Countless musicians have slammed ICE with even more fervor than usual since an agent’s fatal shooting of 37-year-old US citizen Renee Nicole Good in her car in Minneapolis, MN on Wednesday (Jan. 7). Billie Eilish spoke up by resharing a series of posts to her Instagram Story, with one calling ICE a “federally funded and supported terrorist group” that is “tearing apart families, terrorizing citizens, and now murdering innocent people.” Now, the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is responding.
In a statement to Billboard, DHS assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin said, “Clearly, Billie Eilish has not seen the newly released footage, which corroborates what DHS has stated all along — that this individual was impeding law enforcement and weaponized her vehicle in an attempt to kill or cause bodily harm to federal law enforcement.”
The officer, Jonathan Ross, had been “in fear of his own life [and] the lives of his fellow officers and acted in self-defense,” McLaughlin claims. “The American people can watch this video with their own eyes and ears and judge for themselves.” A new video shows that, before being shot, Renee Nicole Good calmly said, “I’m not mad at you,” and that everything was “fine.” After she was shot, a man’s voice can be heard calling her a “fucking bitch.”
McLaughlin continued:
ICE does not separate families. Parents are asked if they want to be removed with their children, or ICE will place the children with a safe person the parent designates. This is consistent with past administrations’ immigration enforcement. It’s garbage rhetoric from the likes of Billie Eilish that is leading to a 1,300% increase in assaults and 3,200% increase in vehicle rammings against our brave law enforcement.
“[Good] behaved horribly,” President Donald Trump told The New York Times on Thursday. “And then she ran him over. She didn’t try to run him over. She ran him over.”
Neil Young shared several anti-ICE statements on his website, and on his birthday yesterday Dave Matthews shared a video addressing her killing and the “revolting” people in Trump’s administration.
“I don’t want my taxes to pay for ICE, to masked thugs to roam our streets and terrorize our communities and rip families apart,” he said, continuing:
We should be taking care of each other. We should be minding each other. We should be housing the homeless. We shouldn’t be, you know, throwing people to the ground, which brings me to Renee Nicole Good, murdered in front of her fellow citizens in Minneapolis, murdered in the streets. And no matter what narrative this administration is trying to sell us, we can see the videos. Maybe if they show you one and they slow it down, they tell you where to look, you might think, maybe there’s a chance, maybe there’s a chance that the gunman was felt threatened. But from most angles near and far, looks like she was trying to get away. And he shot her three times in the head, murdered in cold blood. And this administration, these, these people who are trying to tell us not to believe what we see. It is so horrific. I I don’t understand how you can claim that she was ramming their cars and or that she was attacking them. There’s nothing to suggest that. And it’s mind-boggling and it’s deeply upsetting to me and to so many people and we can’t just let it slide. To Trump, to Kristi Noem, to Stephen Miller, to Pete Hegseth, to Patel, to Bondi, to all of them, just deeply, deeply dishonest people. Just cowardly, shameful, dishonest people. Fuck them. They are revolting.
