Deadly shootings by ICE officers bring renewed scrutiny to recruitment and training

Amna Nawaz:

Two deadly shootings this month involving ICE officers have reignited protests and renewed questions about tactics, training and recruiting at the agency.

Both accidents occurred during traffic stops, one in Maine and the other in Texas. None of the agents involved were wearing body cameras, and none of the victims were the intended target of the operation.

For more, we’re joined now by John Sandweg. He is an attorney and served as acting director of ICE under President Barack Obama from 2013 to 2014.

John, welcome back. Thank you for being with us.

John Sandweg, former acting director of ICE:

Yes, thanks for having me.

Amna Nawaz:

So two men were killed at these last stops. In Houston, Texas, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was 52 years old, originally from Mexico. In Bedford, Maine, was 26-year-old Johan Sebastian Duran Guerrero, originally from Colombia.

In both cases, DHS said the men tried to flee and armed their vehicles. From what we know, do the facts tell you that deadly force was justified here?

John Sandweg:

Safe, it’s really hard to know based on the limited information we have so far.

But I think if you step back and look at this trend, where we have at least 17 shooting incidents involving ICE agents, not including other prosecutor’s officers, five of which were fatal, it’s clear to me that we have a problem. I think it’s pretty easy, if you’ve spent any time in ICE, to understand where the problem is coming from.

And that’s how this department deploys ICE agents and how we now use vehicle stops as part of the tools that ICE agents use to make these arrests.

I’ll just quickly say, Amna, historically, traffic stops have not been a major part of ICE’s operations. They do not need to be a major part of ICE operations since ICE can arrest an individual while riding in their car or after their car. And from a training perspective, because they were not an important part of what ICE does, they were never a major focus of training, as you see with other law enforcement agencies.

So, look, at the end of the day, I think that – you know, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security recommended a pause. I think that made a lot of sense. We have a bigger problem here. Regardless of whether any of these shootings are individually justified, it is the trend itself that is troubling.

Amna Nawaz:

Well, the Minister recommended a pause, and the President stepped in to say that the stopping of vehicles should continue. So it doesn’t look like there will be a stop.

But I want to ask you about body cameras in these as well, because none of the officers appear to be wearing them in these cases. We know ICE is flush with cash after major funding bills, including $20 million for body cameras specifically.

Why haven’t these been excluded yet?

John Sandweg:

It’s hard for me to say, isn’t it?

The administration says, at least vocally, that it supports body cameras. Surely it can’t be money, as you point out, right? I mean, the agency has tens of billions of dollars in this big, nice bill, and tens of billions more in this kind of two-year earmarked fund that was given to them recently. So it’s not a financial issue.

The only thing I can say is it’s a matter of prioritization. And Amna, if you go back into the agency’s history, I mean, it’s probably fair to ask why ICE agents weren’t already wearing these even before the Trump administration.

I think a lot of that goes back to what I was talking about earlier, which is how ICE agents are deployed. Historically, the vast majority of immigration arrests conducted by ICE have been of individuals already in someone else’s custody.

And when you take — or pick up someone from a local jail or go down to a Border Patrol station and pick them up at the border, that doesn’t raise the same concerns that you have when you deploy ICE agents to make these mass arrests within communities, right? There, they interact with the audience in a way that we need that body camera.

But look, I know there’s been excuses made here about lockdowns or this or that. Honestly, at the end of the day, it’s just a matter of prioritization. It just wasn’t a priority. I hope that is the case now, in light of these events.

Amna Nawaz:

As I mentioned, we don’t know much yet. So there are still many unanswered questions.

But we know a little about one of the officers reportedly involved in the shooting in Maine, a man named David Brouillette. His ex-wife and several family members told The Associated Press that he had a history of violence and that they believed he should never have carried a badge or a gun.

His ex-wife, Ashley, told the AP that he called her and confessed that he killed Duran Guerrero. This is actually part of what she said about the meeting.

ASHLEY BROUILLETTE, DAVID BROUILLETTE’S EX-WIFE: I think this guy was murdered. I think David’s mental health played a role in what happened. I think what happened is he was standing there during that process, and he was suffering from PTSD and went into fight or flight mode. Unfortunately, a man lost his life because of this.

Amna Nawaz:

Now, John, I want to be clear that we know nothing about this man’s specific employment circumstances, but there are questions about the screening and training of ICE agents in this hiring surge.

I want to show you another audio clip, because our White House correspondent, Liz Landers, asked Tom Homan about that vetting process earlier today. I listen.

Liz Landers:

So you are satisfied with the training ICE agents currently provide? Nothing needs improvement?

Tom Homan, White House border official:

There’s always room for–that’s a loaded question. There is always room for improvement. Things change all the time. The FBI is updating their training. The DEA is updating their training. Every police department updates its training. But ICE used to — look, I — you can never overtrain. I wish there was more training.

Amna Nawaz:

John, you ran this agency. Does all of this lead you to be concerned about screening and training ICE agents?

John Sandweg:

Oh, sure.

I have real concerns here. This particular moment raises concerns about screening. As I mentioned earlier, I don’t know all the details of his background. And I’m not saying that there aren’t circumstances under which a person like this could be appointed, provided everything is in place – his present condition indicates that he has the qualifications to be a federal agent.

But it is very rare for someone with this type of background to be appointed as a federal agent. And that raises real questions, in this crazy push that we’re seeing to double the size of ICE, to recruit people, to scale back their training and deploy them as quickly as possible, that we’re dropping the ball on the vetting process.

And what really concerns me is, if you look at what — historically, ICE only hires a few hundred agents a year. Thus examination offices were built to handle this volume.

And now we say to them, you’re going to hire 2,000 or 3,000 people a year, and we want to vet them and onboard them as quickly as possible so we can get them on the streets as quickly as possible, and that certainly makes you think, boy, there’s a real opportunity here, because they’re building this thing quickly, they’re going to drop the ball on the screening process.

And unfortunately, again, without knowing for sure whether this was a case of a ball being dropped, or the vetting process being messed up here or something else going on, it certainly raises my concerns about, wow, are we failing to properly vet these potential candidates, give them — under-train them, and then put them on the streets without knowing exactly who they are or what their background is?

Amna Nawaz:

Hey John, before I let you go, I want to briefly ask you about a little bit of reporting from the New York Times, which looked at hundreds of assault charges that the Trump administration brought against people and protesters who came out to kind of register and protest some of the ICE crackdown.

They found that of the more than 400 cases resolved so far, the department lost nearly half of them. The accused were acquitted or the cases were resolved. What does all this tell you?

John Sandweg:

I think what it says to me, again, is that we’ve had this kind of — you know, it makes me concerned about the quality of screening before charging decisions are made, right? We had this – in this period of time that I will give Secretary Mullen credit, it seems to have dissipated, where ICE agents were put in this position to aggressively confront these protesters.

I will say that based on the shift in tactics thus far, those incidents have decreased. But you’ve seen the Department of Justice rush to bring charges against everyone and anyone, including obviously in many of these cases, not necessarily all of them, and many of these cases where there was flimsy evidence as to whether or not there was an intent to actually assault or actually assault an officer.

Look, I realize that this situation, right, ICE — ICE agents have a very difficult job, and I have a lot of sympathy for them. But this idea of ​​charging everything, even when the evidence doesn’t support a federal criminal charge, doesn’t do them any favors.

Amna Nawaz:

John Sandweg, always great to talk to you. Thank you so much for your time and perspective.

John Sandweg:

Thank you.