By Daniel Trotta
April 7 (Reuters) – ICE officers shot and wounded a man in Northern California on Tuesday after the suspect tried to ram one of them with his vehicle, the acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said.
The man was taken to a hospital and the FBI was on the scene, ICE Director Todd Lyons said in a statement.
The shooting took place amid heightened scrutiny over immigration enforcement during President Donald Trump’s crackdown, which resulted in the shooting death of a pair of U.S. citizens in Minneapolis earlier this year, and after a similar claim by ICE last year was contradicted by evidence.
“As officers approached the car, the wanted gang member weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run an officer over. Following their training, our officers fired defensive shots to protect themselves, their fellow agents, and the public,” Lyons said.
The suspected gang member from El Salvador was in the U.S. illegally and had been wanted for questioning in connection with a homicide, ICE said of the incident in Patterson, a farm town of 25,000 people in the San Joaquin Valley, about 90 miles (145 km) southeast of San Francisco.
DASHCAM VIDEO SHOWS SHOOTING
Dashcam video taken by another driver and aired by Sacramento television station KCRA shows three officers surrounding the car as it was stopped in a line of cars on the side of a highway, with at least one officer attempting to open a door. The driver backed out and crashed into the car behind him, then pulled forward in the direction of the officers with their guns drawn.
The car then turned left toward the officer who was closest to the lane of traffic. The officer, still with his gun drawn, dashed out of the way of the oncoming car, which then drove over a median and into the lane for oncoming traffic.
There was no audio, making it impossible to determine when and how often shots were fired.
The Department of Homeland Security said in January that ICE officers experienced 66 vehicular attacks against them in the first year of Trump’s second term, up from two such incidents in the previous year.
Official reports of some of those cases have been undermined by subsequent evidence to emerge.
Police records and witness accounts from a Chicago suburb where a man was fatally shot in September by a federal immigration enforcement officer complicated the picture of the event presented by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which said the agent fired his weapon after the man drove his vehicle toward agents.
Initial accounts regarding the January 7 shooting death of Renee Good in Minneapolis, including Trump’s account that Good “ran over the ICE Officer,” were also undermined by additional video that emerged.
(Reporting by Daniel Trotta in Carlsbad, California; Editing by Rod Nickel and Jamie Freed)
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