ICE has killed before and will kill again.

 

 

JEFFREY ST, CLAIR}

In the last year, ICE agents have fired shots at least 15 times, killing four people. They shot at people trying to warn them of children in the area of their raids and they shot people running away from them. They shot people in a very similar way that they shot Renee Good: while they were in their cars, driving away and then blamed them for trying to run over ICE officers. On September 3, an ICE agent shot and killed Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez, a Mexican national, after dropping his daughter off at pre-school. ICE originally said that Villegas-Gonzalez was shot after he tried to run over an ICE agent, who DHS claimed had been severely wounded. Then, a video of the incident recorded the voice of the officer grazed by Villegas-Gonzalez’s car saying his injury was “nothing major.” Another video showed that Villegas-Gonzalez was driving away from the ICE officers, not toward them. DHS tried to smear Villegas-Gonzalez as a dangerous criminal with a “history of reckless driving.” But a new report by NBC News Chicago shows that he had never been convicted or even charged with a crime.

On October 4, an immigration agent shot Marimar Martinez five times while the 30-year-old teaching assistant and US citizen was driving around the Brighton Park neighborhood of Chicago, warning residents of an impending ICE raid. The Border Patrol officer who shot Martinez pulled up beyond her car and shouted, “Do something, bitch!,” as he aimed his assault rifle at her. He later bragged about the shooting in a text message to fellow agents: “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys.” The agents falsely claimed that Martinez had tried to ram them with her car and arrested the seriously wounded woman. The charges against her were later dismissed.

A day after the Minneapolis shootings, Border Patrol agents in Portland shot two people, a man and a woman, during a traffic stop in the parking of a medical center complex. Once again they claimed they had tried to use the vehicle as a weapon, although both of them couldn’t have been driving at the same time. DHS also claimed both were members of the Tren de Aragua gang, though they offered no evidence to buttress the charge. The couple, who are reportedly married, escaped on foot and were later taken by Portland to a hospital. The man was shot twice and the woman suffered a gunshot wound to the chest. Portland’s Mayor, Keith Wilson, called for ICE and Border Patrol to leave the city, saying “Portland isn’t a training ground for militarized agents.”

So in the course of two days, Trump’s immigration shock troops shot a mother of three and a married couple.

These kinds of raids, while shocking to most Americans, are familiar to many immigrants from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, countries still haunted by the death squads funded, armed and trained by the CIA. Horrors that they fled and have now reappeared like ghosts from the past here on the streets of Chicago and Minneapolis and Los Angeles. They know all too well that collateral damage is a feature of all paramilitaries.