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The FBI said on Thursday that the suspect in the shooting at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention facility in Texas the day before had engaged in a “high degree of planning” before the attack.
The FBI director, Kash Patel, said in a post on X that the alleged perpetrator downloaded a document titled “Dallas County Office of Homeland Security & Emergency Management” containing a list of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) facilities.
The shooting occurred early on Wednesday at a facility in Dallas, with a spray of bullets fired from a rooftop hitting a building and an Ice transportation van, killing one Ice detainee who was inside the vehicle and badly injuring two others.
No Ice staff were hit in the attack, which the Trump administration condemned as being an action aimed at law enforcement and is urgently investigating, amid a surge in political violence in the US.
The suspect was identified as 29-year-old Joshua Jahn, who took his own life at the scene.
Patel on Thursday said that the suspect conducted multiple searches of ballistics and the “Charlie Kirk Shot Video” in recent days, referring back to the murder of the rightwing activist and youth politics leader who was shot dead at an event in Utah earlier this month.
Patel further posted of the Texas suspect: “Between 8/19 – 8/24, he searched apps that tracked the presence of Ice agents. One of the handwritten notes recovered read, ‘Hopefully this will give Ice agents real terror, to think, “is there a sniper”? about to fire from a roof.”
He added: “Further accumulated evidence to this point indicates a high degree of pre-attack planning.”
The suspect who shot Kirk also fired from a rooftop at a relatively long distance, using a high-powered rifle with a precision scope in a sniper-style attack. He fired just one bullet in an assassination-style discharge that hit Kirk in the neck. The shooter at the Ice facility fired many bullets in a much more scattered fashion that did not appear to include aiming at a specific individual.
The identities of the victims in the Dallas attack have not yet been named , although the two men wounded were said to remain in the hospital in critical condition.
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The mayor of Dallas, Eric Johnson, a Democrat turned Republican, said on CNN in a live interview on Thursday morning about the latest incident: “It’s really, really sad. I want to stay out of the way of the FBI investigation … but I will tell you that it’s very troubling. I think the trend that we’re seeing of increasing political violence in this country, and yesterday’s … hit close to home and we’re concerned.”
He added: “The division that seems to be leading to some folks taking these very, very unfortunate and violent steps to try to bring about policy changes [is] just wrong and it’s scary.”
Johnson condemned “the vilification of Ice”, the federal agency that has been stirring up protests amid the Trump administration’s anti-immigration, mass deportation agenda, with raids on immigrants across the country and a surge of detentions.
The motive of the suspect in Wednesday’s incident is still being investigated. A relative of the man said Jahn was not particularly political, NBC reported, but one unspent bullet casing was marked “Anti-Ice”.
Patel shared the developments as Donald Trump blamed the shooting on “Radical Left Terrorists” and the Democratic Party, without citing official evidence of any specific affiliations, party politics or motives of the suspect.
The US president wrote on social media the day of the Dallas attack: “This violence is the result of the Radical Left Democrats constantly demonizing Law Enforcement, calling for ICE to be demolished, and comparing ICE Officers to “Nazis.”
JD Vance made a political comment before a suspect had even been named or many details of the victims released, saying that the attack was carried out by “a violent left-wing extremist” who was “politically motivated to go after law enforcement”.
