President Donald Trump's second term will enter its second year on January 20, and there is already a running tally on the number of people who have been either killed or wounded by U.S. immigration agents.
Nonprofit gun violence news outlet The Trace reported Wednesday that after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent fatally shot a U.S. citizen in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Trump administration immigration officials have so far killed four people and shot five others since Trump officially took office last year. There have also been 28 incidents in which federal agents held people at gunpoint during immigration operations, and 14 shootings.
"They include the shootings of three people observing or documenting ICE raids; the shootings of five people driving away from traffic stops or evading an enforcement action; and the September 30 raid on a Chicago apartment building, during which half-asleep tenants and their children were held at gunpoint," wrote The Trace's Jennifer Mascia.
Mascia noted one particularly controversial shooting in which U.S. citizen Marimar Martinez was shot by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents in Chicago, Illinois last October. Martinez was shot five times but survived.
"I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes," read a text message from the officer who shot Martinez. "Put that in your book boys."
According to The Trace, there have also been 13 incidents in which federal immigration agents fired less-than-lethal munitions (like pepper balls and rubber bullets) at both suspects and the public. Mascia wrote that those munitions "can cause welts and burning in the lungs and eyes."
"[The Trump administration is] describing what’s happening to cities across the United States as an invasion and using language and imagery that’s evocative of war," Ohio State University law professor César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández told The Trace. "The fact that immigration agents are responding in a way that is more aggressive than what is customary cannot be divorced from the fact that the rhetoric that leading figures in the Trump administration, including the president himself, are using is far more aggressive than what is customary."
Click here to read The Trace's report in full.
