This is the moment a suspected illegal immigrant was dragged from his car by US border agents and restrained bodily before being carried away. Shocking pictures show when federal agents approached a man’s vehicle at a gas station in St Paul, Minnesota.
In a sequence of images, the man can be seen attempting to remonstrate with officers during the confrontation at a petrol station. But things quickly escalated when the agents smashed the window on the driver’s side of the car and dragged the occupant from the vehicle. It’s reported that the man had failed to show the officers any identification; however, his citizenship status has not been confirmed.
The US state of Minnesota has seen heightened tensions in recent days after members of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) shot and killed US citizen Renee Good, 37, as they attempted to stop her car on Wednesday.
Thousands of people marched in Minneapolis on Saturday to protest the fatal shooting of Ms Good by a federal immigration officer. St Paul, where these photographs of the man being extracted from his car were taken, is the Minnesota state capital and sits directly across the Mississippi River from Minneapolis. The two urban areas are known in the US as the ‘Twin Cities’.
More than 2,000 immigration arrests have been made in Minnesota since the ICE enforcement operation began at the beginning of December, according to Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told Fox News on Sunday that the Trump administration would send additional federal agents to Minnesota to protect immigration officers and continue enforcement.
While the enforcement activity continues, two of the state’s leading Democrats said that the investigation into Ms Good’s shooting death should not be overseen solely by the federal government.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and US Senator Tina Smith said in separate interviews that state authorities should be included in the investigation because the federal government has already made clear what it believes happened.
Ms Good died after being shot multiple times by a federal agent while she was at the wheel of her vehicle.
Ms Smith told ABC News: “How can we trust the federal government to do an objective, unbiased investigation, without prejudice, when at the beginning of that investigation they have already announced exactly what they saw — what they think happened.”
The Trump administration has defended the officer who shot Good in her car, saying he was protecting himself and fellow agents and that Good had “weaponised” her vehicle.
