Employee at ICE Detention Center Run by Private Prison Company Shot Protester

This article was originally published in Common Dreams under Creative Commons 3.0 license. Read the original article. Contact: editor@commondreams.org

By Brad Reed

Police in Aurora, Colorado on Friday announced that they had arrested an employee of a local US Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center after he allegedly shot a woman protesting at the facility.

The Aurora Police Department said in a social media post that its officers on Thursday night responded to a report of a shooting and subsequently found two women on the scene, one of whom had been shot in her lower body.
Officers would soon after detain 42-year-old Brandon Booth, an employee of private prison firm The GEO Group, after pulling over his vehicle near the site of the shooting and finding a firearm in his possession.

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The police found that, before the shooting, the two women were taking part in a protest at the Aurora ICE Processing Center where Booth works.

After the two women “initiated a verbal confrontation and took pictures of the employees’ vehicles before walking away,” police said, “Booth retrieved his personally owned pistol and fired a single shot in their direction, striking one of the women on her lower body” before getting into his vehicle and fleeing the scene.

After Booth was taken into custody, he was charged attempted second-degree murder, first-degree assault, attempted first-degree assault, felony menacing, and unlawful carrying of a concealed weapon.

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Booth’s alleged victim was transported to a hospital where she was treated for her wounds, which police said “are believed to be non-life-threatening.”

The GEO Group told local news station Fox 31 that Booth “has been placed on unpaid administrative leave,” while vowing to “fully cooperate with law enforcement.”

Booth’s former sister-in-law, a woman named Destiny Winter, told The Denver Post on Friday that the alleged shooter “was not a good person at all,” and described an incident where he gave her a concussion by slamming her into a wall more than a decade ago.

“This is not a person who does the right thing or respects boundaries, especially of women and kids,” Winter explained. “This is not a person who is willing to hold himself accountable for mistakes.”

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