“The nuns were not just nuns. The nuns were also political activists.”

These infamous words were spoken in 1980 by Jeane Kirkpatrick, one of the top foreign policy advisors to incoming President Ronald Reagan, after the brutal murder of four American women, three of them nuns, by government forces in El Salvador. The four—Maryknoll sisters Maura Clarke and Ita Ford, Ursuline sister Dorothy Kazel and lay missionary Jean Donovan—had been raped, killed and dumped in a shallow grave on Dec. 2, 1980, by soldiers of the Salvadoran National Guard on orders from higher up.

Ms. Fitzpatrick sensed, correctly, that such a savage crime might turn public opinion against the massive military and economic aid the United States was providing to the brutal junta ruling El Salvador. So why not put the responsibility on the unarmed, defenseless nuns instead? After all, they were already dead.

A few months later, U.S. Secretary of State Alexander Haig took that gambit and ran with it, stating that any investigation of the killings was “a complex issue. The facts on this are not clear enough for anyone to draw up a definitive conclusion.”

He had thoughts of his own, though. Maybe the nuns were to blame for their own murder:

I’d like to suggest to you that some of the investigations would lead one to believe that perhaps the vehicle the nuns were riding in may have tried to run through a roadblock, or may have accidentally been perceived to have been doing so, and there may have been an exchange of fire, and then perhaps those who inflicted the casualties sought to cover it up.

Mr. Haig, whose brother was a Jesuit priest, continued to deny that the missionaries had been murdered in cold blood. He removed Robert White, the U.S. ambassador to El Salvador, from his post and dismissed him from the Foreign Service for stating that there was no evidence the Salvadoran government was “conducting a serious investigation” of any kind into the murder of the nuns. 

If that rhetoric sounds familiar, it is because we are hearing it again. 

After Renee Nicole Good was shot and killed in her minivan by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in Minneapolis on Jan. 7, Vice President JD Vance called her murder “a tragedy of her own making” and claimed that Ms. Good, a community activist and a mother of three, was “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.” 

Mr. Vance claimed further that Ms. Good “viciously ran over the ICE officer” who shot and killed her, an assertion contradicted by video evidence taken from multiple angles. 

Why the obvious lie? Because, similar to Ms. Fitzpatrick and Mr. Haig, Mr. Vance recognizes the potential for this atrocity to turn American public opinion against President Trump’s brutal campaign against undocumented immigrants, particularly because Ms. Good is an American citizen, was apparently denied medical assistance by ICE agents after the shooting and, according to the video evidence, posed no real threat to the shooter. Not even the most fervent supporter of the arrest and deportation of undocumented migrants, one assumes, would defend such Gestapo-like tactics. 

The answer? Blame Ms. Good for her own murder.

Mr. Vance’s boss, President Trump, has engaged in further deceit and hyperbole in support of that same goal, claiming that Ms. Good “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE officer, who seems to have shot her in self-defense.” She made for an easy culprit for a man desperate to justify ICE’s actions. After all, she was already dead.

The murder of the churchwomen in El Salvador in 1980 was not an isolated incident; they shared the fate of tens of thousands of other Salvadorans, including Rutilio Grande, S.J., St. Oscar Romero, and the six Jesuits and two laywomen who were murdered by the Salvadoran military in 1989 in San Salvador. Eventually, the overwhelming evidence of these murders became too much for American politicians to justify, and U.S. funding for the Salvadoran military government dried up. It just became impossible to believe the lie anymore.

On the 40th anniversary of the martyrdom of the churchwomen of El Salvador, Cardinal Michael Czerny, S.J., preached at a memorial Mass in Rome on the impact of their witness. “Theirs, mysteriously but without doubt, is the triumph because vigorous, courageous acts of solidarity and compassion persist in dreadful, risky conditions,” he said. “Brutal claims failed and fail to stop the evangelizing.”

Let us hope the same will happen in Minneapolis. Nothing can bring Renee Good back; her 6-year-old son is without his mother now, her partner a widow. The masked man who killed her simply drove away. Nor is her death an isolated incident: All over the country, we hear and see more and more examples of violent attacks by masked ICE agents who seem to face no accountability for their crimes. And we hear the brutal claims used after the fact to justify them.

How long before it simply becomes impossible to believe the lie anymore?

James T. Keane is a Senior Editor at America.