The anti-ICE gunman who killed one migrant and wounded two others at a Dallas ICE facility on Wednesday was once a pot-obsessed slacker who hustled marijuana from Washington back to his home state of Texas, according to his ex-boss.
Joshua Jahn, 29 — who fired from a rooftop at a busload of migrants escorted by federal agents into the immigration facility before turning the gun on himself — worked a short-lived job on a legal cannabis farm in Benton City in 2017, where his ex-employer remembered him as a weed-loving drifter with little direction or drive.
“He was all about the weed. He wanted to be part of the scene. He lived in his car while he helped,” Ryan Sanderson, 49, who runs Golden Leaf farm, told The Post.
“He was just a young kid. When the job was over, he drove back to Texas.”
Sanderson, who supervised Jahn during a three-week harvest season, said the shooter had little interest in politics or anything beyond pot.
“He would come to work. He didn’t say a whole lot. He wasn’t an exceptional worker by any stretch,” Sanderson said.
“We never talked about politics or any of that kind of stuff. Nobody did.”
Jahn was part of a 15-person crew, “taking leaves off and listening to music” during the harvest.
“There are people who work, and there are people who go through the motions. He was one of those guys. He didn’t work that hard, probably because he was too high,” the boss recalled.
“What I believe happened is he was selling weed and then he came up here to work in the weed industry because he was all about it and that fizzled out,” he said.
“Then he had to go home. It wasn’t legal in Texas. I understand he worked at a solar plant. That’s kinda a 180, that’s a dirty, hardworking job….He probably didn’t have any direction, any work.”
Sanderson suspects Jahn could have had another motive to venture all the way out to Washington for the temporary gig.
“I just thought it was weird that someone would drive all the way to Texas to work at a temporary job. But now knowing that he was selling cannabis down in Texas and got in trouble prior to coming up here, I have a sense that his motive was to come up here and get weed,” Sanderson said.
“The job was for a three-week harvest, and then I kinda felt bad for him because he wanted to keep working, but I didn’t have a lot of work. I kept him on for three more months, trying to find more work for him,” he recalled.
“Eventually, I couldn’t justify keeping him because he wasn’t an all-star by any stretch.”
Jahn was also busted in 2015 for marijuana possession, before he began working on the cannabis farm.
Authorities are investigating the attack on the ICE processing center in Dallas on Wednesday as a targeted attack.
The words “Anti-ICE” were scrawled on a stripper clip of ammo near his body, and his beat-up Toyota Corolla had a bizarre nuclear fallout map taped to the side.
A handwritten note recovered by investigators also said, “Hopefully this will give ICE agents real terror, to think, ‘is there a sniper with AP [armor piercing] rounds on that roof?’”
The gunman is a registered independent who voted in the Democratic primary in 2020 and last cast a ballot in 2024.
Jahn had experience with firearms, his family said.
While the killer’s political motives remain under investigation, his mother, Sharon, posted a series of anti-gun rants on Facebook, blasting Texas Republican lawmakers who supported the Second Amendment.
A relative told The Post that Jahn was not a radical leftist and didn’t hate immigration agents, despite the anti-ICE sentiment written on the unspent bullet and the note found by the FBI.
But back in 2017, Jahn didn’t seem out of the ordinary, Sanderson said.
“I thought, ‘God, what happened to him?’ He didn’t seem like somebody who would do something like that but you never know who people are,” he recalled after learning he was the gunman.
“Then something took a turn for the worse because he ballooned up in size, he gained a bunch of weight, probably just being miserable,” he added upon seeing his photo. “That’s just my take on it.”
“He was just your typical 21-year-old who liked to smoke weed.”
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