Transcript: Trump’s Agents Kill Citizen—Then Damning New Info Emerges |
The following is a lightly edited transcript of the January 8 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Editor’s note: After we recorded this, The New York Times published a frame-by-frame video analysis of the shooting that further debunks the Trump administration’s version of events.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
On Wednesday, an ICE agent shot and killed a woman in her vehicle on the streets of Minneapolis. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem immediately accused the woman of committing an act of domestic terrorism. Then President Trump posted a misleading video of the affair and blamed it on the victim in truly vile terms. Officials in Minnesota are flatly disputing the official federal government account of the shooting, calling it a reckless act by out-of-control ICE agents. We think the danger of this moment is hard to overstate. There are now heavily armed government militias roaming the streets of U.S. cities, they’ve been given free rein by Trump and Noem, and they appear unbound and unaccountable. So we’re working through all of this with New Republic contributing editor Felipe De La Hoz, who writes well about the need for ICE accountability. Felipe, good to have you on, man.
Felipe De La Hoz: Nice to be here with you, Greg. Wish it was under better circumstances.
Sargent: It’s pretty fucked. So as of this recording, the authorities haven’t released this woman’s name. The government is saying she weaponized the vehicle against ICE agents and that they killed her in justified self-defense. But videos of the event that are floating around online seem to show that the agent in question fired into the vehicle from the side at close to point-blank range after the vehicle had driven past him. And it was going pretty slowly. Felipe, can you bring us up to date on what we know here?
De La Hoz: Sure. So this was all part of, you know, a surge to Minneapolis—and Minnesota more broadly—that is broadly part of the fascination that the administration currently has with that state and city for a number of reasons, including this story about the welfare fraud that has lit up right-wing media.
And so this was part of that broader operation. And it seems that the woman in question, the person who was shot, was either a legal observer or somehow involved in some of the of the protest movements there and had been responding to a raid that was happening in the community.
There are plenty of interviews so far with eyewitnesses, plus, as you mentioned, videos of the event itself, where it seems like the agents are approaching her vehicle, she kind of backs up a little bit, and then slowly turns—begins to turn, is what it looks like is happening—at which point one agent fires what seemed like three or four shots through the windshield and into the open driver’s side window, at which point the car speeds off, hits another car, and eventually a telephone pole.
Sargent: Yeah, I think one thing that’s not clear from the videos I’ve seen—maybe you’ve seen something to help clarify this—the agent who fired the gun might have been standing in front of the car when it first backed up and started to move. But even if that were the case—and again, I don’t know if it is—we’re still in a situation where the car was really visibly turning down the street, not looking like it was trying to ram a guy. And again, he fired into the driver’s side window at close to point-blank range from the side after the car was clearly posing no danger to him whatsoever. This, at an absolute minimum, looks like extraordinary recklessness, right?
De La Hoz: Indeed. Well, there are a few things that we can establish. The car was going very slowly at the time that the shots were fired. As you mentioned, it does seem like the trajectory of the shots indicates........