The Trump Administration Unleashes a Firehose of Falsehoods to Smear the Woman ICE Killed in Minneapolis

The unjustified killing of a citizen by the state is a massive abuse of power. But there is a whole separate abuse of power in government officials systematically lying to the public about what happened in an effort to shield the government from accountability. That is exactly what Donald Trump and members of his administration have been doing.

Much of the mainstream American media coverage is overly deferential to the government, presumably for fear of reprisal, so you have to look to overseas coverage to get a sense for the scope of the administration’s baldface lies. Here is a thorough fact-check in The Guardian:

The killing of a US citizen by a federal immigration agent in Minneapolis was a five-alarm fire for the Trump administration. But a torrent of untruths, half-truths, smears, and innuendo has been unleashed by the White House, and amplified by its social media and cable television acolytes, in an attempt to douse the flames. …

Good, Noem said, without presenting evidence, had been “stalking and impeding” Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) officers before using her car as a weapon to try to run down the agent who killed her. …

Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary of the homeland security department, a regular administration spokesperson for ICE, declared in a post on X that “one of these violent rioters weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism.”

Multiple ICE officers were hurt, she insisted, when videos of the shooting showed no such thing.

Donald Trump repeated the claims in an inflammatory post on his Truth Social platform on Wednesday afternoon, and in a later interview with the New York Times, adding the disprovable assertion that: “she didn’t try to run him over, she ran him over.”

All politicians bend the truth, of course, or try to put their own spin on the facts. But public officials who systematically spread falsehoods and reverse truth and falsehoods in their official capacity are a different thing altogether. They undermine the American system by using the megaphone of the state to broadcast a Big Lie and to prevent the people from knowing that truth about what their own government is doing.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

© The UnPopulist, 2026

Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X.