“Fuck Around and Find Out” Is Not a Legal or Moral Standard
The Trump-Vance regime wants you to believe ICE can murder with impunity. They’re wrong.
I hate giving attention to Vice President Jim Dave Vance, the nastiest, most annoying liar in this administration, but I urge you to read the transcript of his January 8, 2026, guest appearance at the White House Daily Press Briefing.
It demonstrates the determination of the Trump-Vance regime to sanctify the killing of Renee Nicole Good in her Honda Pilot by masked ICE agent Jonathan Ross. This is not merely bluster and obfuscation; the administration has constructed another world where the victim is the villain, and if this story is successfully rewritten, more Americans will die.
Mr. Vance squawked at the WH podium:
“That woman [who died] was there to interfere with a legitimate law enforcement operation in the United States of America. What that headline leaves out is that that woman is part of a broader left-wing network to attack, to dox, to assault, and to make it impossible for our ICE officers to do their job… sometimes using domestic terror techniques…. She was trying to ram this guy with her car. He shot back. He defended himself…. [R]amming an ICE officer with your car […] justifies being shot.”
Mr. Vance knows the footage is genuinely ambiguous, but he feigns that it is indisputably exculpatory. There is no widespread agreement that Ms. Good “tried to ram” Mr. Ross with her car. Mr. Vance may well be describing a parallel universe. I watched the videos and believe my eyes, not the vice president’s. I replaced my failing old monitor with a 5K Ultrawide, hoping I could find the truth in the extra pixels. It is still unclear and certainly not obvious—I do not see the “vehicular weaponization” the administration describes. I want to. I want very much to conclude that ICE agents are not allowed to murder with impunity, but I cannot.
To be clear, nobody should run over federal agents. Dreadful things should happen to anybody who tries. Even though I routinely call masked ICE agents “thugs,” I want to see them tried, not injured. But the administration is more bloodthirsty.
I doubt there was contact between Mr. Ross and the Honda Pilot. But even if the SUV touched him, it could only have been a slight, gentle nudge. President Donald Trump claimed Mr. Ross was “run over” by the Pilot. That is a lie. It absolutely did not happen. Since Mr. Trump misled the public once already, it would be willfully dumb to give him any benefit of the doubt. Or as the old saying in Tennessee goes: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me—you can’t get fooled again.”
Mr. Vance desperately wants us to take his word over our senses.
“But the simple fact is, what you see is what you get in this case. You have a woman who is trying to obstruct a legitimate law enforcement operation. Nobody debates that. You have a woman who aimed her car at a law enforcement officer and pressed on the accelerator. Nobody debates that.”
It is “debated.” Mr. Vance was debating it right then. The video shows the vehicle’s wheels turned all the way away from the officer. I wish I knew whether Ms. Good was obstructing any legitimate law enforcement operation, but no evidence of the lead-up to the incident is public. She could have been a protester, sure, but the Department of Homeland Security said, “violent rioters [were] blocking ICE officers,” and there was no violent riot present. So, I have no reason to take the administration at its word alone that she was obstructing anyone as part of a riot that did not happen.
Republicans claim, essentially, that anyone impeding immigration enforcement gets what they get. “Fuck around, find out,” they brag. FAFO was added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary in 2025, defined as “an expression of warning or schadenfreude.” It is not tenable for the official position of this government to be that its opponents deserve death or any other bad outcome that comes to them.
If Mr. Trump or his servants were wise, they would fucking stop with this rhetoric. They will not. Instead, Mr. Vance suggested those outraged by masked ICE thugs were domestic terrorists. Stupid. If each of this administration’s critics today desisted from opposing the excesses of Mr. Trump’s immigration enforcement, a teenager tomorrow in a Home Depot parking lot who saw men in “shiesties” harassing day laborers would talk shit. DHS, ICE, and CBP will never be beyond or without critique.
There will always be protesters. That is immutable. Mr. Vance’s attempts to conflate demonstrators and activists with violence may even energize them further. So, will the administration always reserve the right to kill them? Because if the federal government says today it has the privilege to shoot anyone viewed as disrupting its operations, that is a demand for the power to do so again tomorrow, and forever.
Do Messrs. Trump and Vance really see no alternative?
Mr. Vance said:
“And we cannot say that when a far-left fringe is inciting violence against our brave law enforcement officials, that we’re no longer going to enforce the law. That’s rewarding the very people who are engaged in this garbage.”
The Trump administration is happy with how things turned out and is not seeking to prevent another event like Ms. Good’s death, which means it permits recurrence.
In 2017, Mr. Trump’s evil vizier Stephen Miller ranted to CBS’s Face the Nation:
“[O]ur opponents, the media, and the whole world will soon see… that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.”
No. Wrong. They will. So long as anybody has authority, there will be an American who questions their power.
Mr. Vance has similar fantasies:
“[Mr. Ross] is protected by absolute immunity. He was doing his job…. The unprecedented thing is the idea that a local official can actually prosecute a federal official with absolute immunity.”
Unless Mr. Ross’s job was “killing women,” shooting Ms. Good was outside the scope of his duties.
Mr. Trump told The New York Times, when asked if anything limited his powers:
“[O]ne thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
Unquestioned power. Absolute immunity. There is no reason to believe someone’s insistence that they cannot be constrained, especially in a country whose great Founding Fathers agonized over the separation of powers. When a villain says, “Nothing can stop me,” they mean that they fear punishment and hope you will let them get away with their crimes.
ICE agents have no “absolute immunity.” If federal law enforcement is never accountable for anything, the horrors of that ability would be well-known and well-feared. Mr. Vance says “absolute,” but he is referring to “Supremacy Clause immunity.”
The Supreme Court in the 1890 case In re Neagle framed it thusly:
“[I]f the prisoner is held in the state court to answer for an act which he was authorized to do by the law of the United States, which it was his duty to do as [agent] of the United States, and if, in doing that act, he did no more than what was necessary and proper for him to do, he cannot be guilty of a crime under the law of the state.”
But that same paragraph also says:
“There must always be a preliminary examination by a committing magistrate, or some similar authority, as to whether there is an offense to be submitted to a jury.”
So, there is a mechanism to establish if an officer is a scofflaw or if his actions were “reasonable and proper.” Lawfare explains:
“Courts conduct a situation-specific inquiry into both the scope of the federal officer’s authorized duties and whether the officer’s actions were reasonable (or ‘necessary and proper’) in carrying out a federal duty.”
Mr. Ross may or may not be immune, but a court determines that—it is not as definitive as Mr. Vance claims. Immunity is a defense to be asserted, not some inherent quality that precludes examination. One wonders why the vice president would confidently make a procedural statement so false—is he ignorant? Has he imagined his whole life that a pissed-off Park Police could roughly handle him if he were caught putting on his guyliner after dark in a national park? Or is he attempting to stymie the investigation?
Of course, Mr. Vance is trying to stop the investigation. The administration’s behavior is exactly what you would expect if you suspected it was going to do a cover-up. Not only did Mr. Ross flee the scene in his van, but the Daily Mail reported “[g]un-toting feds in ski masks swarm[ed] the ICE agent shooter’s home to retrieve belongings as the house sits empty amid claims he has gone into hiding.” Would it surprise anyone if Mr. Ross was moved out of Minnesota to be unavailable to law enforcement, like any other gangster “lying low?”
According to a conversation between Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison and one-man news team Aaron Parnas, “State investigators are being barred from accessing key evidence, including ballistic evidence, Good’s car, and other materials, by federal authorities, with the FBI now handling the investigation and limiting state access. This means Minnesota officials do not currently have custody of the car, the gun, or the shell casings from the bullets fired by ICE agent Jonathan Ross.”
The officer involved in the shooting is in the wind, and the evidence is under the control of a federal government whose principals have already given their conclusions and misstated facts to support them. Sus. Is it any wonder that Minnesota wants to run its own parallel investigation? Mr. Trump’s attempt to put his thumb on the scale has done Mr. Ross a disservice, too—even if the officer is cleared, nobody could trust that the conclusion was not predetermined.
On that same Thursday, Luis David Nico Moncada and Yorlenys Betzabeth Zambrano-Contreras, Venezuelan nationals whom both DHS and Portland officials describe as having “nexus” with the Tren de Aragua gang, were shot by federal agents. Again, in a car. Again, DHS claims the driver attempted to ram agents with the vehicle. It could be true, but how can anyone believe the Department, when it lied about Ms. Good one day before? This is not meant as a rhetorical question, or to draw any conclusions about Mr. Moncada or Ms. Zambrano-Contreras—they may well be crooks—but to show that the rampant dishonesty of this government undermines the legitimacy of any state violence.
It may be the case that stepping in the path of cars to justify shooting at the drivers has been a tradition of Border Patrol officers for more than a decade, as indicated in a 2013 U.S. Customs and Border Protection Use of Force Review conducted by The Police Executive Research Forum:
“It appears that CBP practice allows shooting at the driver of any suspect vehicle that comes in the direction of agents. It is suspected that in many vehicle shooting cases, the subject driver was attempting to flee from the agents who intentionally put themselves into the exit path of the vehicle, thereby exposing themselves to additional risk and creating justification for the use of deadly force…. The cases suggest that some of the shots at suspect vehicles are taken out of frustration when agents who are on foot have no other way of detaining suspects who are fleeing in a vehicle. Most reviewed cases involved non-violent suspects who posed no threat other than a moving vehicle. There is little doubt that the safest course for an agent faced with an oncoming vehicle is to get out of the way of the vehicle.”
This could have been prevented, frankly, if DHS had taken the recommendation from that report to change the “shooting at vehicles” policy to:
“Agents shall not discharge their firearms at or from a moving vehicle unless deadly physical force is being used against the police officer or another person present, by means other than a moving vehicle.”
I also thought it was interesting just how abjectly disparaging Mr. Vance was towards Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (who should be Vice President). Mr. Vance called him: “a guy who just quit because his fraudulent activities have been uncovered,” “a joke,” “unbelievabl[y] incompeten[t].” Sickening to see Mr. Vance’s overindulgence in spite and scorn when, during the 2024 Vice Presidential debates, Messrs. Vance and Walz were so polite to each other that Mr. Walz was criticized for bringing the best out of Mr. Vance. Obviously, that was only a performance—a shame.
I never expected much from Mr. Vance, but if he were a real politician, and not an authoritarian aspirant, he would make a private call to Mr. Walz, leaning on their shared camaraderie at the 2024 debate, and coordinate a response that does not ask Americans to take sides. That better world is never to be.
So much of this criticism would have been preempted had the administration said, “We will investigate and see what the facts are.” The most obvious reason to volunteer preemptive exculpation is for Mr. Trump to let his thugs think they are untouchable. Do not put it past this president to award Mr. Ross some bullshit medal at the upcoming State of the Union. If the slaying does not become unambiguously politically poisonous, Republicans will brag about it for the next decade.
Representative Jasmine Crockett posted on Facebook:
“Renee Good was murdered in broad daylight, and Republicans are acting as if it is ok. Where is your decency? Where is your humanity? When will y’all develop a backbone and actually represent the people that sent you here?”
I fear Ms. Crockett, by appealing to a common morality with today’s Republican Party, is speaking into a void. They loved this broad daylight murder.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, who loves killing puppies, delivered remarks over the weekend from behind a podium that said: “One of ours. All of yours.” Whatever that means seems ominous—I assume when Ms. Noem learns exactly how many times I have called her an idiot, or mocked her affair with Corey Lewandowski, or suggested that she should be tried in The Hague, I will share the same fate as whatever will happen to “All of yours.” For this administration, there is an “us,” there is a “them,” and there are no limits or laws as to how the out-group shall be handled.
On New Year’s Day, the Hexmobile was rear-ended at a traffic light. When I saw the other driver was an elderly Latino man, with Maryland historic plates and a thick accent, I decided against reporting the scrape to the police—I am otherwise meticulous about filing insurance claims, but in this instance, I let it go. Even the possibility that police attention could attract ICE was more than my heart could bear. I feared for my own safety, too—I had a draft of the forthcoming essay: “Throat GOAT Donald Owes America the Epstein Files” on my passenger seat. This shit is why. An agency allowed or even encouraged to use unchecked violence against the regime’s enemies is a risk to everyone, not only immigrants.
Hold onto this moment. Do not disbelieve your eyes. Demand investigation. If Ms. Good emerges after an honest accounting as a villain, so be it—at least the administration will have been forced to unearth the truth. And if Mr. Ross is a murderer, he should go to jail. Mr. Trump’s goons must not be allowed to kill Americans and lie about them—when they do so, it must come at a cost for them, or else it will for us.