Tonight’s column is far longer than I like to run, perhaps the longest one ever. But please don’t give up on it. Although I’d planned to write about developments we expect this week in various lawsuits, these are the times we live in. The situation with ICE is critical right now. I’ve packed a lot of information you’ll need this week as the situation in Minneapolis develops into this post, but don’t feel like you have to read it all at once. Thanks for being here with me at Civil Discourse, and for being part of a community that is committed to keeping the Republic, no matter what they throw at us. Kamala Harris was right. On October 29, 2024, she told a crowd that had come to hear her speak on the Ellipse, “In less than 90 days, either Donald Trump or I will be in the Oval Office, On day one, if elected, Donald Trump would walk into that office with an enemies list…Donald Trump intends to use the United States military against American citizens who simply disagree with him. People he calls ‘the enemy from within.’ This is not a candidate for president who is thinking about how to make your life better. This is someone who is unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance, and out for unchecked power.” Trump has since proved her right. We head into the coming week in an unsettled moment where the administration has blood on its hands. It would have been fair for the administration to call for time to investigate what happened in Minneapolis the morning Renee Good was shot and killed by an ICE agent. But that’s not what ICE’s leadership, the DHS Secretary, or the White House has done. They blamed the victim. They criticized her for exercising her rights as an American citizen. They called her a terrorist. None of this suggests the administration has good intentions. Vice President Harris told us this would happen and now it has. Sunday morning, CNN’s Jake Tapper showed DHS Secretary Kristi Noem video of the mob attacking the Capitol on January 6. Tapper: “I just showed you video of people attacking law enforcement officers on January 6. Undisputed evidence, and I just said, President Trump pardoned all of them. You said that President Trump is enforcing all the laws equally. That’s just not true. There’s a different standard for law enforcement officers being attacked if they’re being attacked by Trump supporters. We just saw that.” Trump’s September 2025 Presidential Memo titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” (NSPM-7) spelled this all out. It divides the country into good guys and bad guys. If you’re for Trump, you’re a good guy. If you’re against Trump, you’re a domestic terrorist. The rules that apply to the two groups are different. Attack the police in support of Donald Trump (January 6), and you get a pardon; stop to watch what an ICE agent is doing, and it’s a death sentence.
Trump attributed the need for NSPM-7 to dramatic increases in “Heinous assassinations and other acts of political violence.” He cited “the horrifying assassination of Charlie Kirk” and called out people who “adhered to the alleged shooter’s ideology, embraced and cheered this evil murder while actively encouraging more political violence,” as the justification for the memo. He also cited the 2024 murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson and “the 2022 assassination attempt against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh” as further justification, along with the two assassination attempts on his own life and what he calls “riots” in Los Angeles and Portland that were a “1,000 percent increase in attacks on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers since January 21, 2025, compared to the same period last year.” He also wrote that “Separate anti-police and ‘criminal justice’ riots have left many people dead and injured and inflicted over $2 billion in property damage nationwide.” Trump claims the recent “political violence is not a series of isolated incidents and does not emerge organically.” He says it’s the “culmination of sophisticated, organized campaigns of targeted intimidation, radicalization, threats, and violence designed to silence opposing speech, limit political activity, change or direct policy outcomes, and prevent the functioning of a democratic society.” No evidence is offered to support this. But that doesn’t seem to matter in the rush to a conclusion: “A new law enforcement strategy that investigates all participants in these criminal and terroristic conspiracies — including the organized structures, networks, entities, organizations, funding sources, and predicate actions behind them — is required.” Although at first this seemed targeted toward civil society and civil rights groups that advocated and litigated on behalf of Americans and their rights, now, it seems to be turned against anti-ICE protestors who are doing nothing more than exercising their First Amendment rights. NSPM-7 identifies “common threads animating this violent conduct” as:
If you have any of these tendencies, or if the administration believes you do, one of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTF) is directed to investigate you. There are about 200 JTTFs across the country. They are the nerve center of the federal government’s efforts to ensure potential acts of terrorism are detected before they can be committed. Agents and prosecutors from federal and state agencies meet to review cases and ensure nothing important is swept aside. The work can be intense and urgent. Now, Trump has ordered that the JTTFs “shall investigate” an exhausting laundry list of potential infractions committed by people who oppose his views. In Trump’s view, Americans exercising their First Amendment and other rights are violent domestic terrorists. But it’s all one-sided. Just like Noem’s failure to recognize the crimes committed by January 6 defendants in the question from Tapper that we started out with tonight. It’s all a thinly veiled mechanism for criminalizing innocent behavior by anyone who opposes this administration. Hence the characterization of Good, who was unarmed when she was shot and killed by a law enforcement officer, as the “terrorist.” Former Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta, who also led the Civil Rights Division at DOJ during the Obama administration, asked the right question: “Are the feds conducting any real investigation of the agent’s actions, or instead focused on trying to justify what happened by tarring the victim as a domestic terrorist?” On Meet the Press, NBC’s Kristen Welker asked White House Border Czar Tom Homan about his boss’s characterization of what Good was doing when she was killed. “Noem called it an ‘act of domestic terrorism,’” Welker pointed out, “What’s the evidence for that allegation?” Homan tried to dissemble, “If they didn’t have sanctuary policies…” But Welker wasn’t having any of it. She fired back, “To be clear, is anyone who protests ICE a domestic terrorist?” Homan was forced to concede, “It’s a case by case basis. If you look at the definition of terrorism, it certainly could fall within the definition.” We will likely learn more about the facts surrounding Renee Good’s death this week. Instead of a credible investigation being conducted by federal, state, and local law enforcement together, we have a turf war over the political spin being conducted by the federal government. Minnesota State AG Keith Ellison has ducked out, explaining he can’t conduct an investigation if he doesn’t have access to the evidence. At least for now, the local DA is conducting her own investigation. Federal use-of-force standards govern agents’ behavior. They were updated by the Justice Department in 2022 and adopted by ICE in 2023. The policy explicitly prohibits shooting into a moving vehicle absent extreme circumstances, which these were not. It only permits officers to use deadly force when their own or others’ lives are at stake, or when there is the prospect of serious injury, and they cannot safely remove themselves from harm’s way. None of those conditions appear to be met here. A proper investigation would focus on whether the agent violated the policy when he shot at Good’s vehicle. A technical issue that could have significant bearing on those considerations involves the shots that were fired, three of them. The first shot, with the agent in front of the vehicle, went through the windshield. But he also appears to fire two additional shots through the driver’s side window. We do not know which shot killed Good. The County Coroner will likely do the autopsy report that will have bearing on this, while the feds may have collected physical evidence from the scene involving the gun and the shots fired that could be important as well. If the case were to be indicted as a murder and go to trial, even if the first shot was legitimate self-defense (which it does not appear to me to be based on multiple video angles and what we know now), the last two clearly were not, as Good had already turned completely out of his path and was driving off. It would be hard for the agent to argue for qualified immunity and claim he was operating lawfully if one of those shots was responsible for her death. That’s all awfully inside baseball, and that’s the point. Meticulous investigations have to be conducted before conclusions are reached. It was irresponsible for Noem to call it self-defense. Conclusions in a situation like this shouldn’t be political knee-jerks; they should be fact-based. If they aren’t, and let’s not fool ourselves here, even if there is a federal investigation, it won’t be unless something dramatic shifts, the public will have no confidence in the outcome. And in this case, where the very life of an American citizen is involved, it’s essential for the public to trust the outcome. That’s the goal federal prosecutors worked toward with their state and local counterparts so they could restore communities’ trust after George Floyd’s and Ahmaud Arbery’s murders, and in countless other situations. That won’t happen here. Our democracy will be worse off for it. The day after Good’s death, Noem signed a new policy barring congressional visits to ICE facilities without a week’s advance notice. It wasn’t made public until Saturday night. This is inconsistent with prior interpretations of the law, that allowed for immediate access, including a mid-December decision by federal Judge Jia Cobb that said a prior policy limiting access violated Section 527(b) of the DHS's appropriation, which provides that "[n]one of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available to [DHS] ... may be used to prevent" Members of Congress or certain congressional employees "from entering, for the purpose of conducting oversight," any DHS facility "used to detain or otherwise house aliens.” Noem wrote, “I disagree with this decision.” She continued “as even the district court explicitly acknowledged, funds deriving from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) ‘are not subject to Section 527's limitations.’ Accordingly, effective immediately…I am issuing this new policy.” Claiming that the basis for the policy is the safety of members of Congress and their staff, along with ICE officials and detainees, Noem imposed advance notice requirements before members of Congress can engage in oversight of facilities. In many cases, human beings are being warehoused in facilities that do not pass constitutional muster. Members of Congress immediately pushed back. New York Representative Dan Goldman, a former prosecutor, tweeted, “After we won our lawsuit forcing ICE to allow oversight, my two visits to 26 Fed have revealed dramatic improvements because oversight works. @Sec_Noem‘s move isn’t about safety. It’s about cover-ups. Why is ‘the most transparent administration in history’ afraid of congressional oversight?” Expect more litigation on this. Something we’ll watch for in the week ahead is whether there is any real appetite in Congress to rein in ICE. Congress has the power of the purse as well as the ability to make long overdue changes to laws regarding immunity. If ever there was a time for it to enter the arena, this is it. This week, there will likely be legal developments in a number of matters we’ve been following: further developments in the TPS case we discussed Saturday night, perhaps news in the DoD investigation into Mark Kelly, and word on the status of Eastern District of Virginia U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan. There will be oral argument in the Supreme Court this week, including two cases involving the rights of transgender youth. Wednesday is the anniversary of Trump’s impeachment following January 6. But ICE’s presence on American streets continues to stand out. Having been denied the ability to use the National Guard as he saw fit by the courts, Trump is deploying federal agents who seem willing to use tactics any other administration would have dismissed as unconstitutional. That bears watching amid multiple reports of aggressive conduct in Minneapolis and St. Paul toward people who are activists, not criminals. You could be forgiven for wondering whether what we’re seeing is an effort to throw gasoline on the flames and fan them. It can be difficult, as we’ve noted in the past, to stay focused on multiple important threads at once. This administration, in particular, excels at overwhelming people with the sheer force of its horrific conduct so that no one outrage stays on the radar screen long enough for the public to coalesce around it and do something. You wouldn’t think that a federal law-enforcement officer killing a woman on video would be the kind of incident a White House would welcome, but Good’s death seems to have knocked the Justice Department’s continuing violation of the Epstein Files Transparency Act and legally questionable invasion of Venezuela off of the front pages. We can’t afford to let Trump benefit like that from such a horrific act. Donald Trump pardoned people who committed crimes on January 6 because they committed them in his name. He’s trying to rewrite that history into one that makes him out to be the hero. As the anniversary of his impeachment approaches, expect more of that. Trump can’t be permitted to get away with the intolerable because Americans lack focus or bandwidth. The moment is upon us and we must rise to it. This is a week to stay informed. We’re in this together, Joyce You're currently a free subscriber to Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance . For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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Sunday, January 11, 2026
The Week Ahead
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