Report: ICE shot a US citizen trying to help kids

For the second time in a little over a week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers reportedly shot someone in Los Angeles, California. This time, it was a US citizen who ICE officers shot from behind while he was driving a car, according to a report from the Los Angeles Times.

The victim was a 25-year-old named Carlos Jimenez, who is a father of three. He was shot after getting out of his car to tell ICE agents, who had pulled over a vehicle, that children would soon be gathering in that spot for the school bus, his lawyer, Cynthia Santiago, told the newspaper. The agents’ cars had blocked a southern lane on the road and jutted into a second lane, according to the LA Times. “He was telling them, ‘Excuse me. Can you guys please, you know, please wrap this up.’ And immediately, the masked agent pulls out a gun and exchanges some words,” Santiago told the newspaper.

The lawyers allege that Jimenez then got in his car, reversed because he was afraid, and was shot in the back of his right shoulder, where a bullet remains lodged. “Use of deadly force is to be used as a last resort,” Santiago said. “Coming out to communities with guns drawn is the opposite.”

ICE, for its part, has offered a more sinister characterization of the events. Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), told the LA Times that Jimenez “attempted to run officers over by reversing directly at them without stopping” and that the shots were “defensive.” Jimenez was charged in federal court with assault on an officer and released on bond Friday.

In the ICE agent’s criminal complaint, filed in federal court on Friday, he claims Jimenez “engaged in a verbal altercation with the officers” and that the complaining officer then told Jimenez to leave and grabbed his pepper spray. As this unfolded, the complaint claims, Jimenez pulled his car forward and to the left, and then apparently turned and “rapidly accelerated in reverse.” One of the officers at the scene apparently “feared that the [Jimenez’s car] would hit [the officer]” and the car they had previously pulled over.

There does not yet appear to be any publicly available video of the incident. Jimenez’s condition was not immediately clear.

There have been other recent reports of immigration officers shootings. Between August and October, ICE officers reportedly shot into four cars—one in LA less than two weeks ago; two in Chicago, including one that was fatal; and one in San Bernardino.

McLaughlin, the DHS spokesperson, told the LA Times that the latest incident is “another example of the threats our ICE officers are facing day in and day out as they risk their lives to enforce the law and arrest criminals.”

But what it more likely indicates is even more proof that, as my colleague Noah Lanard wrote last week, ICE seems to pose a far greater danger to civilians than the other way around—contrary to the agency’s claims that they require the National Guard’s protection.

As he wrote:

A Mother Jones review shows that there is little evidence that ICE agents face such severe and widespread danger compared with other law enforcement agencies that they need military personnel to come to their aid or to break from centuries of public accountability by hiding behind masks.

The Trump administration has provided almost no information to back up its statements about rising assaults, which makes its claims hard to assess. But details about ICE officers who’ve died on the job are readily available on the agency’s website.

Those records show that none of ICE’s agents have ever been killed by an immigrant in the agency’s more than two-decade history. Instead, the leading cause of death by far among ICE officers is COVID-19. According to ICE’s data, the second leading cause of death is cancer linked to 9/11. (The pandemic and cancers connected to the September 11 terrorist attacks account for 75 percent of the deaths in ICE’s history.)