Federal immigration officers have fired on people more than a dozen times since Donald Trump returned to the presidency last year, killing at least four people and injuring at least seven others.
At least 16 shooting incidents by federal officers within the last year include last week’s killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis, where an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer fired three shots into her car at close range, striking her in the face, igniting a political firestorm and protests across the country.
Two days later, Customs and Border Patrol officers in Oregon shot and injured two people accused of “weaponizing” a car against them.
In at least 15 other incidents, federal immigration officers held people at gunpoint but didn’t shoot, and there have been countless deployments of riot control weapons such as rubber bullets, pepper balls and chemical sprays, including at point-blank range.
The Independent’s review of federal records and an analysis from The Trace likely represent an undercount, as thousands of officers continue to surge into largely Democratic-led cities across the country to support Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda.
“This makes us all less safe,” according to gun control advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety.
“Armed intimidation in our communities does not make anyone safer,” added Brady, a nonprofit organization against gun violence. “More firearms in neighborhoods already impacted by gun violence helps no one. Police violence is gun violence.”
Brady president Kris Brown stressed that Americans have a “right to due process and freedom from wanton, arbitrary, and lethal violence.”
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Immigration officers killed 20 people in 2023 and 2022, according to the most recent federal data. Officers with ICE and border patrol — the agencies behind the Trump administration’s latest wave of federal law enforcement actions — used lethal force against 19 people in that time, while a Coast Guard member was responsible for one death, according to federal reports.
Within the 12 months through September 2024, ICE’s internal firearms and use of force committee investigated three incidents in which an officer used a firearm, according to ICE’s annual report.
In the year before that, the committee investigated five shooting incidents.
ICE agents were responsible for 59 shootings within the six-year period between 2015 to 2022, according to a 2024 investigation from The Trace, Type Investigations and Business Insider. At least 24 people were injured in those shootings, and at least 23 people were killed.
Last year also marked the deadliest year for in-custody deaths at ICE facilities in more than two decades. At least 32 people died in immigration detention facilities in 2025, matching the previous record set in 2004.
In September, Silverio Villegas Gonzalez, a 38-year-old father and cook originally from Mexico, was shot at “close range” as he allegedly tried to flee ICE officers during a traffic stop in Chicago — marking the first fatal shooting by immigration officers during the second Trump administration.
Last month, a border patrol agent shot a 31-year-old Mexican citizen three times while trying to detain him in Rio Grande City, Texas, according to the agency. He was pronounced dead roughly one hour after the incident was reported.
And on New Year’s Eve, an off-duty ICE agent fatally shot 43-year-old Keith Porter in Los Angeles, California.
Porter, the father of two children, was allegedly firing a rifle in the air to celebrate the New Year. The officer shot him three times, according to DHS.
Days earlier, an immigration officer in Los Angeles shot and hit an American citizen in the shoulder. Lawyers for Carlos Jimenez say he asked the officers to move away from the area, warning that schoolchildren would soon be there. Federal prosecutors claim he accelerated his car towards an officer as he tried to flee.
Immigration officers have fired on moving cars at least 13 times over the last year, according to an analysis from The Wall Street Journal, with administration officials defending the actions against drivers who have “weaponized” their cars against law enforcement.
“When faced with dangerous circumstances, DHS law enforcement used their training to protect themselves, their fellow officers, and the public,” Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin told the newspaper.
Department of Justice policy prohibits officers from firing at a moving vehicle unless there is “no other objectively reasonable means of defense appear to exist, which includes moving out of the path of the vehicle.”
Homeland Security’s use-of-force policy similarly states that firing at a driver is “prohibited” unless there’s a “reasonable belief that the subject of such force poses an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury.”
Deadly force is forbidden when solely trying to stop a car, according to federal guidelines.
“Everything about these incidents indicates that these are probably shootings that did not need to happen,” Georgetown Law professor and former Department of Justice litigator Christy Lopez told The Trace.
ICE agents “can’t prevent everything, but they have the ability to de-escalate situations,” Lopez said. “Instead, we see the opposite. They’re actually stoking this inordinate amount of fear and this hypervigilance, and they should be trying to tamp it down — but they’re not.”
Marimar Martinez, a 30-year-old teaching assistant and U.S. citizen from Chicago, survived five shots from an immigration officer who shouted “do something, b****” before firing at her, according to a video of October’s incident.
Homeland Security claims Martinez had rammed her car while driving around Chicago’s majority-Hispanic Brighton Park neighborhood, but footage from the incident contradicted the government’s account and prosecutors ultimately dropped the case.
In text messages provided to the court, the officer allegedly boasted about the incident: “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys.”
While a bulk of recent shooting incidents occurred in the Los Angeles and Chicago areas, several — including Good’s killing — took place in and around Minneapolis.
Late last month, an ICE officer shot at a man in an SUV in St. Paul, Minnesota, after the driver allegedly struck two agents with his car. The driver was uninjured.
That same month, immigration officers allegedly brandished firearms at a crowd of students at a private university in Minneapolis.
And in June, the same ICE officer who fatally shot Good was injured in an incident where he fired a Taser at a driver during a traffic stop. The officer, Jonathan Ross, broke the rear driver’s side window, reached into the car and shot Roberto Carlos Muñoz with his Taser 10 times and saw “the impacts on his face,” according to his testimony.
“I was fearing for my life. I knew I was going to get drug [sic],” Ross said. “And the fact I couldn’t get my arm out, I didn’t know how long I would be drugged. So I was kind of running with the vehicle.”
Ross said he was dragged for more than 100 yards and received 20 stitches for a cut on his right arm and 13 stitches on his left hand, according to prosecutors.
But Muñoz survived the encounter. A jury later found him guilty of assault with a dangerous and deadly weapon and causing bodily injury.
