Washington: The more you watch the chilling video of an ICE officer shooting Renee Nicole Good dead in Minneapolis, the more you can’t help but conclude that this was an act of wholly unnecessary violence against an American citizen, if not murder.

The brute force with which Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and the wider Trump administration insisted this was an act of self-defence was a feat of gaslighting. In reality, they gave the game away themselves. There is no feasible way they could have been so sure of what happened so quickly.

A law enforcement agent sprays a line of protesters with chemical spray at the scene of the shooting in Minneapolis.Credit: AP

But ICE and the Department of Homeland Security have form when it comes to misrepresenting encounters with protesters. It was laid out – and called out – by a federal judge less than two months ago.

When ICE began targeting the US city of Chicago in September, in what was dubbed Operation Midway Blitz, they came up against a familiar presence of demonstrators – something ICE agents are used to after nearly a year of Trump’s deportation blitz.

Much of the protest activity focused on an immigration detention facility in Broadview, in the Chicago suburbs. As clashes escalated, protesters and journalists were hit with what legal advocates described as excessive force, including “tear gas, rubber bullets, pepper-balls, flash grenades and other repressive tools”.

A number of legal groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, took Noem and the DHS to court seeking an injunction. The plaintiff in the case was the Chicago Headline Club, representing journalists who were coming under fire for doing their jobs.

A makeshift memorial to Renee Nicole Good near the site of her shooting.Credit: AP

In explaining her decision to grant a temporary........

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