Dig Out of This?

‘It’s Going to Take ICE a Long Time to Dig Out of This’

After controversial shootings in Minneapolis and Portland, a former ICE chief breaks down how the agency ended up here — and what has to change.

By Riya Misra

As federal immigration agents flood the country’s streets, back-to-back shootings have reignited major concerns about the administration’s aggressive crackdown.

In Minneapolis, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent fatally shot 37-year-old Renee Good in her car Wednesday. Just a day later, two people were wounded at an anti-ICE protest in Portland, Oregon. Both shootings happened against the backdrop of President Donald Trump’s hawkish immigration policies, which have turned major cities into hotbeds for ICE activity.

In October, former acting ICE Director John Sandweg told POLITICO that Trump was deploying ICE agents at an “unprecedented” speed. Now, he says, the repercussions of that are playing out in real time.

Sandweg, who led the nation’s top immigration enforcement agency from 2013 to 2014, said ICE serves the entire public — and its politicization is doing it no good. He’s also critical of the administration’s hasty response to Good’s killing, which he argues only further undermined public trust in ICE activity.

As Sandweg sees it, ICE needs to pare back its visibility: Stop taking partisan sides, mend relationships with local partners and cease publicly announcing their operations. He stresses the need to deescalate — but worries it isn’t coming anytime soon.

“It’s going to be a long time,” Sandweg says, “before the agency recovers.”

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Videos of the Minneapolis shooting are circulating online, and there have been lots of different reactions. The Trump administration is claiming that ICE agents were operating in self-defense. State and local officials have swiftly denounced that conclusion. Did you watch the videos, and what was your reaction?

I’ve seen a couple of the videos. To me, it highlighted why it’s so important that you withhold judgment until there is a thorough investigation, and why that’s the standard practice any time there’s an officer shooting.

I feel like each video provided a different perspective that could lend itself to a different conclusion. Of course, I think the entire thing is tragic. And if I were at ICE, what I would hope is that the investigation is not only a tool to determine, if in that moment the officer’s decision was reasonable, but also to look at this holistically. To try to inform us, how can we make sure something like this doesn’t happen again?

Anytime anyone is killed, it’s a horrific tragedy, and I think we need to do everything we can to learn from it. And I do worry that with the quick rushes to judgment and, in many ways, the politicization of this issue, it makes it harder for us to try to at least draw some good from this — which would be trying to reduce the chances of this reoccurring.

Pretty quickly after the shooting, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem framed it as an act of self-defense, insisting that the agent was responding to an act of “domestic terrorism.” Other members of the Trump administration seemed to agree. But what information might the DHS actually have had, in the aftermath of the shooting?

I just can’t imagine any secretary, or the department itself, ever saying anything at that moment other than, “We’re committed to having an investigation here.” Whether that was a Republican administration or a Democratic administration.

I’ve been through five years at DHS, which included a significant portion of time as a senior adviser to a secretary. Whenever something major happens, the initial information we received almost always had severe inaccuracies. You learn very quickly in that job not to trust the initial information. Anytime there’s a major event, information is flowing and fast.

You cannot rush out and make pronouncements about what’s going on until the dust settles a bit and you have a more accurate picture of what happened. There have been a couple of incidents with [FBI Director] Kash Patel, who’s rushed out to get facts out to the public, and then later those facts proved, pretty quickly, to be wrong.

With a shooting like this, you need to look at the totality of the circumstances. Not only does each video give you a different angle and a different perspective, but there’s so much information the videos don’t capture. … You have to wait for all the facts to come in.

But the other reason why that’s significant, though, is because there is going to be an investigation. The public expects an investigation. The risk you run, especially in this environment we’re in now, is that people don’t believe in the government. They’re losing faith in ICE as an institution.

What’s the point of the investigation? We’ve already announced this was a justified shooting, right? “No mistakes were made. We followed our training perfectly.” “She was a domestic terrorist trying to kill people” — I don’t know how you could possibly draw that conclusion at that stage. What was she doing that day? What were her intentions? Are there signs that she was actually trying to kill an officer, that she was in that state of mind that day? 37-year-old mothers don’t typically try to kill federal officers.

But you can’t get [evidence] unless you’re executing search warrants on her phone, getting into her email communications, interviewing people who knew her. In any event, the irresponsibility is not only rushing up to the public and giving them information that isn’t vetted, but it also undermines the investigation. … I just can’t imagine anyone’s going to have confidence in that investigation anymore.

And how exactly do you investigate an incident like this?

Every case is different. Some of the protocols require, of course, getting the officer off the scene, interviewing the officer as quickly as possible about their perspective. All of this gets really complicated. The FBI has taken charge of this investigation, typically you would have some DHS entity involved in that investigation

They interview witnesses and look at all the available evidence; they get all of the available surveillance cameras, interview all the officers at the scene, try to build back what was going on that day.

The investigation itself would determine whether, under the use of force rules, the officer had a reasonable belief that he was facing imminent danger. But it would also look at everything else that happened and if mistakes were made that require administrative action.

One thing we learned recently about the officer involved in the Minneapolis shooting is that he had recently been the victim of a dragging incident with a car. What psychological supports are available for officers after an attack?

There’s certainly tools available. You don’t return to duty until you’re fit for duty. I know there’s an evaluation there. Obviously, everybody’s going to bring their own personal experiences to the job. That’s just the reality of the situation. And, by the way, the investigation will look into that, if there were fitness reports or other things.

But I certainly don’t believe just because somebody was the victim of an assault, that they can’t do their job. We probably wouldn’t have very many officers if that were the standard.

The Trump administration has floated the idea of immunity for the agent. Obviously depending on the outcome of the investigation, what could that look like? Could the officer be prosecuted?

This raises a lot of complicated issues. The state of Minnesota might make their own decision about what happened and whether any state crimes occurred. The state of Minnesota could independently charge the officer. The federal government could obviously charge the officer as well. If the state charges the officer, the officer is entitled to qualified immunity. Vice President JD Vance misspoke at the press conference when he said, “absolute immunity.” There is no absolute immunity. There’s qualified immunity.

Certainly, the state could charge the officer with murder. The officer could have to make a court appearance or two, but there is a process in place, when it is a federal official exercising their official duties, where they can seek removal of the case to federal court. If it’s deemed that they were acting in their official capacity, they were doing their federal job, then the federal court can assert jurisdiction in order to make a determination as to whether they’re entitled to qualified immunity.

As we talked about in our previous interview, it’s difficult to question use of force because we don’t know what the agents knew, what they were thinking at the moment, or what sort of threat they perceived. But with escalating violence across the country, does it seem like the DHS needs to revisit that “objectively reasonable” policy?

I don’t think the policy or the standard needs to be changed. I mean, this is a uniform use of force standard that all law enforcement agencies basically employ.

What I do think we need to do, though, is look at this holistically. … Are we doing things that have made our agents more vulnerable, and are we doing things that have made the public more vulnerable? The administration should be thinking, “OK, what have we done?”

From my perspective, a couple of things have been done. We’ve shifted tactics. We have officers engaged in a lot more traffic stops now than we previously did. We have officers now confronting these protesters, something that ICE very, very rarely did before. We pulled Border Patrol agents up off the border, where they operated in a completely different environment, and put them in an urban environment. … We’ve put our officers in a very difficult position.

On Thursday, Border Patrol agents shot two people in Portland. We know less about the Portland shooting than we do about Minneapolis right now. But these two incidents were nearly back-to-back. Are you concerned that these violent incidents are starting to form a pattern?

The statistics suggest that these shootings are up significantly. But I want to be really clear. Nobody at Border Patrol, nobody at ICE, wakes up and says, “I want to shoot someone today.” It’s the last thing they want to do.

But so, we have to ask ourselves, “Why is this happening?” It goes back to exactly what I said.

The administration has said, in order to make mass arrests, we’re going to pull agents out of what they’re trained to do, and out of their normal operating environment, and we’re going to put them in an urban area with a completely different type of policing. That is where I think the frustration should be.

Certainly, when I talk to retired ICE agents, they say they’re not the slightest bit surprised they’re seeing this. They say this is what you have to expect when you pull these agents out of their normal environments, having them do things that they’re not trained to do.

As these deployments continue, as things get further politicized, will these shootings make it harder for ICE agents to operate elsewhere? And will it be harder for protesters to exercise their rights?

Immigration enforcement has always been politically charged, but now it’s even more charged. And we’re turning it into a both-sides-ism. There is a middle ground here. This is what’s frustrating to me and to other people who worked at ICE. You can be pro-immigration enforcement. You can have, like during the Obama administration, extensive immigration enforcement focused on the right people, done without being so politicized.

But in any event, will it be harder? Of course, yes. It’s going to take ICE a long time to dig out of this. By becoming so political, just at a bare minimum, what it does is it makes it incredibly hard for ICE to [maintain] these relationships with state and local partners, which are so critical to a law enforcement agency like ICE. Those are incredibly damaged right now. Our relationships with these large cities are damaged.

It’s going to be a long time before the agency recovers.

I asked you this question three months ago. Maybe your answer is the same, maybe it’s changed. Where do we go from here?

I’d like to see us deescalate things. ICE serves the entire public. It doesn’t serve a political party. It doesn’t serve just red America, and it’s not the enemy of blue America.

It doesn’t mean you have to back off immigration enforcement, … but try to do things in a less overt manner. Don’t try to antagonize. Don’t take sides. Lower the visibility of ICE. You can keep doing these operations but go back to some of the tactics we’ve seen before where that are lower profile, less visible. Do your job. Do your job quietly.

Stop announcing these operations. This is so bizarre to me. How high-profile [it is], we announce weeks in advance that ICE is coming to town. Candidly, that just puts the officers in greater jeopardy. You’re telling all the potential targets, “We’re coming to get you next week.” I mean, what?

I think we need to deescalate. But unfortunately, it doesn’t look like we’re doing that.

ICE operations in Minnesota are especially large. When we last spoke, one of your biggest concerns was whether ICE could ratchet up its activity without cutting corners on training and recruitment. That doesn’t seem to be the case here; the officer who fired shots in Minnesota had experience with the agency. But just broadly speaking, could inexperience, these concerns about declining training standards, lead to more incidents like these?

Absolutely. I mean, you have a supercharged environment where things are incredibly tense. The officers are operating in a reality where the assaults on them are up. We’re having them do things that seasoned officers have been trained to do. It’s not that they’re not trained to do it; it’s just not something they are as experienced at doing. And now you’re sort of flooding the agency with these new hires.

When you say, “Hey, we’re rolling out onto the streets officers when we’ve lowered our hiring standards, shortened the background checks and shortened the academy training.” The basic fluency training has been shrunk by five weeks. All of this in a rush to get agents out on the street. Of course, this is a major concern. It’s high potential for additional incidents.