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A masked immigration agent shot and killed a woman in Minneapolis during a protest against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on Wednesday.
Officials have not yet released the woman’s identity, but she was identified by Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minnesota) as a U.S. citizen, and local officials cited her as 37 years old. The Department of Homeland Security has confirmed the shooting.
Local reports say that residents were blocking federal agents on a snowy residential road in a protest. The killing was allegedly recorded, captured from multiple angles, with the videos corroborated by witness reports.
Video footage shows a running car stopped perpendicular to the flow of traffic, with a woman in the driver’s seat with the window rolled down. Two federal agents pull up in a truck to join other masked officers at the scene. The agents confront the woman, and a voice is heard saying “get out of the fucking car.” One of the agents rushes to the driver’s door and tries to pull the handle, but it is locked.
As the agent tries to break in, the driver backs up, then begins driving forward, seemingly in an attempt to get around another stopped car and leave the scene. Just as the car begins moving forward, however, another masked federal agent appears around the front of the car and fires at the driver’s head. Three shots can be heard.
One witness told MPR that the federal agent had put his body on the front of the driver’s car at the time. This appears to be the same agent who killed the woman.
“She was trying to turn around, and the ICE agent was in front of her car, and he pulled out a gun and put it right in — like, his midriff was on her bumper — and he reached across the hood of the car and shot her in the face like three, four times,” the witness who lives on the road, Emily Heller, told the outlet.
After the shooting, the car quickly accelerates and slams into another car parked on the other side of the road, footage shows. The driver’s body was slumped over.
The killing apparently occurred less than a mile away from where police officers killed George Floyd in 2020.
Almost immediately after the incident, DHS moved to vilify the woman.
President Donald Trump posted a slowed down clip of the shooting on Truth Social showing the woman turning away from the agent as he shot her. Even though the video directly contradicts his narrative, Trump says she “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense,” and “it is hard to believe [the officer] is alive.”
Trump claims the agent is in the hospital, and blamed the “Radical Left” for the shooting. The video footage of the shooting shows the agent was several feet away from the car for what appeared to be his second and third shots.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem went on Fox News just hours after the killing to characterize the killing as self defense.
“Our ICE officers were out on an enforcement action. They got stuck in the snow,” said Noem. “They were attempting to push out their vehicle, and a woman attacked them, and those surrounding them, and attempted to run them over.”
Noem called the incident an “act of domestic terrorism.”
The officials’ comments were immediately ripped as patently untrue and in direct contradiction to witness accounts and video footage.
“You’re lying. There was no attempt to run the officer over and no ICE agents appear to be hurt,” said Omar on X, quoting a DHS statement on the incident. “Get out of our city.”
“Having seen the video myself, I want to tell everyone directly. That is bullshit,” said Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey in a press conference.
Commentators brought up a similar case of a woman in Chicago, Marimar Martinez. In October, a Customs and Border Patrol agent shot Martinez multiple times, with the federal government accusing her of trying to ram the agent’s car.
But Martinez’s legal team has said that it was, in fact, federal agents who rammed her, and body camera footage of the incident released shortly after also contradicted the government’s narrative of the incident. Ultimately, the Department of Justice dropped charges against Martinez.
In a press conference after the shooting, Frey emphasized his call for the Trump administration to withdraw their immigration agents from the city.
“There’s little I can say, again, to make this situation better,” Frey said. “But I do have a message, for our community, for our city. I have a message to ICE: Get the fuck out of Minneapolis.”
This story is breaking and will be updated.
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