After months of controversy surrounding Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its tactics, things took another brutal turn for the worse last week in Maine, where an ICE officer fatally shot Johan Sebastián Guerrero, a Colombian man who was authorized to work in the U.S. and also the father of a 3-year-old girl. The developments came just a week after a different ICE officer fatally shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo during a traffic stop in Houston, despite the fact that Salgado Araujo wasn’t even the target of the ICE operation.
The day after Guerrero was killed, there was another incident in Florida in which a 28-year-old Mexican man fled immigration enforcement agents and died after getting hit by a truck.
In theory, it stands to reason that FBI officials might play a key role in investigating deadly incidents like these that involve other federal agents. In practice, there’s fresh reason to believe that won’t happen. The New York Times reported:
Federal agents around the country were told in recent days that the F.B.I. would no longer investigate confrontations with immigration agents — cases that sometimes yield evidence that could be used to prosecute Department of Homeland Security agents implicated in violent encounters, according to people briefed on the decision.
If enacted, such a change would sharply limit law enforcement scrutiny of immigration agents, as the Trump administration draws mounting criticism over killings at the hands of federal officers.
The Times report, which has not been independently verified by MS NOW, added that FBI managers nationwide were notified in writing of the change last week, as were ICE agents.
The article added, “Even though such investigations are intended to determine whether the officers were in fact attacked, they can provide a crucial means of gathering evidence implicating the agents themselves.”
It’s important to emphasize that the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department issued a joint statement that said of the Times’ reporting, “This is false. The relationship between DHS and DOJ in investigating assault on federal officer cases has not changed, and FBI will continue to investigate in accordance with agency policy.”
The trouble is, Trump administration officials have spent a year and a half denying all sorts of reports, many of which were accurate, making it difficult to accept the departments’ denials at face value.
Indeed, the joint denial from the DOJ and DHS didn’t stop Ken Martin, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, from saying in a statement, “Accountability isn’t optional in a democracy. The FBI has just issued a license to kill to Trump’s goons who can now murder whoever they want with no consequence. Our constitutional right and freedoms under assault by the very people sworn to uphold and protect them.”
Complicating matters is an overarching question: If there’s a deadly shooting involving immigration agents and the FBI isn’t involved in an investigation, will anyone in the federal government scrutinize what happened?
The apparent answer makes the broader problem worse, not better. “Under the change,” the Times article added, “responsibility for investigating cases involving federal immigration officers would likely fall to Homeland Security Investigations, an arm of ICE, effectively leaving the agency to investigate itself, according to guidance circulated among F.B.I. and ICE agents.”
The Trump administration often embraces the idea of allowing foxes to guard henhouses, and I have a hunch we haven’t heard the last of this one.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
The post FBI reportedly directed to stop investigating confrontations with immigration agents appeared first on MS NOW.
