Immigration Officers Continue To Lie About Their Murders

from the cover-ups-are-SOP dept

Flooding cities with federal officers more used to dealing with border crossings and customs enforcement has led to multiple killings by these officers. They’re not trained to do what they’re being ordered to do. And their new hires aren’t being given the training they need because, apparently, the job of ejecting non-whites from this country is too important to be done within the constraints of the law.

The end result has been the broad daylight murders of American citizens, which are immediately greeted by official government statements claiming the victims of these murders are “terrorists” who are seeking to kill federal officers. Nothing could be further from the truth, as recordings made by citizens and the officers themselves have shown.

But this administration traffics in lies regularly, and it does what it can to keep these lies from being exposed by refusing to release body cam footage captured by officers at the scene, while simultaneously denying any outside agency’s request to perform the sort of shooting investigations that used be considered “normal” before this highly abnormal administration took over the Oval Office.

The government has constantly portrayed victims of federal officers’ gunfire as violent individuals. These claims have always been repudiated by footage captured by people not employed by the federal government.

Via Radley Balko — who points out federal officers have shot at least four people and “brazenly lied” about it every time — here’s another undoing of the government’s narrative about its officers’ violent actions, brought to us by CBS News, which has obtained body cam footage the administration definitely hoped would never be made public.

Video of the March 2025 fatal shooting of American citizen Ruben Ray Martinez obtained by CBS News appears to contradict claims by federal officials that Martinez was shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent because he “accelerated” and “intentionally ran over” another agent with his car.

Much like the government claimed Renee Good was trying to run over officers, before an officer’s own phone recording that he deliberately leaked to a conservative news outlet showed otherwise, DHS spokespeople claimed the victim of this shooting was trying to harm federal officers.

ICE claimed Martinez “accelerated forward” towards an ICE agent and the DHS’s statement insisted the shots that were fired by officers were “defensive.” It also claimed Martinez “intentionally ran over an officer.”

Nearly a year later, body cam footage obtained by CBS News is bringing the truth: this was another unjustified homicide.

But body camera video, which has not been previously reported, shows that Martinez’s vehicle, a blue Ford Fusion, was stationary or going at a very low rate of speed when he was fatally shot. When gunshots are heard in the video, the brake lights of Martinez’ vehicle appear to be on.

It’s unclear whether any of the officers were wearing body cameras during this shooting. And it really doesn’t matter, because the administration is universally unwilling to release footage that might undercut the lies it (and its employed officers) have told in defense of seemingly indefensible actions.

The only reason this footage is available is because it wasn’t captured by federally-owned body cameras. Instead, the footage was recording by a South Padre Island police officer who happened to be on the scene when this shooting occurred.

The recording also shows the standard operating procedure of nearly every law enforcement agency, federal or not. Officers are always more concerned with roughing up and cuffing an impending corpse, rather than seeking immediate medical assistance for the person they’ve just shot.

In this case, two minutes passed after ICE officers shot Martinez, during which they dragged him from the car, threw him face down on the pavement, and handcuffed him. No officer provides medical care of any type. It’s only when EMS shows up two minutes later that anyone tries to save the life of someone who’s now too far gone to be saved.

This administration will lie and lie and lie about its officers’ actions, secure in the knowledge that it controls the recordings, paperwork, and any other actual facts about the shootings its officers engage in. But every time its efforts are undone, either by recordings made by others or — in the Renee Good murder — by an officer who actually was stupid enough to believe his cell phone recording would buttress the government’s bullshit claims.

The killings aren’t over yet. The administration — despite having some second thoughts about its oppressive anti-migrant tactics — still oversees an exceedingly well-funded, extremely large immigration enforcement effort. This sort of aggression — especially when completely divorced from even the most minimal of oversight — is always going to result in people being killed by government forces.

But while the government may have the funding and the power, it can’t prevent outsiders — ranging from legal observers to activists to local law enforcement officers — from exposing the administration’s lies. And it’s starting to have an effect. Some drawdown is happening, and the most visible faces of anti-migrant aggression — Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino and former DHS boss Kristi Noem — have been indefinitely sidelined. The tide feels like it’s turning. But expect the administration to continue lying about pretty much everything because that’s its default setting.

Filed Under: alex pretti, cbp, fbi, ice, mass deportation, renee good, ruben ray martinez, trump administration