Following public backlash over two fatal shootings, the Department of Homeland Security said this week that at least one law enforcement officer on every Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrest team will wear a body-worn camera.
Citing an increase in assaults against immigration agents, DHS said expanding the use of body-worn cameras across its officers nationwide remains a "top priority."
"This is especially needed because the media and sanctuary politicians consistently spread smears about our law enforcement," the DHS statement said, as reported by CBS News.
According to an ICE directive signed in February last year, the rollout of body-worn cameras across immigration officers is dependent on the availability of funding. However, Rep. Sylvia Garcia noted that ICE was allocated $20 million for body cameras after then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said in February that the agency would purchase the devices and deploy them in the field.
In recent days, a Mexican man in Houston and a Colombian man in Biddeford, Maine, were fatally shot by immigration officers who were not wearing body cameras. Shortly after the Houston shooting, DHS said body cameras had been deployed to more than half of ICE's field offices and that the remaining offices would receive them within 60 days.
Garcia, a Houston Democrat, said Acting ICE Director David Venturella assured her during a recent phone call that all agents in the field would have access to body cameras by the end of July, as reported by the Associated Press.
For DHS, ICE's parent agency, two recent government shutdowns and a lack of funding are the reasons body-worn cameras have not yet been issued to all officers.
According to David Hernández, an immigration enforcement researcher at Mount Holyoke College who spoke to USA Today, DHS' explanation that the government shutdown delayed the rollout of body cameras is "a total lie," noting that Congress had already allocated $75 billion to ICE before the shutdown.
"It's to protect themselves from the reckless and disproportionate violence that they use on migrants. ... They do not have the capacity to apprehend someone without violence," Hernández said.
USA Today reported that former acting ICE Director Todd Lyons told Congress earlier this year that about 3,000 of the agency's 13,000 officers were already using body cameras.
Other members of Congress have also criticized the agency, saying its slow rollout has been "truly shameful."
U.S. Rep. Bennie G. Thompson, the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Homeland Security, told USA Today that ICE has had body-worn cameras available for months without deploying them to the field, adding that the agency has been "purposely dragging its feet" despite having "nearly infinite resources at its disposal."
Michelle Gross, president of the Minnesota-based advocacy group Communities United Against Police Brutality, said ICE should not conduct enforcement operations until all officers are equipped with body cameras.
"If they're going to be running around with guns and stopping people, you damn well better have some body cameras," she said, as reported by the Associated Press. "This is an agency that's soaking up an incredible amount of tax dollars and we can't have any accountability?"
