Republicans See Defending the ICE Shooting As Good Politics

Within a day of an ICE agent fatally shooting a Minneapolis motorist, members of the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress had almost uniformly concluded that the shooting was legitimate and probably the fault of the deceased victim. Hardly any Republican officials said, “I have no comment until an investigation has taken place” or hedged bets about the facts and their meaning. As journalists and average social-media users pored over grainy images of the shooting and began to question the official account, Trumpworld’s solidarity with the shooter showed no signs of weakening. Whatever private misgivings Republicans have about Kristi Noem’s immediate and repeated claims that Renee Nicole Good’s death was the result of her own complicity in “domestic terrorism,” they’re closing ranks for the time being, with Vice-President J.D. Vance leading cheers for ICE.

This “rush to judgment” (as a former ICE director, John Sandweg, called it) suggests a highly politicized reaction to the shooting. Yes, some Democrats were quick to call the shooting a criminal act (and their position seems pretty clearly to be supported by the evidence we currently have). But it’s the GOP reaction that is most formidable and puzzling. Much of it could simply reflect the customary GOP deference to Trump, who immediately called the shooting an act of self-defense and identified the victim with the usual “radical left” suspects he fingers whenever something bad happens. But the broader optics of the incident suggest an extraordinary degree of collective Republican self-confidence that, facts aside, support for the shooter is good politics for the GOP.

Seen from 40,000 feet, the shooting and the entire set of controversies over ICE and its terroristic tactics represent the confluence of two issues Republicans think will invariably work in their favor: immigration and crime/policing. It’s true that immigration remains a relative bright spot for Trump among generally negative job-approval ratings. And the mass-deportation initiative that is ICE’s principal mission is very close to the heart of the MAGA movement. Meanwhile, the 2024 presidential campaign made it very clear Republicans believe that pandemic-era protests about police brutality (galvanized by the police murder of George Floyd less than a mile from where Renee Nicole Good had her own fatal encounter with law enforcement) have boomeranged and fed widespread public concerns about crime and disorder, real or just perceived. An associated “Back the Blue” movement is evident around the country, particularly in MAGA-land, and it’s entirely possible Republicans figure they can extend that presumption of police benevolence to ICE, hard as it might be to envision these armed and masked tormenters of immigrants as heroes.

More generally, Republicans may figure a national focus on ICE tactics wrong-foots Democrats, not only by reidentifying them with the phantom menace of “defunding the police” (with scattered Democratic calls for the total abolition of ICE contributing to that caricature) but by shifting the partisan battleground in the GOP’s direction. At present, Democratic politicians are being constantly hectored by consultants to put on blinders and ignore every issue other than “affordability.” In particular, they’ve been warned again and again not to “take Trump’s bait” by letting his rhetorical excesses (again on vivid display in his callous reaction to the Minneapolis shooting) distract them from obsessively talking about housing and grocery prices. The last week has been sheer torment for such Democrats between the Venezuela military strike and now the tragedy in Minnesota. A national debate on mass deportation and ICE tactics that spills over into disputes about the legitimacy of anti-ICE protests and general attitudes toward law enforcement is a nice distraction from Trump’s unpopular economic and foreign-policy agenda. And to the extent this debate remains focused on events in Minnesota, it keeps attention fixed on a blue state that Republicans would love to keep talking about, given the ongoing scandal over illegal pandemic-era spending in child-care programs linked to criminal immigrant networks of fraudsters.

All in all, Republicans probably found it easy to follow Trump’s lead in defending the Minneapolis shooter because this posture gratifies the MAGA base while muddying adverse waters of current events. Before last week, the GOP was staring down the barrel of a midterm-election defeat and fretting about a president who blamed voters for ingratitude about the glorious blessings he had bestowed on them. Now they’re on more familiar and comfortable ground, even as Democrats prepare for more wrangling about how they talk about immigration and policing. Despite the terrible facts on the ground in Minneapolis and the unsavory associations with authoritarianism ICE tactics represent, it could be worse for Trump’s party.