The New York Times dropped a report last week that, if it holds up, tells you everything you need to know about where this administration’s priorities sit.
According to the Times, FBI managers received written notice last week that the bureau will no longer investigate assault claims against ICE agents. Some field-level ICE agents were reportedly told the same thing directly by their FBI counterparts. In other words, the one outside check on an agent’s story after he shoots somebody is quietly getting switched off.
‘Typically,’ when an ICE agent shoots someone, there’s a specific legal wrinkle that comes up almost every time. The agent claims he was “assaulted,” usually meaning a “weaponized vehicle” was driven at him, and that’s why he opened fire.
Up until now, the FBI has been the one digging into whether that claim actually holds water. That investigation wasn’t itself a civil rights probe, but whatever the FBI turned up could feed into one later, since the DOJ is the only entity with the jurisdiction to pursue an agent for a civil rights violation.
Take the FBI out of that first step and hand it to Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, and you’ve got ICE investigating ICE’s story about why ICE shot someone. DHS has no authority to bring a civil rights case against its own people. So even the theoretical possibility of accountability gets quietly bricked over. (For the love of God, Montresor!)
DOJ and DHS, naturally, put out a joint statement denying “any change in oversight.” Read it closely, though, because it’s a masterclass in saying nothing while sounding like you’re saying something.
It doesn’t deny that FBI managers got a memo last week. It doesn’t address the specific claim NYT is reporting at all. It just asserts, in the vaguest bureaucratic language imaginable, that the “relationship” hasn’t changed and the FBI will “continue to investigate in accordance with agency policy.” I’ve read enough of these statements at this point to know what a real denial looks like, and this isn’t one.
This is landing only a few days after David Brouillette shot and killed Joan Sebastian Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine, and less than two weeks after an agent killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston. Both of those cases already have federal and state investigators circling.
If NYT’s sourcing is right, the administration picked this exact moment, mid-scandal, to strip out the one investigative layer that might have kept Brouillette’s “he tried to ram me” story honest.
That’s not an accident of bureaucratic timing. That’s a decision made by people who watched the last two weeks of headlines and decided the problem wasn’t the shootings; it was the paper trail.
I want to stress here that the report isn’t confirmed. The Times is citing sources, not documents they’ve published, and DOJ/DHS are on record disputing it. Even so, this fits a pattern I’ve been writing about since Minneapolis.
Every time oversight gets close to an agent’s actual conduct, something happens to slow it down, muddy it, or quietly reroute it somewhere with no teeth.
Evidence gets withheld for months and then trickles out right as a confirmation hearing comes up. Officers’ names get treated as state secrets while their victims’ names, ages, and immigration histories get published within hours.
And now, allegedly, the agency tasked with independently checking an agent’s “I was assaulted” story gets told to stand down right as two of those stories are under a microscope.
If this is true, nobody in this administration is even bothering to pretend anymore that impartiality was ever the point. They’re not hiding the hand on the scale. They’re just betting you’ll be too busy watching the next shooting to notice they moved it.
(Source)
Leave a Reply