‘Wall Off ICE’: CNN’s Elie Honig Calls for ‘Independent Investigation’ Into Minneapolis Shooting

CNN’s Elie Honig called for a “thorough and independent investigation” into the shooting of a woman by an ICE agent in Minneapolis on Wednesday.

With the Department of Homeland Security and Minneapolis officials offering incongruous summaries of what happened on the ground, anchor Boris Sanchez asked Honig: “When it comes to making a determination about what transpired here, whether the shooting was merited or not, and whether the person who shot this driver should be held accountable, how does the legal system go about determining all of that?”

“So Boris, here’s the legal standard in a situation like this. Police officers, including federal officers, including ICE agents, are allowed to use lethal force to discharge their firearms only if it’s reasonably necessary to prevent imminent, meaning immediate, soon occurring, lethal harm, meaning death or serious bodily injury. That’s basically the legal standard here,” replied the former federal prosecutor. “So the question that needs to be asked is: was this shooting necessary to prevent someone from getting immediately killed or maimed? It can be the officer himself, it can be a fellow ICE officer, it could be a state police officer, it could be a bystander. But that’s the standard that investigators and prosecutors are going to have to apply here.”

“Talk to us a little bit more about what you’re expecting for this, I mean how it plays out, and also just the fact that you heard local officials talking about there being justice. You have federal law enforcement here, right? But this is happening in Minnesota,” followed up Brianna Keilar. “What are you reading between the lines on what they’re saying?”

“So we’ve definitely heard differing accounts of what happened depending on who’s giving that account. What they need above all else, and I’m gonna echo Commissioner Ramsey, Charles Ramsey, what he said earlier, what they need here is a coordinated independent investigation,” answered Honig, who continued:

There’s a lot of entities that have the authority to investigate this. ICE can investigate it internally. The FBI typically gets involved if you’re talking about a discharge of a weapon by any federal agency. Also separate from that, Minneapolis and Minnesota authorities can get involved in investigations here. The best case scenario is if the agencies come together, they say, “Look, let’s wall off ICE because they’re the ones who are going to be under investigation here, one of their agents. Let’s have other agencies get together and do this investigation very quickly.”

And let me tell you some of the things that I think the police and prosecutors are going be looking for here. Obviously the videos: we’ve already seen, we’ve all ready shown here on CNN two different videos. There likely are many more than that. So officers are going to have to go through frame by frame every video that’s determined to be authentic. They’re going to take statements from bystanders, that would include the other ICE agents, that would included the one who fired the firearm into the car, that would include civilians that are nearby. They are going look at the ballistics. How many shots were fired? At what range? Where did they hit? This is going to be, it needs to be a thorough and independent investigation so we can get definitive answers here.

Watch above via CNN.