Last Wednesday’s murder of Minneapolis mother Renee Good at the hands of federal deportation agents has shocked the nation. Many have expressed horror and outrage that an officer of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which has almost no legal authority over Americans, would point a gun at and threaten a US citizen, let alone pull the trigger and kill her. Since then, federal agents have continued a spree of violence in the city, last night shooting a man and sending six children to the hospital.
But Good’s murder was not the first incident in which ICE and other deportation agents have aimed firearms at or threatened lethal force against US citizens and other unarmed people. In fact, it is not even the tenth or twentieth.
Jacobin has identified more than two dozen instances over the past year in which ICE agents have drawn or pointed their guns at people, almost all of them US citizens. This count doesn’t include the more than half-dozen shootings of noncitizens that have happened over the past few months, including the fatal September shooting of an undocumented immigrant in Chicago, which experts told the Washington Post was the result of agents serially violating their own training and guidelines to put themselves in danger.
In most of these cases, those threatened by agents with deadly force were following, filming, or otherwise protesting deportation actions. Sometimes, they were just unlucky, ending up in the wrong place or the wrong time. In no case is there evidence that agents’ lives were in the kind of danger that would warrant drawing a gun. In fact, video footage often definitively shows there was none.
It’s an alarming series of incidents, as the machinery of Donald Trump’s turbocharged deportation plans is more and more turned against not only immigrants of all kinds but also US citizens. And it suggests Good may not be the last American to lose their life at its hands.
As we covered yesterday, agents have repeatedly threatened…
Auteur: Branko Marcetic
