Renee Good and the Big Lie About “Absolute Immunity”

How Trump, Vance, and ICE are normalizing a doctrine of state violence that has no place in American law

Jan 12, 2026

By David Shuster

The killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis would be grim enough if it were merely another case of an armed government officer viewing a woman, driving away, as a threat. But in the Trump administration, where there is no apparent bottom for moral degradation, the tragedy has been multiplied by right-wing liars, demagogues, and constitutional illiterates.

Let’s begin with the facts. Renee Good was shot by an ICE agent.

Multiple videos show she was turning away when the bullets struck her. No credible evidence has surfaced that she posed a lethal threat at the moment she was killed. That alone should provoke somber investigations.

Instead, President Trump, whose relationship with the truth is practically non-existent, declared the deceased woman had been “a professional agitator,” “a radical,” and that she had run over the ICE agent and deserved to be shot.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, a politician whose chief qualification appears to be an unshakable devotion to theatrical cruelty, upped the ante, branding the incident “domestic terrorism.”

But the real jewel in this crown of Trump administration insanity belongs to Vice President J. D. Vance.

He announced with great solemnity that federal law-enforcement officers enjoy “absolute immunity.”

Vance’s declaration is not merely wrong; it is ludicrous. There is no such doctrine in American law. None. It exists only in the fever dreams of fascist wannabes who mistake their own wishes for jurisprudence.

In the United States, law enforcement officers enjoy qualified immunity — a legal contrivance already generous to the point of absurdity. However, even that does not shield police — at any level — from criminal prosecution. There is no constitutional clause or court ruling that grants federal agents the right to kill citizens without consequence. That privilege has been reserved, historically speaking, for secret police, death squads, and the uniformed bullies of authoritarian states — the sort of regimes that enforce order not by law, but by fear.

Yet here we are, with a U.S. Vice President casually asserting that the administration’s hired guns are above the law — that once an ICE badge is awarded, accountability evaporates, the courts are irrelevant, and everybody in the United States is reduced to livestock.

This is the development that should alarm everybody across the political spectrum, even people who feel no affection for Renee Good or for immigrants, activists, or any of the other Trump enemies of the month. The issue is not sympathy. The issue is power. A government that insists its agents may kill first and explain later — or not explain at all — is a government that has abandoned any pretense of liberty.

Throughout our history, American men and women have repeatedly fought wars to rid themselves of such doctrines. But today, MAGA men and women, parroting the Trump-Vance talking points, embrace tyranny without a second thought.

These defenders of the shooting insist that we must “trust law enforcement.”

That’s interesting. Because trust is what you offer in the absence of verification. And verification is clearly what the Trump administration is trying to avoid. Whether it’s economic data, the Epstein files, or forensics from this ICE shooting, the Trump team does not want an investigation; they want obedience. They do not want facts; they want silence. And when silence fails, Trump and his goons will happily promote lies.

Minnesota officials, to their credit, have balked at swallowing the federal story whole. They have asked for transparency, independent review, and evidence — those old-fashioned nuisances that authoritarianism finds so irritating.

For this, the Minnesota leaders — from the Governor to the Minneapolis Mayor to the city’s police chief — have been scolded, smeared, and treated as traitors to the cult of the Trump badge.

This is what it has all become: a cult. A belief that uniforms confer moral purity, guns confer wisdom, and members of ICE, DHS/Border Security, the Military, etc., are absolved in advance of whatever they do, simply if they are doing what Trump wants. It is a theology well suited to intellectually challenged people who prefer force over thought and slogans over law.

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Renee Good is dead. No press conference will resurrect her, and no rhetoric will cleanse the stain of her killing. But the greater danger is not in the ICE action or bullets that ended her life, but in the doctrine now being peddled to excuse the killing – the doctrine that Trump/Vance agents are sovereign and citizens are secondary.

This sort of doctrine, throughout history, has never ended well. It is the doctrine of empires in decline, of republics that have forgotten why they were founded, and of governments that mistake fear for strength.

The tragedy in Minneapolis is not only that a woman was killed. It is that so many Trump administration leaders and their right-wing political/media sycophants rushed forward to argue why her death doesn’t matter – and why next time, yours might not either.