You never give a shit about the thoughts and feelings of those on the receiving end of state violence, i notice. The refugees sent off to a foreign prison notorious for torture, you'll just give a cursory look and declare them probably criminals or gangsters, and justify whatever brutality happened to them. Thoughts and feelings be damned, we can assume the worst on the flimsiest grounds.
Empathy is not declaring the innocence of the people you want to be innocent, it's understanding them even when they are guilty.
Let's take the guy you found as an example, the one who I agree was deported without due process. We don't know too much about him, but we can build an idea of him off of what we do. We know that he came to the US after his parents were already settled here, we know he didn't submit all the immigration forms, we know that in the US he still gravitated to people from Venezuela. The image in your mind of someone coming to the US seems to be starving people with dirt on their face desperate for help, but in this instance, the facts paint a picture of someone who didn't actually care to be here in the first place. And that's fine, that's not a judgment, it's not his fault the government of Venezuela sucks, it's not his fault his dad picked fights with the government, none of it is his fault, so why is it all his problem? That is a totally relatable thought process: "it's not my fault, why is it my problem?" Everyone has thought that, usually when true, but it's easy enough to fall into that trap even when you are at fault. I didn't fill out that form cause they told me I didn't have to, I didn't go with those guys they kidnapped me, I only plead guilty cause they told me to... none of it is my fault, so why do I have to deal with all this? I think anyone can empathize with that thought process while also knowing it's wrong.
Let's look back at this shooting and try to understand the people, starting with the woman. She thinks ICE is effectively Nazis doing the equivalent of rounding up the Jews. She thinks that getting in their way is saving people's lives. And then those same people pull guns on her. The expectation when you point a gun at someone is that they will do what you tell them to, that's how robbing at gunpoint works, but it only works on the principle that the person with the gun wants the other outcome: the robber wants your money, not to shoot you, and the police want you to get out of the car, not to shoot you. That doesn't work if you think the people with the gun want to kill you. I suspect in her mind, she saw ICE the way all of you do, as thugs on a power trip who joined ICE to hurt and kill people, but she figured they can only get away with it against non-white people, so she was going to take advantage of her privilege as a white citizen to get in their way, cause they can't touch her. When they pulled guns, she didn't react like the police were arresting her, she reacted like murderers were surrounding her and she tried to run as fast as she could. There are right-wing opinion pieces about how she put her life and the lives of others at risk just to avoid arrest and defend criminals, and I think those are all full of crap cause they aren't trying to understand her. Of course her actions don't make sense if you project the thoughts of a Republican onto her, but that's not what she was thinking.
Now for the shooter, who was filming her in the moment, I can guarantee you exactly what he was thinking (minus some expletives, of course): "holy crap, look at these psychos". In his mind, he is the lawful authority (cause he was), and you can make of that what you will, but his expectation is that he is supposed to be telling people what to do when they are disorderly. Now there are people actively following ICE around, blocking roads, blaring whistles, setting off car alarms everywhere they go. ICE approaches these women who have blocked the road in front of them deliberately, who are spewing profanities at them. In his mind, he is part of the cops doing their jobs, and people reacting this way have completely lost it. This woman doesn't look to him like a peaceful protester displaying civil disobedience against a fascist authority, she looks like she's having a full-on psychotic breakdown. Just like the woman, his actions don't make sense if you see this as "cops try to arrest normal person". Step aside, let her go, arrest her later is an easy solution when you casually process the scenario as a law enforcement interaction where the suspect flees. But that's not what the moment was, from his perspective, complete psychos were following and harassing them, and then one of them saw him in front of her car, put it in drive, and hit the gas hard enough to spin out.
Her response was flight, his was fight, both were reacting to the blind instinct of fear for ones life in the face of someone who seemed willing to kill them with the means to do so. That doesn't make it a justified shooting, at minimum he should be out of that job, at maximum I could call this something like voluntary manslaughter, there's a strong possibility he gets off on justified self-defense, but given the information we have, I would not advocate for that. But the suggestion that this is what he wanted, that he joined ICE with the desire to shoot people, is ultimately contributing to the problem. Propagating this idea actively makes the world worse, and you all should knock it off.
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