Opinion – Jasmine Crockett breaks down on House floor over Minneapolis shooting

Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) has put to words what so many people are feeling: frustration, grief and disbelief about the tragic death of Renee Good.   “It is so hard to sit here sometimes. Because I didn’t come to Congress to write laws or do things that are hurting people. I’m just asking if there’s any decency or heart or courage on that side of the aisle.”She wasn’t performing. She wasn’t posturing. She was pleading. And she kept going.“A woman was killed. She was shot in her head, and y’all are pretending like nothing happened. I remember when Charlie Kirk was killed. Do you? Do you remember what our response was? Our response wasn’t to sit there and pretend like it was OK. Is it OK because you have a badge?”Here’s more: “Can y’all not just have a little bit of courage and humanity? A child has lost her mom and y’all want to pretend that it is OK.”It’s not OK. None of this is.Renee Nicole Good was a 37-year-old American mother of three — kids ages 15, 12 and 6 — children who are now growing up without their mother. According to her ex-husband, who is also the father of her two oldest children, Renee was shot and killed by an ICE agent on Jan. 7 while returning from dropping her 6-year-old off at school.Like so many of you, I watched the video. I watched a mother be gunned down in her car on a residential Minneapolis street. And before any investigation could happen, the public was told, by our own government, to believe she was a domestic terrorist. There is no evidence of that. None. We don’t know what led up to the encounter. We don’t know what was said before shots were fired. What we do know is that labels came faster than facts.A witness, Caitlin Callenson, told NPR that Renee was given conflicting orders: one agent told her to drive away while another told her to get out of the vehicle. And an expert on police use of force, Geoffrey Alpert of the University of South Carolina, reviewed the video and told The New York Times, “The way you evaluate this is you look to see what’s the imminent threat to life, and there is none. She’s leaving.”That matters.Especially when Minnesota officials say they’re being blocked from accessing evidence. Gov. Tim Walz addressed that concern directly.“It feels now that Minnesota has been taken out of the investigation, it feels very very difficult that we will get a fair outcome, and I say that only because people in positions of power have already passed judgement. From the president to the vice president to Kristi Noem, they’ve stood and told you things that are verifiably false.”Here’s what we can see with our own eyes: the video shows Renee’s tires pointed away from the agent. By all appearances, she posed no significant physical threat to the officer, let alone a mortal one. Yet her life is now over, one of her kids whose father previously passed away is now an orphan, and the other two are motherless.This is frightening. Because if federal agents can kill U.S. citizens on camera, and political leaders rush to justify it, then the most basic liberties Americans depend on are at risk.What makes this even harder to ignore is that this wasn’t always the tone. After George Floyd was killed in 2020, President Trump said this:“All Americans were rightly sickened and revolted by the brutal death of George Floyd. My administration is fully committed that, for George and his family, justice will be served. He will not have died in vain.”Back then, I guess “law and order” still left room for accountability. For restraint. For the idea that a badge does not mean immunity.Now, that obligation seems to be gone. We can’t normalize that.Lindsey Granger is a NewsNation contributor and co-host of The Hill’s commentary show “Rising.” This column is an edited transcription of her on-air commentary.Copyright 2026 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.