The family of the suspect in Wednesday’s shooting at a Dallas ICE facility says he was not a radical leftist.
Joshua Jahn was identified as the shooter after he reportedly opened fire from a rooftop at an ICE field office on Wednesday, killing one detainee and injuring two others.
But his family denied reports that the mass shooting, which ended with Jahn taking his own life, was motivated by leftist ideology.
“It has nothing to do with that,” Jahn’s relative, whose name was not shared, told the New York Post when asked whether Jahn was anti-ICE, but he did not elaborate.
“He didn’t have strong feelings about ICE as far as I knew,” the suspect’s brother, Noah Jahn, told NBC.
FBI Director Kash Patel claimed on X that the 29-year-old left a handwritten note that read, “Hopefully this will give ICE agents real terror, to think, ‘is there a sniper with AP rounds on that roof?’”
Patel also stated on X that, in August, Jahn had searched for apps that track ICE agents’ locations.
Marcos Charles, ICE’s acting executive associate director of removal operations, echoed a similar sentiment on Thursday, in addition to casting blame on media outlets that have reported on the existence of these apps.
“It’s no different than giving a hitman the location of their intended target, and this is exactly what we saw happen in Dallas yesterday,” Charles said at a Thursday press conference. “The media has been amplifying these apps even as we warned them it would only lead to more attacks on law enforcement.”
Patel wrote that Jahn had also downloaded a list of DHS facilities and “conducted multiple searches” into the video of Charlie Kirk’s Sept. 10 assassination.
Nancy E. Larson, acting U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas, expanded further on the note during Thursday’s presser, saying that Jahn had a “game plan of the attack” and wanted the shooting to give ICE agents “real terror,” claiming he saw their work as “human trafficking.”
Larson also said that Jahn wrote, “Yes, it was just me and my brain” in the note, suggesting that he acted alone in the attack.
Following the shooting, Patel posted a photo of shell casings allegedly belonging to the shooter, with “ANTI-ICE” written on them. The FBI director stated that the evidence points to “an ideological motive behind this attack.”
MAGA Republicans have blamed the left and Democrats for Wednesday’s shooting.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem posted on X that “these horrendous killings must serve as a wake-up call to the far-left that their rhetoric about ICE has consequences.”
A male relative, who was reportedly with Jahn’s parents when the FBI interviewed them, claimed Joshua was not a far-left political ideologue, despite the claims.
According to The New York Times, Jahn voted in a 2020 Democratic primary in Texas but was registered as an independent in Oklahoma. He also wrote on Reddit about video games, cars, South Park, and marijuana, and had been living with his parents.
“They don’t want to say anything yet until they have time to think,” Jahn’s relative said about the alleged suspect’s parents, whom he described as “devastated.”
