The Intercept obtained video of a federal law enforcement agent shooting multiple rounds into the vehicle of a civilian, as locals protested an ICE raid in a residential neighborhood of Minneapolis on Wednesday morning.
The driver, whom local officials identified as a 37-year-old woman, can then be seen losing control of the car and slamming into another vehicle, with smoke billowing from their dark red Honda Pilot.
The Department of Homeland Security confirmed that agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement shot the woman, calling her a “rioter” and claiming in a release that the agents felt their lives were threatened. DHS told The Intercept that the person in the car had died.
In the video, the red vehicle appears to be blocking federal agents in a roadway when federal agents approach the car, one reaching into the open driver’s side window. In the video and another posted online from a different vantage point, the agents can be heard saying “Get out of the fucking car.”
As the car appears to be leaving the scene, moving around another federal agent in the roadway, the agent fires at short range directly into the driver’s side.
The video does not clearly show that the person was attempting to run over agents, as DHS claimed. Federal agents had been conducting “targeted operations” in the area when protesters began to arrive, said the department, which referred to the protesters as “violent rioters.”
The video, however, shows protesters filming agents and telling them to leave the neighborhood. Whistles can be heard blowing, a common tactic to warn residents of the presence of federal agents.
At a press conference on Wednesday, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said that DHS was trying to “spin” the shooting. “They are already trying to spin this as an action of self defense,” he said. “Having seen the video myself, I want to tell everybody directly that is bullshit.”
Elected officials, including Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., and Minneapolis Council Member Soren Stevenson, referred to the individual who was shot as “a legal observer.”
The ICE agent shot the civilian as at least 2,000 federal agents flooded the Twin Cities over the past week following the release of a video by a far-right influencer and Republican operative alleging fraud and targeting the Somali American community. Minneapolis and St. Paul had already been hit with ramped up immigration operations, but the fraud video escalated tensions, prompting DHS to send more agents into the area.
As the fraud video went viral, fueling anti-immigrant outrage among conservatives, DHS agents began to conduct investigations in Minneapolis into the alleged fraud, drawing concern from immigrant rights activists that the city’s undocumented residents would be swept up in the operations.
Federal efforts ramped up this week as hundreds of agents arrived in the area with the DHS sharing on social media on Tuesday the threatening message: “GOOD MORNING MINNESOTA.”
A CBS Evening News segment highlighted the raids, showing two dozen agents surrounding DHS Secretary Kristi Noem as they arrested a man.
“The American taxpayer is grateful that the resource allocation has been put here,” Noem said. “We’ve never seen this kind of fraudulent and abuse of programs before in recent history.”
Omar, who has been the focus of many racist attacks on immigrants in Minnesota, called for ICE to leave the city. “ICE must stop terrorizing our communities and leave our city,” she wrote on X.
Within hours of Wednesday’s shooting, hundreds of community members gathered to protest local and federal law enforcement officers near the site, according to local media in Minneapolis. In footage shared on social media by a local reporter with Sahan Journal, a federal agent appeared to fire a chemical irritant into a protester’s face at point-blank range.
Wednesday’s ICE shooting is just the latest example of federal agents brandishing firearms and firing live rounds at unarmed individuals during immigration-related operations.
Last July, the Intercept documented a pattern of federal agents brandishing firearms at unarmed individuals, shooting less-lethal munitions and tear gas, and beating people who were the subject of immigration raids, as well as attacking people protesting them and onlookers documenting the operations.
Since then, Border Patrol agents have opened fire on a family in San Bernardino as they drove away during a traffic stop, narrowly missing an 18-year-old boy; in Ontario, California, agents shot a man in the back as he tried to warn DHS agents of the presence of children at a nearby bus stop; immigration agents shot TikTok streamer Carlitos Ricardo Parias in South Los Angeles; and in Chicago, ICE officers shot and killed Silverio Villegas González at a traffic stop — in the first reported fatal shooting of the second Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign.
Others have been killed while fleeing ICE raids, such as the California cases of farmworker Jaime Alanís Garcia, who fell from a greenhouse roof and died from his injuries, and Roberto Carlos Montoya Valdez, who was struck by a car while running across a freeway as agents raided a Home Depot.
This is developing story has been updated.
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