President Donald Trump is not only violating civil liberties by setting Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on the public without body cameras, he is also putting those agents themselves in danger, former ICE chief of staff Jason P. Houser told MS NOW’s Katy Tur on Wednesday.
This comes after ICE briefly stood down from traffic stops after public outrage exploded following killings by agents in Maine and Texas — then went back to business as usual after Trump ranted on Truth Social, “We CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP! Once we do, we are playing right into the criminal’s hands.”
“The two killings this week, Jason, were not the people that ICE was looking for,” said Tur, noting as well that neither of the officers was wearing a camera. “A lot of money has gone to DHS and ICE and to Border Patrol … why aren’t they wearing body cams?”
Houser agreed this didn’t make any sense.
Implementation plans for equipping body cameras on ICE agents, he said, “go back to the middle of the Biden administration and even my time at the agency; they have the money to do it. They can implement it within 30, 60, or 90 days. They can do it widely. They can put in the data infrastructure, the privacy controls.” There is, he said, “no rational reason” they aren’t wearing them now.
It’s not just important for “accountability,” he added, but “for officer safety, there again, putting the officers at risk as well as the communities.”
Making matters worse, Houser continued, these sorts of traffic stops “[are] not sort of in their tactical … toolkit. You know, yes, there have been vehicle stops used mainly by fugitive operations and other … convicted criminals. But just sort of these, these random stops, like it’s like a DUI stop in some rural county in America.”
That is flatly not “the traditional way” ICE has operated, he added, and Trump’s claims to the contrary are “just factually not true.”
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