‘He shot through the door, with children inside’: ICE officer prosecuted for another slip-up in Minneapolis

Everyone remembers Renee Good and Alex Pretti, these two ordinary Americans killed by immigration police during peaceful protests in Minneapolis. It is for another slip-up by these much-maligned law enforcement agencies that the courts in the United States have decided to initiate proceedings.

An American immigration police (ICE) agent was indicted on Monday for fatally shooting a Venezuelan immigrant in the leg in mid-January during an intervention near his home in Minneapolis, then the epicenter of the protest against the methods of these federal agents. The fifty-year-old police officer is charged with four counts of assault and one of perjury, local prosecutor Mary Moriarty said during a press conference. A national arrest warrant has been issued.

He is one of two immigration police officers who were suspended from duty in mid-February for lying under oath about a shot fired during an operation that turned into a chase on January 14.

Federal justice had shortly before abandoned the proceedings it had initially initiated against two Venezuelan immigrants, Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, the man shot in the leg, and Alfredo Alejandro Aljorna, after noting that video surveillance images contradicted the police officers’ version.

The police officer’s version contradicted by the videos

At the time of the events, the Department of Homeland Security had claimed that an “illegal Venezuelan immigrant” had resisted arrest during a traffic stop and that at that time, “two individuals (had) come out of a neighboring apartment and (had) attacked the agent with a snow shovel and a broom handle”. The latter then “fired a defensive shot to protect his life”, injuring a man in one leg.

But according to the prosecutor’s account on Monday, the police officer was “not hit by a shovel or a broom”. “He wasn’t hit at all,” she said. “He fired through the door of a house with many people, including children, inside, fortunately not hitting others. “There is no absolute immunity for federal agents who commit criminal acts in this state” of Minnesota, she said.

At the same time as this shooting, two Americans in their thirties, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were shot dead by federal agents in the middle of the street in Minneapolis, then the epicenter of the vast anti-immigration operations wanted by Donald Trump. Their deaths widely outraged America, as did the brutal methods adopted by ICE and its agents, most often acting in disguise.