Lessons from a Legal Analysis of the Renee Good Shooting (updated)
What’s one thing that could make ICE agent Jonathan Ross’s lethal shooting of innocent US citizen Renee Good even worse? If it were legally justified.
ICE agent killing Renee Good
How would this make it worse?
The shooting was a horrific event. If it were determined to be legally justified, then
(a) it would be harder, if not impossible, to hold anyone properly accountable for it happening,
(b) it would become less likely that any kind of amends would be made to Renee Good’s family,
(c) it would increase the likelihood of similarly horrific events happening, by telling agents they have sufficient legal cover to be less cautious with others’ lives,
(d) it would likely discourage people from observing ICE to witness (and perhaps, via witnessing, calm) their actions, and discourage people from protesting ICE,
(e) it would suggest that the problem with ICE is bigger than you might have thought; addressing it involves not just getting agents to comply with existing laws and policies but to change those laws and policies, and
(f) it would weaken the extent to which Good’s killing could be used for what you might think are beneficial political ends, e.g., to use its awfulness to motivate political or social efforts to rein in the now Gestapo-like ICE.
But why countenance this? Does anyone really think Good’s killing was legally justifiable?
As it turns out, plenty of people do. A poll last week found that 35% of registered voters, and 77% of Republican party supporters, think the shooting was legally justified. And so do some philosophers.
In a guest post at the newsletter of Dan Demetriou (University of Minnesota, Morris), Tim Hsiao, currently a fellow at the Firearms Research Center at the University of Wyoming College of Law (and previously an assistant professor of philosophy), argues that “the shooting was justified.” (Of course to say an action is legally justified is not thereby to say it is morally justified, or to say that it wasn’t bad.)
Hsiao says that the law permits ICE agents to “stop and detain someone even if they haven’t actually been confirmed to have committed a crime. There only needs to be reasonable grounds, based on articulable facts, to suspect that a crime might have been committed.” He argues that there were such reasonable grounds in the Renee Good incident, justifying the agents’ attempts to detain Good. He then argues that it was “reasonable for Jonathan Ross to believe that Renee Good’s movements [with her car] constituted an imminent threat of serious physical harm or death,” which, he says, is the standard for officers to be legally justified in using deadly force. But what about the fact that the officer fired multiple shots at Good when he was obviously next to the car and not in its path? Hsiao says: “Officers are trained to continue firing until a perceived threat is neutralized, which often results in multiple rounds being discharged in rapid succession… There is an unavoidable delay between perceiving a change in threat, deciding to stop shooting, and physically executing that decision.”
That’s the sketch of his view. You may have objections. Hsiao deals with some, so go read the piece. I don’t know enough about the law to know if Hsiao has it right, that is, whether he’s correct about the law he discusses and whether he hasn’t omitted other legal or evidentiary considerations that bear on the case but are more hostile to his conclusion. If you know about that, speak up in the comments.
After Renee Good was shot, ICE agents made no efforts to see to her medical needs. In fact they actively prevented a doctor at the scene from attending to Good. They reportedly left their vehicles unattended in a way that blocked an ambulance, further delaying medical care. Good still had a pulse when medical workers were eventually able to reach her, but she died shortly thereafter. These crucial moments after the supposed threat is neutralized are, as Lawrence Blum argued in a different context, morally significant, as they suggest that it does not matter to these officers of the law whether the people they interact with live or die. Might they be legally significant, too, in regard to understanding the intent of the agents and assessing the veracity of their reports?
From the abundant footage coming out of Minneapolis, it seems that many ICE officers are overly aggressive and violent and that they regularly violate or disregard people’s rights. By many accounts their training has been rushed or poor.
ICE’s innocent victims have included moms trying to keep their neighborhoods safe, teens at work after school, people on their way to the doctor’s office. ICE agents stop people on the street and ask them where they were born and to prove they are citizens. They have been entering homes without permission and without the appropriate warrants. They are often brutal in their tactics. They respond to people asserting their rights by dragging them from their cars and whisking them away in unmarked SUVs. Protestors are physically assaulted. People are being killed while in ICE facilities.
In short, agents of the law have been terrorizing and killing people, including US citizens, and do not seem to evince any concern for the lives of the people they have harmed. That’s bad. If Hsiao is correct, then, from the point of view of the law, there is nothing wrong with that, in at least one well-known instance. That’s worse.
But if it’s correct, it would be good to know. Better to be clear-eyed about the system one is working in and the obstacles it poses than to form expectations on the false belief that the law and the authorities fundamentally conform to your moral sensibilities. Better to act and strategize in light of how things are than on the basis of mistaken expectations and wishful thinking.
That said, what would be most welcome are arguments to the effect that things in this case are as they seem to so many people, that is, that the killing of Renee Good was not legally justified.
UPDATE 1: While Minnesota is not the only place ICE is active, thousands of agents are in the Minneapolis area. Readers may be interested in Stand With Minnesota, a site about the occupation of the state by ICE that includes a directory of organizations and crowdfunding campaigns to which one can donate or help, testimonies about what it is like to live there now, and links to news sources.
UPDATE 2: See the comments of Michael Gregory (Clemson), which take issue with Hsiao’s analysis of the law. His exchange with Hsiao is here.
It seems to me that Hsiao’s analysis hinges on the question of whether it was reasonable for the officer to assume that Good was a imminent threat of serious bodily harm. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he somehow did not see that she was turning the wheel despite the fact that it was quite obvious from the camera that he was holding. I would argue that even in this case it is a stretch to say that it was reasonable. The car was starting from a dead stop and he was positioned in such a way that he was able to sidestep so even if he were to assume that she would “gun it” straight ahead the threat of serious bodily harm is a stretch. Add to that the fact that he heard her say to him that she wasn’t mad at him less than a minute before the shooting (which calls into question the reasonableness of assuming she would “gun it” straight ahead) and the fact that he pulled the gun prior to the car moving and kept filming with his cellphone throughout the incident. Taken together it seems unlikely that it was reasonable for him to assume an imminent threat to serious bodily harm. It also seems unlikely that he actually felt this way (reasonable or not) when you consider his behavior after the incident occurred.
I had similar thoughts as well. One other question that comes to mind (and I don’t know the answer since I’m not a lawyer): How does the fact that the officer placed himself directly in front of Good’s car, as opposed to the side of it, affect the legal defensibility of his actions? In other words, can he claim to be acting in self-defense if his own actions put him at risk of danger in the first place?
After shooting Good in the arm, chest, and head, Ross says out loud, “fucking bitch.”
I’ll leave it to others to determine whether this is relevant to the legal question. I do find it difficult to square with Hsiao’s claim that Ross will “carry the weight of [his] decision for the rest of his life,” if by ‘carrying weight’ Hsiao is alluding to the having of a conscience.
It hurt me to hear that in the video, and all the apathy that followed. This comment of his clearly portrays Ross as a scared, mad, pathetic piece of shit.
“I’ll leave it to others to determine whether this is relevant to the legal question.”
It’s not. Should we nevertheless give the officer’s insult attention for some reason? What would be the reason?
Primarily, the obvious reason cited by Alice above: it tells us something about Ross and the state of mind he was in during the incident.
We can debate how much attention we should give it, but the idea that we should give it no attention seems completely bonkers to me, unless you are Ross’s defense counsel. In that case, yeah, I sure wouldn’t want anyone paying attention to it. Outside of that, I cannot imagine thinking that the insult is totally irrelevant.
Bonkers? Well, everyone is six degrees from Kevin Bacon, so I suppose it has relevance in some miniscule sense. But what are we to glean from the insult? What does the insult say about his “state of mind”? That he was angry? That he was pumped up right after the shooting. Well, yeah. So what?
So the narrativizing about him “carry[ing] the weight of [the] decision for the rest of his life” should be weighed accordingly, and not necessarily assumed to mean that he feels some level of regret or guilt about the decision.
We actually can’t make ANY assumptions based on his insult, except for the fact that he was angry and pumped up, a state of mind perfectly consistent with having just justifiably shot somebody . . . and consistent with having shot somebody without justification. In other words, whatever one could reasonably glean from his remarks is consistent with everything, except for the fact that he was hunky dory after the shooting.
So, it’s perhaps relevant in some absolute logical sense, but it’s not *meaningfully* relevant.
Oh, he was angry and pumped up after committing a crime? I wonder why that’d be. I’m sure it bears no relation to the crime just committed.
Anyway, in the cult classic series Farscape, we are told that wormhole technology offers us the capacity to “unravel events.” It sure would be useful here, since we apparently can’t unravel this one without it.
The agent who shot Marimar Martinez in Chicago bragged about it in text messages (“five shots, seven holes,” eg). One of the agents involved in the Pretti beating and shooting said “boo hoo” sarcastically afterwards.
An ICE agent saying to a protester recording him that “liberals ruined the country.”
DHS is using far-right and white nationalist memes and songs in recruitement ads and uses geo-tagging technology to target its recruitment ads to specific demographics. I think we can guess which ones.
Hm, what could we possibly infer from all this?
Perhaps I was hyperbolic in how I put that, and I understand your and Tim’s argument below, though I ultimately disagree. What I had in mind, building on Alice’s point, is also something like what Felix says here. There’s a certain kind of way we portray these cases and the people involved in them–we use words like “tragedy” and “weight” and so on, and we assume that people like Ross feel certain things, are conscientious and doing their best, etc. But that bit of audio seems to me to cut against that. It seems to me to demonstrate a lack of respect for human life, to put it shortly.
Add to that the rhetoric and climate on the US right, which is difficult to really appreciate unless you turn on Fox News and actually listen to the kinds of things people say–saying Good was just an AWFUL (“affluent white female urban liberal”), blaming Good for her own death (a “tragedy of her own making,” the vice president called it), the general dehumanization of ICE’s victims, failing to exhibit any sense of basic human decency, etc.–no, I don’t think it was just a bit of callous and unfortunate “emotional leakage.” When Ross says what he says after shooting this woman in the face, he speaks for a lot of people in this country, and the message is pretty clear: this woman deserves to die, and so does everyone else we don’t like. If that seems dramatic, again I urge you to immerse yourself in American right wing political culture, as Ross did.
Can we cut all of that off from this particular incident? Sure, I guess. I think you’ve articulated that position well enough. But it’s hard for me to do so.
The author is very clearly someone with no legal training. While I can’t dedicate myself to going point-for-point with this article, as someone with both legal training and a conscience I am desperately pleading the readers of this blog not to take this seriously. If this shooting is legal then anyone in a running car is subject to summary execution.
Although you cannot do a full analysis could you give 2-3 points to justify your exhortation to not take this seriously?
See Mike Gregory’s comments below. He correctly highlights that ICE cannot invoke a Terry-style detention unless they have statutory authority to enforce the suspected offense, and that § 111 requires forcible interference, not ambiguous conduct that is equally consistent with lawful behavior. That’s the critical flaw in Hsiao’s theory: it assumes the detention was lawful without establishing a legally cognizable basis for it.
Did an LLM write this comment?
The whole discussion about the case is pretty bizarre. The only place in the world where anyone might even suggest that what the ICE agent did was justified is the U.S. In all developed and civilized countries, people are flabbergasted by the case (and Hsiao’s obscure claims) – just as they are by everything happening in the U.S. right now.
2 police killings in UK last year.
1200 police killings in USA last year.
Barry Lam/HiPhi did a podcast that covers some of this ground
https://hiphination.org/season-4-episodes/s4-episode-2-police-discretion-may-9th-2020/
Difficult to talk about this without not saying something ad hominem. So, at risk of committing the fallacy, it is worth looking at Hsiao’s website to see where he stands regarding guns and law enforcement. To avoid the fallacy, I quickly add that of course this doesn’t mean that his legal analysis is not correct. Still, he clearly has an ‘agenda’ or at least a stance on these matters.
And indeed, on blogs like this, run by Americans for largely (but not exclusively) an American audience, one cannot often enough point out how weird a place the US is, certainly in the western hemisphere, the global north, or call it what you wish. It is really some kind of an extremely strange universe with its massive focus on violence, guns, violent law enforcement, prisons and so on.
Is the problem that Hsiao is himself a law enforcement officer? If so, you may have avoided the ad hominem fallacy. But you did so by committing a different fallacy.
I don’t have a problem per se, I just had a look at his publications, and they look opinionated in one clear direction (pro guns etc). But why did I commit the fallacy and which? I did note that of course he might will have provided a correct legal analysis in the US leg
system. In fact, the same can be added about the rest of his publications. So I don’t think what he says is wrong just because he says it. But I did want to note that he has extra motivation, judging from his profile, to want to come out with an affirmative legal analysis in the case (which, again, doesn’t refute his analysis).
I should not have mentioned the ad hominem business, this really was just rhetoric to support what I say after: that people like Hsiao, i.e., professional academics arguing for guns and so on, are really hard to find in Europe (say). I just wanted to support this contrast.
I am not a lawyer, so others can correct me if I am missing something. But offhand, I’d think that it’s not sufficient to justify shooting somebody that there is “an imminent threat of serious physical harm or death.” You also have to have good grounds for believing that shooting the person will defuse that threat.
If somebody is running at me with an axe, or shooting at me with their gun, then sure, shooting them seems like it would remove the threat. But in the case where I am immediately in front of a car that’s driving at me, how is shooting the driver supposed to help? It won’t cause the car to stop–the driver isn’t going to move their foot from the gas to the brake pedal after being shot, and if anything, they might end up jamming their foot down on the accelerator. Stepping or jumping out of the way looks like the best course of action.
(For the record, I endorse the reasons other people give above for rejecting the claim that Ross had good grounds for thinking he was at risk of serious bodily harm or death. But even if we grant it, I don’t see why shooting Renee Good would be justified on grounds of self-defense.)
The fatal flaw in your analysis is that it looks really super duper cool when the hero does that in movies.
US law often proves inadequate for holding officers accountable because it fails to prohibit many bad police tactics that unnecessarily raise the risk of deadly force. Rulings like Graham v. Connor specifying that police actions must be objectively reasonable don’t provide much substantive guidance, given endless debates on what counts as reasonable. As a result, bad tactics continue, leading to so-called “lawful but awful killings” by police. What’s especially disappointing about Hsiao’s piece is his unwillingness to concede that the officer who shot and killed Good engaged in bad tactics.
One encouraging outcome from a piece making that point (https://theconversation.com/ice-killing-of-driver-in-minneapolis-involved-tactics-many-police-departments-warn-against-but-not-ice-itself-271907) is that several law enforcement officers thanked me for it. Though Hsiao isn’t one of them, some in law enforcement are embarrassed and critical of what ICE is doing. From chokeholds to shooting at moving vehicles to brutalizing protesters, ICE’s actions embody policing at its worst.
Very helpful piece. It also seems to answer the question I posed earlier.
Wow. The sadness, hurt, and anger I felt reading that was palpable.
Dead Prez — Police State
“The average Black male live a third of his life in a jail cell. ‘Cause the world is controlled by the white male. And the people don’t never get justice. And the women don’t never get respected. And the problems don’t never get solved. And the jobs don’t never pay enough. So the rent always be late, can you relate? We livin’ in a police state.”
DJ Shub & Phoenix Pagliacci — Bullets
“We got a message for everyone. You can’t kill nobody with an empty gun. We gotta stop making bullets.”
KRS One — Sound of da Police
“Your laws are minimal. Cuz you won’t even think about lookin at the real criminal.”
M.I.A. — Borders
“Freedom, I-dom, me-dom. Where’s your we-dom?”
Gogol Bordello — Immigraniada
“Frozen eyes, sweaty back, my family’s sleeping on a railroad track. All my life I pack/unpack. But man I got to earn this buck. I gotta pay representation to be accepted in a nation. Where after efforts of a hero—Welcome, start again from zero.”
Swiggle Mandela — Dear Portland Police
“Dear Portland Police… I just want my peace.”
Lyla June & Desirae Harp — Time Traveler
“Stay humble or fall. We don’t know it all. And we are not exempt from natural law. Live selfishly and the structure will fall. But if we live for those unborn, then the song will go on.”
what does it indicate about hsiao’s analysis that, amid the chaos in minneapolis, we hardly ever see immigration officers performing terry stops on one another, or local or federal law enforcement performing terry stops on immigration officers? as the evidence coming out of minneapolis has demonstrated, there is abundant ‘reasonable suspicion’ to stop officers and detain them in order to investigate whether or not they have committed crimes.
The argument that Renée Good’s conduct supplied reasonable suspicion for an investigative detention rests almost entirely on the premise that her behavior could reasonably be construed as a potential violation of 18 U.S.C. § 111. That premise is doing far more work than the statute can bear.
To be clear at the outset, Terry v. Ohio allows officers to briefly detain a person based on reasonable suspicion that criminal activity may be afoot, even if no crime is ultimately established. But Terry does not dispense with the requirement that the suspected activity be criminal in nature, nor does it allow officers to infer criminality from conduct that is equally consistent with lawful, non-criminal behavior. Reasonable suspicion must be grounded in specific, articulable facts that point toward the elements of an offense the officer is authorized to investigate.
Section 111 criminalizes forcibly assaulting, resisting, opposing, impeding, intimidating, or interfering with a federal officer while the officer is engaged in official duties. Courts have been consistent on two points that are often elided in public commentary. First, “forcibly” modifies every verb in the statute. Second, force in this context requires either physical force, a credible threat of force, or conduct that objectively places the officer in fear of immediate physical harm. Passive conduct, nonviolent obstruction, verbal opposition, or mere presence near an operation do not satisfy the statute.
This matters because Hsiao treats obstruction in the ordinary sense as synonymous with forcible interference under § 111. Parking a vehicle diagonally in a roadway, honking repeatedly, or placing oneself near a federal operation may be disruptive or irritating, but disruption is not force. Courts routinely distinguish between inconvenience to officers and conduct that rises to the level of forcible interference. Without evidence of aggressive movement toward officers, threats, or use of the vehicle as a weapon, § 111 is not implicated.
Hsiao attempts to bridge this gap by emphasizing that reasonable suspicion does not require proof that a crime occurred, only that one might be occurring. That is true in the abstract, but incomplete. Reasonable suspicion must still point toward conduct that, if developed, would satisfy the elements of the offense. Suspicion cannot be built on conduct that lacks a core statutory requirement. If force is absent, suspicion of a forcible offense is not reasonable simply because the conduct is inconvenient or unusual.
Importantly, courts have rejected attempts to use § 111 as a catch-all justification for detentions whenever civilians insert themselves into federal activity. Observing, filming, protesting, or even verbally criticizing officers does not amount to interference under § 111 absent force or threat. Extending the statute to cover ambiguous traffic positioning and horn honking would effectively convert § 111 into a general “do not interfere with federal operations” rule, which it is not.
The argument also understates the role of ambiguity in reasonable-suspicion analysis. The Supreme Court has allowed officers to draw inferences from conduct that is ambiguous, but those inferences must be grounded in common patterns of criminal behavior. Here, the same facts cited as suspicious are equally consistent with lawful explanations: confusion, protest activity, poor driving judgment, or an attempt to alert others. The video evidence showing Good waving vehicles through traffic undercuts the claim that her purpose was to immobilize movement or impede officers, rather than to manage traffic around her own stopped vehicle.
Even assuming that officers could briefly approach the vehicle to ask what was happening, that is not the same thing as reasonable suspicion of a federal crime justifying a full Terry stop with commands to exit the vehicle and a declaration that she was not free to leave. Terry permits investigation proportionate to the suspicion. Where suspicion is weak and the suspected offense requires force that is not present, escalation quickly becomes unjustified.
The invocation of Pennsylvania v. Mimms at the end of the argument illustrates this overreach. Mimms allows officers to order a driver out of a vehicle during a lawful traffic stop. It does not supply independent authority to create a stop in the first place. If the initial seizure lacks a valid basis, Mimms is irrelevant.
Finally, context matters. This was a U.S. citizen, not suspected of an immigration violation, encountered during a federal operation in a public space. That reality heightens, rather than relaxes, the need for a clear criminal predicate before detention. Treating ambiguous, nonviolent conduct as reasonable suspicion of a forcible federal offense collapses the boundary between lawful observation and criminal interference.
In short, the argument overstates what § 111 can plausibly support. Reasonable suspicion of a forcible offense requires some objective indication of force, threat, or imminent violence. Absent that, the claim that officers were “well within their right” to initiate a Terry stop rests on a misreading of both the statute and Terry doctrine.
Finally, an adult-in-the-room comment. It would be great if Mr. Hsiao would read it and respond (here or elsewhere). Irrespective of this, thank you for the careful thoughts.
I have only rarely been accused of being the adult in the room.
Yes, but you do understand that this is not a policing ethics/criminal law blog, right? Given the nature of the incident and that this is a general philosophy blog, it is just understandable that many if not most of the comments won’t include astute legal or even moral analysis. I don’t mean to suggest, thereby, that any odd comment would do, but I would not call comments that do not offer astute legal analysis childish (which, I suppose, is what the opposite of the adult-in-room would be).
This is a good comment that is one of the few worth responding to.
First, the Supreme Court has made it clear that conduct does not have to be uniquely or clearly criminal to justify an investigative detention. Officers are not required to rule out innocent explanations before acting. The entire point of a Terry stop is to resolve ambiguity before a situation escalates (see also Illinois v. Wardlow and United States v. Arvizu).
Ambiguous conduct, even conduct consistent with innocent explanations, may still generate reasonable suspicion when viewed in context (see especially Arvizu, where a variety of factors that were in themselves innocent nevertheless justified a border stop due to an officer’s experience and training).
In this context, a vehicle impeding traffic positioned diagonally in a roadway adjacent to an active federal operation combined with repeated horn use is not normal driving behavior. Are there articulable innocent explanations? Sure. Are there articulable non-innocent explanations? Sure. It is the point of an investigation to determine what is going on.
You mention her waving other vehicles through. But this is addressed in the article. That she would wave vehicles through presupposes that others perceived to be an impediment to movement, even if it was not an absolute impediment. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have had to wave them through. So if anything that would add to the list of factors supporting reasonable suspicion.
Second, you are correct that “forcibly” modifies all the other terms. The question is whether the facts reasonably suggested the possibility of forcible interference developing. I think they did. Vehicles are not passive objects and can be used as weapons. The physical act of blocking or at least impeding traffic can very reasonably be perceived as the start of forcible interference or obstruction, especially when done with a running vehicle and in the context of repeated and sustained honking. A vehicle is a source of physical power that controls the space it is around. So the absence of overt aggression does not negate reasonable suspicion.
Additionally, in discussing the meaning of “force” in the context of assault, the Eight Circuit’s Model Jury Instructions states the following:
“Physical force is sufficient but actual physical contact is not required” and “Even if there is no physical contact, the force requirement is satisfied even if the defendant’s conduct places the officer in fear for his life or safety.”
Given the facts that I have already explained, it would be reasonable for officers to be concerned about (1) their ability to leave and therefore (2) their safety.
We must look at the totality of the circumstances. Prior to the incident, we have federal officers discharging their duties. A vehicle then parks diagonally in the road right in front of where they are and aggressively honks for at least several minutes. A reasonable officer at the scene would have perceived that kind of action as a safety concern. Are they trying to box us in? What is the driver going to do if we approach? Are they going to move the vehicle again? Is the honking a signal to someone else? Is it meant to distract our attention from something else? All of these are reasonable safety concerns.
Once a lawful stop exists, officer safety measures such as ordering a driver out of the vehicle are routine and well established. PA v Mimms does not create the stop (nowhere did I suggest that), but it governs what officers may do after one is justified.
What I think your argument ultimately misses is that vehicles collapse a lot of the clean distinctions you are trying to draw. A car is a source of physical power that controls space by its mass and positioning, even before anyone accelerates or makes a threat. Terry is forward looking, not backward looking. It allows officers to step in when circumstances reasonably suggest that forcible interference may be developing, not after it has already happened.
I agree with you on the general Terry framework and on the role of ambiguity. Wardlow and Arvizu clearly establish that officers are not required to rule out innocent explanations, and that reasonable suspicion may arise from conduct that is itself lawful when viewed in isolation. I do not dispute that proposition, nor do I think the presence of innocent explanations alone defeats reasonable suspicion.
Where we diverge is not on ambiguity, but on how far ambiguity can be stretched when the suspected offense has a force element and when the officer invoking Terry lacks general police power.
Arvizu and Wardlow are instructive precisely because, in both cases, the ambiguous conduct pointed toward offenses that did not require force as a defining element. In Arvizu, the issue was alien smuggling near the border. In Wardlow, it was evasive flight in a high-crime area. In both contexts, the suspicious conduct mapped cleanly onto criminal activity that officers were authorized to investigate and that did not hinge on speculative future escalation.
Section 111 is different. The force requirement is not incidental; it is the statute’s core limitation. Reasonable suspicion of a § 111 violation must therefore include articulable facts suggesting either present force, an imminent threat of force, or conduct that objectively places officers in fear of immediate physical harm. The question is not whether force could develop in the abstract, but whether the observed facts reasonably indicated that it was developing.
Your argument relies heavily on the idea that vehicles are inherently sources of physical power and therefore collapse the distinction between passive and forcible conduct. I agree that vehicles can be weapons, and courts rightly treat them as such when there is aggressive movement, targeting, acceleration, or refusal to disengage. But if mere spatial positioning of a running vehicle adjacent to officers is enough to generate reasonable suspicion of forcible interference, then the force requirement in § 111 does almost no limiting work. Any nearby vehicle becomes presumptively suspicious once an officer subjectively imagines escalation.
That is where I think you run into trouble. Terry is forward-looking, but it is not speculative. It allows officers to intervene when facts suggest criminal activity may be afoot, not when officers can hypothesize ways in which lawful conduct might become dangerous. Otherwise, the inquiry becomes untethered from statutory elements and collapses into a generalized safety rationale.
The Eighth Circuit model instruction you cite is important, but it does not carry the weight you assign to it. Fear for safety must be objectively reasonable and grounded in the defendant’s conduct, not in the inherent properties of an object the defendant happens to be using. Courts applying § 111 have consistently required some outward manifestation of threat—movement toward the officer, refusal to comply coupled with proximity, verbal threats, or aggressive maneuvering. The instruction does not eliminate the need for conduct that would cause a reasonable officer to fear imminent harm; it merely clarifies that physical contact is unnecessary once that threshold is met.
Here, the conduct you rely on—diagonal parking, honking, proximity—remains equivocal even when viewed in totality. Honking is not a threat. Parking diagonally is not a threat. Being near officers is not a threat. The concern that officers might be “boxed in” is speculative absent evidence that their movement was actually constrained or that the vehicle was repositioned to trap them. Importantly, the video evidence suggesting that Good waved traffic through cuts against an inference of immobilization or encirclement. It suggests awareness of traffic flow, not control over officer movement.
I also think the ICE-specific context matters more than your response allows. These were federal officers without general traffic enforcement authority, interacting with a U.S. citizen not suspected of an immigration violation. That narrows the set of offenses that can legitimately ground a Terry stop. ICE officers cannot initiate a Terry stop on the basis of just any possible crime. When the only plausible federal predicate is § 111, courts should be especially careful not to dilute its force requirement into a general “interference” standard. Whether honking and being parked diagonally is not a violation that ICE has the authority to investigate unless it can reasonably be subsumed under 111, which it cannot.
So I don’t think it is about whether Terry permits intervention before violence occurs. Sure it does. The disagreement is about how much work “may be developing” can do when the statute at issue criminalizes only forcible interference and when the observed conduct lacks any clear indicia of threat, aggression, or imminent use of force (despite the officers apparent phobia of car horns).
Put differently: vehicles do not erase statutory elements. Treating spatial presence plus noise as reasonable suspicion of a forcible federal offense stretches Terry beyond its doctrinal anchor and turns § 111 into a preventive detention tool untethered from force. That, in my view, is where the justification for the stop fails. It is also where arbitrary violations of rights begins.
So it seems like we are largely in agreement on the scope of the law. Where we part ways is on the factual question: whether it was reasonable for the officers, viewing the situation as it unfolded, to suspect that their ability to move or disengage might be about to be physically constrained by Good’s vehicle. Despite what you say it seems to me that you analyze each component of her conduct in isolation, and I think that misses what the totality of the circumstances would look like to officers on scene.
Is parking a vehicle diagonally in the roadway, by itself, indicative of criminal behavior? No. Is laying on the horn for several minutes, or being physically near officers, criminal on its own? Also no. But when you combine diagonal positioning, sustained horn use, close proximity to an active federal operation, and the broader context of a hostile environment, it is entirely reasonable for officers, drawing on training and experience, to infer that their movement may soon be significantly impeded and their safety compromised.
You mention some mitigating details, namely that she waved vehicles through. This is hardly going to make a difference. As I have pointed out, her waving vehicles through already indicates that other drivers were already perceiving her car as an impediment to movement — enough for them to stop their own cars. And even if some vehicles were able to navigate through, it takes very little movement for a driver to fully disrupt traffic or constrain officer movement. With a vehicle, the margin between partial obstruction and complete obstruction is small and can close instantly.
All the officers knew at that moment was that a vehicle was positioned in a way consistent with creating a physical obstruction, the driver was openly expressing hostility through sustained horn use, and the operation was already taking place in a tense environment. Under those circumstances, it is not speculative for officers to suspect that someone may be attempting to use a vehicle to interfere with their ability to move or disengage. It is a reasonable, experience-based inference, and Terry permits officers to investigate that.
Reasonable suspicion is not a finding that someone is boxing officers in. It is a judgment that the observed conduct reasonably supports the inference that this may be developing. Courts do not ask whether that inference turned out to be correct. They ask whether it was reasonable at the time. And based on everything going on, it likely was.
[This has been a substantive exchange — unlike some of the other comments here — but I’m not interested in going at it endlessly in the comments, so I’ll likely respond once more and move on]
This is not merely disagreement about how officers perceived the scene in real time. It concerns what the law permits officers to infer from that perception, and where Terry’s limits actually lie when the suspected offense contains a force element.
Your invocation of totality-of-circumstances analysis again cannot bear the weight you assign it. Totality analysis does not permit courts—or officers—to dispense with statutory elements. It is a method for evaluating whether the elements of a crime are reasonably suggested by the facts, not a license to substitute generalized safety concerns for legally relevant indicators. Aggregating non-threatening facts does not transform them into reasonable suspicion of a forcible offense unless something in the aggregation objectively points toward force.
Yes, Arvizu permits synthesis of individually innocent factors, but there the Court authorized it because Border Patrol agents articulated specific behavioral patterns. They explained why slowed driving, child waving, and particular routes correlated with documented smuggling tactics based on their experience. The synthesis worked because officers demonstrated why these seemingly innocuous behaviors pointed specifically toward alien smuggling. You never do this. You assert that diagonal parking combined with sustained honking and proximity suggests developing forcible interference, but never specify what training or experience connects these particular factors to Section 111 violations. Do officers learn that diagonal parking with horn use frequently precedes assault on federal agents? That such positioning constitutes a recognized tactic for constraining officer movement? Without articulating these patterns, you’re just accumulating factors that generated officer unease and labeling the synthesis reasonable suspicion.
This is the critical doctrinal gap. Section 111 is not a general obstruction statute. It criminalizes forcible interference. Courts interpreting Section 111 consistently require either actual force or conduct that would cause a reasonable officer to fear immediate physical harm, not merely future inconvenience, impaired movement, or tactical difficulty. The statute draws a deliberate line between nonviolent interference and forcible interference, and Terry analysis must respect that line at the suspicion stage.
Your reframing of Good waving vehicles through exemplifies this. You argue this demonstrates other drivers perceived impediment, converting apparently exculpatory evidence into inculpatory confirmation. But this inference proves too much. By your logic, any driver managing traffic around unusual circumstances, accident, breakdown, or protest, admits to obstruction through the very act of traffic management. More fundamentally, you have shifted the target. The question is not whether Good’s vehicle created some degree of disruption, even constitutionally protected protest activity can be disruptive, but whether her conduct exhibited the forcible character Section 111 requires. That other vehicles paused establishes inconvenience, not force. You’re conflating disruption with the statutory element of forcible interference, which collapses precisely the distinction under dispute. Moreover, the waving evidence cuts against your interpretation, suggesting consciousness of causing traffic complications she sought to mitigate—indicating traffic management rather than deliberate forcible obstruction.
You repeatedly frame the question as whether it was reasonable for officers to suspect that their movement “might soon be impeded” or that safety “might be compromised.” But Terry does not authorize detention based on what might happen in a hypothetical future. It authorizes detention when observable facts reasonably suggest that criminal conduct is occurring or is about to occur. Courts routinely reject stops justified by conjecture about how a situation could escalate absent concrete indicators that it is doing so.
This is where your argument, that vehicles can transition instantly from partial to complete obstruction, overreaches. This logic applies to virtually every vehicle near officers. Your reliance on vehicles as inherently dangerous instruments substitutes latent capacity for observable conduct, and that substitution has no limiting principle. Courts treat vehicles as weapons when there is evidence of weaponization: acceleration toward officers, refusal to stop or disengage, targeting, maneuvering to trap, or ignoring commands while closing distance. Without those indicators, the vehicle remains legally neutral. Capacity for harm is not the same as evidence of imminent harm. If it were, Terry would justify stopping anyone near officers with access to a car, bicycle, or even a heavy backpack in a “tense environment.” Every vehicle is always one movement away from obstruction. Every bystander is always one step away from interference. Terry does not permit officers to resolve that universal possibility through seizure.
The horn-honking and diagonal parking fare no better under doctrinal scrutiny. Sustained horn use may be expressive, disruptive, or irritating, but courts have repeatedly held that verbal hostility, signaling, or noise, without accompanying threatening conduct, does not amount to force or reasonable suspicion of force. Diagonal positioning in a roadway may implicate traffic rules, but ICE officers lack general traffic enforcement authority, and traffic obstruction is not a proxy for forcible interference with federal officers.
Your invocation of training and experience demands scrutiny here. Arvizu permits professional expertise but requires officers to articulate how training connects facts to suspected criminal activity. What specific training taught this inference? What patterns does experience reveal about diagonal parking combined with horn use? Without answers, training and experience becomes an epistemic placeholder for unreviewable discretion, precisely what Terry’s articulable facts requirement prevents. If reasonable suspicion rests on unspecified professional knowledge courts cannot evaluate, expertise-based deference becomes indistinguishable from eliminated judicial oversight.
Again, the ICE-specific limitation matters. Reasonable suspicion must be of a crime the officer is empowered to investigate. Here, the only plausible predicate was Section 111. When that is the case, courts scrutinize the inference of force more tightly, not less. Allowing ICE to infer forcible interference from ambiguous vehicle positioning would effectively allow the agency to bootstrap its limited criminal authority into a general perimeter-control power over civilians—something Congress has never authorized and courts have never endorsed.
Your reference to hostile environment context compounds the problem. If ambient tension from controversial enforcement lowers reasonable suspicion thresholds, you’ve created a constitutional feedback loop: unpopular action generates opposition, opposition creates hostile environment, hostile environment justifies expanded detention, expanded detention intensifies opposition. This means Fourth Amendment protections contract precisely where government action is most contested and where citizens exercise First Amendment rights to observe and protest. The Constitution doesn’t let government bootstrap expanded power from its own unpopularity.
You say courts do not ask whether the inference turned out to be correct, only whether it was reasonable at the time. That is true, but reasonableness is judged against legal standards, not officer unease. At the time of the stop, there were no facts indicating imminent force: no movement toward officers, no narrowing of exits, no refusal to comply, no escalation beyond noise and presence. Under settled Fourth Amendment doctrine, that is not enough to justify a Terry stop predicated on a forcible offense.
So the issue is not whether officers could imagine danger. Of course they could. The issue is whether the law permits them to act on imagination rather than indication. Terry draws that boundary. Section 111 reinforces it. Your approach dissolves it. Once that boundary is dissolved, reasonable suspicion becomes indistinguishable from precaution, and seizure becomes a tool for managing officer discomfort rather than responding to developing crime. That is precisely what Terry was designed to prevent, not authorize.
Did you use an LLM to write that? Because your comment looks like pretty obvious AI slop to me, and after running it through an institutionally approved AI detector the analysis indicated that the first half of your comment was heavily AI-assisted, while the second half was completely AI-generated. What gives?
Anyways, much of what you say just seems to repeat what you already said in more verbose terms.
You keep framing the problem as whether officers could articulate a recognized “pattern” linking diagonal parking and horn use to prior § 111 cases, as if reasonable suspicion requires officers to identify a known criminal script before they can act.
But that completely misunderstands how law enforcement training works and how officers make determinations of reasonable suspicion. There is no training manual that contains an exhaustive compendium of objectively suspicious facts or behavior formulas that officers have to mathematically apply. Instead, officers simply use their judgment to make inferences in combination with training and experience. That is not something quantifiable.
Courts routinely give extremely wide deference to law enforcement officers when it comes to judgements of reasonable suspicion. See United States v Cortez (1981), where the court said that “when used by trained law enforcement officers, objective facts, meaningless to the untrained, allow for permissible deductions from such facts…” so that “a trained officer draws inferences and makes deductions — inferences and deductions that might well elude an untrained person.”
That is exactly what is going on here. Officers are not required to show that diagonal parking with horn use frequently precedes assaults on federal agents. They are required to assess whether, in this situation, those facts reasonably suggested combined with other facts show that physical obstruction of their movement might be imminent. I think that an officer in that situation could have very reasonably come to that conclusion.
Imagine a different scenario where a team of officers is executing gang warrants in an environment where they are met with open hostility from members of the public (who are gang sympathizers). While discharging their duties, they see a vehicle ahead of them park diagonally on a road, obstructing both lanes of travel enough that traffic has to slow down. The driver then aggressively lays into the horn continually for several minutes. You would insist that it would *not* be reasonable for the officers to make the inference that someone may be about to box them in and prevent them from leaving? Really? That is quite simply absurd.
As someone with law enforcement training and experience, that would raise all sorts of justified alarm bells in my head, and justifiably so. That this inference would elude you is exactly what Cortez is referring to.
Sorry, but to me all that follows from this discussion (whose quality I fully appreciate) is that the relevant US laws should be changed.
I didn’t use an LLM—I’m a single parent writing between snack demands and sibling disputes. If it seemed scattered, that’s why.
But your dismissal of my response as repetitive actually proves my point. I’m repeating myself because you keep dodging the central issue: how does the stop satisfy Section 111’s force requirement when Good’s conduct showed no indicators of force?
You keep invoking “training and experience” as if these magic words eliminate the need to explain why observed facts point toward forcible interference. But that’s not what Cortez permits. Yes, trained officers can spot patterns civilians miss, but those patterns must be articulable, and so subject to scrutiny by non-officers (judges). When Cortez talks about “objective facts, meaningless to the untrained,” it means facts that gain significance through explicable professional knowledge. A narcotics officer can testify about known courier patterns and explain why this vehicle’s behavior matches them. Courts can then evaluate whether that inference was reasonable.
What you’re proposing is different and dangerous: officers can cite “training and experience” without ever articulating what patterns they learned or why these facts triggered those patterns. That is unchecked discretion founded on knowledge the public is systemically excluded from. And it directly contradicts Terry’s explicit requirement that officer conduct “be subjected to the more detached, neutral scrutiny of a judge.” How can judges provide scrutiny if officers cant explain to us normies the connection between facts and offense?
You keep substituting “physical obstruction” for “forcible interference” as if they’re the same thing. They’re not. Section 111 doesn’t criminalize obstruction or disruption…it criminalizes forcible interference. Reasonable suspicion must point toward statutory elements, and you’ve provided no explanation for why diagonal parking plus honking indicates developing force rather than protest, confusion, or civil disobedience.
Your gang warrant case reveals what’s missing. In that scenario, officers could testify: “Gang members in this area have used vehicles to box in officers during warrant operations three times this year.” That’s articulable pattern recognition courts can evaluate. Thus, a Terry stop based on 111 in this scenario would be based on the fact that this is a recognizable tactic that gang members have used and so the officers were reasonably concerned about that situation developing.
But you provide nothing comparable here. Can any ICE officer testify they’ve seen this tactic before? Are you honestly comparing protesters who are observing and recording officer behavior to “gang sympathizers”? As if the ICE officers in this case were somehow in the midst of some organized conspiracy by middle aged moms to hurt them? Without articulating the pattern, you’re just asserting that unusual conduct near tense operations justifies stops which would authorize detention of protesters, observers, and bystanders whenever federal enforcement is controversial.
You continue to characterize Good’s honking as “aggressive,” but what makes sustained honking aggressive? Courts have consistently held that noise or verbal hostility without threatening conduct doesn’t constitute force. Honking is disruptive, sure. But disruption isn’t force, and Section 111 requires force. You continue to treat these as interchangeable when they’re legally distinct. 111 requires proving the development of FORCE, not mere disruption. As I have said, being in a car is not sufficient to ground the possibility of force.
And you keep dismissing that Good waved vehicles through. You claim this proves others saw her as an impediment, but it equally proves she was managing traffic to minimize disruption…exactly what someone not trying to box in officers would do. That evidence, along with Good’s clearly non-aggressive interaction with the first officer, clearly tips the scales against the officers reasonably believing that Good had any intention of “boxing them in”.
The alarm bells you felt as a trained officer? I don’t doubt them. But tactical concern isn’t the same as reasonable suspicion of a specific crime. Officers can be cautious around ambiguous conduct without having articulable facts that forcible interference is developing. The Fourth Amendment doesn’t equate “this makes me alert” with “this justifies detention.”
Your framework has no limiting principle. If positioning plus honking plus “tense environment” satisfies Section 111, what conduct near federal operations wouldn’t?
Protesters position themselves near police. They make noise. Environments get tense precisely because enforcement is controversial. Under your standard, federal officers could stop anyone exhibiting unusual behavior near operations by claiming tactical discomfort.
Officers may commonly act on generalized unease or tactical concern. But constitutional standards exist to constrain that practice. Terry explicitly rejects stops based on “inchoate and unparticularized suspicion or hunch.” The difference between “I can imagine this becoming dangerous” and “observable facts suggest this is becoming dangerous” is everything. Your analysis collapses that distinction, and with it, Fourth Amendment protections exactly where they matter most.
Thank you for your comments. I find it quite disturbing that some LEO’s appear to take for granted that anyone who is challenging their authority *must* be breaking some sort of law (because they assume the law should always be on their side?), or that such a person *must* be a threat to their personal safety.
It is particularly problematic if the apparent reasoning is hidden behind the veil of training and experience, which, as Hsiao suggests, is something that the rest of us just dont have access to. It seems to just be a way to justify ANY action by LEOs
I find it quite disturbing that some LEO’s appear to take for granted that anyone who is challenging their authority *must* be breaking some sort of law (because they assume the law should always be on their side?), or that such a person *must* be a threat to their personal safety.
Lots and lots of police think that “contempt of cop” is a serious crime that allows them to take forceable steps. It’s not, though, no matter what many police think. Sadly, this leads many police to break the law themselves. When you join this with the idea (extremely common among police) that the most important thing for them is to protect their own safety – to “come home safe” – it’s no surprise that many law enforcement groups end up acting like roving criminal gangs.
“Are you honestly comparing protesters who are observing and recording officer behavior to “gang sympathizers”?”
Yes, he is. That is precisely how the ideological apparatus of this regime conceives of the rest of us. It’s completely unsurprising that when we excavate Hsiao’s argument, we find Stephen Miller’s beliefs at the bottom.
Mike — thank you for this. Your analysis tracks exactly with the established Fourth Amendment framework I’ve been pointing to.
You correctly highlight that ICE cannot invoke a Terry-style detention unless they have statutory authority to enforce the suspected offense, and that § 111 requires forcible interference, not ambiguous conduct that is equally consistent with lawful behavior. That’s the critical flaw in Hsiao’s theory: it assumes the detention was lawful without establishing a legally cognizable basis for it.
Your explanation that later events cannot retroactively justify an earlier seizure is precisely the doctrinal point I’ve been making, and you articulated it with clarity. Thanks for laying it out so cleanly.
May I ask, if you practice law, and if so, where?
Did an LLM write this comment?
I think I once heard that people with certain mental impairments (schizophrenia maybe, and perhaps others?) sometimes experience the delusion that they are not in contact with real people, but rather robots or some other deceptive sorts of beings who are merely impersonating people.
One could always imagine what it would be like to exist with that delusion, but now that we have both Internet comment sections and LLMs, I feel like I have a decent sense of what that feels like, because one gets the sense that one is often interacting with robots impersonating people.
Since the feeling is quite disconcerting (as I’m sure someone with schizophrenia or whatever could tell you) I always try to figure out if I’m just being delusional or if my robot-detector was on the money. Unfortunately the only way to figure this out is to ask the person who posted the comment and hope they tell the truth about whether the comment they posted was one they wrote, or one a robot wrote. Sometimes people tell me, sometimes they don’t.
For the people who don’t, I assume it must be because they are ashamed of having let a robot speak for them. It seems to me that if you are ashamed of this, you should not let the robot speak for you! Simply speak for yourself! Sapere aude!
Is this going to be now the standard DN commenting threat, figuring out who wrote their comments using AI? Who cares? It is their business what they want to use. Life is too short to be spent on figuring out who wrote what comment in which way.
This isn’t about who wrote what comment, it’s about whether anyone wrote the comment.
As for whether someone would care, I’ve already alluded to the main reason for me, which is that I experience a very strange sense for which there is no good word in English but which is most closely described as paranoia when I suspect that some of my interlocutors are not people. If you are immune to this sensation then more power to you, but personally I find it unpleasant and would like to work towards a world where I don’t have to put up with it.
Analogously, if many comments on this website were peppered with anti-Semitism, I would find it irritating and I would try to get people to stop doing this. You might say “why would you be bothered about this? Just ignore it and focus on the substance of the comment,” and again, if you could do that, more power to you.
I think even you must agree that it’s okay to complain in the comments section about people posting in certain ways, because you yourself have done this about me. So surely the rule cannot be “don’t complain about anything.” If you can come up with some sort of principle according to which your complaint is permissible but mine isn’t, I’d be interested to hear it!
I did use LLM to organize my thoughts and compose a reply. It writes better than I do.
I have no issue with people using AI as a writing tool but if you don’t want it to be so obvious (or you don’t want people to think you simply fed a comment into AI and asked it to generate reply) I recommend editting to at least adjust the telltale signs, particularly in the formatting (em dashes, bold phrases, copious italicisation, etc.)
The thoughts communicated in your comment did not need organization. Presenting them in any order would have sufficed. They are few enough in number and simple enough in content that nobody would be misled or otherwise put out by apprehending them in some other order than the one they ended up being presented in.
Moreover, the content of the thoughts is such that I am sure your own writing skills, however inferior they may be to LLMs, would have sufficed for getting the point across.
Given the many drawbacks of LLM usage for yourself and others, I would urge you in the future to be more circumspect with respect to whether your thoughts need to be organized and whether they need to be presented with better writing than your own.
No, all this is fine (and I apologize for not editing my comment…too many mistakes), but the general picture that I see emerging – that we keep hitting the ball back and forth about whether AI wrote the comment or not – bit tiresome. I do admit this. I can see your points, but if all these already long comment threads will get even longer because we try to figure out who/what wrote what, that I don’t like. So, yes, I assume, I prefer not to care and leave it to the person’s responsibility (or their conscience even) whether they used AI or not.
The extent to which people feel a responsibility to do certain things, and the extent to which their conscience twinges in certain circumstances, is malleable. We are at a point in time in history when the extent to which people’s views about responsibility and their consciences are somewhat pliable on the topic of LLM usage. If we do not shape certain norms now, we may find ourselves at a point in history where many people’s consciences and senses of responsibility do not quail at things it would be better for them to quail at. One way to prevent this may be by making comments sections longer in ways that are perhaps tedious. I see no way around this, and also I don’t care. I read quickly!
That’s okay, we can agree to disagree. I have different pragmatics from yours and we probably differ also on the normative nature of the situation (i.e. what it warrants and what it requires). To put the point bluntly, I am in general agreement with you re AI usage, but I disagree that these forums are the right places to ‘educate’ people. Thanks!
I never thought I’d say this, let alone on a Daily Nous blog, but… I fully agree with Daniel Weltman’s line of argument here. This is a fundamental issue that’s creeping up on us as we attend to short-term, ephemeral and partisan topics, but it seems to me that this whole matter of having conversations as human beings in an age of growing AI power is crucial. Thank you, Daniel, for putting the point so well, and taking the time to articulate it.
Funny that you treat the unproven assumption that the other person is using an LLM as the source of the paranoia and not, you know, vice versa.
I’m sure it’s bad for people who are wrongly suspected of LLM use to be accused, too, and worries about that might also be fairly characterized as paranoia. Just another thing to add to the misery LLMs have brought down upon our heads! But we’d be here all week if we tried to list everything. I was just talking about the reason most apposite to me in this context.
I’m not trying to be churlish here, but really who cares what philosophers think about the *legality* of this? For one neither of these guys seems to be experts on the law, so if that’s the question shouldn’t we find some folks with JDs to ask? More importantly isn’t the morality of the thing what we should be interested in? Shouldn’t our discussion be whether or not there’s any remotely plausible theory of when it’s justifiable to kill another human being that would justify shooting an unarmed woman who displayed no signs of anger or ill intent and who was leaving the scene in the face not once but three times? To put it mildly, I doubt there is and if that’s so and the law does in fact say that it’s okay (which I honestly don’t really believe) then so much the worse for the law. Even if these guys are right then it doesn’t justify what Ross did. It only shows that we need to change the law. Questions about whether this is legal are a distraction from the more important issues of morality, especially since legal or not it’s exceedingly unlikely Ross will ever be charged. Perhaps I’m being uncharitable but I’m pretty sure that Demetriou and Hsiao want to distract us with this somewhat complex question of legality so that we don’t focus on the very simple and clear moral question here. Whatever their intent I’m sure their fellow travelers will use this in exactly that way.
I’d also add that this is one of those situations where I think focusing on individuals blinds us to the larger issues (which to be perfectly honest I also suspect is also be their intent). The only remotely exculpatory thing I’ve heard about the shooting is that Ross very likely has PTSD from an incident where he was dragged by a car and injured pretty badly. That actually does make me blame him less– though it’s at best an exculpatory rather than a full blown excuse– but it makes ICE and its enforcement look even worse. Those in charge of ICE are so desperate for warm bodies and so careless that they are putting officers whose mental states make them dangerous on the streets with little to no thought of what might happen.
one hundred percent agree with everything about this comment, but just also want to add that having PTSD (I have lots of personal experience and also am aware of the research) does not suddenly make you unable to judge that you yourself should not be putting yourself in situations where your PTSD makes you more jumpy/likely to hurt someone/etc.
I think we should mainly focus on the structural problem, and I agree that we should focus on the institutions and the agency itself, but PTSD also isn’t even exculpatory in this case. I would never have let myself have a gun or weapon of any kind, and be put in dangerous situations that I could prevent by doing a different job, when I was suffering from PTSD, and for some period of time I was dealing with a very acute case.
Anyone who would (and that doesn’t require knowing you have PTSD, it just requires very minimal self knowledge that you are unusally impulsive/reactive/scared/defensive/violent/flashback-ridden/etc.–which is the kind of minimal self knowledge we should require one another to have as responsible agents) is, imho, wholly responsible for doing so.
but PTSD also isn’t even exculpatory in this case.
This is right, morally, but also legally. I don’t really believe the story that Ross was more afraid and trigger happy because he’d be dragged by a car (when, importantly, he was once again doing something he should not, per policy, have been doing). But even if that was true, it would not change his legal responsibility, because the legal standard is what a “reasonable officer” would think, not an “an officer with an extra fear of being dragged by a car.” Additionally, if Ross did have this extra fear, he should have been moved to a different type of work, making ICE itself even more culpable. (It’s actually not unusual for responsiblie police departments to move officers who have been in shootings out of active duty for some time, sometimes permanently, for this sort of reason.)
This is what I was thinking too… while legality does matter, philosophically the more important question, it seems to me, is the morality of the action and how we should respond to that. (And, yes, absolutely, to the PTSD intuition.)
After all, one of the basic reasons (I assume!) ethics matters for human beings is precisely because it supersedes legality — ethics is what we turn to when we believe the laws are wrong and need to be changed.
And, at least initially, it seems to me that the laws regarding ICE and other similar law enforcement encounters need to change somehow. So, overall, I’m less concerned with what’s legal and more concerned with what’s right… not that it makes things any easier.
Well. I guess a legal justification has been given, even if it does not stand on its own two feet. So there’s a straightforward sense in which, in the past, that shooting was legally justified.
=/
Maine is also being invaded by ICE right now. Folks who have extra funds should consider donating to the Maine Solidarity Fund, the major mutual-aid organization in the state: https://www.mainesolidarity.org/
Thanks for giving me a nice example of punching below the belt in a dispute without even needing to rebut the arguments or evidence given.
You’re using AI (LLM), aren’t you? If you aren’t, prove it!
Introductory Logic professors, take note!
I mean maybe I am just THAT bad of a writer? IDK what I am meant to think about it
Hardly. Your writing style is irrelevant to the very valid points your writing contains.
Has anyone asked how Good’s vehicle came to be in that location? Was this street on the way between dropping off her child at school and somewhere else she wanted to go to next? Could she have wanted to turn left onto a street that was, at that time, blocked by other vehicles? Might her horn honking have been an attempt to encourage drivers of some of those vehicles to clear a passage and relieve her from being blocked in? Wouldn’t it be nice if we could ask her those questions?
[Posting this twice because the first may have been marked as spam]
A lot has been said, and here are my (minimally proofread) remarks to some comments (in no particular order).
What of the “f*cking bitch” statement immediately after the shooting? It doesn’t exactly look good on camera, but I think many commenters are putting way too much stock into it. Given the circumstances, a statement like that is almost certainly going to be a normal acute stress response. An officer who has been hurt or may have just narrowly avoided death/bodily harm is going to be experiencing pain, adrenaline surge, shock, fear, anger, and relief all at once. Emotional leakage is almost certainly expected.
So a statement like that, as callous as it may sound to the general public, is not and should not be interpreted as evidence of anything deeper. If you watch body camera footage of high stress police encounters, you hear these statements made all the time. It does sound callous at the moment, but it does not allow us to reliably infer anything about the officer’s mental state before or after.
What about the fact that she was shot in the head? It is almost certain that Officer Ross wasn’t actually aiming for her head. The events transpired so quickly and the shots were fired in such quick succession that there would have been no time to aim with surgical precision — especially in the context of a moving vehicle. And the fact that she was shot three times? I addressed that in the article. Officers are trained to keep shooting until a threat is over (the idea that a single shot is almost always disabling is Hollywood fiction). The decision to stop a volley takes time, and research has shown that by the time that decision is made and executed, several more shots could have been fired.
Now as far as standing in front of the vehicle is concerned, that is unquestionably bad tactics. But does a poor decision like that negate an officer’s right to defend himself when the driver accelerates toward him? No. There are numerous cases in which courts have found in favor of officers firing at vehicles that accelerated toward them while they were positioned in front.
Consider something similar: officers are routinely taught NOT to stand directly in front of a door when making contact with someone who may potentially be dangerous. Suppose that in a lapse of judgment, I forget about this and stand in front of a door only to get blasted by a suspect on the other side. Does my poor decision negate my right to shoot back? No.
It is not as if Officer Ross suddenly jumped in front of a speeding vehicle and gave the driver no time to react. Renee Good could have chosen not to accelerate forward. This is not to say that Good did so with the express intention to hit Officer Ross (with what we know after the fact, she probably didn’t).
This brings me to my overarching point in understanding this entire encounter. We need to remember that the applicable standard here is what a reasonable officer would have thought given the totality of the circumstances. In other words, what would have been reasonable given the facts and information accessible to them at that moment? Hindsight is not available to an officer at the scene.
Setting aside the legality question for a second, here’s the background we must consider: federal agents are conducting operations in an environment where there is an abundance of open resentment being directed toward them by members of the general public. Officers see that ahead of them (their escape path), a vehicle has parked diagonally on the roadway, impeding travel enough to slow down traffic. The driver of said vehicle has been continuously laying into the horn for several minutes.
That’s all they know at this point, because they haven’t encountered the driver yet. Now ask yourself: based on the information given, would it be reasonable for an officer at the scene (given their experience and training) to suspect that someone might be attempting to box them in, thereby preventing the group from leaving (which will then raise other concerns about safety)?
Yes, absolutely (if you disagree with that, I can’t take you seriously). Are there a million other possible explanations? Yes, but this particular inference fits well with the background knowledge we have.
It is in *this* context where the event occurs (and where our understanding must be guided). Agents roll up and conduct a traffic stop, order Renee Good out of the vehicle and then attempt to reach in and physically extricate her from the car. Good forcefully resists by backing the car up, thereby breaking free of the officer. She then accelerates forward in an attempt to flee.
Now what is Officer Ross thinking during this encounter with the knowledge available so far? Agents are attempting to investigate a suspected attempt to significantly impair their movement. His vehicle pulls ahead of them. Why? From a tactical perspective, you want to get ahead of what may be a potential roadblock. He then exits the vehicle. Why? To investigate, document what is going on (which plausibly explains why he is recording and circles the car once), and to clear what may be a potential roadblock.
In other words, Officer Ross is trying to document the scene and figure out what is going on. He does not exit the vehicle and make a straight beeline to the front. While this is occurring, another officer approaches the vehicle and demands the driver exit. Apparently, she refuses, so he reaches in and attempts to remove her. She backs up, breaking free of his grip, and then accelerates forward.
At this point, what is likely going through Officer Ross’s head? From his perspective, a suspect in an obstruction investigation is refusing to obey commands. She then uses her vehicle’s movement to forcefully break free of another office’s attempt to remove her from the vehicle, whereupon she accelerates in his direction.
With the information available at the scene so far, how do you think that is likely going to be perceived? The salient facts are going to be (1) Renee Good was lawfully detained, (2) she refused a lawful order to step out of her vehicle, (3) she used her vehicle to forcefully break free of the officer’s grip, and (4) accelerated toward him in an attempt to flee. This would very reasonably be perceived as a suspect operating a vehicle recklessly in a manner consistent with an openness to do harm to officers nearby. This is what we would call a “deadly threat.” He reacted accordingly, and the response was reasonable based on the totality of the circumstances.
Some commenters point out that Good told Officer Ross that she wasn’t mad at him. I have two responses:
First, what matters more here is what she was doing, not necessarily what she said. Threat assessment is based on observable actions and objective risk, not verbal assurances from suspects. An officer with a modicum of training and experience would know not to put too much stock in what a suspect says. Speaking for myself, I have had *plenty* of encounters where individuals who were genteel and compliant one second were the exact opposite moments later.
Second, actions speak much louder than words. Any assurances of good faith that statement may have conveyed were almost immediately undercut by the fact that she forcefully resisted another officer’s attempt to remove her from the vehicle (arguably committing a felony).
What about the turning of the steering wheel? Note that the wheels are only turned *AFTER* the other officer approaches her, says “Get out of the car!” and attempts to remove her from the vehicle. Her turning of the wheels occurred in the context of an act of forcefully resisting another officer and thus cannot be plausibly interpreted as innocent. She turned the wheels because she was attempting to flee, and her attempt at flight was dangerous from the outset (again, she backed her car up while an officer was reaching in, thereby using force to break free from his grip).
Also, the fact that Officer Ross was *actually hit* by Good’s car means that the orientation of the steering wheel didn’t ultimately matter.
It is easy to look at these things in *isolation* and think that they are completely innocent. But that is to ignore the totality of the circumstances.
At the risk of wearing out the phrase, most of the comments here are atrociously bad because they completely ignore the totality of the circumstances. Many also show an embarrassing lack of knowledge on police training and firearms (I would highly recommend that many of the commenters here go on a police ride-along).
All that being said, I do want to return and address an argument that I think is more reasonable than the multitude of armchair quarterbacking I’ve seen. It has been argued that 18 USC 111 criminalizes obstruction or interference only if it is done “forcefully.” Mere obstruction or interference does not count. If there was no reasonable suspicion of force that could justify the initial investigative detention, then everything that occurred after may be questionable. I did consider addressing this argument in the article but opted against it, as I was advised by a prosecutor during the writing process that “force” has such a broad interpretation that it likely was not going to be an issue.
The key question is going to hinge on whether the background elements, combined with officer training and experience, can support reasonable and articulable suspicion of forceful obstruction or interference (important: reasonable suspicion is a much lower standard than probable cause). I think it can, and it is not even close.
To begin, “force” does not require physical force or contact. This is explained in the Eighth Circuit’s Model Jury Instructions. Likewise in commenting on 18 USC 111, the DOJ’s Criminal Resource Manual states that: “a threat uttered with the apparent present ability to execute it, or with menacing gestures, or in hostile company or threatening surroundings, may, in the proper case, be considered sufficient force for a violation of 18 U.S.C. § 111. These judicial decisions suggest a similar construction of the statutory words “resists, opposes, impedes, intimidates or interferes with.’”
What are the relevant facts in this case? We have (1) federal officers working in an unfriendly environment, (2) a running vehicle that parks ahead of officers who are currently engaged in an operation, such that the vehicle is (3) parked diagonally in the roadway (4) the driver engaging in repetitive honking over at least several minutes.*
[*3 and 4 almost certainly indicate a willful disregard for local traffic law. While this in itself is not pertinent to initiating a stop, the fact that someone would brazenly violate a law would factor into the inferences being made]
With this background information, could an officer at the scene reasonably infer that their movement may about to be significantly constrained, thereby posing a threat to their safety? Yes. Is this reasonable suspicion of “forceful” obstruction or interference? Yes, given how broadly force is construed.
Could an officer at the scene also reasonably infer that someone may be positioning for a possible ramming attack? Yes. There have been plenty of recent incidents where ICE vehicles were rammed.
To suggest that it would be *unreasonable* for an officer to *suspect* (not believe, just suspect) these things is insane. It shows a fundamental ignorance of knowledge, training, and experience that law enforcement officers have.
One response has been that in order for these elements to constitute reasonable suspicion, there has to be a pattern of similar instances occurring elsewhere. No, there doesn’t. That’s ridiculous. Officers do not have to refer to a preexisting script of identical conduct or to point to prior cases in which the same sequence of actions occurred. Courts have repeatedly rejected this. Reasonable suspicion is based on what a reasonable officer could infer from the facts at hand, because suspicious behavior is often novel. Police officers can use their individual knowledge and experience to make reasonable inferences and judgments without needing to ensure that these inferences and judgments align with some prior precedent.
Are there any others defeaters here? Well, one suggestion is that Good waved vehicles away. As I’ve said before, this is consistent with her vehicle functioning as an impediment. Is it also consistent with her simply trying to control traffic? Sure, but that strains credulity. Why would someone park their car in a way that obstructs traffic to begin with, if not to impede movement?
Another potential defeater that was mentioned are her verbal assurances that she’s not mad at Officer Ross. But this defeater is completely irrelevant. Officer Ross did not initiate the traffic stop, another officer did. To the officer who actually initiated the stop and told Good to get out of the vehicle, that comment was not accessible to him. So even if we take Good’s comments at face value (which, as I pointed out earlier, has its own problems) it would not be a defeater of reasonable suspicion for the officer who made the actual stop.
The response is that this would allow police to detain protesters for almost anything. I don’t see how that follows. I am not proposing vague or unspecific factors for investigative detentions. The claim is simply that in this specific situation, the sum total of background evidence justified an investigative stop. No one factor that I have mentioned is in itself dispositive. But when added together and combined with what officers know and have experienced, these factors justify (very clearly!) reasonable suspicion.
—
I’ve written quite enough already, and it is not in my interest to continue further, especially in a public forum where I have been called a “deluded Nazi liar” with 27 people (as of this time) appearing to approve.
So, anyone who would like to continue this conversation is free to email me.
What would have been good to know, Tim, if I may chime in here, is whether you also think that the laws that, let us assume accepting your analysis, permit this kind of action, are any good (meaning: morally justified). (The legal discussion was sufficiently long that I have not read all of it, so if you have addressed this question already, apologies.) I am not trying to pick another fight, in fact, I fully agree that this debate should now be taken elsewhere, but I think this is relevant since this is the question, I think, that animates most of the comments in this thread. No, you should not be called a ‘deluded Nazi’, nothing of the sort, even if you think the laws are also morally justified. The point is only that this is what – this not being a criminal law or policing ethics blog – makes most people here strongly opinionated. They don’t, most of the time, confuse legal with moral justification, but they do think, it seems to me, that at bottom, the latter is what matters.
In any case, thanks for your astute legal analysis which I have read with interest.
For more, different and opposing, legal analysis, see
https://www.justsecurity.org/129439/investigation-ice-jonathan-ross-renee-good/
from here:
https://leiterreports.com/2026/01/24/anyone-asserting-that-the-killing-of-renee-good-by-an-ice-officer-was-legally-justified/
I’ve now deleted that comment you mentioned, Tim. It should not have been posted. My apologies for not catching it earlier.
Removing that comment was the wrong decision, Justin. If you’re going to open up space for the discussion of a defense of killing an innocent person while in the midst of committing human rights violations, then you need to have space for people to respond to that in the human ways we do.
As somebody who claimed to do some recent reading of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., I’d encourage you to re-read his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” As I read your comment to Tim, I could only think of the line…
“You deplore the demonstrations that are presently taking place in Birmingham. But I am sorry that your statement did not express a similar concern for the conditions that brought the demonstrations into being.”
“We need to have space for people to respond to that in the human ways we do.” I have found that, given the wide range of ways humans respond to things others say, this is not a good principle for managing comments on a website.
I did not endorse the unconditional principle you quoted. My principle was very purposefully conditional. I very intentionally said “If you’re going to open up space for the discussion of a defense of killing an innocent person while in the midst of committing human rights violations, then you need to have space for people to respond to that in the human ways we do.”
My point there was that this is not an ordinary discussion on DailyNous. This has more weight and more impact for a lot more people than almost all of the discussion that happens on this website. And, when you specifically invite discussion of a justification of what you take to be “horrific” and “terrorizing”, then there is a special onus on you to recognize what you may have brought up in people.
Regardless of that point, though, the MLK point about your moral sense being focused in the wrong place stands.
My post clearly expresses horror about the killing of Renee Good and catalogs and condemns various other activities by ICE. The post itself is fundamentally about whether, in opposing ICE’s activities, it is enough to say that ICE agents are breaking the law, or whether the law, too, is problematic. So, I’m okay with the focus of my moral sense on this.
I understand that my moderation policies mean that some people don’t get to say exactly what they’d like to say in the comments here, and I understand that can be frustrating. If it is any consolation, please be aware that I hold myself to those same policies, and sometimes find them just as frustrating.
Justin—I gotta admit, brother—I’m having a hard time feeling like you’re engaging in good faith. I’m feeling like you’re intentionally misreading my comments. And, I don’t feel like you’re carrying many of your own views to their logical conclusion, either. So, it’s seeming to me like this whole thing has been a performance on your part.
With respect to intentionally misreading my comments…
(1) There’s already the issue I mentioned of misquoting me.
(2) It seems odd that you would start your response to me by saying “My post clearly expresses horror about the killing of Renee Good and catalogs and condemns various other activities by ICE.” The conversational implicature is that I would either deny this or that I hadn’t recognized it. I already quoted you in relation to such things, though. My whole point is precisely because you were clear about those things, it seems incumbent on you to recognize those expressions of horror and condemnations carry with them commitments. Deleting that comment and apologizing for it is stifling the resistance that you seem to be committed to. Again, you spoke up for nonviolent resistance just this past week. Words are one of the mightiest tools we have in nonviolent resistance. We want you in the nonviolent resistance, Justin. We know that in moderation you’re going to be less than partisan. But, please, don’t block the resistance of others.
(3) I agree that your moral sense was not in the wrong place when you made those expressions and condemnations. We’re completely on the same page there. My worry about your moral sense was in apologizing to the agent of the state actively engaged in terrorizing communities, while silencing people engaged in resistance to that. I’m still very concerned there. That this whole thread would lead you to question your comments policy with respect to AI and not with respect to how we engage around violent oppression and resistance to it also assures me that your moral sense needs some reorienting.
(4) I don’t believe that you actually think my objection to your moderation was that people don’t “get to say exactly what they’d like to say in the comments here”. Whether or not you think my position is reasonable, I’ve made it very clear that my concern is very contingent upon the topic, how you introduced the topic, the roles of the participants, the impact on human life this discussion has, etc.
(5) I also don’t think my frustration ever had anything to do with my objection. My objection had to do with harm caused to people, trauma visited on people, reframing the narrative on those harms, concrete impacts on limits to public discourse, etc.
To finish out discussion of your comments on your moderation, it is not any consolation to me to hear that you think you hold yourself to those same policies. I have made it clear multiple times (and not just in this thread) that I think your moderation is very problematic in certain situations in your status quo bias.
To be as frank as possible, your take on moderation has seemed to me on quite a few occasions to take a lesson from the Ricky Bobby playbook. Just as Ricky Bobby seemed to think “with all due respect” inserted into a statement made it respectful regardless of the content, you seem to moderate comments in a way that, so long as there’s a veneer of superficial conformity to upper-middle class white American academic niceties, there’s nothing you could need to worry about moderating.
I would have hoped this discussion would lead you to reconsider your approach to moderation. After all, your point in the discussion was something like, “this murder of Renee Good was egregious in such a way that, if it turns out it was legally justified, then so much the worse for the laws.” It seems to me that you should also recognize something like “this defense of murdering people was egregious in such a way that, if it turns out your comments policy requires you to apologize to somebody defending that murder and to silence somebody reasonably objecting to that, then so much the worse for your comments policy.”
Finally, again, I reiterate, Justin—my engagement here is coming from a place of pleading for solidarity. I want for us to be in solidarity with each other. At least here in Portland, though, white liberals and moderates thinking they’re in solidarity with the resistance when they’re actually squashing it is a HUGE problem. Your behavior here has felt to me like a lot of what we face in the movement.
While the United States continues to terrorize the entire world, you (Justin) cozied up to an agent of the state defending the killing of people in cold blood and you silenced people rightfully acting horrified by the situation and you created straw person fallacy arguments to defend that silencing, all the while more death was brought on the people of Minneapolis by genocidal ICE agents.
And this is supposed to be the woke philosophy blog?
Your attempt at exonerating the killer evinces another kind of leakage.
Oh no, poor guys, they should just go home then.
I don’t agree that the shooting was justified, but I do think the two points of his that you criticize are actually valid points, or they highlight things that are relevant to the analysis.
I think suggesting that people are “insane”, “ridiculous” or that “you cant take them seriously” merely because the inference that you say is obvious, does not seem to be obvious, is exactly the kind of epistemic gatekeeping that I was pointing to above. You’re building a closed system where the only people who can evaluate whether a killing was justified are those who did it. How are we suppose to meaningfully review the actions of an officer who murders a civilian if the reasoning is so dependent on “training and experience” that apparently turn the LEO into a fortune teller?
When pressed on what training reveals or why these facts triggered Section 111 concerns, you respond that critics show “fundamental ignorance” and need ride-alongs. But Terry requires officer conduct face “detached, neutral scrutiny.” If judges and civilians can’t evaluate inferences because we lack secret knowledge you won’t explain, Fourth Amendment review is gone. You’ve replaced constitutional constraint with “trust us, we’re trained.”
The DOJ manual definition you cite proves my point. If “threatening surroundings” satisfy the force requirement, the element is meaningless. Every protest near federal operations involves threatening surroundings. Every controversial enforcement creates unfriendly environments. You’ve turned a statute criminalizing forcible interference into authorization for managing officer anxiety during unpopular operations.
You say “reasonably infer” like it’s obvious but never explain what makes it reasonable beyond officers feeling concerned. Officers imagined positioning could become obstruction, and you’re treating imagination as satisfying statutory elements. But Terry requires facts indicating criminal conduct is developing, not just possible.
Strip away the jargon and here’s your argument: during tense operations, any unusual civilian behavior justifies detention if it makes officers uncomfortable. When critics note this gives unreviewable discretion, you respond they’re ignorant and can’t be taken seriously and maybe they just need to learn more about how officers are trained. OR maybe we should change how officers are trained to better line up with the statutory and constitutional standards? Just a thought.
I think this last comment makes it clear that you seem to take people who are not given training (and then buy into that training) as fundementally unable to give informed opinions about police behavior. What does that do except create a police force with de facto immunity from external criticism?
Even if I bought all this, and to be clear I don’t I think it’s an insult to folks like Gorgias to call it sophistry, you’ve said nothing about them interfering with medical professionals trying to give aid. Do you think that justifiable or not? If so why? Even in war zones it’s my understanding that it’s a war crime to deprive wounded enemy combatants of medical attention. Do you think American civilians less deserving of medical attention than wounded SS men or ISIS fighters? Or are ICE agents lives more precious than American soldiers? Both? Or is there some other principle that justifies them forcibly depriving her of medical aid?
I dunno. It seems a deeply philosophical response to these killings is
a uniquely American cry of rage and despair:
It starts with
“Tin soldiers and Nixon coming
We’re finally on our own
This summer I hear the drumming
Four dead in Ohio“
I think Crosby had the tone about right towards the end of
Ohio / Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (Live at the Music Hall, Boston – 03/10/1971)
https://share.google/kIKunc5rDtoMrxbis
I look forward to Hsiao’s equally sustained legal criticism of Alex Pretti’s killing from an LEO’s perspective, but I won’t hold my breath.
lmao, academic philosophy delandea est or something like that; tbh i prefer joe rogan for my opinion laundering
If an agency consistently violates the law, and its agents are ordered to do so, can it still be a law enforcement agency, legally speaking? In other words, is there any way for courts to say, “while such-and-such branch of such-and-such government has instructed agency X to enforce laws L, L may not do so (and must be disbanded or changed in particular ways by a certain date)”? Under such circumstances, does the agency have all the rights that come with being a law enforcement agency, and, correlatively, do citizens have all the same obligations towards the agency?
Imagine that a department or senior members of the government to which this Department belongs is telling the agents of this agency that they can abduct, assault, and kill with impunity and taking steps to enable their agents to do these things? They do so by tampering with evidence of their agents’ actions; blocking investigations into their actions by other law enforcement agents; denying their victims’ rights to lawyers; and cracking down on peaceful protests of their actions.
Under such circumstances, shouldn’t a judge be able to rule that, regardless of what the government says about this agency, it is in fact not entitled to whatever legal rights and authorities come with being “law enforcement”?
This is what’s going on with DHS. The Trump regime is clearly communicating to DHS agents that they can kill, assault, and abduct with impunity. Discussing the murder of Renee Good on Fox News, Stephen Miller said that DHS agents have “absolute immunity” from the law. Pete Hegseth wrote, “Thank God for the patriots of @ICEgov–we have your back 100%. You are SAVING the country. Shame on the leadership of Minnesota–and the lunatics in the street. ICE > MN.”
DHS has taken practical steps to enable their agents to do this. Local law enforcement in Minneapolis/MN got a warrant to investigate the scene of the shooting, but DHS agents nonetheless blocked them from accessing it. DHS has taken over the case itself. They shut local law enforcement out of this case, and out of that of Renee Good’s shooting.
Months ago, in Chicago, DHS shot a woman named Marimar Martinez. DHS claimed that she weaponized her vehicle against them. The DOJ briefly pursued a case against her, but, after the DHS agents kept changing their story, eventually asked the judge to dismiss it. Then the agent who fired the shot drove the vehicle that Martinez supposedly rammed out of state to get repairs, thereby tampering with evidence. According to Marimar’s attorney, bodycam footage shows the DHS agent ramming Martinez’ car, rather than vice versa (the judge didn’t allow this footage to be released).
I assume everyone here has seen footage of DHS agents shooting a priest in the face pepper balls. In January, two protesters were shot in the face from close range in California, and are partially blind as a result.
There’s too much to say about illegal abductions to fit in this reply, but we can start with the fact that dozens of innocent immigrants were illegally rendered to a foreign prison rife with human rights abuses.
Clarification of the above: the quoted Hegseth tweet refers to Pretti’s murderer.