Tell your Idaho congressman to put the brakes on ICE | Opinion
In most departments, when a law enforcement officer shoots someone in the line of duty, the officer is placed on administrative leave or taken off of street duty, and an investigation into the shooting is launched.
Most of the time, the investigation concludes that the officer was justified, but sometimes there are recommendations for how the situation could have been handled differently. Rarely, an officer is charged with a crime.
But at least there is an investigation, a pause, a recognition that shooting someone and taking their life is a serious matter, and that law enforcement officers wield deadly weapons and carry a heavy responsibility.
What doesn’t usually happen is the mayor or police chief or sheriff coming out within minutes of a police shooting to declare the officer innocent of all wrongdoing — while immediately labeling the victim a domestic terrorist who is to blame.
We have now seen two fatal shootings of U.S. citizens at the hands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection agents, the most recent this weekend of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old VA nurse in Minneapolis who was being held by several federal immigration agents while agents fired 10 shots within five seconds.
Pretti was lying on the ground, according to a New York Times video analysis of the killing.
This comes just two weeks after the fatal shooting of Renee Good by an ICE agent.
Watching the videos of both incidents, we see no justification for the deadly shootings. How anyone can watch those videos and talk themselves into justifying that atrocity as ICE agents just “doing their job” or acting in self-defense is mind-boggling.
But in Donald Trump’s America, that’s where we are.
Trump and his administration are blaming the victims, calling them terrorists and making claims about the circumstances of the shootings that are flatly contradicted by the videos and eyewitness accounts.
It’s clear that there is little interest in the Trump administration to conduct a legitimate investigation, learn lessons, hold federal agents accountable, or exact any consequences for unjustifiably taking the lives of two American citizens — all in the name of making arrest quotas and rounding up suspected undocumented immigrants by stopping brown-skinned people wherever they are.
And while that is taking place, God forbid you are an American citizen on a sidewalk or street where masked ICE agents confidently march about their business. You might get harassed, shoved down, attacked, pepper-sprayed or even killed.
Without consequence, this all sends a clear message to the thousands of other ICE agents roaming our cities’ streets: Go ahead and shoot; we’ve got your back.
After Good was shot and killed, video appeared to show an ICE agent using an offensive slur about her. After Pretti was shot, a federal officer told a group of protesters, “Boo hoo.” Other ICE agents have been caught on video telling people the shooting of Good should serve as a lesson.
ICE agents are behaving like callous thugs reveling in the killing and otherwise violent treatment of U.S. citizens. Because they can, and they’ve been emboldened.
It’s frightening, and it’s completely un-American — except in Trump’s America.
The situation has gotten out of control and needs to be stopped.
Congress has the power to put an end to our nightmare.
It can and should use that power now, before another person is shot and killed by a federal immigration agent.
Congress has the power of the purse, the constitutional duty to approve funding of government operations. It can cut funding for the Department of Homeland Security, which runs ICE, and several members of Congress have suggested doing so.
Rather than give a full-throated defense of ICE, as U.S. Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, has done, Simpson should join the call to halt funding until the situation is brought under control.
Congress can also change the Immigration and Nationality Act to restrict who ICE agents can detain and how they detain them — rather than allowing them to storm around with absolutely no restrictions, as above-the-law agents of an unseemly presidential administration.
Congress also has within its power to completely abolish ICE — not a bad option given the lawlessness and recklessness with which the agency is being run.
At the very least, Congress can hold investigations into ICE actions, as Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy, of Louisiana, has called for.
We urge Simpson, fellow Rep. Russ Fulcher, and Sens. Mike Crapo and Jim Risch to use the power of Congress to shut down ICE now, question their tactics, and urge investigations into the shooting deaths of two U.S. citizens on the streets of an American city.
How far over the line of decency and democracy does this administration have to race before our elected officials finally say, “Enough is enough”?
We urge all Idahoans to contact Fulcher, Simpson, Crapo and Risch and demand accountability.
Before another person is killed.
Statesman editorials are the opinion of the Idaho Statesman’s editorial board. Board members are opinion editor Scott McIntosh, opinion writer Bryan Clark, editor Chadd Cripe, assistant editor Jim Keyser and community members John Hess, Debbie McCormick and Julie Yamamoto.
