A former Border Patrol commissioner laid into the Department of Homeland Security on Thursday morning, claiming the shooting death of an innocent 37-year-old mother in Minneapolis by an ICE agent should never have happened.
Appearing on MS NOW’s “Morning Joe,” Gil Kerlikowske lamented the “level of cruelty,” that has risen dramatically under Donald Trump’s administration and pointed the finger at DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and her de facto chief of staff Corey Lewandowski among others.
Discussing the shooting and pinning the blame on the ICE agent, who was whisked away from the scene after shooting Renee Good point blank in the face, he told the hosts the Border Patrol is being horribly misused by the Trump administration.
“They're not trained to work in an urban environment,” he explained. “And as you've already mentioned, a city police officer knows that you don't get in front of or behind a vehicle. You don't attempt to stick your hands in the window or open a car door. You would do exactly as you had mentioned: you have the tag number, you could figure this out and you've already got cars on the street, if that's what your intent is to arrest her.”
“I think that we need to recognize that this is an untrained, unskilled, unexperienced agent and I don't blame these agents,” he later added. “I know a lot of these agents. I know that their morale is in the pits, and they would do anything possible to avoid being assigned to some of these details. What we need to realize is the leadership, whether it's Secretary Noem, President Trump or Stephen Miller, et cetera. Corey Lewandowski, who are all in charge of doing this. And it is not the fault of many of these agents.”