In the wake of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents’ increasingly lawless and violent rampage through Minneapolis, those defending their abuses have claimed they are rooted in a respect for law enforcement. To second-guess ICE agent Jonathan Ross’s murder of Renee Good or the Border Patrol agents who murdered Alex Pretti, or to criticize federal agents’ behavior more generally, they argue, is tantamount to reviving the “defund the police” movement. And a fair and judicious review of the footage of Good’s killing specifically shows that Ross was perfectly justified in using deadly force.

All of this is pretty impossible to square with anyone who has used their own eyes to watch the videos of the killings of each. But it’s also hard to square with the fact that some of the harshest criticisms of not just Good’s and Pretti’s murders but DHS agents’ tactics over the past year more broadly have often come from former and current law enforcement officers, including former DHS personnel themselves.

Craig McQueen, a former assistant chief of police with the Miami Police Department, seemed astonished that Pretti would even be pepper sprayed for trying to help a woman who had been pushed over, let alone shot, calling him “basically a helpless man” at the time he was killed and declaring it “totally unjustified.”