Like pretty much everyone else in America right now, the cohosts of The View had the tragic shooting death of a Minneapolis woman on their minds. Renee Nicole Good’s shocking killing by an ICE agent was the main topic for discussion on Thursday (January 8) morning’s new show.
Cohosts Whoopi Goldberg, Sara Haines, Joy Behar, Sunny Hostin, and Alyssa Farah Griffin all weighed in on the incident, which has sparked rallying cries among those who believe the killing was unjustified and defiant responses from those who think it was, including the entire federal apparatus.
One person whose response garnered particular vitriol from the cohost was Kristi Noem, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, who, very quickly after videos of the incident went viral, claimed that the victim was committing domestic terrorism at the time of the attack, despite video evidence and eye witness testimonials on the ground contradicting those claims.
Goldberg started the segment by calling footage of the incident “disturbing, awful, tragic, [and] horrendous” and then playing footage of Noem’s statements.
“This is not the first time Kristi Noem has lied to the American people,” Goldberg said. “She’s continuously repeated the lie that ICE didn’t sweep up U.S. citizens in their raids; she lied about whether military vets were deported; and in December, an Illinois Congresswoman called out Noem for lying to Congress on the border and continuously violating court orders.”
“So she’s a liar,” Behar said.
“Yes, she is,” Goldberg affirmed.
Haines was the next to weigh in on the matter and noted some of the failures of Noem’s leadership of ICE agents in reducing training protocols. “It is basic law enforcement training to not step in front of a vehicle that can move, because it creates an opportunity for that vehicle to become a death threat and therefore unnecessary shootings like this. So, although we don’t know who this agent is or many details about him, we do know there was an increased goal last year to double the amount of ICE agents and to hit that number. What they did was they removed all age requirements and cut the training program to less than half of what it had been, while also recruiting people using visuals… that are warlike images,” Haines explained.
After reviewing a recruitment photo styled like the Halo game series imagery with the inscription “Destroy the flood,” Haines added, “[That] is kind of presuming that all of these immigrants are parasitic alien enemies, so it also is recruiting, potentially, the wrong type of people to come and be under-trained to do this job.”
Griffin piggybacked off of Haines’ point and said, “A key point to me that you said [is] in America, the punishment for evading law enforcement in a vehicle or on foot is not death. It simply is not. That is not how our system works… DOJ has specific guidelines that specifically say firearms may not be discharged solely to disable moving vehicles. DHS’s are a bit more nuanced, but it talks about de-escalation. They’re supposed to get de-escalation training in these situations.”
She also condemned people who rushed to issue “partisan” reactions to the story on social media, saying, “When did we become a country that a woman my age and a mother of three is killed — the facts will play out, we may learn more — but is killed, and our first thought is, ‘How do I make this a win for the party I vote with?'”
Behar then chimed in to say, “Are we in the middle of fascist America? Because in just this last week, I’m just going to give you a summary of what we’ve been through, one week: Pete Hegseth started an illegal war for oil in Venezuela; Stephen Miller threatened a military takeover of Greenland; RFK Jr. slashed childhood vaccine recommendations; and ICE shot and killed a United States citizen in Minneapolis. That sort of adds up to me like a dictatorship in the making, that we are now in it. We are in it now. And American people, I think, have to wake up to this a little bit more than we are.”
Hostin then reiterated Haines’ point about Noem’s leadership of ICE, saying, “They cut training for ICE agents in half. It used to be about 13 weeks, and now it’s six weeks.” She also called the shooting of Good an “unlawful killing” and said the “propaganda” from Noem and others about the incident was “Orwellian.” “You must believe what your eyes see, people,” she said.
Goldberg concluded on a somewhat optimistic note by pointing to the protests have begun to follow, saying, “This is what really gives me great hope. People are starting to recognize — from wherever they voted from — that something is terribly wrong, and it makes me feel better, feel like I can take a breath… Because everyone is affected by this. That young lady could have been anybody in this audience… Forget color. Forget it. Could have been anybody. And if they can do this to her, they can do it to you, too.”
The View, weekdays, 11a/10c, ABC
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