ICE Plans to Keep Body Cam Footage Secret Unless It's Beneficial to Them
The $20 million body cams the taxpayers bought for ICE that they refused to implement will finally be implemented, but the footage will only be released when it's beneficial to ICE agents.
The $20 million body cams the taxpayers bought for ICE that they refused to implement will finally be implemented, but the footage will only be released when it’s beneficial to ICE agents.
Even though taxpayers gave Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) $20 million for body cameras and former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem took a break from shooting expensive, taxpayer-funded self-promotion films on horseback in order to promise to purchase the body cams and actually use them in the field, nearly half a year later Houston agents still weren’t wearing them when they fatally shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in July of this year.
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Now, DHS has announced that they will wear the cameras, but only release the footage when it’s in their “best interests.”
“Immigration and Customs Enforcement is moving to equip officers with body cameras in the next two months but the agency’s policy gives it broad control over what footage will be made public by specifying any releases must be in its “best interests,” the AP reported this morning. They noted this “could mean taxpayers who are pitching in tens of millions of dollars to pay for the cameras may be kept in the dark about some high-profile confrontations, at least in their immediate aftermath.”
This “gives its director discretion to release recordings that reflect well on the agency’s image while working to keep others secret, experts on body camera policies said.”
Yes, any releases of body cam footage by the agency that has repeatedly escalated violence even against US citizens without cause and then caused their death must tell the story that the agency is telling in order to be released.
Given this, we can bet the footage will be sliced and diced to tell the misleading stories they have been busted for telling in court rooms around the country.
Trump’s ICE Thugs Rely on Secrecy, Lies and Corruption
Trump’s ICE has displayed mind-blowing corruption, lying about their authority, abusing their authority, escalating violence, and lying in court.
It isn’t that this policy is so weird, it’s that they are announcing it. The AP noted that “selective releases are routine in some law enforcement agencies”, but they aren’t articulated this clearly in policy.
To get an idea of how this policy will be abused, we need only look at ICE’s abuse of use-of-force protocols and the lack of body camera utilization in recent high-profile shootings, including ICE’s fatal shooting of US citizen Renee Good.
Kristi Noem, who foreshadowed her leadership style of deadly incompetence by using her own incompetence at training her own dog as justification for shooting the young pet, claimed ICE had to shoot 37-year-old mother of three Renee Good because she was engaging in an act of “terrorism”.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey told reporters, “ So they are already trying to spin this as an action of self-defense. Having seen the video of myself, I want to tell everybody directly that is bulls*it. This was an agent recklessly using power that resulted in somebody dying.”
They lied so much about the shooting of Renee Good that the FBI killed the investigation.
They also shot and killed US citizen Alex Pretti and misled the public about their reasons for doing so. They blamed Pretti carrying a gun for why they shot him, but Pretti had a permit for his gun, he was legally observing ICE’s actions, and verified video showed Pretti holding a phone in his hand, not a gun, as he tried to help other protesters who had been pushed to the ground by agents.
Because Trump’s ICE refuse to identify themselves as police in a democracy must do, the FBI had to warn that criminals are posing as ICE agents to commit sexual assault, robbery, and kidnappings.
ICE’s fatal July 7, 2026 shooting in Houston, Texas brought both the victim’s family and LULAC to demand independent investigations after they fatally shot 52 year-old Mexican national Lorenzo Salgado Araujo while he was on his way to work.
They have to demand independent investigations because ICE lies so much. This time, it appears they lied about Araujo ramming them with his vehicle. They used this lie to justify their shooting of him.
