WHAT FEDERAL GUIDELINES SAY ABOUT AGENTS USING DEADLY FORCE
At the White House on Thursday, Vice President JD Vance strongly defended the ICE shooting in Minnesota, saying the officer was defending himself and called Renee Nicole Good's death "a tragedy of her own making." For a closer look at training for ICE agents, Amna Nawaz spoke with Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security.
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Amna Nawaz:
For a closer look at training for ICE agents and what we know, I'm joined now by Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security. She's now at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Juliette, welcome back to the show. Thanks for joining us.
Juliette Kayyem, Former U.S. Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary: Thanks for having me.
Amna Nawaz:
So, as you see, there's competing narratives now on whether or not the ICE agent was justified in using deadly force here. There are federal guidelines, standardized training of some kind.
Walk us through what those guidelines and the training shows when it comes to the use of deadly force.
Juliette Kayyem:
OK, so the Department of Homeland Security is guided or their agents are guided by rules and protocols regarding engagement with the community.
So the number one priority is no loss of life. That is in their -- that is in DHS' own regulations. The second is de-escalation. We have heard that word a lot lately, which is, it's the responsibility of the law enforcement agent to ensure that they do not put themselves in a position in which there is imminent danger.
There are all sorts of caveats and qualifications, but, as a general rule, police officers and law enforcement do not shoot into moving cars, do not put themselves in front of cars, because those are things that are easily de-escalated.
The car, you can get the license plate. You know where the person likely lives at that stage. And so these rules guide both federal law enforcement and most state and local law enforcement. And that is why the videos are raising so many significant concerns about that interaction, that moment in which a federal law enforcement officer, the ICE agent, is engaged with a civilian who may or may not have known what they were expecting of her.
I just want to add for your audience, because the politics of this are quite loud, the way it's talked about now is as if use of force is an on and on-or-off switch, right? Like, someone didn't comply, use of force, right? It doesn't work that way.
Most good law enforcement and training, you would think about use of force as sort of a dimmer, up and down. And it's the responsibility of the armed agent to ensure that you are sort of bringing any sort of tension, any sort of interaction down, so that you don't result in the killing of an unarmed civilian who was not under any law enforcement orders or any search.
Amna Nawaz:
So, Juliette, based on all of that, let me pull on that a little bit more from you here, and based on what we have seen in the videos, was there another way in which you might have expected the officer to respond in this incident?
Juliette Kayyem:
Yes, I mean, step aside. Step aside. I mean, you could -- at that stage, he could -- he saw that it was a woman.
We -- she's been accused of lots of things by the White House in terms of, was she engaged in activism, was she trying to run him down? He could have easily -- and some people looking at the videos believed that he actually wasn't in the line of sight of the car -- or the line of impact of the car. And you let the car go on and either pull it over 10 feet away or get the license plate.
And so this interaction that results in not one, but multiple bullets being put through the window of an unarmed civilian, who may or may not have known what ICE was expecting of her, I think shows the challenges of these large deployments, ICE with an unclear mandate of what they're supposed to do, and the fact that you have not local law enforcement so engaged with communities that do not know them and would view them as a hostile.
Amna Nawaz:
I want to ask you too about the latest in what we have heard on the investigation. Minnesota state law enforcement officials are saying federal agencies are denying the state investigators access to the evidence. The Minnesota agency says it's now withdrawing from that probe.
We saw the DHS secretary say that it's a matter of jurisdiction. What do you make of that? Is that standard?
Juliette Kayyem:
No. And it's absolutely not.
It's -- basically, what has happened is because you had the secretary of homeland security and then the president and then today the vice president so aggressively conclude what the investigation is -- and I have to admit, just so, a very shameful maligning of who she is as a human being -- I mean, she's a mother and she was unarmed -- is -- and they called her a domestic terrorist.
It is hard to imagine that this investigation would be objective, because they have already created that narrative. Now, one could argue that the FBI is not part of those agencies and will do this objectively, and one would hope that that was true, especially if it came out of the Minnesota FBI offices.
But the more important thing is, in most of these cases, in all -- I can't think of another case -- where you have an incident like this, you have concurrent investigations, because you don't know what's going to result here. It might be a federal crime, but it might not rise to that level, and it would still be a state crime.
So, in most cases, we often hear of concurrent investigations, concurrent prosecutions, because we don't quite know what's going to happen at the start. Unfortunately, the White House has created a narrative of what this is. And I would anticipate that the state is separately going to start an investigation because of their lack of confidence in the federal investigation.
Amna Nawaz:
All right, that is Juliette Kayyem, formerly of DHS, now at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Juliette, thank you.
Juliette Kayyem:
Thank you.
Amna Nawaz serves as co-anchor and co-managing editor of PBS News Hour.
Courtney Norris is the deputy senior producer of national affairs for the NewsHour. She can be reached at cnorris@newshour.org or on Twitter @courtneyknorris
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