A fight erupted on CNN Saturday morning as conservative political commentator tried and failed to defend Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Kash Patel as reports mount of ICE agents involved in fatal shootings.
Jason Rantz spurred an uproar as he tried to the Trump administration after Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a father of three killed by ICE in Texas last week, was found not to have drugs, as the FBI suggested, but salt in his car.
“Any time there’s any kind of action, the response has always been that ICE is 100 percent to blame,” Rantz said. “They used their vehicle to flee. We should be having a conversation, at least in part, to say, ‘Do not do that.”
This defense came in direct response to Xochitl Hinojosa, former Democratic National Committee advisor, and her argument that the FBI was more concerned with controlling the narrative than investigating the truth.
“The FBI has typically taken its time until it has more information about any sort of shooting or any incident,” she said. “Under Kash Patel, what has happened is that they have tried to rush to frame the narrative a certain way, and it’s not the way that you do law enforcement.”
Hinojosa referenced the response to two fatal ICE shootings in Houston and Maine — where an ICE agent with a reported history of violent behavior fatally shot a Columbian father named Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero — as proof of serious problems within the FBI.
“These were massive law enforcement failures,” she said. “We have seen Kash Patel and our law enforcement agencies fail at every turn to try to get ahead of the narrative.”
Tensions mounted among the commentators when podcaster Cari Champion brought up the topic of quotas.
“They are actually randomly killing people,” she said. “Accusing people because they have in fact, because they do have a quota in place of 2000 arrests per day, they are actually probably not trained to do their job effectively in the way in which they should.”
“How is it random?” a flustered Rantz shot back.
“It’s random because you’re targeting people and you’re suggesting, after the fact… after you murder someone,” she replied. “And then you say that they had methamphetamine and then you’re like, ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute, it wasn’t that it was actually something so they can stay hydrated because they’re construction workers and they work out.’”
“The FBI hasn’t—,” Rantz tried to interject, but Champion cut in with a question: “If you sit up here and tell me straight face on a Saturday morning that you don’t think that they’ve made mistakes?”
“I don’t think they have,” he said.
Champion then threw down a challenge: “Explain to me what they’ve done right.”
As the pair shouted each other down, Hinojosa cut it to raise the topic of an FBI investigation, which Rantz tried to argue was under way.
“The FBI usually opens a civil rights investigation anytime there’s a police involved shooting,” she said. “Except for in this administration.”
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