Paco Alvarez: Just to get us started, could you just talk a bit about the investigation generally, like your main findings and such?
Lila Hassan: Well, we obtained a Freedom of Information request that we had to litigate. And so part of our major findings is even finding out about the shootings at all. Some of these shootings, 17 of them in specific, have never been reported to the public before. We identified 59 shootings from 2015 to 2021. But because the way it had to be litigated, this is actually the first time that a comprehensive analysis of all of these shootings was possible.
Some of these shootings have been reported about previously in local media and state specific media. But this is the first time that anybody’s taken a look at all of the shootings known and recorded by ICE during this time period. So what we found when we looked into all of these shootings, and also another 20 FOIAs later to state and local police to find out whether or not there were ever criminal indictments, is that none of the shootings we reviewed resulted in a criminal indictment. All of them, whether or not they killed somebody, whether or not somebody was criminally injured, even if they were found to have had administrative issues or policy violations, none had resulted in a criminal indictment. There’s no evidence of that. We found that some might not have been investigated at all by local or state media, given the confusion over jurisdiction between local and state police and federal immigration agents being involved in these shootings. And we found that 23 people were killed altogether.
We also found that some of these shootings occurred in public places, endangering other by standards or people that were nearby. And one of the shootings we looked into and talked about a little in a little bit more detail, there was a four year old in the front seat. So essentially what we found in this investigation is that Ice agents shoot sometimes recklessly, sometimes without thought, sometimes almost immediately, and don’t really suffer any consequences for it.
The main person we looked into, Gabino Ramos Hernandez, who was shot by Ice agents in 2016, actually pursued two legal claims against the ICE agent that shot him. He’s not alone in that. We’ve identified seven other lawsuits where that was also the case. But none of them were successful in actually bringing about a wrongful action from ICE. Only one case resulted in a settlement, and that was without admission of wrongful anything. One is currently underway, and the rest were all dismissed, either because the claims weren’t strong enough or because the agents were protected by qualified immunity. So all going back to the point to say that Ice agents in their shootings that we reviewed during this time period don’t really suffer any consequences, neither criminal conviction nor legal.
Alvarez: What initially inspired your investigation and how did you start it?
Hassan: Yeah, I was taking an immigration class at Columbia J-School when I was still there four years ago. And one really headline making case that actually went across the country because at the time it was the Trump administration. And this conversation about sanctuary cities or non sanctuary cities was in the forefront of everybody’s minds. ICE agents had shot somebody in the face in Brooklyn around ten minutes away from my parents place. So it hit really close to home to know that that was something that occurred essentially around the corner. And I was so curious because at the time, New York Times, New York Post, local media that was reporting about it, all asked ICE how many shootings had taken place during the Trump administration, and ICE was willing to give a number, but they weren’t willing to give out any other information – where they occurred, how often they occurred, how many per year. I was interested to see if there was perhaps a spike because of Trump’s anti-immigration policies during his time from 2016 to, at the time, 2020, if there was a number increase from year to year. And so I just wanted to know more about this because I wasn’t even sure that ice could shoot people that weren’t within the realm of their authority. I thought, because removal and deportation, when somebody overstays a visa, that’s very much a civil issue. It’s not a criminal issue. It’s not a felony for me. To see this level of violence being waged against people that were supposed to be deported seemed excessive. And so really, it was just a whole lot of like, question marks that I wanted to answer. And later in the process, it kind of unfolded into an investigation.
Alvarez: Like you mentioned at the beginning, a lot of your reporting is based on information for Republicans and from public records requests. What were your experiences like communicating with ICE and DHS, both in terms of their requests and just general requests for comments?
Hassan: Yeah, I think what I did over the last four years was let them know in every other corner that I was doing this investigation. So at no point were they out of the loop that this was happening. The press officer that originally gave me the numbers of how many shootings happened during the Trump administration eventually told me that if I wanted more information, I would have to FOIA for it. So I kind of took that email exchange into my initial FOIA request with them, to let them know, like, hey, even your office is telling me that if I wanted this information, I’d have to get it from you. And I had received, you know, positive responses, believe it or not, even during the Trump administration to say like, oh yeah, we’ve received your request. We’re processing it. We had an exchange, at some point to say, if you really want these records, you’re going to have to relinquish asking for people’s names, both ICE agents and the people that have been shot, because you would need third party consent. I was happy to make that negotiation to get the records anyway.
And it was when things had taken eight months that I wrote back to amend my FOIA request and say, okay, well, you know what? I’m actually going to amend the request, to extend up until you actually complete the records, because at that point, like, we were going on a year that I wouldn’t be able to get the records out because I had, asked for all of the shootings up until that shooting in Brooklyn, which was in February 2020. So I amended the request and I added an extra clause to say, you have to expedite these records because of an imminent harm clause that’s within public record requests. Given that agents were actively shooting people, I wanted to indicate that you’d have to get me this because there’s an endangerment to the public in some way. It was that day that I made that amendment that they canceled the request altogether and made all the arguments that there are so many exemptions that they don’t actually need to provide these records to me.
And it was that day that I also decided to seek out legal representation. There was Gumshoe Group, it’s a part of the fund for Investigative Journalists now, but at the time it was its own independent thing. They accepted my application within a month or two months, and then that’s how long it took to get the actual suit going. But all the while, I was in touch with the ICE media office. I wanted to let them know that I was doing this investigation, that these are the records that I was seeking through FOIA, but I still wanted to know more about the use of force policy and when do shootings ever constitute an issue or a criminal issue.
DHS I was less involved with because DHS essentially has a use of force blanket policy that applies to all of its agencies. So border protection, the Secret Service, all of these other agencies that are within Homeland Security. ICE was in charge of itself, and ICE is also in charge of investigating itself. So I was only interested in dealing with ICE.
Over the course of four years, I had gone through four different spokespeople at ICE. They had kept me going for so long, giving me the idea that they were going to give me an interview, then saying they were going to answer my questions, then saying they were not going to answer my questions. And another person coming in to be like, oh, this person is no longer in the role. Here’s somebody else that you can speak to who would, be like, oh, let’s get on the phone and chat, which we would. And then, you know, it was just we had a lot of conversations about having a conversation, but we never actually had that conversation, and by the time we actually came to publishing our findings, we gave them honestly over two weeks to answer all of those questions. But the reality is, we’d give them over four years to answer all the questions that we have. And in the end, they still didn’t answer all of our questions, claiming they didn’t have enough time. So that was essentially the relationship I had with them for four years.
Alvarez: In the article, you mentioned that you supplemented the details from ICE with, like, other sources, like police reports and like, local news sources. Could you just talk about that a bit? What were the differences between what was in the use of force logs versus these other sources?
Hassan: The use of force logs were a good starting point I would say. They didn’t have any narrative details in them. In the story, we even published an example of what one of them looks like. They indicate the weapons that the ICE agent had and might have used, indicate the environment type, and they indicate what had happened to the quote, subject/suspect.
So they weren’t really that comprehensive. What they were was a really, really good starting point to understand where these shootings were taking place. You know, we found I mean, this isn’t necessarily written in the story, but, what we found in the database that I then used to create from them was that they happened in cities that were actually populated with immigrants, and they weren’t necessarily like, you know, suburbs in far out places. They were major cities like Detroit, Phoenix, Tucson, Arizona, like Miami, like New York. What we did after having those records was I, having the city in the state, was able to then reach out to a state district attorney or a local county attorney to find out, like, well, did you ever investigate them? Was it a bill or no bill? Essentially, were they charged with any criminal indictment for having shot at something? What were the administrative violations that might have taken place? What we found was ICE agents didn’t always participate in the investigation. Some of them didn’t show up for a week, two weeks, if at all, to actually offer their witness statements. They weren’t necessarily cooperative with local authorities when they were conducting these investigations. And without these investigations and without local news reporting, honestly, like it would have been really difficult to understand what actually happened in all of these shootings because, like I mentioned, 17 of these shootings never actually saw the public view at all. O ur records or the first record of them ever occurring.
Alvarez: The article focuses on the experiences of one man specifically who was shot by an ICE officer. How did you get in contact with him and his family? Did you speak with other people?
Hassan: Yeah, I spoke with other people. Understandably so, some people that didn’t have status were not as eager to get on the record with me, for fear of their shooting and then, you know, perhaps their litigation following the shooting, putting them at even more risk of deportation or for ICE potentially retaliating against them. These are fears that had been communicated to me. And then in other cases, where there was ongoing litigation, like in the case of the settlement, they weren’t allowed to talk about the shooting anymore because they had reached that settlement.
So where I managed to get in touch with people is where there were lawsuits against ICE agents. After I built out this database based on our very bare bones records, I identified all of the media reporting that I could about all of these shootings. And wherever there were names, I reached out to people, whether that was a lawyer or whether that was a person themselves shot, and I managed to find their contact information one way or another, or even the local police stations, if they could give me their police records that I could then find identifying information and reach out to people.
So with Gabino Ramos Hernandez, the way that I reached out to him was in one of those ways. I found a lawyer that was representing him in a lawsuit. The Southern Poverty Law Center, based in Alabama, had actually filed a FOIA against, the Laurel Police Department and the Mississippi Bureau of Investigations, for the investigative report that they had done to find out whether or not they would, you know, charge essentially that this agent that shot him with a bill or no bill, for the criminal charge. And in that I was able to find out, you know, piece together who were the actors involved in that shooting? What exactly took place that night? And when I reached out to the lawyer, he had told me, actually, that national media had reached out to him before and just kind of abandoned him. And so he had a distrusting relationship with the media at that point. But I let him know, like, no, I’m really in this for the long game, and I want to know what happened. And I’d love to know what you learned as you waged a lawsuit against ICE about the agency. Like, did you get a use of force report? Did you understand how their local investigate how their internal investigations work? And luckily, luckily, he had already submitted a photo of himself for all of the information that surrounded Gabino’s case internally with ICE. And that’s how we managed to get an inspector general report. That’s how we got the depositions of the ICE agents that he had to depose in the course of the lawsuit. It’s how we got a lot of other identifying information or background information into how ICE conducts an internal investigation.
So we got in touch with his lawyer at first. And because I was going to make the trip out to Mississippi to actually meet them, the family opened up to me quite quickly because they couldn’t believe that a national reporter or that somebody outside of Mississippi was actually interested in them that actually wanted to meet with them. So when I went down to Mississippi to meet them, actually, they were all waiting for me – Gabino, his sister, his partner, his sister’s children that went to go pick him up in the hospital that night. They were really eager to have their story be told, and they just hadn’t had the opportunity yet for that.
Alvarez: A lot of your investigation dives into how Ice agents face very little accountability when they violate use of force protocols. What are the avenues for accountability when violations occur? And how do they fail to produce any meaningful changes?
Hassan: Yeah. And as such, it’s a heartbreaking answer because there really isn’t a there aren’t a lot of avenues for change, or for accountability for ICE. There is, civil complaints hotline that they can submit a complaint to, but there’s no guarantee that ICE would reach out to them. That’s, you know, more for internal purposes for ICE to keep track of, you know, whether or not they’re receiving civil complaints. The other only avenue of change is waging a lawsuit against an Ice agent or the agency itself that requires resources or requires a litigator that is willing to take on a case like that, considering there is a 0% success rate that I was able to find during this time period. Perhaps there was others, but none that I was able to identify. And because they’re federal agents, like I mentioned earlier, they’re protected by qualified immunity, and that is to protect ICE. That’s to protect all federal agents from fearing litigation in the field while they’re conducting, you know, very high risk or, national security interest actions in the field. So if they were to get past that qualified immunity barrier, they have quite a high bar to prove that their civil rights or their constitutional rights were violated in some way. Because something else that we’ve found is that there’s a high emphasis in the training. And this is for part two that’s going to come out this week. But, there’s a high emphasis on how to articulate what you’re doing in the field. So as not to prove that you’re not violating someone’s Fourth Amendment rights.
So in Gabino’s case, for example, this case is still ongoing, even though the court had dismissed all of the claims in February. His lawyer actually managed to file an appeal. And that appeal is now ongoing and unfolding in another stage of this lawsuit. But this lawsuit was initially filed in 2017. It’s 2024. That is seven years of resources and commitment. And again, if you’re an undocumented person, that’s seven years of risk of getting deported and seven years assuming that you’re going to be in the country to actually see to the end of this lawsuit. And that’s been the case with all of the other lawsuits that we looked into. It’s either dragged on for years, continues to drag on for years, or dragged on for years until the party actually had no more resources or arguments to continue in court. So the only avenue for accountability, which is a personal undertaking, is also one that’s pretty much posed not to succeed.
Alvarez: And are there any processes within ICE that agents theoretically have to go through if they do a violation?
Hassan: Yeah, well, if there is a shooting, it’s always going to be reviewed and investigated by ICE. Whether the office, you know, which office that is, is not always consistent. And that’s something we found when we spoke to a former special agent from Ice. They said that there’s just no consistency with how these investigations are handled. Some of the records that we’ve obtained indicate that the main investigative jurisdiction is a state or a local law enforcement agency. And what we found is that is sometimes all the investigation there could be. ICE doesn’t make any of their investigations public. ICE doesn’t make any of their discipline public. ICE doesn’t communicate what happens to agents that discharge their weapon. The only communication is that it gets investigated or reviewed.
A Government Accountability Office report came out last year that found that DHS and all of the agencies within it, including ICE, were undercounting their uses of force because their recordkeeping was so poor. Sometimes they would count several instances in one and not really be able to understand the full scale of one incident of use of force. And as we mentioned, even the records we’ve obtained are pretty bare bones that they don’t indicate violations or administrative violations. They don’t indicate whether or not there was a wrongdoing o r a violation finding. It’s something that ICE kind of has, a total monopoly over whether or not they investigate it, whether or not they release those findings. That’s something that’s completely shrouded in secrecy. So what we’ve been able to do with cabinet members, Hernandez case is kind of understand what they might even look like within ice. What we found through the inspector general report was that Causey had taken time off – Agent Causey, the ICE agent that shot Gabino– had taken time off of his own volition, came back before the noncriminal indictment came through. None of his time off was recorded. And even though his actions, by local and state police were found not to be criminal, he had still violated administrative violations. But that report still didn’t indicate whether or not there was any discipline. And ICE didn’t speak specifically to our question when we asked, what kind of discipline does this kind of conduct ever bring about? So, the question mark about whether or not Ice agents are ever facing accountability or investigations, and what those results are is still a big question mark even after this investigation.
Alvarez: Do you have any advice for other reporters who want to look into either use of force violations or just like ICE in general?
Hassan: Yeah, I think that filing an effective FOIA quickly and forcefully is really the way to go. I found a lot of pushback and a lot of resistance, even in the lawsuit that we filed against ICE for the records, in that we had agreed towards exactly the information they were going to give me. I had said that I’d relinquished getting people’s names, including the Ice agents names, in order to obtain the records at all. And even when they did come back, they came back almost fully redacted to the point where my lawyers had to go back to court and tell ICE, you didn’t agree to the terms that we both agreed on on the outset of this lawsuit. And of course, the court saw our side in that because it was like an agreed upon deal. They eventually had to produce the records. But by the time I had gotten the records from filing the FOIA to actually obtaining the records, it was two years and a half. I had a lot of worry that by the time the investigation would be done, that it would be outdated or irrelevant.
That’s not the case at all. I think some of the best advice that I had received over the course of my investigation was that it doesn’t really matter when you get this information, because it will still be relevant to the public sphere. These stories will still not have been told, these issues will still not have been reviewed, and it could very well be the case that it’s the first time that somebody is looking into whatever issues you are looking into. I would just be very forceful and very transparent with communication, even though I didn’t have a productive conversation with ICE over all of these years, I’m very glad that they were in the loop and had so much opportunity to answer any of my questions, and I actually managed over this long amount of time, even though it took all this amount of time to, you know, really see their lack of improvement towards becoming more transparent, their lack of improvement towards becoming more outright with their information. Presidential administrations had changed and their practices didn’t. If anything, anything that they’ve adopted policy or conduct wise, just kind of solidified from presidency to presidency. And that was something that also reflected in the story when we spoke to experts to say that ICE isn’t getting better, it’s just accumulating new policies of impunity along the way. And so whether or not things will take a long time – be forceful, be straightforward, don’t hesitate. And don’t let time be a factor in this investigation when the matter has never been investigated before, that would be my main advice.