Video Undercuts ICE Account in Shooting as Deportation Policies Draw Court Rebukes

Newly released surveillance video has demolished the official account of a January shooting involving Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in Minneapolis, the latest in a series of incidents that expose a pattern of excessive force, misleading statements, and eroded accountability during the Trump administration’s aggressive mass deportation drive.

The footage, made public this week, contradicts ICE’s description of events on January 14, when two deportation officers attempted to stop a car in traffic. The driver, Alfredo Aljorna, a Venezuelan national identified by authorities as unauthorized, fled at speeds reaching 80 miles per hour before crashing into a parked vehicle and running toward an apartment building. His roommate, Julio Sosa Celis, was standing at the entrance holding a snow shovel.

In the agency’s initial telling, the encounter escalated into a violent confrontation in which officers claimed they were attacked, leading them to fire at Sosa Celis. Both men were charged with assaulting a federal officer. Those charges collapsed weeks later as supporting evidence failed to materialize. The video now publicly undermines the officers’ version, raising fresh questions about the use of lethal force and the reliability of incident reports provided by an agency already under intense scrutiny.

This marks the third time video evidence has contradicted ICE’s self-defense narrative in Minneapolis officer-involved shootings. The fatal shootings of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, captured on bystander cell phone footage, were deemed so disproportionate that they triggered a White House shake-up in leadership amid collapsing public support for the deportation campaign. A string of similar prosecutions against individuals accused of assaulting federal immigration officers has also fallen apart, suggesting systemic problems in how encounters are documented and justified.

The Minneapolis revelations arrive alongside other recent blows to the Department of Homeland Security’s practices. On Monday, a federal judge in Los Angeles ordered DHS to immediately stop giving unaccompanied immigrant children coercive advisals that pressured them to self-deport. The language, implemented last September, informed detained minors that they could voluntarily return home with no administrative consequences and still apply for visas later. It warned, however, that choosing to seek an immigration hearing or expressing fear of return would result in “prolonged” detention. Children who turned 18 in custody would be handed to ICE for deportation. The advisals further threatened that sponsors lacking legal status could face arrest, removal, or criminal prosecution for aiding illegal entry.

U.S. District Judge Michael W. Fitzgerald ruled that such statements were “blatantly coercive” and violated a 40-year-old court order prohibiting immigration agents from pressuring unaccompanied children into abandoning their asylum claims. Government attorneys did not dispute the wording when it was presented in court documents.

At the same time, accounts from Maine illustrate how the agency is responding to public oversight. In January, during a publicized enforcement surge labeled “Catch of the Day,” federal agents confronted civilian observers filming their operations in a Home Depot parking lot. One 23-year-old Portland resident, Elinor Hilton, captured video showing masked agents approaching her aggressively. One placed a phone in her face and informed her she was being placed on a “watch list.” Another warned that authorities would “show up at your house later,” according to the recording. Hilton later described experiencing fear, sleeplessness, and constant vigilance, including avoiding parking her car in predictable locations. The incident has fueled concerns that ICE is not only evading scrutiny but actively seeking to deter and intimidate members of the public attempting to document its actions.

These developments occur against a backdrop of entrenched financial interests in the deportation machinery. Micah Lasher, a leading Democratic candidate to succeed retiring Rep. Jerry Nadler in Manhattan, has campaigned on abolishing ICE, calling it “an agency beyond repair” and protesting companies he accuses of profiting from its operations. Yet public records show his wife, Elizabeth Mann, has earned more than $17 million in compensation since becoming chief financial officer of Verisk Analytics in 2022 and nearly $580,000 from Motorola Solutions since joining its board in 2024. Both companies hold multimillion-dollar contracts with ICE for surveillance technology, communications equipment, and related services. The contrast highlights how deeply private profit is embedded in the enforcement system even as its methods face growing legal and evidentiary challenges.

Taken together, the collapsing prosecutions, judicial rebukes, suppressed video evidence, and reported intimidation tactics paint a picture of an agency operating with reduced constraints and limited external checks during a period of heightened activity. Whether the accumulating contradictions will produce meaningful oversight or reforms remains uncertain. For now, the public record continues to diverge sharply from the narrative offered by ICE itself.