Minnesota (QNN)- A US immigration officer fatally shot a woman in her car in Minneapolis, sparking protests in the city over the “reckless use of power.” The ICE shooting has raised questions about similarities between ICE actions and those of Israeli forces, including whether officers receive training in Israel, especially after the officer prevented a doctor from helping the victim.
The ICE agent shot and killed on Wednesday a 37-year-old woman in the head in front of a family member, about 1.6 kilometres from where George Floyd was killed by police in 2020, during the Trump administration's latest immigration crackdown on a major American city, a shooting that federal officials claimed was an act of self-defense but that the city's mayor described as "reckless" and unnecessary.
Her killing was recorded on video by witnesses, and the scene of the shooting quickly drew a large crowd of angry protesters.
The victim, 37-year-old Renee Nicole Macklin Good, had a six-year old child. She described herself on social media as a "poet and writer and wife and mom" who was from Colorado.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey blasted that characterization and the federal deployment of more than 2,000 officers as part of the immigration crackdown in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul.
"They are not here to cause safety in this city. What they are doing is not to provide safety in America. What they are doing is causing chaos and distrust," Frey said.
"They're ripping families apart. They're sowing chaos on our streets and in this case quite literally killing people."
The mayor added: "They are already trying to spin this as an action of self-defence. Having seen the video myself, I wanna tell everybody directly, that is bullshit."
"Get the f--k out of Minneapolis. We do not want you here.”
One video shows that moments after the ICE agent fatally shot the woman, a man who identified himself as a doctor was barred by officers from checking on the victim.
"Can I go check a pulse?," a man asks.
An agent tells the man, "No," and to back up.
"I'm a physician," the man replied.
"I don't care," one agent is heard saying.
https://x.com/yashar/status/2009024658281316835?s=46&t=t_-JFgpXqgMIkVsuBfWELw
The fatal shooting has sparked questions about similarities between the actions of ICE agents and the treatment and attacks carried out by Israeli forces against Palestinians and whether ICE agents receive training from Israel or are even Israeli soldiers themselves.
Social media users shared a video of Anthony Aguilar, a retired US officer who also worked for the infamous Israeli and US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, during which he says: “ICE trains in Israel — then brings those same apartheid tactics back home.”
https://x.com/ounkaonx/status/2009177372960907380?s=46&t=t_-JFgpXqgMIkVsuBfWELw
“ICE is Copying Israel's IDF Playbook in America,” wrote one user on X.
https://x.com/ryanrozbiani/status/2009281234115989633?s=46&t=t_-JFgpXqgMIkVsuBfWELw
In 2017, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) launched the Deadly Exchange campaign to sever the decades-long collaboration between U.S. law enforcement and the Israeli military. JVP said its Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests revealed that well over a thousand police, sheriffs and federal agents, including the FBI, ICE, and Homeland Security, had flown to Israel for training in surveillance, racial profiling, crowd control, detention, and deportation.
https://x.com/truthtellerftm/status/2009083005181047279?s=46&t=t_-JFgpXqgMIkVsuBfWELw
https://x.com/aldamu_jo/status/2009175134180188608?s=46&t=t_-JFgpXqgMIkVsuBfWELw
In 2018, Researching the American-Israeli Alliance (RAIA), in partnership with JVP, produced “Deadly Exchange: The Dangerous Consequences of American Law Enforcement in Israel.” In this report, the authors examined how U.S. law enforcement in Israel studied visual monitoring in public places, internet surveillance, racial profiling of communities of color, treatment of protesters as enemy combatants and coordination of media reporting on state-sponsored violence.
Eran Efrati, then executive director of RAIA, told Al Jazeera in 2020 that U.S. law enforcement who travelled to Israel witnessed “live demonstrations of repressive violence in real-time, in protests across the West Bank, patrols in East Jerusalem, and visits to the Gaza border.”
Efrati told Al Jazeera, “Delegates meet with the Shin Bet and chief officers in Israeli military prisons to discuss investigation tactics, with Palestinian Authority agents and police, to learn about how Israel uses their collaboration in suppressing Palestinian dissent.”
JVP’s FOIA requests revealed that, in 2015, Peter Edge, then the associate director of ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations, accepted an invitation from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to attend a “counterterrorism” seminar in Israel.
FOIA requests also turned up ADL documents in which Edge, prior to visiting Israel, said he was looking forward to “learning more about how the law enforcement community manages perpetual and elevated threat levels, both internally and from neighboring countries, how/whether they are effective, and how those techniques can be applied more broadly.”
Israel and the United States also rely on the tech companies — Google, Palantir, Amazon, Microsoft, and Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons developer — to surveil the movements of Palestinians in the occupied territories, as well as the movements of immigrant communities and Palestinian rights activists in the United States.
Since 2008, the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE and CBP, has signed $235 million in contracts with Elbit Systems. That includes a $23.9 million contract with Elbit’s U.S. subsidiary for new surveillance towers, complete with cameras and radar systems, for an integrated virtual border wall, awarded during former President Joe Biden’s tenure.
Sam Chambers, a research associate at the University of Arizona, notes that immigrants wishing to avoid the virtual wall traverse isolated and mountainous paths, where some never make it out alive.
Another DHS-Elbit contract for night vision goggles would allow the CPB to track immigrants crossing the U.S.-Mexican border in darkness or fog. The words “REAL. RAPID. READY.” are headlined across Elbit America’s website that boasts of AI-powered technology for a 98 percent detection rate of illegal border crossings.
“Our fully autonomous systems are field-proven, rapidly deployed, and ready today,” reads the website.
Source: Al Jazeera, Truthout, Deadly Exchange, CNN,
