, as we saw in this shooting, dangerous. It resembles the behavior that psychologists have long documented in abusive partners, which goes under the acronym DARVO for “Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender.” First, deny the abuse. When confronted with evidence, attack the victim to imply she had it coming. Then declare you’re the real victim here, and you were forced to hit, rape or, in this case, shoot the victim because [fill in lie about how mean she was]. The ease in which all of MAGA immediately reverted to the psychological habits of self-pitying wife-beaters should give us all pause.

It is also why, as Ganz writes, “it’s important both for one’s soul and sanity, as well as one’s politics, not to live solely among the lies.” That Trump and his team would swing into action, saying whatever they needed to smear the victim and justify themselves, regardless of facts, was a given. We all could write their lies for them at this point before they even say them. Like a battered wife, we know all the excuses and justifications for the abuse; we have heard them all a million times before. The relentlessness of the lying is about wearing us down, so that we give up on the truth and simply accede to a narrative everyone knows is false.

As exhausting as it is, we can’t give up standing for the truth. Not through annoying “fact checks” or other useless “um, actually” tactics that are beloved by the well-meaning nerds of the left but are mostly useless. We need a more emotionally robust response. One cannot “correct” MAGA liars; they know they are lying. It’s about calling them out, as Frey did, as deliberately abusive, dishonest and, above all, pathetic people, as men who want to impress everyone with how “strong” they are but whose actions reveal them, time and again, to be contemptible. And weak.