National

HSI agent shootings raise accountability questions

Efrain Torres swung open the brick-red wooden gate to his family’s northwest Chicago home and headed toward the back door after a night out with friends. In the predawn darkness, he heard voices behind him.

“Felix, come here,” they said. “Come here, Felix.”

Efrain Torres said he turned around to see three men wearing black vests that said “Police.” He didn’t know what they wanted, he later told Chicago police, and banged on the door for his father to let him in.

Fearing neighborhood gangs were harassing his son, Felix Torres Sr. grabbed his licensed handgun before opening the door, a police incident report said. Seconds later, the father lay on his kitchen floor bleeding from an M4 rifle bullet fired by an agent of Homeland Security Investigations.

The March 2017 shooting outside the tidy tan-brick home in a working-class neighborhood of Chicago is one of at least 13 HSI agent-involved shootings identified by the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism.

HSI agents told Chicago police the elder Torres had pointed his gun at them, according to the incident report. In a hospital interview with police, Torres refused to say whether he took aim at the agents. In a subsequent lawsuit, Torres, a legal U.S. resident, said he didn’t have the gun with him when he came out of the house.

HSI agents wanted to talk to his son, Felix Torres Jr., as part of an operation to check the immigration status of known gang members, the police report said. Torres Jr. had been arrested a month earlier on a weapons charge, according to Cook County court records.

Chicago police officers were at the scene at the time of the shooting, “on overwatch in event of an emergency,” according to the report. After Torres was shot, officers rushed into his home and administered first aid.

“CPD had no active part in the Homeland Security investigations,” Sgt. Gus Vasilopoulos said in the incident report. Chicago is one of the nation’s “sanctuary cities” and says it has a mission to “make Chicago the most immigrant friendly city in the country.”

In October, Torres Sr. sued the federal government and the HSI agents involved in the incident, alleging battery, false arrest and intentional infliction of emotional distress, according to court documents. It was at least the fourth federal civil rights lawsuit filed in connection with HSI-agent involved shootings.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office responded in January, denying most of Torres’ allegations and saying the agents “acted reasonably and in self-defense.”

The March 2017 shooting outside the tidy tan-brick home in a working-class neighborhood of Chicago is one of at least 13 HSI agent-involved shootings in recent years identified by the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism.

At least 16 people have been killed, wounded or injured in the shootings, most of which occurred in the past two years. The majority of shooting victims were black, Hispanic or Native American.

Arizona had the most agent-involved shootings, but at least eight other states have had at least one since 2011, the year after the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency created HSI – the largest investigative unit in the Department of Homeland Security.

No agent has been charged in connection with any of the shootings. ICE says its Office of Professional Responsibility reviews all agent-involved shootings, but those investigations have not been made public.

Homeland Security Investigations, the investigative arm of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, enforces hundreds of criminal statutes with thousands of agents, who operate in the U.S. and abroad. ICE boasted in a December news release that HSI had made more than 37,500 criminal arrests in fiscal 2019, a 9% increase over the previous year. (Video by ICE, published on the news release agency's website)

Larry Cosme, a retired HSI agent who is the national president of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, said agents involved in shootings should be investigated because it promotes transparency but added, “Those reports don’t need to be disclosed to be transparent.”

“HSI agents are doing a great job, and they’re doing the job under circumstances that are very difficult to deal with,” Cosme said. “They are trying to protect the communities that we all live in.”

Attempts to get comment from HSI field offices involved in the shootings were mostly unsuccessful.

An ICE spokesperson in Chicago, Nicole Alberico, said the agency does not comment on pending litigation.

“However, lack of comment should not be construed as agreement with or stipulation to any of the allegations,” Alberico said in an email. “As part of the Department of Homeland Security’s homeland security mission, our trained law enforcement professionals adhere to the Department’s mission and values, and uphold our laws while continuing to provide the nation with safety and security.”

Howard Center reporters pieced together details of the agent-involved shootings using police reports and other official documents from state agencies, obtained under public information requests, as well as court records, lawsuits and interviews.

A half-dozen of the shootings identified by the Howard Center occurred in busy parking lots of strip malls and restaurants. At least five shooting victims, including Felix Torres Sr., were not subjects of the agents’ original investigations. Each shooting affected, in one way or another, the communities in which they occurred.

Juan Cruz, an organizer with the Chicago advocacy group Communities United, said his organization received numerous calls from concerned residents and parents on the day of the shooting. Some parents, who had heard about ICE’s presence, were afraid even to pick up their kids from the nearby elementary school, he said.

“It definitely had an impact on the community,” Cruz said. “Who are these officers who responded, you know, accountable to?”

Questions about accountability and transparency frequently accompany HSI agent-involved shootings. Many people are still unaware of the ICE investigative division.

“What’s HSI?” a police officer asked one plainclothes agent shortly after arriving at the scene of an April 2019 shooting in the Phoenix neighborhood of Ahwatukee Foothills.