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A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot and killed a woman in Minneapolis on Wednesday. Video and eyewitness testimonies have already circulated widely. There can be little doubt that this was a cold-blooded killing, for which there is no justification.
An ICE agent shot point-blank into the windshield of a car, killing the driver. The woman was believed to have been taking part in some capacity in a protest against ICE’s huge gestapo-style operation in Minnesota, which began at Donald Trump’s behest this week. Ilhan Omar, the Democratic Minnesota member of Congress, said the victim was “a legal observer.”
Given ICE’s violent, impunity-drenched core, at a moment when the Trump regime is leaning heavily into a vision of dominance grounded in aggression and lawlessness, such a killing was all but inevitable.
It is a reminder, too, at the beginning of Trump’s largest anti-immigrant operation to date, that this force makes everyone in the country less safe.
This is not the first ICE shooting, and it is not the first time a civilian has been killed during a vile anti-immigrant operation. According to gun violence investigations in The Trace, federal agents have shot people 14 times since last January, killing at least four; on multiple occasions, officers shot at people observing ICE raids and people attempting to drive away.
The Minnesota slaughter is not so much a first, but a particularly shocking example for being captured on video from more than one angle.
The Minnesota slaughter is not so much a first, but particularly shocking for being captured on video.
Footage of the incident posted online shows the victim’s car blocking a relatively quiet, snow-covered street. ICE agents in a truck wanting to drive down the street pull up and exit their vehicle. One agent tries to aggressively open the driver’s car door and reach into the front window. The driver briefly backs up and clearly tries to drive away.
At no point is any federal officer put in any danger. Nonetheless, another officer pulls out a pistol and immediately shoots directly into the windshield.
As an eyewitness resident on the scene told Minnesota Public Radio, “She was trying to turn around, and the ICE agent was in front of her car, and he pulled out a gun and put it right in — like, his midriff was on her bumper — and he reached across the hood of the car and shot her in the face like three, four times.”
Donald Trump’s administration has already begun to flagrantly lie about the incident. Contrary to ample available evidence, the government said the ICE agent “fearing for his life, the lives of his fellow law enforcement and the safety of the public, fired defensive shots.”
The Department of Homeland Security statement also said that the slaughtered driver “weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them — an act of domestic terrorism.”
“They are already trying to spin this as an action of self-defense,” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said in a press conference. “Having seen the video myself, I want to tell everybody directly that is bullshit.”
It is, of course, bullshit — bullshit atop the ocean of bullshit that federal authorities have spewed out for months when attempting to frame a brutal, masked army of jackboots as imperiled, brave heroes.
On numerous occasions judges have dismissed cases in which ICE agents accused people whom they shot of attempting to ram officers with vehicles. The victim in Minneapolis, shot multiple times in the face for trying to drive away, will have no day in court.
Justice according to the criminal legal system would see the ICE shooter charged with murder. And that would no doubt be appropriate. Much as the murder conviction for Geoge Floyd’s killer, former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, was rightful. This seems a tall order in our current context of fascist impunity. It has already been announced that Trump’s FBI will oversee the shooting investigation, after all.
Even if this particular ICE agent is held accountable in a court of law, however, it would be an impoverished justice indeed.
Chauvin’s conviction did not turn the tide against systematic racist policing. The number of people killed by police every year in the U.S. has only risen since Floyd’s death, and it remains the case that a disproportionate number of those killed are Black. The demand now, as it was when uprisings birthed in Minneapolis spread nationwide in 2020, is not that one officer be brought to justice, but that a system of racist injustice be abolished.
The immediate and necessary demand today is neither new nor excessive. If not met, we can be sure that more incidents like Wednesday’s will attend the already extraordinary violence of immigrant abductions and deportations. This demand, with which we must take to the streets, organize our workplaces, and orient our daily practices, is only a small but necessary part of anti-fascist struggle. Abolish ICE.
