Three people have been shot in an attack on an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Texas.
The details remain scant, but the breaking news headline is crystal clear: Three people have been shot in an attack on an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Texas.
We do not know the motives of the shooter, who is dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, according to reports. Nor do we know the shooter’s intended targets. No ICE agents were injured in the attack — only ICE detainees.
Internet-based sleuths and self-appointed tone police are convinced this morning that his fact pattern is radically different from the last two attacks on federal law enforcement facilities in Texas. Rather than seek out more facts to contribute to the new pattern they believe they have identified, they’re taking the opportunity to lash out at anyone who presumed that this attack on an ICE facility was, in fact, an attack on an ICE facility.
Prudence compels us to hold out the possibility that the detainees were the attacker’s targets, not ICE agents. Rather than mistaken identity, the shooter might have had a gang-related motive or some other reason to target migrant detainees. Anything’s possible. And that would depart from the sequence of events to which we’ve become horrifyingly accustomed. But from what we know so far, this deadly event does not appear to be radically different from this summer’s attacks on law enforcement facilities.
This looks to have been a lone shooter — not unlike the lone shooter who descended on a Customs and Border Protection office in early July. Just before sunrise, 27-year-old Ryan Louis Mosqueda opened fire on that facility, shooting one local police officer in the knee before his targets returned fire and killed him. The shooter had the Latin phrase “Cordis Die” on the driver’s side door of the suspect’s car, which federal officials soon linked to a video game. “In the Call of Duty: Black Ops II video game, Cordis Die is a revolutionary movement that aims to cripple capitalist governments, according to gamer websites,” the BBC reported.
Just days earlier, an ICE facility had been targeted by a small-cell militant group. In a sophisticated ambush, ten attackers clad in “black, military-style clothing” descended on the facility, used fireworks to lure its targets out of the building, and opened fire on them from behind a tree line, utilizing multiple angles of attack. Investigators recovered propagandistic materials from the scene featuring slogans like “Fight ICE Terror with Class War,” “Free All Political Prisoners,” and “Resist Fascism. Fight Oligarchy.”
Now, it’s certainly possible that this gunman had a distinct demographic profile and unique motives. It’s also possible, perhaps even likely, that the shooter was inspired by what preceding shooters were inspired by — what has driven the staggering increase in the number of threats directed at federal law enforcement officers over the course of the summer.
We should not jump to conclusions. Neither should we subordinate all we know about the threat environment just to appease those who insist the most important thing we can do right now is stop talking about the third ambush-style attack of immigration enforcement agents in as many months.
UPDATE: According to the FBI, the still unidentified shooter left behind “anti-ICE” messages etched into bullet casings — a familiar motive and a familiar calling card, which follows the example set by Charlie Kirk’s shooter and the Annunciation Catholic Church killer. Occam’s Razor wins again.