Gavin Newsom is calling the fatal ICE shooting of a woman in Minnesota “state sponsored terrorism.”
The California governor joined the chorus of critics condemning the killing of 37-year-old mother Renee Nicole Good by a still-unidentified ICE agent who shot her multiple times through her driver’s side window as she was driving away from him.
The Department of Homeland Security has dubiously asserted that the woman had been engaged in an act of “domestic terrorism” because, by their account, she attempted to run over multiple federal agents with her vehicle. But videos of the incident, taken from various angles, and eyewitness accounts suggest otherwise.
That evidence has led Newsom, 58, and others to place responsibility for Good’s death on DHS, which just last year was exposed for having provided false information about an officer-involved shooting of a Chicago woman.
“STATE. SPONSORED. TERRORISM,” the governor’s press office wrote on X, followed by a post showing Noem in an enlarged cowboy hat with the caption “All hat. No clue.”
Newsom added on his other account that Trump’s “personal police force has rampaged across America” over the past year.
“His administration has driven extremism and cruelty while discarding basic safeguards and accountability,” he wrote. “Now, a 37-year-old U.S. citizen is dead. Donald Trump owns this. His deliberate escalation of intimidation and chaos has consequences. His reckless crackdown must end.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Donald Trump bizarrely responded to the incident by saying the officer, who didn’t appear to be injured after the shooting, was lucky to be alive.
Noem’s story has been called into question by Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, and a number of law enforcement experts and political commentators.
“Even if you grant that the driver here was going right at the ICE officer, there are clear problems with these statements,” MS NOW contributor Sam Stein wrote on X before refuting some of Noem’s claims, point by point.
“1. The officer was out of the way by the time the driver passed, hence why he shot the SIDE window,” he wrote. “2. Noem claimed the woman was attacking ‘them’ (multiple). That’s not true, per video. 3. Noem said the driver was attempting to run ‘them’ over (multiple) 4. Noem says the officers had gotten stuck in the snow (they hadn’t, at least per video).”
Fox News hosts have also cast doubt on Noem’s version of events.
John Roberts, for instance, questioned Noem’s assertion that ICE agents had been trying to push their vehicle out of the snow when they were “attacked.”
“There is an area in front of the vehicle that is obscured by the vehicle itself, so we don’t know 100 percent what happened during that incident,” Roberts said, “but what I saw of it does counteract the narrative that they were trying to push their car out of the snow—the ICE agents who were involved here, because that vehicle was clearly in the middle of the street, as it was approached by a couple of federal agents before it sped off.”
Later on The Five, co-host Harold Ford Jr. similarly commented that Noem’s characterization “seemed inconsistent” with released videos of the killing.
