\n<\/p>\n
United States Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has described the actions of Renee Nicole Good, a Minneapolis woman killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer on Wednesday, as \u201cdomestic terrorism\u201d.<\/p>\n
Noem said Good refused to obey orders to get out of her car, \u201cweaponise[d] her vehicle\u201d and \u201cattempted to run\u201d over an officer. Minnesota officials disputed Noem\u2019s account, citing videos showing Good trying to drive away.<\/p>\n
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, a member of the state\u2019s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, said on Thursday on the CNN news channel that Noem\u2019s statement is \u201can abuse of the term\u201d \u201cdomestic terrorism\u201d.<\/p>\n
President Donald Trump\u2019s administration has turned to the phrase in recent months, including in an October immigration enforcement-related shooting.<\/p>\n
In September, the administration issued a memo calling on law enforcement to prioritise threats including \u201cviolent efforts to shut down immigration enforcement\u201d, saying \u201cdomestic terrorists\u201d were using violence to advance \u201cextreme views in favour of mass migration and open borders\u201d. Experts said it violates free speech laws.<\/p>\n
Good, a mother of three and a poet, lived in the Minneapolis neighbourhood where she was fatally shot. She was a US citizen and had no criminal background, The Associated Press news agency reported. Good\u2019s ex-husband told AP that she wasn\u2019t an activist and he hadn\u2019t known her to participate in protests. Good had dropped off her 6-year-old son at school and was driving home when she encountered ICE.<\/p>\n
The Trump administration has ramped up Minneapolis immigration enforcement in recent weeks after news reports about allegations of daycare funding fraud involving the local Somali community.<\/p>\n
Federal agencies have their own definitions of \u201cdomestic terrorism\u201d.<\/p>\n
According to a 2020 memo, the FBI, citing a specific section of the US Code, defines \u201cdomestic terrorism\u201d as acts dangerous to human life that violate federal or state criminal laws and appear intended to intimidate or coerce civilians; influence government policy by intimidation or coercion; or affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination or kidnapping.<\/p>\n
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) uses a similar definition, citing a different statute that defines \u201cdomestic terrorism\u201d as dangerous to human life or potentially destructive of critical infrastructure or key resources.<\/p>\n
The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service wrote in 2023: \u201cUnlike foreign terrorism, the federal government does not have a mechanism to formally charge an individual with domestic terrorism which sometimes makes it difficult (and occasionally controversial) to formally characterise someone as a domestic terrorist.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 2022, former FBI agent Michael German, then a fellow with New York University Law School\u2019s Brennan Center for Justice, told PolitiFact that 51 federal statutes apply to \u201cdomestic terrorism\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think there is and always has been confusion between rhetoric and the law in regard to terrorism,\u201d German told PolitiFact after the Minneapolis shooting. \u201cThere is no law that authorises the US government to designate any group or individual in the US as a \u2018domestic terrorist\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n
The federal government periodically revises how it describes threats. For example, in 2025, federal officials sometimes used the term \u201cnihilistic violent extremists\u201d to describe perpetrators who don\u2019t subscribe to one ideology but appear to be motivated by a desire to, as one expert put it, \u201cgamify\u201d real-life violence. Experts told PolitiFact that the term is valid but cautioned against its overuse or citing it to obscure other ideological motivations, such as white supremacy.<\/p>\n
The DHS rhetoric around Good\u2019s fatal shooting is similar to another immigration enforcement-related shooting in October. During DHS\u2019s months-long immigration crackdown in Chicago called \u201cOperation Midway Blitz\u201d, a Border Patrol agent shot US citizen Marimar Martinez five times.<\/p>\n
A DHS news release described Martinez as a \u201cdomestic terrorist\u201d and accused her of ramming her vehicle into the Border Patrol agent\u2019s car, carrying a semiautomatic weapon and having a \u201chistory of doxxing federal agents\u201d.<\/p>\n
A federal judge granted a motion from prosecutors to dismiss federal charges against Martinez in November.<\/p>\n
\u201cUltimately, there was a determination when everything was evaluated that there were serious questions about the officers\u2019 narratives,\u201d legal analyst Joey Jackson told\u00a0CNN.<\/p>\n
The government\u2019s use of the term goes beyond immigration and the DHS.<\/p>\n
After conservative activist\u00a0Charlie Kirk\u2019s murder, Trump issued a September 25 memo ordering the attorney general to expand \u201cdomestic terrorism\u201d priorities to include \u201cpolitically motivated terrorist acts such as organised doxing campaigns, swatting, rioting, looting, trespass, assault, destruction of property, threats of violence, and civil disorder\u201d.<\/p>\n
Trump signed an\u00a0executive order\u00a0a few days before designating\u00a0antifa, a broad, loosely affiliated coalition of left-wing activists, as a \u201cdomestic terrorist\u201d organisation.<\/p>\n
US Attorney General Pam Bondi told federal prosecutors and law enforcement agencies to compile a list of groups \u201cengaged in acts that may constitute domestic terrorism\u201d.<\/p>\n
Legal experts have\u00a0raised\u00a0alarms\u00a0about the memo\u2019s potential infringements on the First Amendment.<\/p>\n
\u201cBoth the order and the memo are ungrounded in fact and law,\u201d Faiza Patel, the director of liberty and national security at the Brennan Center for Justice, wrote. \u201cActing on them would violate free speech rights, potentially threatening any person or group holding any one of a broad array of disfavored views with investigation and prosecution.\u201d<\/p>\n
Experts have also pointed to the memo\u2019s focus on left-wing violence. It does not mention the politically motivated assassination of Minnesota state Representative Melissa Hortman, a member of the state\u2019s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, months before.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen a policy directive targets one ideological family and leaves others to the footnotes, it sheds any pretense of neutrality,\u201d Thomas E Brzozowski, former Department of Justice counsel for domestic terrorism, wrote on December 12.<\/p>\n
Information is still surfacing about what transpired before Good was fatally shot. However, frame-by-frame analyses of video footage by The New York Times and The Washington Post found Good\u2019s vehicle moved towards an ICE agent, but the agent was able to move out of the way and fire at least two of the three shots from his gun from the side of the car as Good veered away.<\/p>\n
Brzozowski told PolitiFact that because Good was trying to drive away, to \u201ccharacterise that as domestic terrorism, I think, is a stretch.\u201d<\/p>\n
However, he said the larger concern is that Noem is using the \u201cdomestic terrorism\u201d term absent any actual findings before an investigation.<\/p>\n
\u201cEssentially within hours of the incident occurring, labelling this activity as domestic terrorism, what that does is effectively strip domestic terrorism of its significance,\u201d he said, calling it a \u201cblatantly partisan effort to label it as domestic terrorism\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cNow what is domestic terrorism? Whatever the DHS secretary says it is? She can characterise anything she wants as domestic terrorism. She is doing so without any facts to go on.\u201d<\/p>\n
Shirin Sinnar, a Stanford University Law School professor, told PolitiFact: \u201cWhile intentionally ramming a vehicle for a political purpose could amount to terrorism in a different context, the videos of the Minneapolis incident appear to show a woman attempting to drive away from ICE officers, not hit them. Here, the administration\u2019s calling her a domestic terrorist is simply an attempt to malign a protester and justify her killing by an ICE officer.\u201d<\/p>\n
German told PolitiFact there isn\u2019t any public evidence to suggest that Good was \u201cengaging in conduct that could have been prosecuted under the terrorism chapter of the US Code\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo a government official calling her a domestic terrorist isn\u2019t supported in the law and is entirely pejorative and prejudicial.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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United States Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has described the actions of Renee Nicole Good, a Minneapolis woman killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer on Wednesday, as \u201cdomestic terrorism\u201d. Noem said Good refused to obey orders to get out of her car, \u201cweaponise[d] her vehicle\u201d and \u201cattempted to run\u201d over an officer. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8243,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-explained"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8242"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8242\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/8243"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}