THE HUTCHINSON REPORT:
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Contributing Columnist, WAVE Community Newspapers
“I’m not going to judge what the secretary says, but if you look up the definition of terrorism, it certainly can fall within that.
Tom Homan, the director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, was simply parroting his boss, Homeland Security Director Kristi Noem’s narrative about the slaying of Renee Good. Both wasted no time in tarring Good as a domestic terrorist days after an ICE agent killed her in Minneapolis Jan. 7.
This is the first of a two-part series excerpted from Earl Ofari Hutchinson’s latest book, “The ICE Shooting Scorecard.”
Homan gave his self-assured assertion about Good’s action and killing to NBC News. By then the video, multiple videos, had raised serious doubt that Good acted out of deliberate malice and that she posed an imminent danger to ICE Agent Jonathan Ross. Though the Good slaying was exceptional in that it was caught on video, it was hardly the first time that Homan spoke out on ICE actions, especially the use of deadly force.
The Good slaying, in fact, opened the door to many about just how emboldened and deadly ICE agents had become in the first year of President Donald Trump’s second Oval Office tenure. During 2025, ICE agents, at Trump’s iron-fisted directive, fanned out into Los Angeles before spreading to Washington, D.C., Chicago, Memphis, Portland, Charlotte, North Carolina, New Orleans, and of course, Minneapolis.
In almost all those cities, there were reports of an avalanche of abuses, up to and including shootings.
An independent investigative group, Trace, tallied 31 incidents where ICE agents either opened fire or held someone at gunpoint. The one figure that jumped out in the tally was five. That was the number of people shot that the agency claimed were fleeing in their vehicle.
There were two presumptions about those shootings. One was that the allegedly fleeing individual was an undocumented worker, or had committed some criminal act, and was trying to evade apprehension. The other was that the use of deadly force was justified.
The only evidence that the first presumption was true was the word of ICE agents. There was no evidence that any of the five individuals shot at while driving away posed an immediate danger to the agents, let alone that any of them possessed a weapon.
There are two questions about ICE’s use of deadly force under Trump. The first is were the shootings really necessary? The other is did the shootings indicate a dangerous trend that ICE teetered on being a lawless, out-of-control agency, with the wholehearted cheerleading of the Trump administration?
“Everything about these incidents indicates that these are probably shootings that did not need to happen,” Christy Lopez, a former senior civil rights litigator at the Justice Department, noted, “The ICE agents can’t prevent everything, but they have the ability to de-escalate situations. Instead, we see the opposite. They’re actually stoking this inordinate amount of fear and this hyper-vigilance, and they should be trying to tamp it down — but they’re not.”
Another issue is whether the shootings mark a deadly trend by ICE and Homeland Security with no fear of genuine scrutiny and accountability when deadly force is used. There was little evidence that an ICE agent during Trump’s first year in the White House was prosecuted for an unwarranted shooting.
The courts did little to rein in the violence. They steadily watered down the grounds on which victims of violence or abuse by ICE could bring legal action or a suit against federal law enforcement officers. That especially included immigration enforcement officials and agents.
The list of shootings that were by any legal standard grounds for arrest and prosecution of the agent involved had grown by the end of 2025.
Trump, ICE and Homeland Security officials had the same stock answer to why there was more gunplay and use of other weaponry in abundance. That was that ICE agents were under attack, and they had the right to defend themselves. Homeland Security officials went further and claimed that attacks were up in 2025 more than 25%.
They ticked off the hazards the agents supposedly faced — terrorist attacks, being shot at, having cars being used as weapons against them, bomb threats, assaults, and doxxing, shoving agents and throwing objects at them The agency, in its defense left out one salient point, that was the overwhelming majority of the pro-immigrant rights protests were lawful and peaceful. It also did not mention that some ICE agents routinely engaged in provocative actions against the peaceful protesters.
Even so, there were a few widely isolated incidents where ICE officers were fired on. The incidents were exceedingly rare, and no agents were killed or even seriously injured.
But they happened and that gave ICE, Homeland Security and Trump all the ammunition they needed to proclaim continually that their agents were in danger and that using force to protect themselves would and could be ruled out.
With the slaying of Good and Keith Porter Trump, and Homeland Security seemingly had the perfect foils to rail that ICE was under attack. Therefore, any means, and that included deadly force, was not only mandated but somehow heroic. That was a script that Trump would follow repeatedly.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His latest book is “The ICE Shooting Scorecard” (Amazon ebook and Middle Passage Press PB).
