All immigration personnel operating in the Minneapolis enforcement surge will be outfitted with body cameras, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Monday.
She said they will then expand to all personnel nationwide “as funding is available.”
She said the decision was more evidence that the Trump administration is “the most transparent administration in American history.”
“We will rapidly acquire and deploy body cameras to DHS law enforcement across the country,” she said on social media.
Democrats on Capitol Hill have demanded body cams for those involved in immigration enforcement as one of the conditions for supporting new a new funding bill for DHS.
President Trump said it was Ms. Noem’s decision to deploy the cameras.
“They generally tend to be good for law enforcement, because people can’t lie about what’s happening. So it’s, generally speaking, I think, 80% good for law enforcement. But if she wants to do that, I’m OK with it,” he told reporters.
The announcement comes amid a series of shootings involving officers and agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection.
Some agents and officers do have body cameras already, but adoption is not universal.
There is video of last month’s fatal shooting of Alex Pretti, for example, but investigators said there was no body camera video of a non-fatal shooting by a Border Patrol agent in Portland, Oregon, earlier in the month.
Civil-rights groups have long called for body cameras for law enforcement as a way to tamp down on overheated police interactions.
CBP began a pilot program for body cameras in summer 2021, outfitting some 6,000 personnel.
ICE, under prodding from Congress, followed suit later that year with a pilot program to deploy them to members of its special reaction teams in some major cities.
