A veteran in New Jersey was recently shown in a video confronting ICE agents while calmly ignoring their threats. ICE agents have long disliked being followed by protesters, and this wasn’t the first video of them warning residents to stop trailing behind them. In this instance, the agents were doing the same thing.
In the video, the ICE agents asked the New Jersey veteran why he was following them. The veteran retorted by asking why they were wearing masks. One ICE agent replied by calling the man by name. While most people would be unnerved, the New Jersey veteran remained unbothered, saying that he wouldn’t get scared just because they used his name. The two exchanged heated words, with neither willing to hear the other talk.
The veteran said he refused to speak to the ICE agents unless they identified themselves. The agents merely repeated their warning, telling him to stop following them. Funnily enough, the veteran responded by raising his car window, muting the sound of any response from the agents. That wasn’t the only confrontation he had with ICE. In another scene, he spoke with a male and female pair of ICE agents in their car. Like the previous agents, they told him to stop bothering them and threatened to arrest him for impeding their work. The veteran replied that they had no grounds to arrest him since he wasn’t impeding anyone.
Many Reddit users who saw the video found the encounter entertaining, noting how the New Jersey veteran stood his ground. Unlike in most videos where ICE agents usually have the upper hand and residents can only watch from the side, this veteran showed what it meant to stand up for oneself. “This really fires me up. Love it! Strong guy standing up to some cowards,” one user wrote.
Some commenters found it especially amusing that the New Jersey veteran actually raised his car window to stop the ICE agents from speaking further. “Rolling the window up on them had me laugh,” one commenter said. It was clear he refused to talk to any ICE agent unless they identified themselves.
A handful of users were more curious about the identities of the ICE agents the veteran encountered. It’s well known that ICE agents and many other government officers have ways to identify people by their faces, but many Americans have also started creating their own databases, gathering photos of various ICE agents and other officials so they can track and identify masked agents. Sadly, these civilian efforts aren’t as powerful as the facial recognition tools ICE agents have, as users struggled to identify the agents in the video.
