By Steve Gorman and Keith Coffman
DENVER, July 22 (Reuters) – A man employed by a company running a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility near Denver was charged on Wednesday with assault stemming from the shooting and wounding of an ICE protester there last week, local prosecutors said.
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Brandon Booth, 42, who works for GEO Group, was accused of opening fire with his personally-owned handgun in the direction of two women who were demonstrating outside a GEO-operated ICE processing center in Aurora, Colorado, last Thursday.
The two protesters had “initiated a verbal confrontation” with GEO employees waiting to enter the grounds of the facility and were taking pictures of the workers’ vehicles, when Booth got out of his vehicle and fired a single shot, according to Aurora police.
One of the women was struck in the foot.
Booth left the scene in his vehicle but was arrested nearby a short time later, police said.
He was charged with one count each of first-degree assault and attempted assault in the first degree, both felonies, according to a statement from the District Attorney’s Office of the 17th Judicial District of Colorado.
The assault charge carries a sentence ranging from 10 to 32 years in prison, while attempted assault is punishable by five to 16 years in prison, the prosecutor’s office said.
“We are aware that an off-duty Aurora ICE Processing Center employee was involved in a shooting incident,” a GEO Group spokesperson wrote in a statement on Friday. “This individual has been placed on unpaid administrative leave, and we will fully cooperate with law enforcement.”
The incident in Colorado followed back-to-back fatal shootings earlier this month by ICE agents conducting vehicle stops in Houston, Texas, and Biddeford in Maine.
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In both those cases, federal authorities acknowledged that the two men killed, one a Mexican citizen, the other a Colombian national, were not the intended targets of immigration enforcement operations underway at the time.
Two U.S. citizens involved in protests against ICE operations in Minneapolis, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were shot to death by immigration officials in January.
No criminal charges have been filed in connection with any of those shootings.Many ICE detention and processing centers, some managed by GEO under contract for the agency, have been criticized by migrant rights and civil liberties advocates who say detainees are subjected to unsafe, unsanitary conditions and a lack of adequate medical care.
Colorado Public Radio News reported that the woman injured in Aurora, 22-year-old Emma Landis, was pictured walking on crutches with her lower-right leg bandaged and returned to an anti-ICE demonstration outside the Aurora facility on Sunday.
“We were on the sidewalk protesting, and they were mocking us and threatening us. And as we were crossing the street, that was when he shot me,” the news outlet quoted Landis as saying. “Never in a million years did I think that would happen.”
(Reporting by Keith Coffman in Denver; Writing and additional reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Michael Perry)
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