Two days. Two cities. Multiple people shot by federal agents. The same justifications. The same language. And a growing sense that we’re being quietly trained to accept something we shouldn’t.
On Wednesday, Renee Nicole Good was shot and killed in Minneapolis by an ICE officer. She was a U.S. citizen. She had just dropped her child off at school. According to local officials and witnesses, she was not the target of any enforcement action. She was an observer, watching and documenting an ICE operation in her neighbourhood. Within hours, federal authorities framed the killing as self-defence, claiming her vehicle had been “weaponized.”
On Thursday, it happened again. This time in Portland.
Federal agents shot and injured two people during what the Department of Homeland Security described as a “targeted vehicle stop” involving a Venezuelan national. Once again, the explanation followed a now-familiar script. Agents identified themselves. The driver allegedly “weaponized his vehicle.” An agent fired what was described as a “defensive shot.” The vehicle fled. The injured were later found by local police and taken to hospital. Their conditions remain unknown.
Oregon’s Attorney General has launched a formal investigation into whether federal officers acted outside the scope of their lawful authority. Portland’s mayor called the shooting “deeply troubling” and demanded that ICE end operations in the city. He explicitly referenced the killing of Renee Nicole Good, noting the growing public outrage and the widening rift between federal authorities and local governments.
Two incidents alone do not automatically make a trend. But when the facts, the language, and the official responses line up this closely, it becomes impossible to ignore the pattern taking shape.
And that’s what scares me.
What’s alarming isn’t only the shootings themselves, as serious as that is. It’s how quickly they are explained away. How fast the narrative is locked in. How familiar the phrasing already feels. “Weaponized vehicle.” “Defensive shot.” “Officer safety.” These terms appear almost instantly, before independent investigations have begun, before evidence has been reviewed, before the public has had time to absorb what actually happened.
Language matters. It doesn’t just describe events, it frames them. It tells us which questions are acceptable and which are meant to be dismissed. When lethal force is justified immediately, using the same stock phrases over and over, accountability doesn’t just get delayed. It gets crowded out.
What makes these incidents especially troubling is who is being harmed. In Minneapolis, it was a citizen who was not accused of a crime. In Portland, it was two people shot during a traffic stop that escalated in seconds. These were not armed standoffs. These were not shootouts. These were encounters involving vehicles, confusion, fear, and heavily armed federal agents operating in civilian spaces.
Observing government action is legal. Recording enforcement activity is legal. Being present in public space is legal. Even driving away from a frightening or confusing encounter is not, on its own, a capital offence. Yet the way these incidents are being framed suggests a dangerous shift in how “threat” is being defined and deployed.
The broader context matters too. These shootings are occurring during an aggressive expansion of federal immigration enforcement, under an administration that has shown open hostility toward local governments, civil liberties concerns, and public dissent. When that political posture meets armed enforcement on the ground, history tells us things can escalate quickly.
And history is worth remembering here.
Nazi Germany did not begin with gas chambers. It did not begin with mass extermination. It began gradually. With language. With expanded police powers. With people labeled as threats. With violence justified as necessary for order, safety, and national security. Each step was framed as reasonable. Temporary. Defensive. Until it wasn’t.
That comparison isn’t about accusing today’s officials of Nazism. It’s about understanding how normalization works. Atrocities don’t arrive fully formed. They are built, one justification at a time, as the public’s tolerance is slowly recalibrated.
Normalization is the real danger. First something is shocking. Then it’s debated. Then it’s defended. Then it’s routine. We’ve watched this cycle play out before, with policing, with surveillance, with emergency powers that quietly become permanent.
I don’t want to live in a country where multiple federal shootings in two days barely register as news. I don’t want to live in a country where a woman like Renee Nicole Good is reduced to a line in a press statement. And I don’t want to accept a future where every civilian killed in a confusing encounter is retroactively transformed into a “threat” to protect the system that killed them.
Accountability is not anti-law-enforcement. Oversight is not chaos. Asking hard questions is not disloyalty.
It’s civic responsibility.
Right now, what I’m seeing looks less like isolated incidents and more like a warning flare. And the most dangerous part isn’t what’s happening. It’s how quickly we’re being asked to get used to it.
