Brother of Suspected Dallas ICE Shooter Claims He Wasn’t Political After Officials Label Him ‘Left Wing Extremist’
The brother of the suspected shooter behind an attack on an ICE facility in Dallas, Texas is claiming that there were no major political leanings in 29-year-old Joshua Jahn’s background.
While the investigation into the Wednesday morning Dallas shooting is still ongoing, officials have been suggesting the shooter was motivated by extreme left-wing views. FBI Director Kash Patel posted an image of rounds found near the shooter — who died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound — and one was engraved with the message “anti-ICE.” Vice President JD Vance called the shooter a “violent left-wing extremist,” while Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem warned that rhetoric and criticism of ICE agents needs to be toned down.
NBC News spoke with multiple people who knew Jahn and are surprised he would be behind such an act. According to police, the Dallas shooter shot into a transport van at the ICE facility, killing one detainee and critically injuring two others.
“He didn’t have strong feelings about ICE as far as I knew,” Noah Jahn said about his brother.
Joshua Jahn was a registered independent. His brother said he didn’t seem “politically interested” and that they last saw each other just two weeks before the shooting.
“I didn’t think he was politically interested,” the brother said. “He wasn’t interested in politics on either side as far as I knew.”
Noah Jahn described his brother as “not a marksman,” but familiar with rifles. Police say the shooter used a rifle to shoot from a building adjacent to the ICE facility.
NBC News also spoke with a man who was connected to Joshua Jahn since a teen through a Boy Scout troop. The man said Jahn had recently expressed frustration over the US immigration system.
“He was just upset about how people were not understanding people’s desperation to get out of bad situations and how immigration was being handled as a whole,” the fellow troop member said.
He described Jahn as someone he could rely on for “emotional or physical support” and claimed his friend did not condone political violence.
“So that’s why this is making it even more surprising,” he said. “He was not somebody that would condone those kind of actions.”
Watch above via MSNBC.
