By AVA FAHY and ERWIN FREED
Early Wednesday morning, Sept. 24, three detainees at the ICE field office in Dallas were shot by a gunman who was later identified as Joshua Jahn, 29. According to reports, the shooter then turned the gun on himself and died by suicide. Three immigrant detainees were shot, and out of those, one has since died.
In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, Vice President JD Vance, speaking at an event in North Carolina, labeled the shooter as a “violent left-wing extremist.” Without being specific, he alleged that evidence proved that the shooter “was politically motivated to go after law enforcement … to go after people who are enforcing our border.”
Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform, “This violence is the result of the Radical Left Democrats constantly demonizing Law Enforcement, calling for ICE to be demolished, and comparing ICE Officers to ‘Nazis.’” Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Sept. 25, he again emphasized that message: “The radical left is causing the problem. They’re out of control.” He warned that retaliation by the right could become inevitable.
In this particular case, it is quite possible that the shooter was hoping to disrupt ICE operations. According to the FBI, one of the handwritten notes that it recovered read, “Hopefully this will give Ice agents real terror, to think, ‘is there a sniper’? about to fire from a roof.” At the same time, as we discuss below, there is a growing pattern of ideologically mixed symbols connected with recent shootings and assassinations that are either ambiguous or outright distorted by investigating agencies.
Trump, Vance, Homeland Security Agency head Kristi Noem, and other capitalist representatives have gone even further than speculating the motives of the shooter. They are using these tragic deaths in Dallas to paint ICE agents as increasingly at risk. In actual fact, ICE and CBP are two of the safest law enforcement positions, which is itself a generally safe career.
While increases in violence against ICE agents have been reported since Trump took office, this is likely related to the increased frequency of enforcement and the deployment of enforcement tactics wherein ICE agents emerge, wearing face coverings and no agency identification, from unmarked cars with their firearms drawn. These were the circumstances, for example, in the case of Silverio Villegas González, who was fatally shot by ICE agents in Chicago on Sept. 12 after dropping his children off at a childcare center. ICE also has a tendency to completely fabricate claimed “assaults.”
In any case, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLoughlin has already stated that no federal agents were injured in the Dallas shooting. This smokescreen around motives and facts is an example of how the far right has become effective at using acts of violence to demand and facilitate attacks on working people—especially trans and Black people and immigrants of color—as well as progressive activists.
They are aided in the use of “culture war” narratives by the growing prominence of shooters inspired by esoteric neo-Nazi forums and materials from groups like “The Com” and “Order of Nine Angles.” These generally nihilist worldviews take hold in impressionable and often mentally unstable people, who are pushed to carry out acts of violence. Online discussion spaces are often, if not always, penetrated by police infiltrators and informants. A prime example is Joshua Caleb Sutter, a neo-Nazi and former leader of the Aryan Nations, who has gained notoriety for his role as a FBI informant and provocateur. Similarly, police and particularly the FBI are known to plant evidence to bolster their own “official” narratives.
This background context can help us to understand that much skepticism is needed to objectively review the information trickling out from the police agencies. In particular, FBI Director Kash Patel posted pictures of shell casings allegedly left by the shooter that appear to have “ANTI ICE” written on one. Shooters inspired by police-informant-run neo-Nazi networks have been consistently writing both “left” and “right” slogans on their weapons and ammunition. A notable example was Robin Westman, who killed two children when firing on a Catholic school in Minneapolis in August. The news outlets, and certainly the Trump administration, generally only commented on Westman’s “leftist” slogans while ignoring the racist, antisemitic, and nihilistic messages. “The message is there is no message,” Westman wrote in a journal.
And, it should be noted, the FBI has faked evidence in the past to achieve favorable outcomes for themselves—for example, George Perrot spent over 30 years in federal prison based on an FBI hair analysis found to have been completely bogus. His case was one of thousands in which the FBI, in their own words, “provided either testimony with erroneous statements or submitted laboratory reports with erroneous statements.”
In summary, the capitalist class—through its media, police, and politicians—is using acts of violence, no matter the source, to construct narratives justifying further attacks on the left and all oppressed peoples. It is necessary to be highly critical about the information that they release, which is often decontextualized, depoliticized, and missing crucial details.
In particular, the Trump administration and its MAGA supporters are using these horrific deaths to further demonize immigrants as well as distract from the real conditions in ICE’s “detention centers.” We cannot let the voices of the people who are made to suffer in these centers be drowned out by speculation about motives, investigations, and conspiracies. Since Trump took office, 15 people have died in immigration detention, while thousands are tortured. The most recent death, Ismael Ayala-Uribe, a former DACA recipient, occurred last Sunday.
Earlier this year, ICE announced that they were out of detention space, with 50,000 people under detention—4000 more than they had beds for. Rather than parole detainees or slow down the pace of immigration enforcement, ICE has launched contracts with several private, for-profit prison operators.
Today, ICE detentions stand at a record high, at over 60,000 people. Whistleblowers say the conditions are unsanitary and unsafe. Due to overcrowding, detainees are increasingly being denied changes of clothes, blankets, pillows, phone calls to family, phone calls to attorneys, medication, and mattresses. Detainees at the Krome Detention center in Florida made headlines earlier this year for forming a human “SOS” sign in the recreation yard with their bodies. According to a lawyer who represents Krome detainees, his client was only given a cup of rice and a glass of water per day. At one point, Krome detained over 1200 people more than its contractual capacity.
El Pais has reported that the overcrowding in detention facilities has fueled a surge in detainee suicide attempts driven by desperation. At least two of the known detention fatalities this year have been suicides: Jesus Molina Veya and Chaofeng Ge. This is likely caused by jail employees’ blatant lack of disregard for detainees’ health and wellbeing. For example, one woman, a survivor of female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C), taken to jail for the “crime” of seeking asylum, was strip-searched in front of a camera—which caused her to go into acute mental crisis and placed on suicide watch. In an ICE detention center, “suicide watch” means solitary confinement.
Importantly, ICE detention facilities are not, ostensibly, criminal detention centers—at least not by the letter of the law. Most violations of immigration law, such as overstaying one’s visa, are not criminal offenses, but are civil offenses that carry no criminal penalties. The highest court in the land, the Supreme Court, has stated that immigration proceedings are not “punitive” (at least, according to the government). For this reason, ICE detainees are not afforded the same due process protections as individuals in criminal proceedings. Unlike folks in criminal court, people facing down immigration charges are not entitled to a court-appointed lawyer, not entitled to “Miranda” rights, not entitled to exclude unlawfully obtained evidence against them, and can be deported for criminal convictions that did not render them deportable at the time they were committed.
These “civil” detention centers are often located directly next to—or sometimes, inside of—already existing criminal detention facilities, and are staffed by the same employees. In this “civil” detention, detainees are forced to wear prisoner uniforms, submit to invasive strip searches and cavity searches, routinely placed in solitary confinement, assaulted by officers, and denied medical care—or, in the cases of some immigrant women, are forcibly subjected to nonconsensual gynecological procedures, including sterilization.
Moreover, the Trump government has promulgated several pieces of legislation and policy directives that have stripped individual actors within the immigration system of the power to parole individual detainees. The Laken Riley Act, signed in March, has made it mandatory to detain without bond immigrants who have not only been charged with or convicted of theft-related offenses, but also those who have merely been arrested for theft, even if the charges were resolved in their favor.
More recently (although woefully underreported), a BIA decision entitled Matter of Yajure Hurtado set a legal precedent that any noncitizen who entered the United States without inspection (commonly known as EWI) is not entitled to bond out of immigration detention. It is estimated that over half of the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. fall into this category.
Far from being non-punitive, the point of the poor conditions in immigration detention—and the intentional worsening of the already-poor conditions—is explicitly to deter immigrants from exercising their due process rights. When asked if DHS’s new planned ICE detention center at Louisiana’s Angola prison was deliberately intended to drive immigrants out of the country, ICE director Kristi Noem giggled and said “Absolutely!” with a grin.
Workers’ Voice stands in solidarity with the immigrant victims of Wednesday’s tragic shooting at the Dallas ICE field office. We are likewise in solidarity with all people in immigration detention, imprisoned for the crime of crossing an imaginary line. All sectors of U.S. workers must take a stand against the cruel and unusual punishment of immigrants and for justice and civil liberties for all the millions of immigrants in the United States, regardless of documentation or status.
