STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Sergio's reporting raises a question - are immigration authorities trained for all parts of the mission they are now ordered to conduct? Juliette Kayyem joins us next. She served as assistant secretary for Intergovernmental Affairs at the Department of Homeland Security in the Obama administration. Welcome back.
JULIETTE KAYYEM: Thanks for having me, Steve.
INSKEEP: As far as you know, what were ICE agents doing in Minneapolis - on that street in Minneapolis this week - and how did that compare to their preparation for the job?
KAYYEM: Right. So let's start with the first question, which is the fact I can't answer that directly is the problem. When we talk about training and readiness and capacity and even judgment in the moment of the shooting that we saw this week, all of that gets to, well, what was the mission? What were they doing there? We've heard a variety of explanations by the White House and Vice President Vance, ranging from, you know, this was a deployment because of crime in the city, to door-to-door knocks, to essentially traffic control or traffic stops. None of those is very clear. None of them is based on specific criminal activity by any person in the street or in a home or at a school. And that vagueness is challenging, I would say, in terms of how do you train for that.
On the training issue, we all know, and we knew before, ICE is an agency that is satisfying a massive mandate by this White House. And so training to get all of those bodies into ICE, all of the right law enforcement folks into ICE, training has been reduced from about 16 weeks to about six, six and a half weeks. Yeah. And so you're starting from a pool of people who are not getting the training, don't have the time to have judgment, who are being launched in missions that are hard to describe with a political overlay. And that's the generic mix that you're getting. This specific case may be very different, but that's what's happening throughout the United States.
INSKEEP: Now, let's talk about this video...
KAYYEM: Yeah.
INSKEEP: ...Or the videos, which I know that you've looked at closely.
KAYYEM: Yeah.
INSKEEP: And many people have at this point. There is a policy memo which gives an idea of training. And this officer - we're told this agent was an experienced officer who presumably had the longer training, the 16...
KAYYEM: Right.
INSKEEP: ...Weeks that you talked about. DHS policy memo, 2023 - this is a quote - "officers," quote, "may use force only when no reasonably effective, safe and feasible alternative appears to exist." If that is the standard, and you compare it to what you can see on the various videos from the various angles, was this action within his training, as Kristi Noem has said?
KAYYEM: No. I think it's very fair to say that. I know people like to do the frame-by-frame and was the - was his foot there, and was the steering wheel there? Just take a step back 'cause it's the responsibility of law enforcement to do two things. One is to preserve life. And second is to deescalate any situation that they might view or might be perceived as being hostile. Look, giving every narrative that the White House wants me to believe about or wants us to believe about Miss Good, the victim, assuming she was hostile, she was an activist, all of it, although none of that has been proved true.
INSKEEP: Yeah.
KAYYEM: But even assuming their narrative, honestly, so what, right? I mean, in other words, the whole point of law enforcement is people are often not compliant. That doesn't result in death of them, right? And that is - and that's why we have to think about use of force protocols not as an on-off switch. This is what we often - you know, people talk about it in the political space, well, she was not compliant, therefore, she's dead. Right? That's - it doesn't work that way. Use of force is about a graduated escalation so that you don't get to a shooting immediately. And you didn't see any of that in any of the videos.
INSKEEP: Yeah.
KAYYEM: She was in a car. She could have driven away. They had the driver's license.
INSKEEP: Yeah. Wasn't moving very quickly either at the instant of the shooting.
KAYYEM: Yeah.
INSKEEP: I want to raise very briefly one other thing. Vice President Vance has defended the agent by noting, apparently correctly, that he was dragged once by a car before, and Vance says, well, maybe he was really sensitive to the idea of being dragged by a car again. If you're an agent, are you allowed to apply your unpleasant past experience to the current incident and just shoot someone?
KAYYEM: No. And the shocking thing about that is, at least in the public reports about that first instance, that the agent's arm got stuck in the car because he bashed his arm into the car, which would suggest in this instance, it has less to do with the cars and more to do with this specific agent who is responsible directly for the death of a mother who was unarmed and under - and, you know, under no law enforcement order.
INSKEEP: Juliette Kayyem. Thanks so much. Always a pleasure talking with you.
KAYYEM: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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