ICE Caught Lying About A Shooting Again, This Time Making Up Entire People And Things

Sigh.

Photo by Erfan Rg on Unsplash

It may seem like there are fewer stories of ICE violence and lies lately, but that’s only because the President of the United States of America is a headline-hogging diva who uncovers a new low for human rights and sanity every day, not because DHS has improved any. Trump’s co-stars may have changed on the Playbill, but it’s the same dumb goons singing the same songs.

Example latest, newly obtained video from the New York Times shows what led to a Venezuelan man being shot in Minneapolis on January 14, the week between the murders of Renee Good (on January 7) and Alex Pretti (January 24), and turns out agents and Kristi Noem lied wildly about what happened, not just in a “car was about to run me over!” way, but making up entire people and events that did not happen.

Starting with that there were two men, not one, nor three. And the one who was shot, Julio C. Sosa-Celis, was not the same man the ICE agent was pursuing, that was his housemate Alfredo A. Aljorna.

You may recall the original tale from January; DHS concocted an Action Comics-worthy drama, in which the ICE triggerman had been first attacked, subjected to a three-minute beatdown and attempted murdered with a shovel and a broom and/or broom handle by three activist-protestor assailants, before he was forced to open fire on them to save his own life. The story was immediately fishy, given that Kristi Noem and Tricia McLaughlin were telling it, yes, and also how the man had been shot by a bullet that was fired through the door of his own home.

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ICE Director Todd Lyons Maybe Gotta Tell It To The Judge

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But DHS had video footage of the shooting in their possession within hours, and Noem, McLaughlin, et al. (bon voyage, both!) insisted that was what it showed, and Sosa-Celis and Aljorna (who was not injured) were arrested and charged with felonies. And then, a month later, Daniel N. Rosen, the Trump-loyalist top prosecutor in Minnesota, popped up in court asking a judge to dismiss charges against the two men! And ICE director Todd Lyons made a brow-raising statement at the time:

“Video evidence has revealed that sworn testimony provided by two separate officers appears to have made untruthful statements,” Mr. Lyons said. “Both officers have been immediately placed on administrative leave pending the completion of a thorough internal investigation.”

Don’t hear that too much!

What actually happened, turns out: There were no protestors, and no ICE agent beatdown for three minutes or any other number. There was a snow shovel, but it was on the other side of the yard, and no one touched it. There was no broom, and/or broom handle. The agent was chasing Aljorna, who slipped on the path of his home. The agent jumped and tackled Aljorna on all fours like some kind of Twilight werewolf, and Sosa-Celis ran out to help drag his friend away from the agent. And the whole tussle took all of 12 seconds, not three minutes.

Aljorna and Sosa-Celis succeeded in getting away from him, into the house, and shut the door. Neither of them attacked the agent, though who would have blamed them if they grabbed whatever they could and went for an appendage like Greg Kihn fighting a tentacle church monster.

Horror movie shit! Then they got away, and the fucking faceless nameless nightmare monster from hell that they got away from assumed a firing position and shot through the door of the home where two children also lived, hitting Sosa-Celis in the leg and also narrowly missing a playpen. Then DHS tear-gassed the entire house, including the children. Soulless, evil, and trained and directed to be that way from the top.

And … why did prosecutor Daniel N. Rosen wait a whole month before asking a judge to dismiss the charges? Oh, he just never bothered to watch the video until then.

Is DHS going to get training to fix their murderous rage with no consequences problem? Not with Todd Lyons in charge! Perhaps his hospitalizations for nervous breakdown were his body trying to tell him something.

Markwayne Mullin? He’s still onboarding to pivot his management skills wheelhouse from running his family plumbing business and strutting around Congress in a belt buckle and voting on stuff he didn’t bother to read every now and again into managing 260,000 employees, about 70,000 detainees, about 409 detention sites, a gajillion vehicles and dozens of airplanes (less one $70M fuck plane he lost to Melania), a weapons arsenal larger than most other entire countries’, and $115 billion a year plus the extra $165 billion in fun money from Trump’s Big Bullshit Bill while your nice single mom neighbor just got her SNAP and Medicaid slashed. But it’s all scalable for a brain genius like him, right?

DHS has backed off on its Operation Suburban Poop Warehouse, so that’s one less think for him to think about. And it’s now on Interim AG Todd Blanche to abet DHS agents in avoiding any legal consequences of their cold-blooded murders, deaths due to medical negligence in custody, deportations against judges’ orders and so on. So guess Markwayne can mostly just go off challenging people to duels and fistfights in the hall, and regaling his coworkers around the water cooler with stories about beating his kids until it is time again to go on the teevee in a cowboy hat and say some ICE murder victim was a blue-haired ANTIFA who wouldn’t have gotten killed if their daddy popped their butt more growing up.

And whatever “extra” ICE training they may have gotten, apparently it still doesn’t involve the dangers of using their vehicles like battering rams, or shooting at the drivers of moving cars, as they just did again on Tuesday.

And that is all I can stand to type.

[New York Times gift link: “Newly Obtained Video of Minneapolis Shooting Undermines ICE Account: Prosecutors did not watch video of the shooting until weeks after charging the wounded man, an official said.” / New York Times gift link: “In Court Record, Official Describes Assault Before ICE Agent Shot Man in Minneapolis: The agent told an investigator that he was assaulted with a broom and a shovel before he fired a single shot that wounded a Venezuelan man.” / Vera / Politico ]