It seems like forever ago, in October 2012, that I wrote about a single bullet that separated defense from murder. It was in context of the “hack back” or “active defense” work I was doing at the time. The case of Private Lee Clegg, a British soldier at a Belfast checkpoint in 1990, is foundational to the study of defense ethics. He had fired four shots at a car that refused to stop. The court accepted the first three shots as self-defense, because the evidence showed they were fired while the vehicle approached. That was his plausible defense against danger. The fourth bullet, however, entered the car from behind, after it had passed, hitting someone fleeing and more than fifty feet away from him.
Forensic trajectory reconstruction contradicted Clegg’s testimony that he fired through the side door as the car went by, which still wouldn’t have been in defense. The judge ruled the fourth bullet was fired “with the intention of causing death or serious bodily harm” and convicted a serving soldier of murder. The state that armed him prosecuted him.
The fourth bullet doctrine was about the moment a threat passes, because any shots that follow are a killing. A laboratory proved that moment in 1990. In 2026 we repeatedly have to watch the moment as it streams in high definition, where it is plainly visible how the fourth shot now comes first.
ICE Murder Doctrine
I’ve written here about January 7, 2026, when an ICE agent in Minneapolis executed Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother, in her car. Frame-by-frame review of the video shows the sequence. The agent stood at the front left of her vehicle. She turned hard right, away from every agent on the scene. He pivoted to his left, out of any possible path of travel, took a two-handed stance from the position of safety he had just created, and fired into the side of a departing car. The clearance he manufactured for himself was used as a firing angle.
Every element the Clegg court needed a ballistics laboratory to establish is visible in real time, and the geometry is unmistakable. The killing shot was aggression, without threat and therefore not in defense.
Secretary Noem then supplied the doctrinal statement. The officer, she said, “followed his training, did exactly what he’s been taught to do”. Take her at her word. In 1995 the fourth bullet convicted a soldier. In 2026 the training is execution through offensive shooting, not defense or safety related at all.
The tally confirms this is doctrinal, rather than accidental. At least 22 people have been fired on by agents in the violence-led deportation campaign since January 2025. Six are dead, three of them US citizens, and nearly every incident involved firing at people in vehicles. In every case where video has surfaced, the person was fleeing, disarmed, or posed no threat at the moment of fire.
Seventeen days after Renee Good, agents in Minneapolis publicly executed Alex Pretti; DHS falsely claimed he approached with a pistol, while video showed the weapon stayed holstered and an agent had already disarmed him when another fired offensively. The Deputy Attorney General later conceded on the record that the conduct was a far cry from any legal definition of domestic terrorism. Then U.S. citizen Ruben Ray Martinez was executed by ICE in South Padre Island on March 15, 2025.
The case in Houston on July 7, shows agents executed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a man who was never their target, wore no cameras, and held to a vehicular assault story for 48 hours before DHS admitted the error.
Six days later in Biddeford, Maine, an agent executed Joan Sebastian Guerrero, a 26-year-old Colombian who was also never the target of the warrant; the photograph from the scene shows four bullet holes in the windshield of the Kia he was reported driving, and the official DHS account states the vehicle attempted to flee and the officer fired.
Read this latest account against ICE’s own written policy barring deadly force to stop a fleeing suspect. The agency’s defense of the shooting is a clear confession to violating it. Notably, Minnesota and Hennepin County had to sue the federal government to obtain evidence in their own homicide investigations.
Fifty Years Aren’t Forgotten
The rule all these shootings violate is older than most of the agents pulling the trigger.
The NYPD drafted Temporary Operating Procedure 237 in 1971 and formalized it in August 1972, after police killed a child fleeing in a stolen car on Staten Island: officers may fire neither at nor from a moving vehicle unless its occupants present deadly force by means other than the vehicle itself.
Shootings dropped immediately and stayed down. Peer-reviewed analysis of the 100 largest US cities confirms the mechanism: departments that constrain vehicle shootings and instruct officers to move out of the path have fewer of them. The Department of Justice wrote the same physics into its own use-of-force policy: step out of the way.
ICE knows the rule, and now avoids the rule, to intentionally deploy an execution doctrine.
Its own written policy prohibits discharging firearms at the operator of a moving vehicle absent a grave threat, and bars deadly force used solely to stop a fleeing suspect. A 2022 executive order required every federal law enforcement agency to adopt policies matching or exceeding the DOJ standard. ICE’s 2023 rewrite omitted exactly one thing: the instruction to move out of the vehicle’s path. The primary documents are compiled at Just Security for anyone who wants provenance. The ICE record shows agents are violating their own agency’s written policy, on camera, while the Secretary certifies that they are being trained to offensively attack instead of defend. That combination has a name. Impunity.
Provenance of ICE Execution Doctrine
A counter-doctrine that is so consistently being applied has a very particular lineage, which has been documented by those studying white nationalism. Sharpeville, March 1960: South African police fired into a fleeing crowd, killed 69 people. Most were shot in the back. Parliament answered with the 1961 Indemnity Act, retroactively immunizing the shooters. The doctrine of apartheid argues the target category licenses the fire, and then the law pre-forgives executions.
In the final years of apartheid and through its 1994 collapse, the doctrine was privatized. Executive Outcomes (EO), the firm credited with promoting the modern mercenary corporation, drew its ranks from 32 Battalion and the Civil Cooperation Bureau, apartheid’s counterinsurgency and assassination organs.
EO became Sandline, which re-emerged as Aegis Defense Systems, which won a $300 million American contract to run the Green Zone and coordinate every private security company in Iraq. Erinys International, founded by an apartheid-era military intelligence officer, employed veterans of Koevoet, the bounty-per-body unit, and Vlakplaas, the death squad farm; two of them were named in the press only because a Baghdad bomb ended their rein of terror. A UN report placed South Africa among the top three personnel suppliers to the Iraq contractor economy, five to ten thousand strong and funded by American taxpayers.
Inside the white nationalist mercenary doctrine funded by American foreign policy hawks, a convoy escalation-of-force procedure made every approaching vehicle a threat category and the driver was the first target. This is where the history and the present administration converge. Nisour Square, September 2007, opened with contractors firing into a non-threat, a slowly rolling Kia sedan carrying a medical student and his mother; fifteen more innocent people were executed by the mercenaries in the minutes that followed, seventeen dead in all. American courts convicted four of the shooters in 2014. Trump pardoned all four in December 2020, like the 1961 Indemnity Act of apartheid, converting the murder verdict back into standing policy.
The terror pipeline in Iraq then was imported for domestic policy. In February 2025, Erik Prince and Blackwater’s former chief operating officer circulated a 26-page blueprint for a privatized mass deportation force: $25 billion, twelve million removals before the midterms, a hundred private aircraft, processing camps, deputized civilians. By late 2025 ICE procurement documents mirrored the blueprint, with skip-tracing and bounty contracts worth over $40 million authorizing contractors to locate up to one million people from lists of ten thousand names at a time to push into “migration centers” with the rhyme and shape of “data centers”. And the government workforce hired to execute it was built the same way. Congressional oversight records show ICE dropped its minimum agent age from 21 to 18, removed the upper age limit entirely, offered $50,000 signing bonuses, cut five weeks of training to compress the deportation academy to eight weeks against 27 for investigators, and put recruits into training before fingerprints and drug tests, dismissing more than 200 of them mid-course. DHS answers that most surge hires already completed a police academy somewhere else, an answer that concedes the agency itself now trains less than the departments whose fifty-year-old rules its agents break.
The chain I’m presenting preserves doctrine through multiple changes of institutions: apartheid special forces seeded the contractor industry, the contractor industry normalized the vehicle as a fire category, the pardon restored the license, the blueprint and the hiring surge imported it into domestic enforcement. The individuals change, the institutions reshape, while the shoot-to-kill offensive license is identical. Indemnity Act, presidential pardon, federal immunity claim against state prosecutors: the same legal architecture, pre-forgiveness for shooting people who are fleeing, through seventy years.
Where We Are Today
On July 14, one day after Biddeford, ICE headquarters ordered officers nationwide to stop “pursuing” people in vehicles. That’s a significant admission of offensive orders.
The directive applies to Enforcement and Removal Operations, carves out an exception for the “most egregious” targets, and is described as temporary until officers receive new vehicle engagement training. Read that memo for exactly what it says. Individual failures will be tracked for individual discipline. Doctrine gets suspended by directive, agency-wide, in a single day. The agency just certified that firing on vehicles has been its operating practice, and the promised remedy, retraining, uses the same word Noem offered as the defense in January.
The alibi for executions and the prevention for it are being deployed officially as the same thing.
Note also the reason to issue the admission of guilt framed as an excuse. Six deaths across eighteen months produced personnel shuffles: Noem out, Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino retired, ICE Director Todd Lyons gone. Prosecution is avoided by disposable staff given a parachute and kick out the door. The stand-down order came hours after Senator Susan Collins, campaigning for reelection in the state where Guerrero died, called the new Secretary and demanded an end to non-urgent stops. The electoral angle apparently accomplished in one phone call what all the innocent people being killed could not. ICE’s public comment on the change:
We will not disclose or discuss law enforcement tactics.
The 2012 post had argued that defensive acts must be measured, proportionate, documented, and verifiable, and that even trained professionals need formal rules of engagement precisely because they will be held to them.
The Clegg case in the 1990s proved the mechanism exists: a state examined its own soldier’s trajectory and called the fourth bullet murder. Britain then previewed the modern pattern, releasing him after two years under political pressure, returning him to the Army with a promotion, and acquitting him of murder at a 1999 retrial.
The 2026 update records a total inversion of the defense logic, and loss of enforcement professionalism to favor coin-operated mercenary extremists. The trajectory has been repeatedly filmed in real time, where the geometry of offensive fire needs no laboratory, and the employing state responds by corrupting self-defense, withholding evidence from prosecutors, shuffling the leadership, and issuing broad vague indemnity in advance.
Clegg fired a three bullets before he was classified a murderer by his fourth. These agents start with his fourth, murdering from the first trigger pull, because they are being trained on old white South African race-based murder doctrine, a human safari that paid bounties by the body.
