This Is What Happens When The Rules Don’t Matter

Well, it’s morning in America, and those of us insistent on torturing ourselves have awoken to yet another slew of news alerts with a headline that seemed unbelievable just six months ago: federal law enforcement has killed another protester.

I feel no need to devote time or energy to listing out constitutional protections violated or hypocrisies exposed. The First Amendment does a better job than I can. But ICE’s killing of two individuals in Minneapolis underscores a cacophony of problems. 

As I see it, there are three possible explanations for ICE’s conduct in Minneapolis: (1) the agents are absurdly undertrained, panic very easily and don’t know the rules. That’s a very generous reading of these people, but seems plausible. (2) ICE has absolutely no dedication to upholding law enforcement standards, which forbid agents from killing people in the street after they have been restrained; or (3) ICE agents are just murdering people because they want to.

I sincerely don’t believe it’s the third. I have a little more faith in the average person than that. But the answer seems somewhere between the first and second explanation. 

As for the training of ICE agents, while reports vary, it is clear that training has been severely condensed. Sen. Mark Warner (D–VA) claimed the process took merely 47 days, and while that specific number is subject to scrutiny, unnamed DHS officials claim the process—which used to be 13 weeks—is now between six and eight. My verdict: not enough time.

My evidence: the streets. Videos of ICE agents confronting protestors, even those generous enough to not shoot, illustrate that these people are simply in over their heads. Some ICE agents were ​​sent to field offices without having completed proper “Law Enforcement Officer” training. That seems to have been a genuine error with the ICE system, and not explicitly nefarious, but excuse me for being skeptical of ICE’s mission. Either way, it meant people with little-to-no prior experience did not get acclimated; some never even passed the necessary background checks. 

Couple the training changes with new ICE directives, ranging from problematic to blatantly illegal, and you get unnecessary violence. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller instructed their agents to arrest 3,000 people a day; agents apparently expressed fear for their jobs were they to come up short. That shift in policy has led to predictable results: ICE has now detained more than 70,000 individuals, an 84% increase from January of last year. 

Minneapolis serves as the perfect marriage between arming poorly trained law enforcement and leadership eliminating guardrails and incentivizing confrontation.

The first part of my equation dealt with agents without experience who simply don’t know the rules. Those people placed in high-stress situations lead to panic, which I believe accounts for much of the violence and misconduct. It doesn’t account for all of it, though. And that’s deeply terrifying.

The ICE agent responsible for killing Renee Good, Jonathan Ross, was not one of these new recruits. He has been employed by ICE since 2015 and served in Iraq as a machine gunner. Ross’ law enforcement background tells me he knew the rules. He knew that the DOJ’s Use of Force policy prohibits agents from employing deadly force unless “the vehicle is operated in a manner that threatens to cause death or serious physical injury to the officer or others, and no other objectively reasonable means of defense appear to exist, which includes moving out of the path of the vehicle.”

I’ve seen the videos. Did Renee Good comply perfectly with ICE? Maybe not, though it’s unclear. Did she try to run Ross over? Clearly not. 

Ross knew the rules. He didn’t follow them. That brings me to my second component: ICE agents simply don’t care that they’re breaking the rules.

What’s worse than too-little training is the type of training Noem and Miller have encouraged ICE agents to receive—one that provides little-to-no instruction against the use of escalating force and contains an elaborate playbook to defend misconduct. So why should I be surprised when that becomes tacit approval for gross misconduct?

Essentially, either Ross felt he could play God and the rules didn’t apply to him. Or leadership has insisted that the rules don’t apply to ICE. Pick your poison—but both are deadly.

This is worsened by Stephen Miller’s mindset. He has framed ICE’s actions as counterterrorist operations designed to dispatch combatants. Of course, there is some truth in that; there are violent criminals among those detained and deported. Most—even all—of the undocumented people targeted, however, are not American citizens protesting. Regardless, Miller has insisted ICE agents have “federal immunity,” and that anybody attempting to “obstruct [them] is committing a felony.” 

Secretary Noem framed Good’s killing not as an error, but as an officer doing “exactly what he’s been trained to do in that situation.” Noem referred to Good’s actions as an “act of domestic terrorism,” again signifying this association of ICE work with counterterrorism. 

While that seems—and is—preposterous on its face, counterterrorism units do have broader immunity and less scrutiny with regards to administering force. Soldiers in Iraq had different training than city police forces. As they should. But framing Minneapolis as a warzone rampant with domestic terrorists and agitators blurs that line dangerously.

And that, my friends, is how you get this weekend. 

Saturday, five ICE agents pepper-sprayed, beat and disarmed a 37-year-old man before promptly shooting him several times in the back. The man, an ICU nurse with the Department of Veterans Affairs, was in possession of a pistol, for which he had an open carry license.

The videos seem to indicate that he posed no legitimate danger. He did approach an agent, but only after that agent assaulted and pepper-sprayed a bystander with no discernable pretense. Frankly, even if he had been dangerous, one would surmise that a five-on-one with a restrained man would neutralize that threat. Either way, minutes after the killing, Stephen Miller called the man a “would-be assassin [who] tried to murder federal law enforcement.” Gregory Bovino, a senior Border Patrol officer, claimed the individual “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.”

I don’t want to burst Bovino’s bubble, but the video indicates he was merely helping a woman who had been assaulted and pepper-sprayed for little-to-no reason. Even if you remove the propagandistic words of administration officials, this murder reinforces the same problems laid bare by the killing of Renee Good. 

The video shows ICE agents inciting contact with a protestor and assaulting her without pretense. That might work if you assume, as Miller insists, that the protestors are “domestic terrorists.” But they aren’t. 

According to Bovino, the officer who killed the man had “experience in less lethal operations” as a Range Safety Officer and had served eight years in Border Patrol. Let’s return to the three possible explanations:

It seems obvious that the second theory—carelessness for the rules facilitated by a top-down mindset framing these campaigns as pseudo-wars—applies here, as it did to Ross. This agent knew the rules, and had practiced them for nearly a decade. Yet, he defied them. So did the rest of the cohort that opened fire. 

What does that mean? Not that ICE agents are all ignorant, gun-wielding idiots. No. Rather, ICE leadership—Miller, Noem, Bovino—has created an environment where the rules are disregarded. 

Because Minneapolis is “rife” with “violent agitators” posing a threat to ICE. And ICE agents have immunity to do whatever they want to those in their way. 

If that sounds like America as usual to you, I fear we grew up in different places. 

I implore you all—watch the videos. Formulate your own opinions. Speak to your friends.

The America I know is all about dialogue. And try as you might, you can’t murder words.

Yet while words remain, in theory (and with sufficient public pressure), safe, people aren’t. Immigration enforcement is necessary, and there is room for a reasoned discussion around how to handle undocumented people. But those conversations need to take a backseat to a more important one.

Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, Bovino and the like have endorsed behavior that, on video, looks like cold-blooded murder in the street. Miller’s words sound a tremendous amount more inflammatory than fire-eater John Calhoun’s from the 1840s; and his speeches sowed the seeds of civil war. Plain and simple: this administration doesn’t care about the rules—and belief in the rules, at least the facade of caring, has sustained this country for 250 years.

Maybe, instead of just mindlessly waving the banner in celebration of 250 years, Americans could think long and hard about what happens when the rules no longer matter.

The image featured in this article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. No changes were made to the original image, which was taken by Chad Davis. The photo can be found here.