Even as residents at a recent Ward 7 community meeting countered his statements, Sixth District Commander Jaron Hickman vehemently denied the presence of ICE agents operating alongside his officers in the community.
“We are embedded with federal agencies, not ICE,” Hickman told residents on the evening of Oct. 22. ”We’re embedded with ATF. Border Patrol does come out, but when they’re with us, they’re not in an immigration enforcement type of field. When they go out in the 6th District, they’re mostly embedded with my crime suppression team, and they do visibility for me.”
As those residents would later find out, some of those agents do much more than “visibility.”
Less than a week before the meeting at Dorothy I. Height/Benning Neighborhood Library, a Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) special agent shot an SUV during a stop initiated by a Sixth District Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) officer’s call.
HSI is a division of ICE under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
The HSI special agent encounter happened near 44th Street and Benning Road in Northeast— less than a block from the library where Hickman met residents. According to reports, MPD made a call about dark tints and alleged missing front tags. MPD officers, unable to chase vehicles, deferred to the HSI agent referred to as “Bebber” who pursued and shot three times at the vehicle.
Phillip Brown, the driver of that SUV, would later be charged with the felony of fleeing a police officer. One of the bullets shot by the HSI special agent went through his seat, and another through his jacket, nearly hitting his body.
Given the details of Brown’s arrest that have surfaced, Ward 7 resident and political leader Chioma Iwuoha said there’s no excuse for what Hickman said, or didn’t say, to community members that very next evening.
“He came in that meeting knowing that this… had happened,” Iwuoha told The Informer.
Iwuoha, a Ward 7 resident and D.C. Democratic Party at-large committeewoman, organized the Oct. 22 meeting that started with a know-your-rights training conducted by Samantha Davis of Free D.C. Both women later sat among the nearly two dozen community members who listened to, and weighed in on, a discussion between Hickman and Dr. Marla Dean of the Ward 7 Education Council about: the nature of MPD Sixth District’s relationship with federal agents and how residents can hold federal agents accountable for unlawful interactions.
During the meeting, Hickman said that agents aren’t bound to MPD accountability protocols. In regard to MPD’s relationship with federal agents, Hickman told residents that federal agencies, and ICE in particular, listen to radio correspondences and appear on the scene of their own volition.
“If there’s a stop and officers say they need assistance, there’s a chance that an ICE agent or there’s a chance that an agent would assist,” Hickman said. “When you talk about ICE, we’re not embedded with them in the operations.”
After learning of Brown’s violent police encounter, Iwuoha counts among those alleging deception by law enforcement. She has since reached out to Hickman about the remarks he made before an audience that included staffers in D.C. Councilmember Wendell Felder’s office.
“He didn’t distinctly in the meeting separate HSI from ICE,” Iwuoha said about Hickman. “To me that says that ICE is embedded in our operations. But apparently he’s making a distinction that I don’t think he made in that meeting which feels like it was misleading.” mar
Council Members Tackle MPD-Federal Agency Collusion in Two Public Hearings
On Oct. 30, during a hearing that the D.C. Council’s Committee on Public Safety and the Judiciary conducted on the emergency youth curfew extension, Felder asked MPD Chief Pamela Smith for clarity on what transpired on Oct. 17, and why MPD officials omitted the HSI agent-involved shooting from their arrest report.
“Are you familiar with that case, and is there anything you would want to put on the record?” Felder asked Smith. “I know the purpose of this [hearing] is about juveniles, so I don’t want to spend too much time on this, but I think it’s important just to address this while I do have you.”
Smith, in response, didn’t deny an omission of HSI agent’s actions from the arrest report. She instead characterized the situation as one where the officer who completed the document deferred to a colleague, not a superior, in making that particular decision.
“The transcript from the court stated Officer Sterling testified that he saw guidance from another officer due to all of the supervisors and managers being on the scene of the officer- involved shooting,” Smith said during the early afternoon of Oct. 30. “He asked one of his colleagues, who has a bit more time in our crime suppression team, and when he was asked by the defense attorney if Sparrow was his supervisor, he said no, and that he was a team lead.”
Soon after, in speaking with Felder, Smith then went on to criticize The Washington Post, one of several outlets that broke the news of the federal officer-involved shooting and alleged cover-up. She focused on the notion that MPD withheld body camera footage.
“The United States attorney would have the responsibility of providing the footage to the defense attorney,” Smith said. “The court discussion about the videos being locked down simply means that they were restricted by the Internal Affairs Division, which happens in all of our office-involved shooting cases.”
Smith later called out what she called the news outlet’s “misleading” depiction of events, as outlined in the Oct. 21 court transcript.
“The case being dismissed by the judge was not based on the office-involved shooting not being recounted in the court documents,” Smith told Felder. “The judge found the elements of the fleeing statute had not been met, and you can find that transcript on page 75.”
On the day preceding the Public Safety and Judiciary Committee hearing, D.C. Councilmember Brianne Nadeau (D-Ward 1) conducted a committee hearing of her own where she heard several complaints about federal law enforcement activity carried out in concert with local police. One such incident took place in Northeast, near D.C. Bilingual Public Charter School when MPD officers and ICE agents surrounded moped drivers.
As first grade teacher Mary Calhoun recently recounted in that public hearing, that stop brought community members together.
“When I arrived, I saw several officers from multiple agencies working together: FBI, HSI, MPD, and some others too far away for me to read their jackets,” Calhoun said in her testimony before the D.C. Council’s Committee on Public Works and Operations.
On the afternoon of Oct. 29, Calhoun told Nadeau that tensions increased amid community members’ inquiries about the stop.
“They and several police guards were surrounding two men who were handcuffed and seated in the street,” Calhoun continued in her testimony. “As I approached from a distance, one MPD officer yelled at me that simply by being present and ‘distracting him,’ I was ‘interfering with the scene.’”
The MPD officer, Calhoun said, took the interaction to the next level.
“He moved toward me aggressively and demanded that I move to a specific location, otherwise he would arrest me,” she said.
Minutes after Calhoun’s testimony, Ward 4 resident and Georgetown University professor Gregory Afinogenov spoke about the activity unfolding outside of his window, in real time, for what he said was another time this year.
“Federal MPD officers are accosting people getting off the buses at Georgia Avenue and pulling them off the bus, interrogating them,” Afinogenov told Nadeau. “And I’ve seen at least one woman be hauled out in handcuffs, apparently for the crime of riding the bus.”
Nadeau would later tell reporters that, upon further review, Transit Police Department officers, not MPD, pulled two people off of that Metrobus.
On Oct. 29, Calhoun and Afinogenov counted among more than 50 public witnesses who signed up to speak at a roundtable that Nadeau conducted in exploration of possible D.C. Human Rights Act violations. In her opening remarks, Nadeau read quotes collected from District youth about their family members’ experiences with ICE, including instances when parents gave their children banking information in case of their detainment, and youth went into hiding during ICE sightings.
“I was terrified because I’ve never been in a situation like that but I did what she told me to do and went in my parents’ room with my 4-year-old sister and told my cousin to be quiet and not say nothing,” Nadeau read in her opening remarks as she shared a youth’s story. “I was just praying to the Lord that nothing happens and my dad called me – he just told me to stay in there and my mom was coming and to pray that everything will be okay so I did that. And just stayed there waiting until my mom finally came home and she said that they left, but I just saw from the look of her that she was scared and relieved that we were okay.”
Other public witnesses who spoke with Nadeau, and at times D.C. Councilmember Zachary Parker (D-Ward 5) on Oct. 29 included Free DC’s Samantha Davis; U.S. shadow Rep. Dr. Oye Owolewa; Jacqueline Castaneda of the DC Latino Caucus; Ward 1 D.C. Council candidate Aparna Raj, and Catherine Gaal, chairwoman of the Third District Citizens Advisory Council.
Other committee members — D.C. Council members Robert White (D-At large), Janeese Lewis George (D-Ward 4), and Wendell Felder (D-Ward 7) — didn’t attend the nearly five-hour hearing.
Though no representatives from the D.C. Office of Human Rights provided government testimony, Nadeau said her hearing affirmed the need for further action. She noted that the testimony heard throughout much of Wednesday implicates MPD, though not necessarily federal agents, other than in incidents involving encampments.
“As elected leaders in our city, it’s really important for us to hear those firsthand accounts so that we understand exactly what’s going on in our neighborhoods,” Nadeau said. “The ward council members, we hear from constituents all the time about what’s going on in the neighborhoods. We see it with our own eyes, but having it all compiled here today was very powerful.”
In speaking about next steps, Nadeau mentioned further collaboration with her council colleagues, the majority of whom she believes to be against MPD-federal agent cooperation.
“What we need to do is get some input from the Judiciary Committee on this and how they want to approach it,” Nadeau told The Informer.
For Nadeau, however, there still remains the question of how effective the council would be in countering the ongoing federal law enforcement activity.
“The executive order that was issued on cooperation with ICE is definitely something that I think we need to look more deeply at,” she told The Informer. “because it seems to identify an area under the Sanctuary Values Act where we are vulnerable, where our residents are vulnerable to MPD cooperation.”
The Local Arm of a National Movement Makes Its Presence Felt
Minutes after Afinogenov’s council testimony on Wednesday, Merawi Gerima and other members of the D.C Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression filed into Room 500 of the John A. Wilson Building in demand of an immediate response to the incident on Georgia Avenue.
Nadeau told the organizers to speak with her staff.
Earlier in the week, Gerima hinted at actions he and his comrades would continue to take to compel the D.C. Council’s movement against MPD-federal agent collusion.
“We’re…making sure that we bring pressure to our city council members who need that pressure to do the right thing,” Gerima told The Informer. “We visited Chairman Mendelson in Tenleytown this past Saturday and asked him to take some concrete positions on fighting back against the Trump agenda in D.C. and the mayor’s capitulation.”
The D.C. Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression is one of 30 groups across the U.S. continuing a tradition that started amid efforts to free Angela Davis and other political prisoners. Throughout much of the second Trump presentation, and especially since President Donald J. Trump evoked Section 740 of the D.C. Home Rule Act, the alliance continues to press the Bowser administration to not cooperate with the Trump administration.
Gerima said those sentiments remain the same in the aftermath of the HSI officer-involved shooting on Benning Road— and the subsequent cover-up.
“This case shows just how closely federal agents and local law enforcement are working together and the extent to which they’re willing to go to cover up for each other,” Gerima told The Informer. “It is against the law to falsify a police report. It’s essentially conspiracy, and they did it in order to protect a federal agen[t] who nearly killed a D.C. resident.”
On the morning of Oct. 27— 10 days after the incident involving HSI— Gerima and other alliance members gathered in front of MPD headquarters in Judiciary Square. Those joining them included Terra Martin, mother of Delaneo Martin, a District youth shot and killed by U.S. Park Police in 2023.
The press conference, Gerima said, follows the alliance’s interruption of a town hall Bowser attended earlier this month. Despite the mayor’s assertion that, by cooperating with the Trump administration, she’s protecting D.C., Gerima said she’s leaving District residents in more of a vulnerable state.
“Mayor Bowser can no longer tell us that Home Rule is her North Star, because this case clearly shows that every time she concedes, she erodes our autonomy,” Gerima told The Informer.
With formations in Chicago, Los Angeles and other U.S. cities, the Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression has organized legions of activists against federal agents that have been targeting people of color and those believed to be immigrants.
Those efforts, Gerima said, have proven successful in Chicago, where Mayor Brandon Johnson is pushing back against the intrusion of federal agents.
“If the people of Chicago did not have that united front between the people and their elected officials, thousands more would be getting deported,” Gerima said. “ICE in Chicago has to fight and struggle for every arrest and deportation that they get, and in D.C., it’s open season on our immigrant community and…our Black youth.”
Though mindful of the odds stacked against a city lacking budget and legislative autonomy, Gerima said that he and his comrades won’t stop until Bowser truly channels the energy that brought about D.C. Home Rule half a century ago.
“No amount of concessions will stop the racists in the White House from doing what they want to do,” Gerima told The Informer. “So the best thing that [Mayor Bowser] could do is to stand with the people in their defense of Home Rule.”min