ICE abuses demand urgent accountability

ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) con­tin­ues its egre­gious activ­i­ties, albeit with less and less expo­sure with­in the media. But these out­landish behav­iors are not recent events. 

It has been report­ed that, from 2015 to 2021, ICE agents were respon­si­ble for at least 60 shoot­ings, 23 of them fatal. Since January, 2025, 79 deaths have been attrib­uted to ICE, 52 of those of indi­vid­u­als in cus­tody at the time. 

In one week of July this year, ICE agents killed three peo­ple, one each in Texas, Florida and Maine. It was lat­er admit­ted that at least two of those were not even the per­sons who were being pur­sued by the agency. 

Perhaps the most expo­sure that ICE has expe­ri­enced came as a result of two indi­vid­u­als, both American cit­i­zens, who were killed by agents in Minnesota, just a cou­ple of weeks apart. Since both killings were cap­tured on video by bystanders, they demon­strat­ed the excess­es being per­pe­trat­ed by the agents. 

Renee Good was shot while in her car, attempt­ing to leave a scene where agents were doing traf­fic stops. Moments before her death, she was videoed telling an agent that she didn’t hate him. The excuse for her killing was that she attempt­ed to run over an agent, but videos appeared to show this to not be the case; she was mere­ly try­ing to leave the scene. 

Two weeks lat­er, Alex Pretti was shot while on the ground try­ing to help anoth­er civil­ian who had been pep­per sprayed and knocked to the ground by an ICE agent. Pretti was sur­round­ed by at least five offi­cers while he protest­ed that he was just try­ing to help the woman on the ground. While down, he was shot mul­ti­ple times by agents who lat­er claimed that he tried to pull a gun on them. Videos showed that an agent had con­trol of the gun at the time Pretti was shot. 

As a result of these two shoot­ings, Congress began to demand that all ICE agents be equipped with body cam­eras, as is cus­tom­ary for many police forces in the coun­try. Full deploy­ment of such cam­eras was sched­uled to be com­plete as of August 31 of this year. There is no evi­dence to con­firm that this has been accomplished. 

At this time there is no indi­ca­tion that any ICE agents have been indict­ed or con­vict­ed of crimes relat­ed to any of these doc­u­ment­ed shoot­ings. One of the expla­na­tions being used for this lack of judi­cial over­sight is that there exists a claim of fed­er­al juris­dic­tion. States and local­i­ties attempt­ing to hold agents account­able are rou­tine­ly con­front­ed with delays and obfus­ca­tion as fed­er­al offi­cials claim juris­dic­tion and then fail to act. 

During the week of August 24, 2026, ICE agents were report­ed to be arrest­ing peo­ple at school bus stops in Connecticut. State offi­cials and advo­cates alleged that ICE arrest­ed par­ents at or near school bus stops in Danbury; DHS denied tar­get­ing par­ents at bus stops, and Tom Homan said he was unaware of such arrests.

About Tom Homan. He served as Acting Director of ICE dur­ing Trump’s first term in office, dur­ing which he was a vocal pro­po­nent of the “fam­i­ly sep­a­ra­tion pol­i­cy” which split fam­i­lies when one mem­ber might be ille­gal­ly in the coun­try and is deport­ed, leav­ing the fam­i­ly to deal with liv­ing with­out that per­son. He was a mem­ber of the Heritage Foundation (a con­ser­v­a­tive think­tank) and con­tributed to the for­mu­la­tion of Project 2025. In 2025 Trump appoint­ed him “bor­der czar,” coör­di­nat­ing cross-agency bor­der enforce­ment and depor­ta­tion operations. 

Obviously, he has bit­ten off more than he can rea­son­ably chew, since he appears to not know what his agents in Connecticut are doing behind his back. 

Recently it has been report­ed that peo­ple are being deport­ed to for­eign coun­tries where they have no con­tacts and no rela­tion­ship. Salvadorans have been report­ed being sent to Libya where they don’t speak the lan­guage. They are sent with­out visas, mean­ing they have no method of try­ing to secure pas­sage to anoth­er coun­try. They are left in limbo. 

This is not America, at least not the one that most of us grew up with. And if Congress and the courts don’t start per­form­ing their con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly man­dat­ed roles it will be even less so for our chil­dren and grandchildren. 

As this was being writ­ten, a nation­al news source report­ed that fed­er­al charges have been brought against the ICE agent who killed Renee Good in January of 2026.