The killing of a Minneapolis woman is latest by ICE and Border Patrol officers in recent months. Others have been wounded or threatened with guns.
By Shannon Heffernan
The Mrshall Project Reprinted
https://www.themarshallproject.org/
When an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis on Wednesday, it was not the first time that federal officers have killed civilians since the Trump administration launched its aggressive immigration enforcement campaign.
Federal officers have fatally shot at least three other people in the last five months, according to news reports reviewed by The Marshall Project. In September, Silverio Villegas González, a father originally from Mexico who worked as a cook, was killed while reportedly trying to flee from officers in a Chicago suburb, WBEZ reported. In December, a border patrol agent killed a 31-year-old Mexican citizen while trying to detain him in Rio Grande City, Texas. And on New Year’s Eve, an off-duty ICE agent used his service weapon to shoot a man in Los Angeles, California, according to CBS News. Authorities said the man had raised a rifle at the officer.
Agents have also shot other people. The Trace, the nonprofit news organization covering gun violence, has counted more than a dozen such shootings. In some cases, the victims survived, including a woman who suffered multiple bullet wounds in an incident in Chicago in October. The Border Patrol officer who shot her appeared to brag about it in a text message, later presented in court evidence. The message reportedly read, “I fired 5 rounds, and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys.” That shooting happened as part of Operation Midway Blitz, an immigration enforcement campaign in which federal agents fanned across Chicago, similar to what they are doing in Minneapolis now. The administration has also conducted large-scale blitzes in Los Angeles, Portland and New Orleans.
According to The New York Times, in the last four months federal officers have fired on at least nine people while they were in their vehicles, like Good. In those cases, authorities said the drivers were attempting to use the vehicles to strike an officer. In Wednesday’s shooting, Department of Homeland Security officials said Good had attempted to run over officers in “an act of domestic terrorism.” Minneapolis’s Mayor Jacob Frey and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz quickly disputed the federal description of the incident after they said they had viewed a video of the shooting.
In addition to shootings, federal immigration officers have pointed their guns at activists and bystanders. Illinois State Rep. Hoan Huynh said agents blocked his car and pointed a gun at him while he was trying to alert community members about the presence of immigration officers and inform them of their rights, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
A pregnant Illinois woman told Newsweek she thought her life was about to end when a federal agent pointed his gun through her car window, after she honked her horn to alert people ICE was nearby.
In another incident in Chicago, a combat veteran alleged in a court filing that a federal officer said “bang, bang” and “you’re dead, liberal” while pointing a handgun at him.
The Department of Homeland Security has routinely defended the shootings as necessary to protect officer safety. However, video and witnesses have disputed their accounts in many cases. After federal immigration agents fatally shot González — the cook in Chicago — during a traffic stop, Homeland Security claimed an officer was seriously injured. Body-camera video, however, captured the agent saying it was “nothing major,” according to footage obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times.
A lawyer for Marimar Martinez, the woman shot five times in Chicago, said body-cam video contradicts the government’s account that she drove towards officers before they shot her, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. Assault charges against Martinez were dropped. A judge has ordered that the video be withheld from public release.
After reviewing a video of Wednesday’s shooting in Minneapolis that he said seemed to contradict federal officials’ accounts that the driver was attempting to run them over when they shot her, Walz posted on social media, “Don’t believe this propaganda machine.”
An earlier version of this story omitted Marimar Martinez’s first name.
