How Not to Think About the ICE Shooting in Minnesota

By Charles C. W. Cooke 

Thursday, January 08, 2026 

I am not entirely sure what I think about what happened in Minnesota yesterday. On balance, I think that the ICE officer was likely legally justified in his actions, even if I wish that it had turned out differently, but I am always open to counterarguments, as well as to the emergence of new evidence. These cases are always difficult, and they usually revolve around minutiae. That the crucial details of the event have immediately been swallowed up by maximalist sloganeering is unhelpful in the extreme. 

As a result, I thought it might be useful to lay out how not to think about this case. Sometimes, the best way to arrive at a reasonable conclusion is to rule out all the distractions and the red herrings, and, since yesterday afternoon, I have seen so many of both as to make clear thinking quite tough. Here, in my estimation, are the main lines that ought to dismissed: 

• “ICE executed/assassinated a peaceful protester.” 

This is not true. Certainly, one can watch the various videos of the incident and come to different conclusions about the appropriateness of the officers’ choices. But none of those conclusions can be that the deceased was “executed” or “assassinated.” The officer opened fire because the deceased’s car started moving. The material question is whether he was justified in feeling threatened by that movement. Irrespective of one’s answer to that, his response was quite obviously triggered by the deceased’s immediate actions, and thus it was not in any sense an “execution.” 

• “The deceased didn’t deserve to be killed.” 

This is true — in a cosmic sense. In the abstract, we would not impose the death penalty on a person who blocked traffic and resisted arrest, just as, in the abstract, we would not have imposed the death penalty on Ashli Babbitt. But this is not a cosmic question. The whole thing happened in a matter of seconds. This is about cause and effect, at speed. “Deserve” doesn’t enter into it. (Yes, this also goes for those who have responded to the story by saying “FAFO” — as if any resistance to authority ought to carry an automatic death sentence.) 

• “Knowing what we now know, the officer . . .” 

This is also not a useful way to think about what happened. We have lots of different angles, the testimony of eyewitnesses, and the ability to slow down the footage frame by frame. We can see in what direction the car’s wheels were turned, the effect of the ice on the ground, and the eventual trajectory of the car once the shots had been fired. The officer could see none of those things. This does not mean that his decisions were correct. It does mean that he was making them in different circumstances than we are. 

• The deceased “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer . . .” 

So said President Trump. It’s not true. It’s probable that the officer was hit by the car, and, if so, that adds weight to his decision to open fire. (Again: That he reasonably believed he was being targeted would probably be sufficient to justify his actions, even if he was never actually hit.) Still, it’s not at all clear that this was “willful,” and, while being hit by a car is always “violent,” the characterization of the collision as “vicious” is hyperbolic. A reasonable observer who had not seen the video would read the words “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over” and come to a considerably different conclusion as to what had happened than is shown in the footage. That’s a problem. 

• The deceased was just “a 37-year-old lady in a Honda Pilot.” 

This line is obviously intended to juxtapose the armed, male ICE officer with the unarmed, female civilian victim, and thereby to make the latter seem less of a threat. But it’s absurd. This wasn’t a bar fight. A Honda Pilot weighs around 4,000 pounds — pounds that respond to its accelerator identically regardless of the strength of the person controlling it. The driver could have been a mother or a retiree or Mike Tyson or a computer, and the car would have done exactly the same amount of damage to any human body that it hit. In this respect, a vehicle is the same as a firearm. The important question is what the driver did with the car, and what the officer could reasonably have concluded was happening in the moment. The driver’s biography is not important. 

• “This could have happened to anyone.” 

No, it couldn’t. This is the bizarre cousin of the “executed” line. A lightning strike could happen to anyone. This incident could not have. That the deceased was there in her car did not necessarily make her death legitimate, but it did make it more likely than if she had not been there in her car. She was not chosen at random. She decided to interfere with law enforcement, and, subsequently, to refuse to follow law enforcement’s orders, and those decisions had knock-on effects. Whether those knock-on effects were justified remains to be seen, but they were one possible result of her choices, not a freak occurrence staged by a capricious universe. 

• “ICE shouldn’t have been there in the first place.” 

This is nonsense. We have a lot of duly passed immigration laws in the United States, and the duly elected head of the federal government is permitted — required, even — to enforce them without the acquiescence of the states. This is Constitution 101, and the alternative is not unicorns and rainbows, but nullification, insurrection, and chaos. It is entirely reasonable to criticize the prosecutorial choices of the executive branch, or the tactics deployed by a given agency, but to propose that the mere existence of federal agents is responsible for the conduct of those who wish to undermine them is to invert our system of government and make a case for anarchy. It cannot stand, and, if the deceased had been, say, a tax protester, it would not be expected to. 

Addendum: 

I missed another popular red herring in my earlier post: Namely, the claim that the officer in Minnesota was justified in opening fire, but that, rather than shooting to kill, he ought merely to have “shot the tires out” or “shot only once” or “shot to wound.” 

Outside of the movies, this is not a thing. One is permitted to use one’s gun if one reasonably believes that one’s life is in danger, and, if one reasonably believes that one’s life is in danger, one shoots to kill. For good reason, officers are trained to shoot at the person who presents the threat, and, when doing so, to shoot at their center mass. To do otherwise is to risk shooting someone else, or to risk shooting a bystander, or to risk having the round ricochet wildly off a hard substance (like, say, a metal car). There is no circumstance in which an officer — or a civilian, for that matter — is allowed to use a gun for self-defense, but only sort of. That is a TV trope, not a real-world rule. 

As for the idea that the first shot was justified but the subsequent shots were not? That, too, is ridiculous. If a minute had elapsed between shots, that would be one thing. In that case, the second shot would be part of a separate incident, with a fresh risk calculation and a separate set of details. But, here, the second and third shots were part of the same moment that justified the first. Naturally, it is entirely unworkable to expect a person who fears for his life to distinguish between the need for a first, second, or third shot when those shots are all fired within a few seconds of one another. As such, the case against the second and third shots in this circumstance is also the case against the first. If that was legitimate, so were the others. If it was illegitimate, the others were as well.