For Texas Democrats, Minnesota ICE shooting can’t become a flashpoint | Opinion
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Democrats risk losing if campaign frames contest as party vs. police.
- Criticism should target federal enforcement policy, not individual officers.
- Texas Democrats must show more respect for police to win future elections.
If the fall election turns into Democrats vs. the police, Democrats will lose.
Right or wrong, that’s politics.
Horrendous law enforcement deaths — like an ICE agent’s killing of Renee Nicole Good, 37, on Jan. 7 in Minneapolis — are both maddening and frightening. They deserve answers.
But Democrats must not twist legitimate complaints about the Trump administration’s shadowy, aggressive immigration enforcement into a broad campaign against law officers, or against policing itself.
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison got this right.
“If anyone broke the law in today’s act of violence, I will do all I can to ensure they are held accountable,” he said, speaking carefully in his role as the state’s top litigator but not the chief prosecutor.
His criticism was aimed where it belonged: at the Trump administration’s severe misuse of police power, not at a split-second, life-or-death decision by a federal agent confronting a swerving vehicle.
Other Democrats rushed to convict the agent.
“There is nothing to suggest the shooting of an unarmed woman in Minneapolis was justified,” Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the U.S. House Democrats’ leader, wrote on X.com.
But someone behind the wheel of a lurching SUV is not unarmed.
“We have someone dead in their car for no reason whatsoever,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said, in a state still jarred by the police restraint killing six years ago of Texan George Floyd
ICE agents had a bad reason to be in Minnesota — chasing new TikTok videos.
The agent might have responded in anger or panic. But the shooting itself could have a valid cause. A veering SUV is a risk.
In Texas, Senate candidate Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Dallas, wrote outright: “ICE just murdered a U.S. citizen.”
The confrontation is the result of “racist rhetoric coming from Donald Trump and his allies,” she wrote.
That part is true.
But that still does not make it murder.
The political contrast was clear. In Fort Worth the day before Good was killed, Gov. Greg Abbott was on the campaign trail touting public safety.
“I’ve always had the back of our law enforcement officers,” Abbott said as eight police organizations endorsed him. “And as governor, I will continue to have their back every single day.”
Robert Leonard is the head of the Austin-based Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas, which represents 28,000 officers and has supported the occasional labor Democrat.
Leonard thanked Abbott for his “unwavering support for public safety.”
Tarrant County Commissioner Manny Ramirez, a Republican and a former police labor leader, said Abbott “has stood with us time and time again to hold that thin blue line between chaos and order.”
I didn’t see any Texas Republicans criticizing the ICE agent.
But I did see Gina Hinojosa, the Democratic frontrunner for governor, amplifying criticism from another Democrat.
Hinojosa reshared U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar’s X.com post: “Today in Minneapolis, ICE shot a woman in the head and killed her.” Escobar called any claim of self-defense a “blatant lie.”
This all happened in the same week when Democrats in Washington gathered to honor the Capitol Police and other officers from 20 agencies who defended Congress in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.
More than 100 officers were injured that day. In the same kind of on-the-spot decision, one Capitol Police officer shot a rioter in self-defense.
The Trump administration wants the day erased from history. Democrats rightly remember it with seriousness.
That’s the kind of respect Texas voters expect for police.
This story was originally published January 8, 2026 at 11:28 AM.
