United States Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem described the action Renee Nicole GoodA Minneapolis woman was killed Wednesday by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer in what she described as “domestic terrorism.”
Noem said Good refused to obey orders to get out of her car, “arm(ed) her vehicle” and “attempted to run over” an officer. Minnesota officials disputed Noem’s account, citing citations Video Trying to drive away is showing well.
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, a member of the state’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, said Thursday on CNN News that Noem’s statement was a misuse of the term “domestic terrorism.”
President Donald Trump’s administration has turned to the phrase in recent months, including an immigration enforcement-related shooting in October.
In September, the administration issued a memo urging law enforcement to prioritize threats including “violent attempts to shut down immigration enforcement,” saying that “domestic terrorists” are using violence to advance “extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders.” Experts say it violates free speech laws.
Good, a mother of three and a poet, lived in the Minneapolis area where she was fatally shot. She was an American citizen and had no criminal record, the Associated Press reported. Goode’s ex-husband told the AP that she was not an activist and that he did not know her to participate in the protests. Good had dropped off her 6-year-old son at school and was driving when she got home ICE.
The Trump administration has stepped up immigration enforcement in Minneapolis in recent weeks following news of allegations of daycare funding fraud involving locals. Somali community.
What is ‘domestic terrorism’?
Federal agencies have their own definitions of “domestic terrorism.”
According to a 2020 memo, the FBI, citing a specific section of the US Code, defines “domestic terrorism” as acts threatening to human life that violate federal or state criminal laws and appear intended to intimidate or coerce citizens; influencing government policy by intimidation or coercion; or influence the conduct of the government by mass destruction, killing, or kidnapping.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) uses a similar definition, citing a separate statute that defines “domestic terrorism” as dangerous to human life or potentially destructive of critical infrastructure or key resources.
In 2023 the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service wrote: “Unlike foreign terrorism, the federal government does not have a mechanism to formally charge an individual with domestic terrorism, which sometimes makes it difficult (and sometimes controversial) to formally characterize someone as a domestic terrorist.”
In 2022, former FBI agent Michael German, then a fellow at New York University Law School’s Brennan Center for Justice, told PolitiFact that 51 federal laws apply to “domestic terrorism.”
“I think there is and always has been a confusion between the rhetoric and the law when it comes to terrorism,” German told PolitiFact after the Minneapolis shooting. “There is no law authorizing the U.S. government to designate any group or individual in the United States as a ‘domestic terrorist.'”
The federal government periodically revises how it defines threats. For example, in 2025, federal authorities sometimes used the term “nihilistic violent extremists” to describe criminals who are not members of an ideology but appear to be motivated by a desire to “gamify” real-life violence, as one expert put it. Experts told PolitiFact that the term is valid but cautions against overusing it or citing it to obscure other ideological motivations, such as white supremacy.
The Trump administration has expanded the ‘domestic terrorism’ label
DHS rhetoric surrounding Goode’s fatal shooting is similar to a second immigration enforcement-related shooting in October. DHS’s months-long immigration crackdown in Chicago “Operation Midway Blitz”A Border Patrol agent shot U.S. citizen Marimar Martinez five times.
A DHS news release described Martinez as a “domestic terrorist” and accused her of ramming her vehicle into a Border Patrol agent’s car, carrying a semiautomatic weapon and having a “history of doxxing federal agents.”
A federal judge in November granted a motion from prosecutors to dismiss the federal charges against Martinez.
“Ultimately, when everything was evaluated, there was a determination that there were serious questions about the authorities’ narrative,” legal analyst Joy Jackson told CNN.
The government’s use of the term goes beyond immigration and DHS.
After conservative activists Charlie KirkAfter his assassination, Trump issued a memo to the attorney general on September 25 ordering the expansion of “domestic terrorism” priorities to include “politically motivated acts of terrorism such as organized doxing campaigns, swatting, riots, looting, trespassing, assaults, destruction of property, threats of violence and civil disorder”.
Trump signed the executive order days before the appointment AntifaAs a “domestic terrorist” organization, a broad, loosely affiliated coalition of left-wing activists.
US Attorney General Pam Bondi asked federal prosecutors and law enforcement agencies to create a list of groups “engaged in acts of domestic terrorism.”
Legal experts have raised alarm about the memo’s potential violations of the First Amendment.
“Both the order and the memo are groundless in fact and law,” wrote Faiza Patel, liberty and national security director at the Brennan Center for Justice. “Acting on them would violate free speech, potentially putting any person or group at risk of dissent, including investigation and prosecution.”
Experts have also drawn the memo’s attention to left-wing violence. It does not mention the politically motivated killing of Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman a few months ago, a member of the state’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.
“When a policy directive targets one ideological family and relegates others to footnotes, it loses any pretense of neutrality,” Thomas E. Brzozowski, a former Justice Department adviser on domestic terrorism, wrote on Dec. 12.
Experts question Noem’s label of ‘domestic terrorism’
The information is still there surface About what happened before Goode was fatally shot. However, a frame-by-frame analysis of the video footage by The New York Times and The Washington Post found that Goode’s vehicle was moving toward an ICE agent, but the agent was able to get out of the way and fire at least two of three shots from his gun into the side of the car as Goode sped away.
Brzozowski told PolitiFact that Goode was trying to run away, “I think describing it as domestic terrorism is a stretch.”
However, he said of greater concern was Noem’s use of the term “domestic terrorism,” despite no prior actual findings. investigation.
“What it does is effectively delegitimize domestic terrorism, essentially within hours of the incident, by labeling this activity as domestic terrorism,” he said, “a blatantly biased attempt to label it as domestic terrorism”.
“Now what is domestic terrorism? It’s whatever the DHS secretary says? She can characterize anything she wants as domestic terrorism. She’s doing it without any facts to go on.”
Shirin Sinner, a professor at Stanford University Law School, told PolitiFact: “Intentional driving for political purposes could be terrorism in a different context, but the video of the Minneapolis incident shows a woman trying to get away from ICE officers, not kill them. Here, the administration calling her a domestic terrorist and killing a CE officer is pure protest.”
German told PolitiFact that there was no public evidence to suggest Good “engaged in conduct that could be prosecuted under the terrorism chapter of the US Code.”
“So for a government official to call her a domestic terrorist is not supported by law and is completely insulting and prejudicial.”