ICE unit may investigate its own agents after fatal shootings

Handing fatal-shooting probes to Homeland Security Investigations would put an ICE component in the position of examining incidents involving its own agents. ICE says HSI investigates “the full spectrum of transnational crime,” and says the unit has broad legal authority and one of the largest international footprints in U.S. law enforcement.

That authority now sits beside a credibility problem. A Brennan Center for Justice report says HSI has a history of going beyond its stated mission, including routine immigration enforcement and targeting protestors, which makes any move to shift shooting investigations into the unit more politically fraught.

HSI already has formal procedures for such work. ICE maintains a directive titled HSI Special Agents Responding to State Crimes, issued May 30, 2013, and a Critical Incident Readiness and Response Handbook for HSI personnel dated February 6, 2026. Those internal rules show the bureau is not entering this territory cold, but they do not answer the central oversight question: whether an ICE-run probe can be seen as independent when the subjects are immigration agents themselves.

The issue sharpened after a House Oversight Democrats report said federal immigration agents fatally shot two U.S. citizens in Minnesota in January 2026. The report identified Renée Nicole Macklin Good, shot on Jan. 7 by an ICE officer, and Alex Jeffrey Pretti, fatally shot on Jan. 24 by a Customs and Border Protection officer and agent. The two were shot less than two miles from each other in Minneapolis. After those killings, the Department of Homeland Security pledged to “rapidly” deploy body cameras to officers nationally.

Questions only deepened after the Maine shooting. Democratic lawmakers demanded answers about the vetting of David Brouillette, the ICE agent who fatally shot Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a Colombian man in Maine. Rep. Bennie Thompson called for an investigation, putting Congress on record as it pressed Homeland Security on training, screening and use of force.

The Trace has documented deadly shootings by immigration officers and tracks federal immigration agent shootings in a dataset, placing the Minnesota and Maine deaths in a wider pattern rather than as isolated events. That broader record is what makes the oversight issue so sharp now: if HSI is asked to review shootings by ICE or CBP personnel, the public will have to decide whether ICE can credibly investigate ICE.