Trump Admin Immediately Politicizes Killing of Immigrant Detainees in Texas
This is your TPM evening briefing.
As we saw in the immediate aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination earlier this month, the Trump administration is looking to markings on bullets and grasping at any other early information they can grab ahold of to blame some amorphous, leftist, anti-Trump entity for another act of violence.
At least one immigrant detainee was killed and two others are hospitalized and in critical condition after a shooter opened fire on a ICE facility in Dallas, Texas Wednesday morning, according to a statement from the Department of Homeland Security. The suspected shooter, identified as 29-year-old Joshua Jahn, was also found dead with what authorities described to NBC News as a self-inflicted gun shot wound. The victims’ identities have not yet been released but they were all immigrant detainees. No ICE officers were hurt in the shooting, Dallas police said in a news conference Wednesday.
It appears as though the alleged shooter fired multiple rounds of a weapon from an elevated position down into the ICE facility’s sally port. Special Agent in Charge of the Dallas FBI Joe Rothrock announced during the news conference Wednesday that there were bullets found near the shooter that had some sort of “anti-ICE” messages on them.
While initial reporting from multiple news outlets has found that the suspected shooter, Jahn, was registered as an independent voter, who was charged in 2016 with marijuana delivery-related charges, President Trump and his allies are immediately jumping to pin the violent attack on immigrants in an ICE facility as a politically-motivated one carried out by the political left.
Law enforcement has not yet identified a motive and have barely begun investigating the shooting.
But in its statement on the attack, DHS posted an image of bullet casing that it says were left behind at the scene, saying, “The shell casings were found with anti-ICE messages on them. This was an attack on ICE law enforcement.” That message was followed by a statement from DHS Secretary Krisi Noem, who characterized the shooting as a “vile attack” “motivated by hatred for ICE” before blaming “politicians” and the “media” for the incident.
“Our prayers are with the families of those killed and our ICE law enforcement. This vile attack was motivated by hatred for ICE,” she said. “For months, we’ve been warning politicians and the media to tone down their rhetoric about ICE law enforcement before someone was killed. This shooting must serve as a wake-up call to the far-left that their rhetoric about ICE has consequences. Comparing ICE Day-in and day-out to the Nazi Gestapo, the Secret Police, and slave patrols has consequences.”
FBI Director Kash Patel also posted the same photos of the shell casings — which appear to have the term “Anti-ICE” written on one of them — on Twitter, along with a message declaring that the engravings make clear “an idealogical motive behind this attack.”
Vice President JD Vance posted on Twitter, characterizing the shooting as an “obsessive attack on law enforcement, particularly ICE” that “must stop.”
An official White House Twitter account went so far as to point the finger at Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) for her recent remarks comparing ICE to “slave patrols.”
Trump himself then weighed in.
“We have already declared ANTIFA a Terrorist Organization, and I will be signing an Executive Order this week to dismantle these Domestic Terrorism Networks,” he wrote on Truth Social. “I AM CALLING ON ALL DEMOCRATS TO STOP THIS RHETORIC AGAINST ICE AND AMERICA’S LAW ENFORCEMENT, RIGHT NOW!”
Similar conclusions were jumped to by Trump administration officials in the immediate aftermath of the Kirk killing, when the Wall Street Journal published reporting about engravings on bullets that it described as espousing transgender “ideology.” In fact, most of the markings on the bullets in the Kirk shooting were found to be references to deep-cut internet memes. Patel also attracted attention and some derision — even from the right — for livetweeting the hunt for the Kirk shooter, including the questioning and release of two individuals.
As my colleague Josh Kovensky reported earlier this week, experts who have spent their careers studying violent extremism are alarmed at the Trump administration’s ongoing effort to hide the record of right-wing violence that has swelled in recent years. Just after Kirk was murdered earlier this month, the Trump administration deleted a study previously published by the Justice Department that found far-right extremist commit more violence than those on the far left.
As Trump administration officials jump on and elevate the narrative that the attack in Dallas was motivated by criticism of the relentless and inhumane ICE operations being carried out across the country, local officials are asking people to take a breather.
“There’s still a lot of unanswered questions, and I want to encourage all of you to exercise a little bit of restraint and allow them to do their job to help make sure this continues to be a safe city,” Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson said Wednesday.
Texas Dem Calls Out Politicized FBI
In the wake of the attack Wednesday, a Democratic lawmaker from the Dallas area called out the FBI for running with a political narrative before an investigation is properly conducted.
“I don’t trust anything that’s happening out of that agency at all,” Rep. Marc Veasey (D-TX) told NOTUS after today’s news conference with local authorities. “I don’t trust them at all. They’re overly political.”
GOP Leadership Threatened Massie and Others Over Epstein Push
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) told Semafor that Republican congressional leadership threatened him along with other Republicans who signed a petition pushing for a vote on the release of the Jeffrey Epstein case files with political retribution.
“They came back and tried to get the four of us to take our names off of the petition,” Massie told Semafor after an event in his Northern Kentucky district. “They asked some of my colleagues who are co-signers. And they actually threatened them politically, not physically.”
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