ICE killing people is exactly what Donald Trump and Stephen Miller want. They can’t wait to shoot more lefties.
Two ex-ICE workers I spoke with described an agency that, in pursuit of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation mandate, is engaging in reckless and risky behavior.
“They’re essentially operating now in a resource constraint-free environment and doing very dangerous things,” said Scott Shuchart, who previously worked at the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties within DHS and more recently as ICE’s assistant director for regulatory affairs and policy under the Biden administration. Violent interactions with the public aren’t surprising, he added. “That’s sort of by design.”
Dan Gividen, an immigration lawyer who acted as deputy chief counsel for ICE’s Dallas field office between 2016 and 2019, compared what the agency is doing as akin to running into a crowded movie theater and yelling “fire.” “You’ve got these ICE officers that are pouring out of these vehicles, pointing guns at US citizens—people who’ve done absolutely nothing wrong—and causing chaos.”
ICE removal agents charged with doing administrative arrests, he said, lack the tactical training to safely do operations out in communities. “It’s not at all surprising that this is happening with these ICE ERO officers being sent out to basically treat people terribly,” he said, anticipating more escalation of violence.
Another former ICE trial attorney I spoke with said that, typically, removal officers weren’t trained in high-risk operations because the daily demands of the job didn’t require it. In the past, if such an encounter took place, local law enforcement might have gotten involved to help keep the situation under control. “What has changed is there has been an encouragement from the top to be much more aggressive in enforcement and ramp things up and get the job done,” the ex-counsel for the agency told me.
In Gividen’s view, the federal immigration agents didn’t have a reason to interact with Good to begin with. “He had no reason to believe she had committed any offense that he actually has the authority to investigate,” Gividen said of Ross. “They murdered her, plain and simple. That is all there is to it. The notion that they were in any way, shape, or form acting in self-defense to put three bullets in that woman is absolutely absurd.”