After ICE officer Jonathan Ross killed 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis Wednesday, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin immediately blamed the victim. She said ICE offices were “conducting targeted operations when rioters began blocking ICE officers and one of these violent rioters weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them.”
Video footage from the scene doesn’t seem to support the government’s description of Good or capture the complexities of the scene, and Ross hasn’t been charged with a crime. But McLaughlin’s “violent rioter” label wasn’t an off-the-cuff remark. Rather, this is a phrase the Trump administration, particularly DHS, has regularly and quite purposefully used to characterize people who show up to oppose its officers and their actions.
This is a phrase the Trump administration has regularly used to characterize people who show up to oppose its officers and actions.
Chicago was the site of many protests throughout the fall and winter, as ICE agents flooded the city streets during Operation Midway Blitz. DHS consistently described those protests with one-sided, inflammatory language. On Nov. 14, for example, DHS posted a video on X that characterized protesters outside an ICE facility as “violent rioters” attempting to secure the release “of some of the worst human beings on planet earth.”
Jack Jenkins, a reporter for The Christian Century who was present that day, wrote that among the peaceful protesters was the Rev. Michael Woolf, a Baptist preacher who, Jenkins reported, was standing “alongside fellow protesters, fiddling awkwardly with his backpack as faith leaders and other protesters chant slogans at a line of police officers.”
When an officer walked up, grabbed Woolf’s wrist and yanked, Jenkins reported, “Demonstrators attempted to hold onto Woolf, who was wearing a clerical collar, but four officers wrenched him from the crowd and tossed him to the ground.”
Also in Chicago, Marimar Martinez was shot multiple times by a CBP agent in October, who claimed he was acting in self-defense after she assaulted him with her car. A DHS statement called Martinez a “domestic terrorist” and initially charged her and a co-defendant with assaulting, resisting or impeding federal officers — only to drop the charges before the case could fully get underway. A defense attorney said bodycam video showed an agent drove into Martinez’s truck.
As The Guardian pointed out, “Since Operation Midway Blitz began in September, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has characterized protesters as violent rioters and vowed to prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law. But of the more than two dozen people arrested for impeding or assaulting federal officers or other protest-related offenses, none have gone to trial and charges have been dropped against at least nine of them.”
There’s no doubt that some federal agents have been confronted by violent individuals who want to hurt them, but the government’s broad, seemingly reflexive, use of “violent rioters” has helped push the noxious idea that it’s criminal to publicly gather and express outrage at government officials and law enforcement as they carry out Trump’s deportation agenda. In Minneapolis, the government seems determined that we not think of Good as an American who had the right to object to her government’s actions. They want us to reduce Good to a “violent rioter” who got what violent rioters are due.
This attitude has been confirmed by leadership at some of the highest levels of the U.S. Border Patrol. During an Oct. 30 deposition related to a lawsuit alleging overly aggressive immigration enforcement tactics in Chicago, Locke Bowman, a lawyer for plaintiffs, asked U.S. Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino a question about how federal agents had responded to “protesters.” Bowman said agents had responded “to violent rioters and assaultive subjects.”
“Will you acknowledge that some of those at the Broadview facility who came to that location to protest are not violent rioters and assaulters?” Bowman asked. And Bovino said, “I don’t know what they are.”
Quoting Bovino’s phrase “violent rioters and assaulters,” the lawyer asked, “Have you ever interacted with anybody who wasn’t that?”
“I can’t remember,” he replied.
It’s noteworthy that, in that deposition, Bovino’s refusal to acknowledge the presence of peaceful protesters at that Broadview ICE facility came after the attorney showed him video of Pastor David Black being shot in the head with a pepper ball. His refusal also came after Bovino was shown video of the CBP commander climbing over a barrier and personally tackling a man who was walking away after calling Bovino a fascist. (Despite the video evidence, and to a federal judge’s dismay, in the deposition, Bovino wouldn’t even admit he’d tackled that man.)
I shared the lawyer’s exchange with Bovino with Ashley Howard, author of “Midwest Unrest: 1960s Urban Rebellions and the Black Freedom Movement,” who has written thoughtfully about the way the words “riot” and “rioter” have been used to depoliticize and delegitimize violent protest. But, in this case, the federal government is using “riot” to describe nonviolent protest. Bovino was shown the video footage of the pastor being hit by federal agents and still wouldn’t say whether any peaceful protesters had been in attendance. “It would be comically absurd if it wasn’t so terrifying,” Howard said of Bovino’s testimony. “People who can use force with impunity need to justify the use of that force, and so they must portray these people, regardless of how they’re engaging, as violent, as rioters.” “They have a vested interest in suppressing this type of protest,” Howard noted, “and so they need to drum up this idea that they are in imminent danger and that the people who are out in the streets pose an immediate and violent threat.” To be clear, the stretchy use of the word “riot” didn’t start with the Trump administration. Howard’s book, which focuses on the 1960s, quotes the U.S. criminal code, which shows that it’s easy for the government to paint a protest (or even a gathering) as a “riot.” “It’s three people,” Howard said. “Three people acting in concert, and that can be a group of high school students tipping over a trash can. That can be people out in the street blocking a car. They can use that designation of ‘riot’ or ‘riots’ as they see fit. And that’s what makes it so dangerous.” The day after his October arrest, the Rev. Woolf told a reporter, “It’s just foolish to be called, like, a violent rioter by someone when you’re with a clerical collar, and you’re simply trying to express your First Amendment rights.” “Foolish” doesn’t really get at it. It’s more authoritarian. Tricia McLaughlin isn’t the first government official to try to weaponize language in this way. But the government’s push to immediately dehumanize Good in the wake of her killing is just another sign of how authoritarian this government is becoming.
Jarvis DeBerry is an opinion editor for MS NOW Daily. 
