Legal, wise, and moral are distinct dimensions of any policy

12 Jan, 2026

David French, in the New York Times today, hits on a key point about the ICE shooting of a US citizen in Minnesota:

Still, the fact that a shooting is unnecessary or immoral does not mean it is criminal. A shooting can be unnecessary and immoral without being illegal, and the legal standard can be quite complex.

This has been totally lost on a lot of people this week. For the Trump administration and its defenders, as with so many of their policies, the legality of the ICE agent’s actions are all you need to know. If he was within his legal rights to kill Renee Goode—and the current state of the law givers LEOs a tremendous benefit of the doubt in these situations—there’s nothing else here to even discuss. If the actions were legal, the outcome was perhaps unfortunate, but it couldn’t have been morally wrong, or call into question the policy.

For many people appalled by the killing, a similar but different logic holds. An obvious moral failure has occurred here—more on that later—and a woman is unnecessarily dead. Those responsible for the moral failure must be guilty of some crime, because justice makes no sense if immoral acts that contribute to deaths cannot be punished. The tactics used by ICE agents—and maybe their entire mission— are immoral, and when they lead to the death of a citizen, the ICE agents are legally responsible. If there’s no trial and/or no conviction, it’s just more proof of a lawless administration acting with impunity about its own criminality.

Neither of these views seem particularly convincing to me.

What seems to be missing is any recognition by either side that our legal, policy, and moral systems all exist as distinct dimensions of public life, and only partially overlap. You cannot substitute legality for moral soundness, and you cannot substitute morality for legal standards. There’s nothing illegal (in most cases) about ICE agents purposefully terrifying small children, but it strikes me as a deeply immoral policy. But conversely, there’s no legal recourse available to you if ICE does terrify your child.

And this is why Hamilton tells us we need “energy” in the executive.

Legislatures can make all the laws they wants and provide all the money they wants, but at the end of the day governance falls on the executives. The mayors, the governors, the agency-heads, the secretaries, and the presidents. Congress cannot tell you how to distribute a vaccine to 300 million people, and Congress cannot tell you exactly how to enforce the immigration acts. Someone has to solve that problem. That’s the executive job. And it requires skilled politicians who are good at managing, good at bargaining and judgement, good at designing and executing policies, and good at accumulating and using power. That’s the energy that creates good governance, and no amount of good legislating can replace it. Bad governance means bad government.

I would submit to you that current ICE policy is a massive governance failure. There are lefties who seem to think the very existence of ICE—or the existence of any deportation policy—is immoral and therefore should be scrubbed from legality by Congress. I disagree. The problem with ICE is that the Trump administration has chosen to govern without any regard to the wisdom or the morality of the policy. The only measure of the policy is the outcome. If it’s not illegal and it increases immediate deportations, than the wisdom and/or morality of the policy is irrelevant. It often feels like they prefer policies that appear inhumane.

But there’s little reason to believe that more humane ICE governance could not achieve as many, and perhaps more, deportations. For one, the current policy has led to tons of demonstrations that have (1) impeded ICE’s central mission; and (2) led to agents wasting time fighting with protestors instead of working on deportations. Shifting from a “worst of the worst” policy to a “door to door” policy has exacerbated this, and hurt the agency’s public standing, which can’t be good on the margin for it’s medium term funding and authorities. Biden’s ICE policy was garbage, bu Obama’s—while not exactly popular with the liberals—was both effective and more humane and not encumbered by a massive public backlash to its tactics.

At the heart of the problem, in my view, is Trump himself. People constantly accuse him of having no respect for the rule of law, but it’s at least as big of a problem that he has little or no concern for the moral dimensions of many of his policies. So he’s hired thousands of new ICE agents by reducing the standards, poorly trained them, pushed them out on the streets and demanded big arrest numbers, and put few restraints on their tactics and little to no oversight on their inhumane excesses.

None of that is illegal.¹ It’s just terrible policy.

And in my view, the death of Renee Goode is first and foremost a policy failure. The most striking thing to me about the newest video is how little tension there appears to be at the scene 15 seconds before she is killed. Neither the agents nor citizens look at all like they have any intention of harming anyone. The citizens are being modestly annoying, for sure, in the classic protestor manner. And the agents are being aggressive and rude in the standard unprofessional ICE manner. But that should be the end of it; I’ve seen dozens if ICE incident videos that look much more dangerous than this one.

But everything about current ICE policy is designed to take modestly-dangerous situations like this one and make them riskier than they should be. The agents behave in obviously reckless ways, consistently. Officers draw guns with impunity. They seek out conflict instead of using de-escalation strategies. They wear the masks. They play fast and loose with warrants and probable cause. And they seem to relish scaring and physically threatening protestors; t’s like we put 10,000 Joe West’s on the street, ready and eager to go toe-to-toe with any wannna-be Lou Pinella who comes out to argue a call with them.

I don’t have any reasons to believe Renee Goode was trying to injure that ICE officer. And I don’t have any reasons to believe he was planning on shooting her. My guess is that she slightly panicked as things escalated and tried to exit the situation, and he genuinely got scared she was going to run him over even though he was probably not in any real danger, and he was already behaving pretty recklessly (e.g. phone in hand) and he panicked, and there’s your tragedy.

And because he likely didn’t behave illegal when he shot her, case closed for Trump and his partisans. No need to even revisit the policy. Why would you?

What gives me serious moral pause is the rest of the incident. As I wrote on Twitter, I can morally understand a world where agents of the state are given the benefit of the doubt about the use of deadly force, but I can't wrap my head around the morality of those agents impeding medical care for victims of that benefit of the doubt. Embarrassing and beneath us.

The basic moral premise of this sort of grey area self-defense is Tragic but Necessary—literally VP Vance's words. Showing complete disdain for the victim of the tragedy totally undermines the notion the agents or their defenders are actually operating on that moral premise. The alternative moral theory is something like interfering in any way with the state absolves us of any and all moral responsibility for your life and sadly I think that's a better description of the values at play here.

Again, this is beneath a grand republic. I'm not morally opposed to giving agents of state wide benefit of the doubt, or even erring on that side of the line considerably. But a good-faith effort at that moral system requires an actual belief that the main tragedy here is the dead person, not the self-defender. And that the policy is designed to prevent, rather than contribute to, these sorts of tragedies.

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#ICE #policy #politics