MINNEAPOLIS — The ICE deportation agent who shot and killed a Minneapolis woman in her car this week was Minnesota-based Jonathan Ross. Eerily Ross’s record with ICE has a somewhat parallel incident in June in suburban Bloomington. He shot a motorist in the face during a traffic stop and later offered an excuse that he feared for his life. It’s the same excuse that his supervisors are making for him in shooting Renee Nicole Good in the face on Wednesday — that he feared for his life, that it was self-defense. To be sure, the Trump administration has refused to identify Ross as the ICE agent in Good’s death, but his name has been confirmed by multiple news sources. The government’s refusal to identify Ross publicly has been part of a quickly hatched scheme Wednesday morning to create a false narrative about what happened. The scheme was put in place immediately after shooting by Kristi Noem, chief of the cabinet-level federal Homeland Security Department, Noem’s department runs the Immigration Control and Enforcement agency. At a hastily convened news conference in Texas, Noem blamed Good, whom she falsely called a “domestic terrorist,” and tried without evidence to exonerate the ICE agent who shot her. This was still amid confusion at the scene 1,400 miles away in Minneapolis.
Noem. Spinning fact-loose and dubious account of fatal ICE shooting. At news conference in Brownsville, Texas, even before the shooting of Renee Nicole Good could be investigated.
Noem nrofile
Kristi Noem had just been elected to a second term as governor of South Dakota when President Donald Trump named her director of the cabinet-level U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Noem’s qualifications dumb-founded political observers. It appeared a further reflection of Trump’s attraction to weak but flashy appointees. Noem, age 53, a fashionista, was famous for multiple wardrobe changes a day. Her grand smile was a dental resurrection. She disturbed readers of her 2024 autobiography “No Going Back” with an unremorseful account of shooting her family’s 14-month-old puppy Cricket for ruining a pheasant hunt with guests by “chasing all those birds and having the time of her life.” As Trump’s Homeland Security secretary, Noem has overseen a massive build-up of immigration control and border agents. These agents have rounded up thousands of immigrants and deported them without a day in court to the hell-hole Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorism prison in El Salvador. The prison is operated as an international profit center by ruthless EL Salvador strongman-dictator Nayib Bukele, a Trump ally. Noem’s record at Homeland Security has been not as honest counsel to Trump on policy but as an unflinching executor of his instructions.
Ignominous locale choice. On publicity photoshoot outside CECOT prison in El Salvador.