The hosts of MS NOW’s “Morning Joe” condemned the Trump administration’s handling of immigration in the wake of yet another ICE shooting this year, telling viewers, “There’s just no good justifiable explanation.”
“When will the ICE shootings stop, given that there was one just days ago?” host Mika Brzezinski asked atop the Wednesday segment. She went on to detail the Sunday shooting of Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez, a 28-year-old Venezuelan man, in Austin, Texas. The Department of Homeland Security has claimed he was in the United States illegally at the time of the shooting, which his lawyer has disputed.
“Setting aside the terror that ICE has brought upon cities and towns across the country, the lives they have disrupted, the children they have traumatized, the people they have, yes, disappeared. Set all that aside for a moment, if it’s possible,” Brzezinski said. “Focus on the people who were gunned down on American streets by government agents.”
The MS NOW host went on to list the names of some of the people who have been shot by ICE officers within the past year, including Minneapolis residents Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti.
“The administration immediately blamed the victims. Then Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem called Renee Good a domestic terrorist. She wasn’t,” Brzezinski recapped. “The head of Border Patrol said Alex Pretti was there to massacre law enforcement. He wasn’t. The government was lying.”
Brzezinski further slammed America’s string of ICE shootings this year, categorizing them as part of a pattern that only continues to leave devastation in its wake.
“There’s one just simply unbearable throughline here. Lethal force, competing accounts, incomplete information and devastated families — also terrorized communities,” Brzezinski explained, adding, “A country can enforce its laws, we’ve learned this, and still insist on the Rule of Law.”
“It can protect its borders and still demand that the government meet the highest standard when an agent draws a weapon and pulls the trigger,” she continued. “That is not what’s happening in America right now.”
“Morning Joe” co-host Willie Geist later returned to the shooting of Garcés Pérez this past weekend.
“Let’s say, even if he were a criminal they were pursuing, these untrained ICE agents, you don’t run people off the road,” he said. “You don’t sideswipe them and run them off the road and then shoot them in the back as they sit in the car. I mean, we want to hear all the facts in this case, but from what we know now, there’s just no good justifiable explanation.”
