THE WASHINGTON POST: More federal agents headed to Minnesota, officials point fingers over ICE shooting

In an interview with Fox News’s Sunday Morning Futures, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem said the administration will send more officers to Minneapolis on Sunday and Monday.

“There’ll be hundreds more, in order to allow our ICE and our Border Patrol individuals that are working in Minneapolis to do so safely,” Noem said.

The Department of Homeland Security said last week that the crackdown in Minnesota would involve 2,000 federal agents and officers, calling it the agency’s largest immigration enforcement operation ever. Protests have continued throughout the weekend. Demonstrators gathered across the country to protest Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the killing of Renée Good, a 37-year-old mother of three.

Trump officials remained adamant Sunday that Ms Good was responsible for her own death, while Democrats insisted that an investigation including local law enforcement must be completed before drawing conclusions.

Tensions over the facts of the incident grew as the FBI, which has taken over the investigation, continued to block Minnesota officials from participating in the inquiry, forcing the local authorities to conduct their own review.

Speaking to CNN’s State of the Union, Ms Noem said that Ms Good was to blame for the shooting, even though an official investigation into the shooting has not been completed and as video evidence raised several questions about the administration’s assessment of what happened. About two hours after the shooting on Wednesday, Ms Noem released a statement asserting that Ms Good committed an act of “domestic terrorism,” and she accused Ms Good of weaponizing her SUV by attempting to “run a law enforcement officer over.”

Almost immediately after the shooting, federal officials, including President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Ms Noem, said the officer - identified through court records as Jonathan Ross - fired in self-defence. Details of the killing, which was captured in videos disseminated online, dispute the administration’s view of the incident. Federal officials’ quick decision to blame Ms Good for the shooting has drawn deep condemnation from Democrats nationwide and Minnesota leaders, who have argued that federal authorities have not yet finalized a full review of the incident and that they are blocking Minnesota officials from participating in the investigation.

Across interviews on Sunday, Ms Noem repeated her accusations that Ms Good used her Honda Pilot to attack the officer, telling CNN’s Jake Tapper that “everything that I said has been proven to be factual.” When pressed by Tapper about video evidence showing that the ICE officer was able to move out of the vehicle’s way and fire at least two of three shots from the side of the car as it veered past him, Ms Noem said Ms Good was “breaking the law by impeding and obstructing a law enforcement operation.” Ms Noem also mentioned that there is video - which Tapper said he had not yet seen - that shows “that this officer was hit by her vehicle.”

“These officers were doing their due diligence that their training had prepared them to do,” Ms Noem said, insisting that she is correct in labelling Ms Good a “domestic terrorist” because she “weaponized her vehicle to conduct an act of violence against a law enforcement officer and the public.”

When Tapper once again pressed her on her decision to draw conclusions ahead of a full investigation, Ms Noem said the administration “will continue to look at this individual and what her motivations were,” but she claimed that Ms Good had “harassed and impeded law enforcement operations.”

Ms Good’s wife has said that Ms Good had “stopped to support our neighbours” when she was fatally shot on the residential street. Ms Good’s family members have said they do not think she was tailing ICE officers. She had just dropped her son off at school before the shooting, they said. Her father, Tim Ganger, said in a brief interview Wednesday that she got “caught up in a bad situation.”

Tom Homan, Mr Trump’s border czar, told Fox News Sunday that he believes the officer thought his life was in danger and acted in response. Mr Homan, however, urged Americans to wait for an investigation to play out before making more accusations.

“There’s a lot of things we don’t know,” Mr Homan said. “You can’t compare this to murder. Murder requires malice, and that is just dangerous to put that type of language out.”

Mr Homan then accused Democratic leaders - including Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, who used an expletive when saying ICE should leave the city - of spreading “the hateful rhetoric (that)has caused a lot of this violence.”

Cr Frey told NBC’s Meet the Press that he does bear responsibility to “bring down the temperature” of the rhetoric.

“To those that are offended, I’m sorry I offended their delicate ears,” Cr Frey said. “But as far as who inflamed the situation, you know, I dropped an f-bomb. And they killed somebody. I think the killing somebody is the inflammatory element here, not the f-bomb.”

Cr Frey also told NBC News that he thinks there is now “deep mistrust” over what the results of an FBI investigation into the shooting will be, given that federal officials are not allowing Minnesota authorities, including the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, to contribute to the review.

“What I was pushing back on from the very beginning was a narrative that had jumped to that conclusion right from the get-go,” he said. “When you’ve got a federal administration that is so quick to jump on a narrative as opposed to the truth, I think we all need to be speaking out.”

Senator Tina Smith (D-Minnesota) was more aggressive in her rebuke, accusing the Trump administration of running a “cover-up” of Ms Good’s shooting by trying to shift the public narrative before facts could be learned by investigators.

“Hours after Renée Good was shot and killed by federal agents, Kristi Noem was telling us what had happened,” Senator Smith said in an interview with ABC’s This Week. “How can we trust the federal government to do an objective, unbiased investigation without prejudice when at the beginning of that investigation, they have already announced exactly what they think happened?”

Federal officers arrested at least one motorist in a Minneapolis neighbourhood on Sunday. A man was dragged out of a silver pickup truck after being briefly followed and stopped.

At one point, a caravan of ICE vehicles drove past the memorial neighbours built for Ms Good on the street where she was shot. Visitors to the memorial were surrounded by Minneapolis police as the federal vehicles made their way down the street.

Joshua Lott, Kyle Rempfer, Brady Dennis and Douglas MacMillan contributed to this report.

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