CNN Airs Footage of ICE Agent Pointing Gun at Motorist: ‘There’s No De-Escalating’

Footage of an ICE agent pointing a gun at U.S. citizen Carolina Molina aired Wednesday on CNN, with the network’s senior crime and justice correspondent Shimon Prokupecz noting, “There’s no de-escalating” on the part of ICE agents.

Dashboard and cellphone video, shown on Anderson Cooper 360, shows parts of the confrontation that unfolded Monday afternoon in the parking lot of a Falls Church, Virginia shopping center. Molina shouted profanities at ICE agents she had seen detaining people nearby before pulling into a parking spot to turn around, allegedly in an attempt to conceal the location of her destination. According to CNN, she is a therapist who works with immigrants and was on her way to an office to meet with immigration lawyers. Agents then surrounded and blocked her vehicle, with one agent’s gun already drawn as he exited his own car. He then proceeded to point it toward Molina while accusing her of “following” agents and of trying to run them over.

Anderson Cooper explained Wednesday that the video “does not show her doing what the ICE officers accused her of — trying to run them over,” but stressed, “Again, we do not know what, if anything, was not caught on camera.”

In the footage, Molina, a 36-year-old mother of two, repeatedly insisted that she was a legal citizen. She was not arrested after the incident.

She’s since spoken out, as Prokupecz noted, emphasizing, “She’s certainly denying that she tried to run anyone over, that she was following them, that she was using her vehicle in any way to try and prevent them from doing what they were doing.”

“When you see those officers — especially that officer — come out with his weapon, they are already agitated,” he continued. “And what is so striking, what we see time and time again, is them so quickly going for their gun. Like, there’s nothing else. There’s no de-escalating. It’s just grab the gun, and just how close they are to her, to her face, pointing it through her windshield, essentially, at her, and that’s the tactic here, as we’ve seen other times.”

The Department of Homeland Security offered a sharply different account of the encounter, accusing Molina of driving her car in circles around ICE officers before attempting to harm them by “weaponizing her vehicle against them” in an effort to help undocumented immigrants escape. The agency said officers stopped Molina because they feared for their safety and collected her background information, adding that she “could face criminal prosecution as a result of her actions.”

Watch the full clip above via CNN.

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