406. The Target

ICE agents have shot and killed a 26-year-old Colombian man in Maine. He was not the target of the investigation that brought agents to his location. Earlier, ICE agents shot and killed a Mexican man who also was not the target of their investigation. The two incidents are separate. The two men had in common that neither was the person agents were looking for.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents conduct enforcement operations. These operations begin with a target: a specific individual the agents are authorized to locate and take into custody. In both incidents, agents encountered someone other than that individual. In both incidents, that encounter ended with the person they encountered being shot and killed. The targets of both investigations are not named in the public reporting. Their status as targets is unchanged.

(Law enforcement agencies maintain policies governing the use of force during operations. Both incidents are presumably being reviewed under those policies. The reviews are ongoing. The individuals whose encounters with agents resulted in their deaths were not the subjects of any enforcement action. They were present at or near the location where agents were conducting operations. Their presence, and what followed from it, is what the reviews are examining. The targets remain at large or unaccounted for in the public record.)

The Colombian man was 26 years old. Maine is in the northeastern United States. His name has not been widely reported. The Mexican man's name was also not included in the summary of events available at publication. Both men had names, histories, and reasons for being where they were. Those details are part of investigations that are ongoing. The fact that neither man was the target of the operations that ended their lives is the fact that appears in both reports.

Two operations. Two deaths. Two men who were not the target. Whether this is a pattern depends on how many incidents are required to constitute one. It is, at minimum, two incidents with the same structural feature: agents sought one person, encountered another, and the encounter was fatal. The targets, in both cases, were not found at the location where the fatal encounter occurred. That is the information available.