Videos apparently blow hole in ICE agents' deadly shooting story

ICE Killed a Man, Then Tried to Explain It AwayThe Story in One SentenceIn Biddeford, Maine, ICE agents shot and killed a 26-year-old Colombian man who was authorized to work in the United States, while video footage and witness accounts undercut the government’s claim that he used his car as a weapon. A second video shows agents removing his body and dropping it headfirst to the ground after the shooting.The Claim Does Not Survive the VideoThe central fact here is not confusion. It is contradiction. The government said one thing; the footage shows another. Agents are seen walking beside a slow-rolling car, not confronting some cinematic attempted attack. That matters because ICE is not an accident-prone bystander. It is the armed state deciding when force is justified, then reaching for language that launders the decision after the fact.When an agency kills someone, it does not get to hide behind vague invocation of danger once the visual record cuts against it. The burden is on ICE, not the dead man, to explain why lethal force was used. So far, the explanation appears to be: trust us, even when the evidence says not to.Power Sat Where It Always SitsActual institutional power was on the side of ICE. The agency had the guns, the authority, and the ability to detain, shoot, and control the scene afterward. The victim had none of that. He was alive, on the street, bleeding, and then dead. That asymmetry is the whole story.The article also shows how state violence is protected by paperwork and narrative management. Congress had already given DHS $20 million after earlier fatal ICE shootings specifically for body cameras. Yet the agents in Biddeford had none, and neither did the agents who killed a man in Houston last week. That is not a technical oversight. It is institutional refusal. The agency keeps operating in the dark because darkness is useful.No Camera, No AccountabilityThe lack of body cameras is not a side note. It is the mechanism that lets ICE keep turning lethal force into a dispute over interpretation. If the agents had cameras, this would be harder to spin. Without them, the agency gets to narrate itself as threatened, even when witnesses and video show otherwise.And the aftermath is revealing too. A second video shows the body being removed and dropped headfirst on the ground, apparently while handcuffed. That is not just grotesque. It is the final insult of an institution that can kill first and then mishandle the corpse as if dignity were an afterthought.The Usual MisdirectionThe political move here is familiar: shift attention from the armed federal agents to the vehicle, the moment, the supposed uncertainty, the “split-second decision.” That framing treats deliberate state violence as if it were weather. It is the oldest trick in policing politics: make the victim look like the problem and the shooter look like a tragic employee caught in circumstances.But the source gives the lie to that posture. Witnesses said the man said, “I tried to stop.” One neighbor watched, from her window, as agents stopped the car and pulled him out. Another said he was bleeding profusely and talking before he died. Those are not the details of a clean defensive shooting. They are the details of a man killed by an agency that thinks its force should be taken on faith.Abolish the MachineThis is not an argument for better training, more oversight, or a fresh promise that ICE will do better next time. The pattern is the argument. Fatal shootings, missing cameras, post hoc excuses, and contempt for the dead are not deviations from ICE’s mission. They are what an unaccountable deportation force produces when given broad power and thin scrutiny.ICE should not be reformed into a kinder version of itself. It should be abolished. An agency that can kill a work-authorized man in Maine, explain it away, and leave the body in public view has already answered the question of whether it can be trusted with this power. Get full access to Systemic Error at paulstsmith.substack.com/subscribe