The front- and rear-facing dashboard cameras that Carolina Molina has mounted on her Toyota Supra are, by her telling, for accountability.
“It’s for traffic incidents. I have a nice car, and if somebody were to hit me I want proof of that,” she said. “You just never know what could happen, so you should always protect yourself.”
But earlier this week, the dashcams became a tool for a different type of accountability.
On Monday, a masked ICE agent confronted Molina as she drove through an office park in the Bailey’s Crossroads area of Northern Virginia, pointing a gun at her head while accusing her of trying to run them over. She says he was lying, and had the dashcam footage to prove it.
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Molina — a first-generation American whose family is from El Salvador — caught the rest of the interaction with her cellphone’s camera, and she posted the footage on Instagram.
The footage immediately went viral, prompting widespread criticism over the agent’s aggressive tactics and again pointing a spotlight at ICE, which came under intense scrutiny earlier this year for two killings in Minnesota and again this summer for similar fatalities in Texas and Maine.
The Department of Homeland Security is standing by the agents involved, accusing Molina in a statement of “weaponizing her vehicle against them — all in an attempt to help illegal aliens get away.” The agency also said Molina herself “could face criminal prosecution as a result of her actions.”
Democratic Rep. Suhas Subramanyam, who represents Virginia’s 10th Congressional District, is calling for criminal charges to be pressed against the agent, not Molina.
“They have no right to attack someone who exercises their First Amendment right to free speech,” he told NOTUS. “If ICE doesn’t want to have people jeer [at] them wherever they go, they should change their tactics. They should be more accountable, more transparent to the American people.”
But Patrick Jaicomo, an attorney specializing in police conduct for the libertarian Institute for Justice, says that accountability may be hard to come by.
“When you see federal agents violating someone’s rights, there should be an avenue to seek relief in court,” he says. “But there is very little to be done, and we’ve had to piece together novel theories to restore some avenue for federal accountability. The federal government has no interest in holding itself accountable no matter how egregious the behavior is.”
After ICE agents fatally shot two people in Minnesota in January, the uproar prompted DHS leaders to promise to outfit agents nationwide with body cameras, which advocates tout as one tool to ensure that there’s a record of when things go wrong. While that rollout hasn’t been completed, the agents who confronted Molina were wearing body cameras.
But whether the footage is released remains an open question. The Associated Press recently reported that the agency’s existing policy gives it full discretion over whether to release footage from body cameras, and specifies it will do so when “it is in the best interests of the agency.”
This conflicts with policies in many local law enforcement agencies, including D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department, which mandate that footage showing a serious use of force be made public within five days of the incident — unless the victim or their family objects. (Earlier this year, the D.C. Council passed a bill expanding the release of footage to include situations where federal agents use serious force when patrolling with D.C. police officers. A group of Republican senators is now trying to repeal that law.)
An email to a DHS spokesperson inquiring as to whether the footage in Molina’s case would be released went unanswered. Molina said Wednesday she would like to see it made public, and Subramanyam said he plans to request the footage from DHS — but also that the agency’s existing policy troubles him.
“That policy makes clear that they don’t care about the American people; they only care about themselves and protecting the administration and its immigration overreach,” he said. “If they cared about our country and the American people, they would release body camera footage and all the other information related to an incident like this, so that everyone knew what was going on and exactly what happened, and we could fix the issue.”
Molina conceded that had she not been equipped to record the interaction, things could have ended much worse for her.
“I think they would have shot me and gotten away with it,” she said.
“Body cameras are a good thing,” Jaicomo said. “They are used in many cases to show the objective truth of what happened. They can show a criminal did criminal things or the police lied. In this case, it’s the latter. But if those videos are never recorded or made public, they serve no purpose.”
Another element of Molina’s incident was that the ICE agents were masked — as they have been through much of the Trump administration. Earlier this year, Virginia lawmakers approved a bill prohibiting federal agents from being masked, but it is currently held up in litigation. Democratic Virginia Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine have introduced legislation to end masking by federal agents.
“There must be an increase in transparency, accountability, and safety in immigration law enforcement,” Warner said in an email to NOTUS. “My Immigration Enforcement Identification Act would make it illegal for law enforcement officers to obscure their faces and require that they clearly display their agency, name, and a unique identifier while conducting immigration enforcement functions. It also has some commonsense exceptions for select tactical missions and officer health and safety.”
For Subramanyam, Monday’s incident shows why some people want to scrap ICE altogether, he said. But he wouldn’t go that far.
“We do need to do immigration reform, but not like this. We do need to do immigration enforcement, but not like this,” he said. “What we need is a completely new way of doing immigration enforcement.”
As for Molina, a therapist by trade, she said she isn’t yet sure how she’ll proceed but that she will be speaking to an attorney. She wants the ICE agents who confronted her to be investigated, but absent that, she proposed her own form of accountability: “therapy.”
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