Seattle joins national protest following Minneapolis ICE shooting

Approximately 200 protesters filled the block in front of the Henry M. Jackson Federal building in downtown Seattle Wednesday night, part of nationwide protests after the fatal shooting of a Minnesota woman by a federal immigration officer.

“Nicole should not have been murdered for showing care for her community,” Jonathan Toledo told the Seattle crowd, speaking on behalf of the Legalization for All Network, one of the groups that called for the emergency protests.

The Minneapolis City Council identified the deceased woman as Renee Nicole Good.

Good was shot in the head and killed by an ICE officer Wednesday in Minneapolis when she attempted to drive away from an area where ICE agents were conducting immigration enforcement. The shooting was captured on video by multiple witnesses who were documenting the encounter with their phones.

A spokesperson for ICE said the officer who fired the shots acted in self defense. Both the FBI and the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension are investigating the shooting.

Toledo called for accountability for Good's killing, the release of the shooter’s name, and the end of mass deportation, among other things.

“My people should not be thrown in concentration camps,” Toledo said.

As the Seattle gathering got underway, demonstrators unfurled a long banner that read “Abolish ICE” and chanted, “Say her name, Renee Good.”

Sara Lopez, a recently retired teaching professor at the University of Washington, said she was driven to this protest out of a building sense of frustration and helplessness in the face of escalating immigration enforcement action against immigrants, and now a U.S. citizen.

“I think there's always a risk when we stand up, especially for social justice,” Lopez said. “But there's a bigger risk in us not taking action and doing whatever it is we can in our world and our place.”

Lopez said Good’s death has prompted her to get more involved, and she plans to sign up for local immigrant watch groups that monitor ICE activity.

Similar protests in reaction to Good's shooting were planned for Wednesday night in cities across the country including Tacoma, Portland, Dallas, Denver, Austin, and New York.

The death is the fifth in the last year connected to the federal immigration crackdown by the Trump administration, according to reporting by the Associated Press. Those deaths include a Mexican man who was fatally shot during a traffic stop in suburban Chicago, two people who ran away from federal agents and were fatally struck on freeways, and a farmworker who fell off a roof during an ICE raid at a cannabis facility in California. That man later died from his injuries.

In a statement to NPR, Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said ICE officials were met with rioters during a targeted operation when one of their vehicles got stuck in icy conditions on the road. She said the woman who was fatally shot weaponized her vehicle.

During a press conference in Minneapolis Wednesday, U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem characterized the woman’s actions as “an act of domestic terrorism.”

“The ICE officer, fearing for his life and the other officers around him and the safety of the public, fired defensive shots,” Noem said. “He used his training to save his own life and that of his colleagues.”

Noem’s department deployed thousands of immigration enforcement officers in Minnesota earlier this week in an immigration crackdown in the state.

Local reporting and witness videos conflict with Noem’s account of the shooting and her characterization of the threat faced by federal agents.

Witnesses told Minnesota Public Radio that ICE agents gave mixed orders to the driver. They said one agent ordered the woman to drive away from the scene where an ICE vehicle was stuck in a snowbank, while another yelled for her to get out of her car as he reached for the door handle.

“She turned her steering wheel toward the right. The person was grabbing her door handle, the ICE officer who was in front of her vehicle shot once from the front and twice from the side, hitting her maybe three feet away at the max,” the witness said. “Because she was shot, and she was already trying to leave, her foot was on the accelerator, and she crashed into a telephone pole.”

The witness also said that ICE officials denied medical help to the woman until ambulances arrived on the scene.