DHS to make all immigration agents in Minnesota wear body cams

All immigration personnel operating in the Minneapolis enforcement surge will be outfitted with body cameras, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Monday.

She said the cameras will expand to all personnel nationwide “as funding is available.”

She said the decision was more evidence that the Trump administration is “the most transparent administration in American history.”

“We will rapidly acquire and deploy body cameras to DHS law enforcement across the country,” she said on social media.

Democrats on Capitol Hill have demanded body cameras for those involved in immigration enforcement as a condition for supporting a funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security.

President Trump said it was Ms. Noem’s decision to deploy the cameras.

“They generally tend to be good for law enforcement, because people can’t lie about what’s happening. So it’s, generally speaking, I think, 80% good for law enforcement. But if she wants to do that, I’m OK with it,” he told reporters.

The announcement was made after a series of shootings involving officers and agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection.

Some agents and officers already wear body cameras, but adoption is not universal.

Cameras captured footage of the fatal shooting last month of Alex Pretti, for example, but investigators said they had no body camera video of a nonfatal shooting by a Border Patrol agent in Portland, Oregon, earlier in the month.

Civil rights groups have long called for body cameras for law enforcement as a way to tamp down overheated police interactions.

CBP began a pilot program for body cameras in the summer of 2021, outfitting some 6,000 personnel.

ICE, under prodding from Congress, followed suit later that year with a pilot program to deploy body cameras to members of its special reaction teams in some major cities.

Some 3,000 additional agents and officers have been sent into Minnesota as part of Operation Metro Surge.

White House border czar Tom Homan has said he is working on a drawdown after the death of Pretti, though it’s contingent on state and local authorities doing more to turn over deportation targets from their prisons and jails.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, reacting to news of the orders for body cameras, said it “should have been the case long before they killed two Americans.”

“Border patrol agents should never have been sent in masks and camo to wreak havoc and aimlessly run around a state 1,500 miles from the Southern border,” he said on social media.