An irate Vice President JD Vance lashed out at reporters at a White House press briefing as he defended the Trump administration’s defense of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer who shot and killed a woman in Minneapolis one day earlier despite an ongoing investigation into the shooting by federal investigators.
Vance’s appearance in the White House briefing room Thursday was ostensibly to announce the creation of a new Associate Attorney General position charged with investigating fraudulent abuse of federal benefits of the kind that has rocked the Minnesota state government in recent weeks and forced Governor Tim Walz to drop his bid for a third term.
But the vice president quickly pivoted to complaining about press coverage of yesterday’s shooting of Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother-of-three, after her vehicle blocked a street during an active ICE operation.
Vance began grousing about how media reports over the last 24 hours had quoted prominent Democrats — including Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey — who described the shooting as “murder” or questioned whether the shooting was justified by showing or analyzing video footage calling into question whether Good had accelerated her car at the ICE officer - later identified as Jonathan Ross - who fired the fatal shots into her.
“The way that the media by and large has reported this story has been an absolute disgrace, and it puts our law enforcement officers at risk every single day,” he said.
The fatal shooting occurred on a street in Minneapolis Wednesday morning, where numerous immigration officers were present following a recent influx of federal agents to the city. Video of the incident shows an ICE officer confronting Good in her car before firing several shots into the vehicle as it started to move.
Officials from the Trump administration described the shooting as an act of self-defense and alleged that the Good had engaged in “domestic terrorism.” In contrast, Frey condemned the agent’s actions as reckless and called on federal immigration authorities to withdraw from the city.
But Trump administration officials — including the president himself — have blamed Good for her own death by accusing her of having deliberately attempting to run the officer over with her Honda Pilot.
Vance went further than that by accusing the deceased — without offering evidence — of being in Minneapolis “to interfere with a legitimate law enforcement operation in the United States of America” and calling her part of what he described as “a broader left-wing network to attack, to dox, to assault and to make it impossible for our ICE officers to do their job.”
“If the media wants to tell the truth, they ought to tell the truth that a group of left wing radicals have been working tirelessly, sometimes using domestic terror techniques to try to make it impossible for the President of the United States to do what the American people elected him to do, which is enforce our immigration laws,” Vance said.
He continued, shouting, as he accused “you people in the media” of “lying about this attack” while again stating that Good had been “trying to ram” the officer who shot her.
“He shot back. He defended himself. He's already been seriously wounded in law enforcement operations before, and everybody who has been repeating the lie that this is some innocent woman who was out for a drive in Minneapolis when a law enforcement officer shot at her. You should be ashamed of yourselves,” he said.
Vance did not offer any evidence to support his assertions that Good was part of the “left-wing network” he accused her of participating in and when pressed by reporters to back up his claims he said the identities of those in that alleged “network” were “one of the things we're going to have to figure out.”
At the same time, he continued to suggest that the protests that have sprung up around the administration’s heavy-handed immigration enforcement operations are not organic and are instead organized by a nebulous organization that provides miscreants with the means to commit violence.
He asked: “When somebody throws a brick at an ice agent, or somebody tries to run over an ICE agent, who paid for the brick — and who told protesters to show up and engage in violent activity against our law enforcement officers?”
Vance’s rhetorical question appeared to be based on a years-old and debunked right-wing conspiracy theory that came during protests in Minneapolis and other cities following the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020.
At the time, pro-Trump social media personalities claimed that pallets of bricks found on streets were purchased by unknown parties and placed for rioters to throw at law enforcement, but multiple fact-checking organizations found at the time that the bricks had been purchased for nearby construction projects and staged there for use by workers.
When asked specifically whether the administration had any evidence in-hand to support his claim that Good was part of an organized network of leftists aimed at undermining or harming ICE operations, Vance said both DHS and the FBI were in the process of investigating the shooting itself but immediately resumed offering his own conclusions that Good “was trying to obstruct a legitimate law enforcement operation” and “aimed her car at a law enforcement officer and pressed on the accelerator.”
“I can believe that her death is a tragedy while also recognizing that it's a tragedy of her own making and a tragedy of the far-left who has marshaled an entire movement, a lunatic fringe, against our law enforcement officers. I think what is clearly happening here,” he said.
Despite the vice president’s assertions, video footage from bystanders at the scene do not support the allegation that Good was attempting to hit the agent, according to an analysis by The New York Times.
Good’s ex-husband also told the Associated Press that she was in the area where ICE had been operating while driving home after dropping her six-year-old son off at school earlier in the day.
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