ICE Agents to Wear Body Cameras After Fatal Shootings

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents will be required to wear at least one body camera during most traffic stops, according to the Trump administration’s border czar, after ICE officers without cameras fatally shot two people in the span of a week this month.

Agents will be required to use the body-worn cameras “whenever possible,” White House border czar Tom Homan said in an interview on Fox & Friends on Sunday.

“I’m a big proponent of body cams, always have been,” Homan said.

“They exonerate more law enforcement than they convict, and I want officers to wear body cameras because I want the American people to see what the officer saw when they took that action.”

In a separate interview on Sunday with Face the Nation on CBS News, Homan blamed recent Democrat-led government shutdowns for delaying the rollout of ICE body cameras.

“Everybody in ICE would have a camera now if the government wasn’t shut down by Democratic members of Congress,” said Homan, adding that cameras are being purchased and deployed now, while officers are being trained on how to incorporate the cameras into operations.

ICE told The Independent earlier this week that more than half of its field offices already have body cameras deployed, with the remaining offices set to receive the cameras within the next 60 days.

The new requirement comes after ICE agents without cameras fatally shot two men during vehicle stops in Houston, Texas and Maine within one week.

Those men were not the intended target of immigration enforcement operations, prompting widespread protests and calls for accountability.

Critics of the Trump administration argue such cameras are necessary, given that White House officials have often made misleading claims about the facts of high-profile incidents involving Department of Homeland Security officers using lethal force.

“Even if the government is telling the truth, however, most Americans no longer give the Trump administration the benefit of the doubt,”The Washington Post’s editorial board wrote Monday. “DHS has made these situations more combustible by squandering credibility in previous cases when force was used.”

At the beginning of this year, after immigration agents carried out a pair of fatal shootings against protesters in Minnesota, then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem vowed that agents nationwide would soon be equipped with body-worn cameras, and the agency was awarded an additional $20 million in April to aid in getting cameras into the field.

Even with a change in body camera policy, ICE continues to face scrutiny over the shootings in Texas and Maine.

The brother of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, the 52-year-old Mexican national who was fatally shot by an ICE agent in Houston, claims they were unaware that the unmarked cars following them were federal agents. Homan told Face the Nation he had not seen video evidence that the officers turned on their emergency lights in the operation.

In Monday’s shooting in Biddeford, Maine, in which an ICE agent killed Joan Sebastian Guerrero, a 26-year-old father with work authorization, a witness told Reuters he heard the victim tell law enforcement, “I tried to stop.”

An ex-wife of the agent accused of committing the Maine shooting told The Independent she had long worried about his temperament, but ICE failed to properly vet him.

“For years, I told people he was going to hurt somebody,” she told The Independent.

ICE appeared to suggest that The Independent’s reporting on that subject was an attempt to “dox our law enforcement officers” and did not respond directly to the claims.