Sen. Tina Smith said Sunday that the Trump administration is attempting to cover up the circumstances surrounding the fatal shooting of Renee Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis last week, accusing federal officials of shaping the narrative before any investigation had taken place.
“I mean I think what we are seeing here is the federal government, Kristi Noem, Vice President Vance, Donald Trump, attempt to cover up what happened here in the Twin Cities,” Smith said during an appearance on ABC’s This Week. “And I don’t think that people here and around the country are believing it.”
When host Martha Raddatz noted that accusing the administration of a cover-up was a serious charge, Smith did not back down.
“What I mean by that,” Smith said, “is that you can see everything that they are doing is trying to shape the narrative, to say what happened, without any investigation.”
A neigbhor who saw what happened told local MPR news: “She was trying to turn around, and the ICE agent was in front of her car, and he pulled out a gun and put it right in — like, his midriff was on her bumper — and he reached across the hood of the car and shot her in the face like three, four times” / Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Smith pointed directly to the speed with which top administration officials publicly characterized the shooting. She said that within hours of Good’s death, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was already asserting that Good had committed an act of domestic terrorism.
“They were calling her a domestic terrorist before they even knew what her name was,” Smith said.
Good, a 37-year-old woman, was shot and killed last week by ICE agent Jonathan Ross on a Minneapolis street. Central to the case is whether Ross reasonably believed his life was in imminent danger at the time of the shooting. The Trump administration has argued that he did, a position Noem reiterated Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union, where she again described Good as a dangerous person who was breaking the law.
Smith expressed deep skepticism toward that account, citing standard law enforcement training and procedures.
“I understand how law enforcement, professional law enforcement, is trained,” she said. “They are trained to de-escalate situations, not make conflict worse. They are certainly trained to step out of the way of a moving vehicle, not place themselves in the middle of a moving vehicle.”
Jan 29, 2025; Washington, DC, USA; Sen. Tina Smith, D-Minn., speaks during the Senate Finance Committee confirmation hearing on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination to be Secretary of Health and Human Services on Jan. 29, 2025 in Washington.. Mandatory Credit: Jack Gruber-USA TODAY via Imagn Images
She also criticized what she described as the escalation of a protest encounter into a deadly confrontation.
“And no professional law enforcement would exchange words or banter with somebody who is engaged in their legal right to protest and then lose control,” Smith said. “Which looks to me like what happened here.”
Smith, who has announced she will retire from the Senate at the end of the year, said the administration’s approach risks permanently damaging public trust in the outcome of the investigation.
As the federal probe continues, Democrats and local officials have called for greater transparency and outside oversight, warning that early, definitive statements from top officials have already cast doubt on whether the public will accept the findings — whatever they ultimately conclude.
