Karoline Leavitt Flips Out Over Anti-ICE Protests in Minneapolis
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt can’t understand why the country is up in arms over the ICE-induced violence taking place in Minneapolis.
“It’s striking that all weekend you had agitators and violent citizens in the streets of Minneapolis protesting—protesting what, exactly?” Leavitt asked while addressing reporters outside the White House Monday.
Nationwide protests took place over the weekend after Agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Nicole Good Wednesday. More than 1,000 individual demonstrations were planned. Good was a 37-year-old mother who, alongside her wife and dog, had just dropped her 6-year-old child off at school. Ross is an Iraq War veteran who worked for Homeland Security for more than a decade before he pointed his firearm into the open driver’s side window of Good’s SUV, shooting her several times in the face.
Administration officials immediately worked to shove the extrajudicial killing under the rug, claiming that Ross had acted in self-defense. Donald Trump claimed that Good “viciously ran over” the agent—an allegation immediately disproven by video footage captured from several different angles. Still, the administration decided to brand Good as a domestic terrorist.
Even as the rhetoric fell apart, other officials, including Vice President JD Vance, argued that Good’s death was effectively her own fault on the basis that she was “brainwashed,” that the national outrage was little more than a Democratic-fueled smear campaign, and that protesting ICE was not a valid expression of Americans’ First Amendment rights.
“Apparently, they are protesting the removal of heinous murderers and rapists and criminals from a city that I can guarantee you, when you look at the list of the illegal criminals that ICE is removing from our communities every day, not a single person in those protests, and not a single person standing here that works in the mainstream media in Washington, D.C., would want those individuals in your neighborhood, in your community, around your children, and around your families,” Leavitt said on Monday.
But that’s largely untrue: The Trump administration’s pledge to prioritize violent criminals in its mass deportation scheme has not panned out. ICE agents have been tasked with arresting upward of 3,000 undocumented immigrants a day at Homeland Security adviser Stephen Miller’s direction. That gargantuan figure has largely forced agents to focus on noncriminal immigrants and has even sent them hunting for potential deportees at kids’ sport practices.
The unpalatable development has tanked job satisfaction for ICE officials and agents alike, who have reportedly never been so miserable, despite constant praise and material bonuses from the White House.
Meanwhile, ICE’s presence has made some cities across the country significantly less safe. In 2025, before Good’s death, the agency killed 32 people—its deadliest year in more than two decades.
