ICE agents’ aggressive tactics in arresting people in their homes, workplaces, and from their cars have sparked nationwide protests, as they appear to be acting as the president’s paramilitary police rather than as a publicly accountable government agency. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) oversees ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), which is conducting raids in Minneapolis and other Democratic cities to find aliens who have not become citizens and are believed to be dangerous.
A Quinnipiac University National Poll of registered voters found that 57% disapprove of the way ICE is enforcing immigration laws. As expected, the two parties are far apart, with Republicans at 12% and Democrats at 94% disapproving. But Republican candidates this fall should be concerned that 64% of Independents disapprove.
ICE, justifying the killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, released a font of misinformation.
A national wave of them showed ICE agent Jonathan Ross shooting three shots into a car driven by a white middle-aged woman, Renee Good, while she was slowly moving her car out of the way of Ross. He appears to be standing in front of or near the front of the vehicle.
Despite Kristi Noem, Secretary of DHS, immediately claiming after the incident that he was “run over,” all the videos posted on social media show Ross standing on his feet. He walked toward the car after it crashed, while Good apparently died at the steering wheel from his shots. The majority of those in the Quinnipiac poll who saw the video say the shots should not have been fired by the ICE agent, with 59% of independents agreeing that it was not justified.
The majority of those in the Quinnipiac poll who saw the video say the shots should not have been fired by the ICE agent, with 59% of independents agreeing that it was not justified.
Noem said that Ross was taken to the hospital with internal bleeding. That may be true, because if the side of Good’s car brushed him, even at a slow speed, the officer could have sustained bruises. By definition, bruises are minor, localized internal bleeding; the medical term is ecchymosis. The government has not released hospital information about Ross’s injury.
Noem labeled Good and other protestors as terrorists and said she would prosecute them as such. However, a judge threw out the government’s request to label her a terrorist suspect because it was too weak an accusation.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem regularly defends ICE’s arrests of immigrants as preventing potential violence from terrorists, not provoking violence from civilians monitoring or protesting ICE activities. Noem told reporters that “the brave men and women of ICE are doing everything in their power to remove those heinous individuals and make our country safer.”
However, just over two weeks after killing Good, ICE’s aggressive actions led to the killing of 37-year-old intensive-care nurse Alex Pretti. He was monitoring ICE’s actions toward immigrants and protestors by filming them on his phone. As before, the federal government expressed no remorse for killing a civilian and relied only on the version of events from the five federal agents involved. They maintained that he “violently resisted” and that he refused to give them a gun he was legally allowed to carry, until the officers fired “defensive shots.”
Wall Street Journal reporters reviewed videos of the killing and concluded that bystander footage contradicts the agent’s account of what happened.
This article has been excerpted from: ‘ICE as Paramilitaries’. Courtesy: Counterpunch.org
