“There is no genius at the Soros Foundation to strategically allocate funds to left-wing groups,” says a former top domestic terrorism official at the Justice Department.
Tensions remain high in Minneapolis as ICE actions spark protests
Protests continue as students walk out in Minneapolis following an ICE raid and a fatal shooting by federal agents.
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump and senior administration officials have claimed that the Jan. 7 shooting death of Minnesota resident Renee Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent was prompted by Good’s participation in a left-wing extremist network that directs people to attack federal agents.
However, the government has not provided any public evidence linking Good (who was driving his own car when he was shot) to such a network.
Vice President J.D. Vance said at a press conference on January 8 that Ms. Goode’s death was “a tragedy of her own making, and a tragedy of the entire movement against our law enforcement officers, the far left, which has brought together a rabid faction.”
FBI Director Kash Patel went further on the night of January 15th in an interview with the right-wing online show Real America’s Voice.
“The general consensus is that these protests, whether it’s in Minneapolis or Los Angeles or Portland or wherever, are not spontaneous,” Patel said. “They don’t magically appear. … Someone has to pay for the transportation. Someone has to pay for the sign.”
He said the protests against recently stepped up ICE enforcement are, in my opinion, “a coordinated effort to criminally cause chaos and disrupt the community.”
Asked by USA TODAY about the details underlying Patel’s claims, the FBI declined to comment. Ministry of Justice and the white house He did not respond to several requests for comment. And the White House doubled down on its claims of an organized conspiracy, although it did not provide specifics.
“Left-wing organizations are inciting violent riots across the country, conducting systematic attacks on law enforcement officers, organizing illegal poison extraction operations, and arranging drop sites for weapons and riot materials,” White House Press Secretary Abigail Jackson said in a statement. “The Trump Administration is taking a whole-of-government approach to getting to the bottom of this vast network of inciting violence in American society.”
Good’s family and friends said she was a devoutly religious mother of three who was fulfilling her civic duty by supporting anti-ICE protests in her hometown of Minneapolis, where as many as 3,000 federal agents are swarming to hunt undocumented immigrants as part of the Trump administration’s deportation plan.
“Our legal team is aggressively addressing the persistent falsehoods circulating online that misrepresent Renee Good’s background,” said Antonio Romanucci, an attorney representing Good’s family. “Renee and Becca Good were responsible community members, lived peacefully, and did not engage in harmful acts toward others, including the federal officers involved on January 7, 2026.”
Many domestic extremism experts, including former Justice Department and FBI experts, say that while there may be some truth to the claims that a left-wing network exists, there is virtually no evidence that the Trump administration’s claims link it to terrorism or goodness.
There is little in court records or the Justice Department’s indictment to support claims of a national network of well-funded extremists planning violent or destructive confrontations with federal law enforcement.
“There’s no genius Soros Foundation that would strategically allocate money to all these organizations with some kind of master plan,” said Thomas Brzozowski, who served as the Justice Department’s domestic terrorism adviser for nearly a decade until last September.
Brzozowski, who served as an FBI consultant on domestic terrorism cases from 2010 to 2015 before moving to the Justice Department, told USA TODAY that he was in government for an organized left-wing violent extremist network that trained people how to weaponize vehicles, throw bricks and do some of the other acts that President Trump and administration officials have claimed, but found no evidence.
On January 15, as protests over Goode’s death continued, President Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807, which authorizes the president to send in the U.S. military to quell insurrections and civil disturbances.
“I will enact the Insurrection Act to stop Minnesota’s corrupt politicians from not following the law and professional agitators and insurrectionists from attacking ICE patriots who are just trying to do their job. Many presidents have done so…” President Trump said in a social media post.
What happened to Renee Good?
President Trump has dramatically increased immigration enforcement domestically, with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Trump’s immigration adviser Stephen Miller demanding immigration officials make 3,000 arrests per day in May.
Immigration enforcement agents are mainly sent to cities and states run by Democrats, including Chicago, Los Angeles and Massachusetts. Some of the operatives, often wearing masks and full body armor, sprayed protesters with pepper spray, manhandled and detained American citizens, and shot and killed at least 11 people, including Good.
In Minneapolis, Ms. Good was the director of her young son’s school, and the document was related to a document encouraging parents to monitor ICE and direct training after the agency began ramping up raids on the school in recent weeks.
Video of the Jan. 7 encounter in Minneapolis shows Good stopping his Honda Pilot in the middle of a suburban road and driving away as agents approached. As she did so, veteran ICE officer Jonathan Ross shot her three times at close range.
What did Trump, Vance and Noem say?
Within hours of the Jan. 7 incident, Noem described Good’s actions as “domestic terrorism” at a press conference.
Noem said Good disobeyed commands to get out of the car and “used his car as a weapon” to “attempt to run over” Ross, and Noem claimed he fired the fatal shots in self-defense.
Minnesota authorities disputed Noem’s account, citing video that showed Good trying to drive away from agents as Ross fired a second and third shot into the side of the car.
Noem said people like Good were “trained and instructed to run over agents.” And Good herself was part of an “organized” left-wing operation that “targeted (agents) with her car,” Noem said.
Mr. Vance claimed that Mr. Good was part of an “extensive left-wing network that attacks, oppresses, raids, and disables ICE officers from doing their jobs.”
Neither Noem nor Vance have publicly identified specific organizations, legal cases, investigative or intelligence results, training programs, funding sources or communications networks that demonstrate Goode’s involvement in left-wing extremist operations opposed to immigration enforcement in Minneapolis.
The Departments of Homeland Security and Justice and the FBI did not respond to USA TODAY’s questions about providing evidence to support the Trump administration’s claims. The White House did not respond to requests for comment.
Is there a “dissonance” between President Trump’s rhetoric and facts?
Experts in extremism and terrorism law told USA TODAY that the administration’s rhetoric is not consistent with publicly available evidence or understanding of how such domestic networks operate.
Most of the country’s extremist networks are fueled by right-wing grievances and include “nihilistic violent extremist” groups of white supremacists, neo-Nazis and anti-government agitators, Brzozowski and other extremism researchers and former federal law enforcement officials said.
For decades, domestic right-wing extremism and terrorism has far outstripped those committed by left-wing groups, according to the FBI, Justice Department and outside groups.
Terrorists inspired by Islamist ideology accounted for 87% of deaths in attacks on U.S. soil since 1975, most of them in the September 11, 2001 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.
A report released last September by the libertarian CATO Institute said that “right-wingers were the second most motivating ideology, accounting for 391 murders and 11 percent of the total.” “The definition of right-wing terrorist here includes terrorists motivated by white supremacy, anti-abortion beliefs, involuntary celibacy (incels), and other right-wing ideologies.”
A report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies found an unusual increase in incidents allegedly motivated by leftists in 2025, but said that “such violence has risen from very low levels and remains well below historic levels of violence by right-wing and jihadist actors.”
“There’s a dissonance between what I’ve heard law enforcement people say under oath in Congressional hearings and this rhetoric that the Trump administration is using,” Brzozowski said.
One notable exception on the left, Brzozowski said, is the Black Bloc, an anarchist group that has made headlines for setting fire to buildings and cars and attacking police during recent events such as the 1999 World Trade Organization summit in Seattle and the 2020 protests after the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.
Brzozowski said protests and sporadic violence after controversial law enforcement incidents are not in themselves evidence of a professionalized or centrally-led terrorist organization. If such a left-wing network exists, there will be arrests and prosecutions in connection with it, he added.
When authorities start using terms like “domestic terrorism” without evidence of planning, coordination or organizational structure, “the terms are stripped of their meaning,” Brzozowski said in an interview.
Some evidence of “organized anti-ICE” groups
Some analysts say there is certainly something to the Trump administration’s claims of an organized network, although they stop short of describing them as violent instigators or domestic terrorists.
Joshua Sinai, a domestic and international counterterrorism security analyst with more than 30 years of experience, told USA TODAY, “While I downplay any ties to Soros, it appears that there are organized anti-ICE groups that are spearheading protests across the country and providing propaganda and material support to demonstrators.”
Sinai, who worked for several years at the Department of Homeland Security’s National Operations Center during the George W. Bush administration, said he is currently studying all politically motivated violent attackers in the United States and Australia since 2014.
looking for a connection that doesn’t exist
Michael German, a former FBI domestic terrorism investigator and terrorism and civil rights analyst at the Brennan Center for Justice, said the Trump administration has been trying to concoct a false left-wing terrorist plot since the beginning of Trump’s first term, without success.
“The same accusations are being made against Black Lives Matter and environmental groups in 2020,” German said, as well as against a wide range of other left-wing protest groups.
German said law enforcement agencies in the Trump administration and past administrations have “expended significant efforts to identify these networks, but have been unable to produce an indictment that would reveal the existence of such networks.”
During the 2020 protests following Floyd’s killing, FBI agents went undercover to investigate these networks, going into New York City police custody and interviewing arrested protesters, German said. Amid protests surrounding wildfires in Oregon and Northern California, state, local and federal agency officials at the government’s Information Fusion Center reported that “anarchists in vans are moving into fire zones to start fires or delay response.” This report was later proven to be false.
German said he is “not aware of any” evidence linking Good or other anti-ICE protesters to domestic terrorism.
German said of the Trump administration’s claims about Goode and unspecified extremist networks: “This is how they’ve been using this radicalization theory that they’ve adopted, even though there’s no empirical evidence to suggest it’s accurate.” “This is an effort to criminalize protest and criminalize any political organization that opposes existing government policies.”
