One day probably very soon college psychology and political science lectures will be based on what happened Wednesday in Minneapolis.
Videos emerged almost instantly of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent shooting and killing a motorist. But politicians and many Americans on social media, at least quickly came to starkly different conclusions about what had happened and who was at fault.
It’s still very early. But generally, people who tended to support President Donald Trump and his deportation policies quickly sympathized with the still-unnamed ICE agent, arguing he feared being run over by the 37-over-old driver, Renee Nicole Good. Trump critics tended to quickly label it murder, arguing the fleeing woman was turning her car away from the officers. (CNN has a good video breakdown that shows how the incident unfolded from multiple angles.)
Virtually everything in our polarized society is a Rorschach test these days, but this might be Example A1 in the Trump era. And it will take some time to see which view Americans side with more.
But one thing is clear at this early juncture: The scene Wednesday in Minneapolis has injected urgency into a debate over ICE and its controversial tactics.
Americans have been quite skeptical of ICE for much of the past year. Now we have a flashpoint that could move or harden views about one of the most significant ways in which Trump has recast American society.
To the extent Americans sympathize more with the agent, it could marshal support for the administration’s claims that such agents need to engage the way they did on Wednesday.
To the extent Americans believe this was murder, it could epitomize a perceived overzealous heavy-handedness and contribute to the political unraveling of Trump’s often-militarized mass-deportation project, has been so central to the president’s second term.
