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The Truth with Lisa Boothe: ICE Agent Shooting in Minneapolis: Jonathan Fahey on Sanctuary Cities, Law Enforcement, and Political Backlash
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Podcast Announcer
This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.
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Lisa Booth
Welcome to the Truth with Lisa Booth where we get to the heart of the issues that matter to you today. We're joined by Jonathan Fy. He is the former acting ICE director under President Trump. He's also a friend of the show. You've seen him on Fox as well. But we're going to break down the escalating chaos in Minneapolis following a fatal ICE shooting of Renee Good. Federal authorities claim that it was self defense that she was ramming her vehicle into the ICE agent. Obviously other people dispute that, you know, including the mainstream media and those on the left. So what really happened? What do you need to know? What will this investigation look like? And where are we heading as a country as we sort of see this inevitable chaos and clashing between federal authorities and the people opposed to them? Also intensifying all of this is you've got local leaders and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob for Fry blasting ice saying get the F out of Minneapolis. That sentiment's been echoed by people like Jimmy Kimmel on TV as well. So a lot to unpack here, but who better to do it than Jonathan Fahey? Stay with us. Well, Jonathan Fay, it's great to have you back on the show. Wish it were under different circumstances, but we're, we're looking forward to hearing your insight and what happened in Minneapolis, Minnesota. So thanks for coming on.
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Jonathan Fahey
Yeah, thanks for having me.
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Lisa Booth
So, you know, obviously tragedy in Minnesota. A young woman was in a car and was driving into a police or into an ICE agent and he shot her from what I saw. You know, obviously you have to look at the different angles. Some of the angles you're kind of like, I'm not sure, but if you look at the front on like the head on angles, it really does look as if this woman was accelerating into the police officer or the ICE agent. And if you're the ICE agent, I'm thinking I'm about to get, you know, ran over. So run over. So I don't know what's your perspective in watching the videos and the different angles? You know, sort of how do you read this situation and what happened?
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Jonathan Fahey
Well, I think that was a good point you first made that, you know, there are, it's always important to be able to look at multiple angles, just like, you know, the instant replay on TV with an NFL game or something just to get a full perspective. But I think the important things to, to sort of note on this is first of all that this woman was ordered out of her car lawfully by one of the Other ICE agents refused to comply and then fled. She, at the point when they ordered her out of the car, she was not free to leave in any respect. She was detained. She was temporarily arrested at that point. So she, she decides on her own to flee. And when she does that, she drives directly or almost directly at an officer, but an officer that's in front of her and putting him in the position. And again, you know, when we look at all of these angles, I think the thing that's also really important to note is we get the benefit of hindsight. And a lot of these cases that deal with use of force, the courts actually say we're not going to second guess officers because obviously in Hindsight it's always 2020. But when you look at an officer having to make, I say split second, but it's, it's far less than a second decision to make. When she starts coming at him, he knows she, she's been, I think, been obstructing justice is the reason they told her to get out of the car. They know she's fleeing, so why is she fleeing? And they all. He also knows there are other people around, so if he doesn't stop her, you know, he doesn't know if they're his colleagues behind him or members of the public behind him that would be in danger from her as well. So everything I saw so far indicates that this was not only legally, just like legally justified, but it seems to me this officer acted entirely consistent with his training or the way I understand officers are trained on these types of things. I don't know the specific officer's training, but yeah, so I think it's a tragedy that someone died. This officer did his job and did what he was required to do. And it's, you know, the last thing a law enforcement officer wants to do is have to use their weapon. You know, there's not this idea that these officers are trigger happy or whatever. It's. There's nothing that could be farther from the truth. It's like one, no, they don't want to. They're doing these jobs because they want to help people, not hurt people. But also, you know, when you're involved in one of these, there's going to be internal investigations and it's a very unpleasant experience. Even like in this case, where I believe he will ultimately be cleared of any wrongdoing, at least on the federal level. And that's sort of another issue we could talk about.
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Lisa Booth
What does that review process, you know, normally look like for this agent? And just at Large, what will happen.
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Jonathan Fahey
Here is the FBI will investigate this case and they're really good at these types of things. They do this all, all the time or not all the time, but when they're, you know, shooting is involved. So they're going to collect every single video they could get their hands on. They're going to interview the witnesses, interview the, or officers around, get a context as to what was happening before, what led up to it, and then make, ultimately make a decision, did this officer violate the law? And then the secondary decision would be made by the Department of Justice if they found he did. You know, could it be proven beyond a reasonable doubt here? I believe they're going to find that again, this officer acted lawfully and also consistent with his training. I do think the, the real rub here is the state will probably try to charge him anyway because we saw Jacob Fry and we saw, you know, Governor Walt. Basically, they've determined this officer is guilty. And if they decide to charge him on the state level, even if he's cleared federally, it, it will say it'll put in an immunity issue in front of the court whether or not this officer has immunity, which is also, there's a lot of, there's clear Supreme Court precedent on this, but it doesn't mean they won't at least try to charge this officer, charge him, and then it will be dismissed because he has immunity for the actions involved in this case.
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Lisa Booth
But regardless, this ICE officer's life has now been turned upside down by, by being put in the position of having to make the split second decision.
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Jonathan Fahey
Yeah, exactly. He is. Right now, I would guess he's on, I mean, he's on paid leave, but he's on leave until the investigation unfolds. The investigation, hopefully it will be fairly quick for, for his sake and for the public's sake because once the FBI does an investigation, hopefully they'll release their findings so the public can see what they saw and how they, how they reach their conclusions because they will do a very thorough job. They will have, you know, not only the videos, but they'll probably have computer animations to show all the perspectives. And, and it will be helpful for the officer, but it'll be helpful for the public to understand that. And another thing I forgot to mention, but I think it's important where the bullet hit the car. It was in the front in the windshield. So it wasn't, I mean, through the side or anything else. So indicating if the bullet hits the front, the per. That means the person that fired the bullet fire the Gun was in front and she was driving the car. So again it supports a self defense theory.
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Lisa Booth
And then I assume too part of the investigation will get into Renee Good's, good's intentions that day and why she was there and what events she was involved in. I mean, how much of that is. I know there's conflicting reports about why she was there, what she was doing, how much of that will be taken into account and sort of reviewing her intentions that day.
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Jonathan Fahey
I think it will be interesting to know what her intentions are. But ultimately if the officer didn't know what she had been doing all day and what her intentions are, it's not going to be the sort of a deciding factor. Because if the officer and the officer might have been interacting with her earlier in the day, I just don't know. But assuming there wasn't any direct interaction, he didn't know who she was other than that she wasn't complying with the lawful order. It won't be as big of a factor. And also when you have these things like, you know, you've heard a lot on these shows that you know a car is a deadly weapon, which is in fact entirely true. But one, one thing the officer doesn't know when she's driving the car towards him, he doesn't know if she's going to continue to accelerate. He doesn't know if she's going to, if she's trying to kill him, trying to get away, he has no way of knowing that he doesn't know anything about her. Which again makes his, his actions justified because he doesn't know her intentions. And you know, and even, even if her intentions were all good at that point, he probably, he was still justified. But I'm just saying the unknown of who this person is, what their intentions are, if they're trying to harm him or other people. And we know from these previous many, many ICE protest riots, whatever you want to call them, cars have been used routinely as weapons against ICE officers. Part of the sort of the political force behind a lot of this stuff has been to disrupt, not just protest against ice, but actually disrupt them from doing what they're doing and being egged on by the politicians.
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Lisa Booth
So account in a court. The fact that we have seen these coordinated and intentional vehicle rammings, I don't.
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Jonathan Fahey
Like if there was a charge against this officer. I think what would, what would. And I don't think there will be, but I think what would go into effect would be his personal experience, his, his training and experience and why he made the decision that he did. So then, like his personal experience involves being in ICE during the, you know, the last year, he apparently was dragged by a car in a prior incident, according to what Secretary Noem said, I think at her press conference maybe yesterday. And also not the overall knowledge that these are cars are being weaponized against, you know, ICE and cbp. I think I just saw, I think it was on Fox just now that there were 99 of these car related attacks. And I'm sure there are various degrees of what you consider an attack, but 99 vehicle related incidents involving ICE. So that certainly would heighten this officer's awareness of the danger put them on, you know, it's a greater, higher level of stress, plus his own experience of being dragged by a car. Plus their training. They are trained when they go to fletc, which is their federal law enforcement training center in Georgia. One of the things they're trained on when they're trained on use of force is that, you know, cars can be deadly weapons. A good, I think a third of all officers killed in line of duty involve vehicles. It doesn't mean they're, you know, always attacked with the vehicle. But cars are dangerous. And so these are all things that would be factored into it. Ultimately, I don't think it'll be charged federally and if it was charged in the state, it would be dismissed on immunity grounds, but those would be the types of things that would play out well.
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Lisa Booth
So, I mean, this guy is lucky that President Trump's in office and will be for the next three years because, you know, he's going to make sure that, you know, that this guy's. Why. I mean, I guess if it's on the state level, I don't know actually how that would work in terms of a pardon because I think that would just be federally, but, you know, because right now the federal government is, you know, they're standing behind the ICE officer talking about how, you know, rioters were blocking the police officers. One of the rioters weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over the law enforcement officer and attempt to kill him and that he was fearing for his life. These were defensive shots. But I mean, I think even just from a common sense standpoint, like if you've got a car accelerating towards you, I'm thinking I'm gonna get run out, you know, like, I mean, like you're just from a common sense standpoint, like that's, that's gonna instill fear in you. I'm thinking that.
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Jonathan Fahey
Right. And he has, he has a level of responsibility not just for his own life and safety, but the safety of, you know, his fellow officers, but also the public as a whole. So he has more than you and I would have, that is simply, you know, just us. He, he has an oath to protect the public. And when this person's doing that, he has to take action. And, you know, you can make a very good argument if she got away and, and didn't and end up hurting someone or running someone over and this officer didn't do this, you could make a good you'd be able to make the argument, why did this officer not act and this horrible thing happened.
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Lisa Booth
Got to take a quick commercial break. More on what's happening in Minneapolis. I mean, I think the sad thing is, too, that, you know, we were kind of moving toward this, like, collision course with us where you've already have, you've had assassination attempts against ICE officers, you've got Border Patrol agents with bounties on their head. And when you have these continued clashes in these cities, in these states, like, inevitably something bad is going to happen.
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Jonathan Fahey
Yeah, you're exactly right. And, and it's still, it's so scary because, you know something and we're not like, you know, unfortunately, this isn't like the incident that will, like, end the bad things. I think it will only, you know, create more danger for agents. And you look at the way these politicians reacted, and I'm saying the Democratic politicians, because I think it's way out of line, the way their first reaction is accuse the agent of murder and everything else. It just shows that their intent is to keep ramping this up, celebrate the obstruction. Because these aren't just protesters. They're obstructing ice. They're trying to prevent them from doing what they're doing. And, you know, particularly in Minnesota, you have to not only do you have sort of the open borders, mass amnesty mindset of the Democrats that oppose all deportations, but now you have Tim Waltz that is like, trying to do anything he can to get the spotlight off of him and the Somali fraud. So he's more than happy to amp things up. And again, we know his history. You know, what was it last May at the commencement speech, I think, for the University of Minnesota Law School, he's calling ICE agents Nazis, which is or the Gestapo. But it's like, it's beyond the pale. I just can't even imagine going to a graduation ceremony and having a speaker talk like that. It's so, so beyond the pale. But they are trying to ramp it up. They want chaos Jacob Rye wants another George Floyd 2.0. I think that was sort of sadly his heyday. And even though the city hasn't even recovered from that, it's almost like they want a sort of a ICE version of George Floyd. And I felt like they, they wanted that. And they tried it in the Biden administration with the, you know, the rumor, the fake Border Patrol whipping incident. But they've always been looking for one of these to kind of change the narrative, have everyone turn on ice, and then ICE won't support the illegals. And then the illegals get to say, which obviously that's their ultimate political goal.
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Lisa Booth
And we've had the Minneapolis Mayor, Jacob Fry, say, ice, get the F out of Minneapolis, which, you know, clearly is trying to incite. And then you've even got Jimmy Kimmel pushing the narrative too, saying he isn't just killing people overseas. Get the F out of Minneapolis, get the F out of all of our cities, saying that President Trump is ordering ICE to kill Americans. So, you know, unfortunately, they're really, you know, ramping up this rhetoric, which I'm concerned about, you know, where this, this heads. You know, right now they have this massive ICE deployment of agents in the Minneapolis area, about 2000. It's the largest DHS operation ever. What do you make of this? Is it necessary? And why such a heightened force in Minneapolis specifically, do you think?
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Jonathan Fahey
I think it's necessary. And I think part of their two folds, and they talked about this when they went in there, one, a lot of these are HSI agents to focus on the Somali fraud aspect of it, and also the immigration agents as well, or the agents that are going to do the immigration enforcement. But I think it's necessary, particularly in places like Minnesota, Minneapolis, which are sanctuary cities. So the non sanctuary cities, as you know, they turn over the criminals to ICE and they do it in a jail and they take them out of the country and everyone's better off and everyone's safer and it's efficient and easy. But Minnesota doesn't do that. So ICE is forced to be on the ground to get these criminals and remove them from the country. And I think it's interesting you were mentioning Jacob Fry and his statements. One of his statements yesterday, he talked about how, you know, ICE says they're trying to, this is to make things safer, but it clearly doesn't make things safer type of thing. But the, the irony is, since Trump's taken office, we are, I think, having a record decrease in crime, and we may even have the lowest murder rate ever recorded. I think depending how they, you know, the last month of the year was calculated.
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Lisa Booth
So.
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Jonathan Fahey
And that's because President Trump removed 413,000 people with criminal records and probably also created a great deterrent to those here illegally and also those committing crime that, hey, the days of the Biden administration were so total free for all on the streets are over. So this really has made Minneapolis safer, and it's certainly made Chicago safer. We saw that from Operation Midway. So, you know, it's funny when, during Jacob Fry's antics yesterday, it's like, it's not. What he's saying isn't even remotely true. And he's the reason crime went up in Minneapolis to begin with during, you know, George Floyd. But, yeah, it's just very sad that there, there doesn't seem to be an adult in the Democratic Party. I mean, save maybe a John Fetterman, but they're very. There's no Democrats that will even stand up for the ICE agents or anything else, which kind of gives up the game for the Democratic Party. When they, you know, during the last campaign, tried to act like they were for border security and things like that, and not one of them has ever said, well, Trump's done great on border security, but I wish he would not be as aggressive on immigration. They don't even give him any credit because they didn't want border security. They want open borders and mass amnesty. And they are so sort of wedded to this that no one deviates from it other than Fetterman that I could think of. There might be somebody, a few people in the house, but everyone else is fully on board with the most radical immigration agenda you can think of.
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Lisa Booth
Well, and also, you know, I believe, as the Washington examiner recently looked at the data from DHS and found, concluded what we've been hearing from the Department of homeland security, that 70% of the individuals deported have been criminals or have pending charges. When we're talking about millions upon millions of people who came into this country under the Biden administration, how difficult, particularly when you've got sanctuary cities shielding some of these folk, how hard is it to find these?
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Jonathan Fahey
It is so difficult for a couple of reasons. One, say, for example, if a city that's not a sanctuary city, they have somebody that's locked up for a crime in their jail, they just simply call ice. When their sentence is over, ICE will send an agent, maybe two agents, pick them up, process them, and they sort of go on, on their way out of here. But if you have to an arrest, you have to one identify the person find out where they are, you know, to locate them, then then put together an entire arrest operation which involves usually multiple officers, higher degrees of danger to the officers, higher degrees of danger to the, you know, community because the person might be wanting to flee, might want to harm officers, other types of things. So it is exponentially more difficult in terms of just the logistics of it. Also exponentially less efficient in terms of the manpower. My guess is a jail arrest versus a on the street arrest is, I would guess, at least tenfold in terms of the amount of resources required in addition to having to locate someone.
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Lisa Booth
Why do you think the left has so much hostility toward law enforcement? Because this is just the latest iteration of it. But you can go back to the whole Michael Brown, hands up, don't shoot lie in 2015 and you know, like, so this war on cops is not new. It's just, you know, now it's with some of these federal law enforcement agents. So like, why, why do you think they have so much hostility for law enforcement?
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Jonathan Fahey
That is a great point because yeah, you're right, this is not even new. It's. It's sort of like more left, the less focus is more now just focused more on ice. But they've always been meaning in the last, you know, 10 plus years, anti law enforcement. Every single, every step of the way, they, they find reasons to blame the cops, support the victims. You know, and again, Jacob Fry, before he was anti ice, he was anti cop in his own city. And you know, watch seller basically celebrated his city burning, which is pathetic. You know, I don't know because it's like when I grew up, both parties seem to be almost competing to be who could be more pro law enforcement. You know, everyone would always want to have the photos with the cops and the sheriffs. Bill Clinton was all over, you know, he always wanted to be standing or, you know, shoulder to shoulder with cops. But I, yeah, something changed during the Obama administration. It just became this sort of, everything became, you know, sort of this identity politics. All, everything is about a grievance. So if you're, if you're, you know, getting arrested for crimes, the cops must be the bad people. And all of this racial animus was injected into it and it's been disastrous. And when you bring up the hands up, don't shoot. It's like no one ever goes back and says, how's Ferguson, Missouri doing these days? Because it got burned to the ground, but no one cares. And it never wasn't even true to begin with. The hands up, don't shoot narrative, but the Democrats love it. I mean, even after it was conclusively proven to not be true by Eric Holder as the Attorney General, Hillary Clinton and other Democrats were still out campaigning and doing events with Michael Brown's family, sort of continuing. Continuing to perpetuate the narrative. But I. But I think it's a lot of. It's the identity politics to pander to, you know, minority votes and stuff like that. But it's been disastrous in terms of, you know, I think for the people they claim to be serving, because all of these places that have these incidents ended up worse off afterwards. If it's Ferguson, if it's Minneapolis, if it was Baltimore with that, his name was something gray. But there was this incident right around the same time. But everything got worse, and then the Democratic politicians somehow elevate themselves while the communities they serve get worse.
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Lisa Booth
Yeah, I mean, Tim Walls let his city be taken over and a precinct be taken over and allowed $500 million worth of damage to Minneapolis because he delayed the National Guard. You know, before we go, what should people know about the ICE agents that sign up to do this work? The Border Patrol agents that sign up to do this work?
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Jonathan Fahey
They should know these people are like all of our friends and neighbors. I've known so many ICE agents, Border Patrol agents, FBI, local police. These are people that actually care about the community, want to make people safer. They're. They're, you know, whatever the narratives are put out there by the left are false or. I mean, probably. I mean, not that there's not exceptions here or there for anything, but it's amazing. Yeah, they're good people, care about the community. They don't deserve to be maligned. And we all benefit from their work, and even the Democrats do. It's like you have Pritzker, you know, beating his chest every day. But Chicago's safer because of these ICE agents, and he gets the credit for the community being safer and gets to just trash these agents. It's so shameful. But the Democrats, you know, a lot of ways, it's sort of easy for them. You just. You just have a bad guy, you trash them, and you don't have to ever be constructive about dealing with anything.
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Lisa Booth
Jonathan Fahey, we appreciate your work. Thanks for coming on the show to break this all down, praying that cooler heads prevail and all this craziness.
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Jonathan Fahey
Well, thank you very much for having me.
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Lisa Booth
That was Jonathan Fahey, former acting ICE director. Appreciate him for making the time to come on the show. Appreciate you guys at home for listening every Tuesday and Thursday, but you can listen throughout the week. Also want to thank my producer John Cassio for putting the show together. Until next time.
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Jonathan Fahey
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