Trump's aggressive immigration crackdown is getting ICE agents hurt
New tactics are being met with rising public resistance and desperation from suspects facing ICE detention and deportation.
Masked agents. Terrified suspects. Emotions running high as screaming crowds press in, cell phone cameras in hand.
Amid surging immigration enforcement across the country, federal agents are being hurt and hospitalized as they make increasingly public – and risky – arrests of people they believe are undocumented.
White House officials say there's been a 500% increase in assaults on agents, as President Donald Trump's massive deportation campaign ramps up.
Administration officials say bold tactics are needed to repel what they call an "invasion" of immigrants. But policing experts say the aggressive approach is provoking unnecessarily dangerous encounters.
In a recent incident in Nebraska, a female ICE agent was thrown to the ground and choked by an accused Tren de Aragua gang member who said he was formerly a Venezuelan soldier, according to court documents. The suspect escaped and was later captured with the help of local police.
Bystander videos have captured agents wrestling suspects to the ground on crowded streets and chasing them through farm fields. One widely circulated video showed an agent grabbing a U.S. citizen by the neck in a Walmart parking lot as he resisted being taken; federal prosecutors have charged the man with assault after he allegedly punched an agent.
"Just this week, an ICE officer was dragged 50 yards by a car while arresting an illegal alien sex offender," Tricia McLaughlin, Homeland Security Assistant Secretary, told USA TODAY. "Every day the men and women of ICE put their lives on the line to protect and defend the lives of American citizens."
Trump, who has promised to deport 1 million immigrants this year, ordered U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents "to do all in their power to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest mass deportation program in history."
In a June 15 social media post, he also said: "Every day, the brave men and women of ICE are subjected to violence, harassment and even threats from radical Democrat politicians, but nothing will stop us from executing our mission, and fulfilling our mandate to the American people."
Art Del Cueto, the vice president of the National Border Patrol Council, said the union's 16,000 members welcome Trump's tough new approach to immigration enforcement.
Detainees are increasingly fighting back, he said, because they know there's no escape: "That's why you're seeing attacks on agents."
'It's not about public safety anymore'
But there's growing pushback from the public. Recent immigration sweeps in the Los Angeles area sparked widespread protests and small riots downtown, as people threw rocks at law enforcement and set patrol vehicles on fire, and federal agents responded with tear gas and pepper spray.
In some cases, federal agents are getting into shoving matches with crowds trying to film or stop what they consider to be overzealous detentions, especially when the masked agents refuse to identify themselves.
Policing experts say ICE agents are exacerbating tense situations with practices that many American police departments have largely disavowed.
While there's little objection to detaining violent criminals, masked agents descending upon Home Depot parking lots to arrest day laborers and food vendors – most with no criminal record – sparks panic.
"The aggressive police tactics being employed by the federal government are causing the issue," said longtime police supervisor Diane Goldstein, who now directs the Law Enforcement Action Partnership, which has spent decades working to develop trust between the public and police.
"Their direction and their leadership is directly putting them in a horrific situation," she said.
The ICE tactics on display are a dramatic departure from how cautiously ICE agents previously worked, said Jason Houser, a former Department of Homeland Security counterterrorism official. Houser is an Afghanistan combat veteran who was ICE chief of staff during the Biden administration.
Previously, ICE agents prioritized serious criminal offenders for arrest, Houser said. A team of agents might work for days or weeks to surveil a single subject before making an arrest carefully timed to minimize risks to the public and to agents themselves.
ICE agents are trained to "think about prioritization of public safety, risk and removability," he added.
Internal Justice Department training programs stress that police agencies should focus on de-escalation whenever possible and avoid making arrests in public areas, especially when there's no imminent threat to public safety.
"Now we have political quotas: 'Give me 3,000 arrests' (per day). And all gloves are off," Houser said. "It's not about public safety any more."
Before Trump, assaults were on the decline
An increase in assaults on officers and agents this year would reverse a three-year trend of declining incidents, according to internal Department of Homeland Security statistics.
Despite millions of daily interactions with the public, it was rare for ICE, customs officers and Border Patrol agents to get attacked on the job.
The agency logged 363 assault incidents in fiscal 2024, down from 474 incidents in fiscal 2023 and 524 in fiscal 2022, according to DHS data.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which includes both customs officers and Border Patrol agents, has 45,000 law enforcement personnel and is the nation's largest law enforcement agency. Additionally, ICE has roughly 6,200 deportation agents on staff.
White House officials declined to answer USA TODAY's questions about the numbers underlying the 500% increase in assaults, including the total number of injuries and their severity. It's also unclear how many additional federal agents have so far been re-assigned to immigration enforcement.
Masked agents refusing to identify themselves
In Huntington Park, Calif, authorities this week detained a man they said appeared to be pretending to be an ICE agent ‒ a situation they said was possible because real ICE agents are refusing to properly identify themselves as they aggressively detain people.
Mayor Arturo Flores said the way ICE agents are acting does not present "the image of a just and lawful government." He said he can understand why people are angry and scared, especially knowing there are potential vigilantes and impersonators operating in the area.
In response to the accused impersonator's arrest, Huntington Park leaders asked local police to verify the identity of any suspected ICE agents operating in the city.
The suspect was found with multiple police radios, official-looking federal paperwork, flashing lights and a 9 mm handgun in his otherwise unmarked vehicle, according to city police.
"When people cannot trust who is enforcing the law, public safety us undermines and fear begins to take hold," Flores said in a June 27 press conference. "What we are saying is simple: if you are acting with federal authority, show it. ID yourself Do not hide behind unmarked vehicles, facemasks and vague credentials."
'Someone's going to pull a gun'
Underlying the tension between ICE and members of the public is a fundamental fact: ICE is arresting a record number of people who have no criminal record.
An analysis by the Libertarian Cato Institute shows ICE is arresting four times more people with no criminal convictions or criminal charges per week now than the agency did during the same period in June 2017, when Trump was also president.
"This is a radical tactical shift compared to Trump 1.0," David Bier, Cato director of immigration studies, in a post on X.
ICE officials said they are responding to interference by the public.
They say advocacy groups are stalking agents as they try to make arrests, putting the agents at risk and allowing their targets to escape. Federal agents testifying before a Senate committee on June 26 said that during a recent enforcement operation bystanders photographed an officer and posted the photo online with a threatening message.
There's been a small but growing number of incidents, too, in which people called their local police department to report the presence of armed, masked men bundling community members into unmarked vehicles.
ICE officials also often say that if hundreds of "sanctuary" jurisdictions around the country would hand over immigrants after they've completed a criminal sentence, that would reduce the need for agents to make risky, public arrests.
But prior to Trump's enforcement ramp-up – about 70% of people arrested by ICE were transferred directly from the prison system into ICE custody, according to the nonprofit Freedom for Immigrants. Trump's new approach has pushed agents to make more arrests in the community at places like Home Depot.
The push to meet a quota is driving agents toward raids and round-ups that expose them to greater risk in the field, says Goldstein. She worries that aggressive tactics combined with masks will eventually lead to a shootout. Twenty-eight states have "Stand Your Ground" laws that allow citizens to shoot if they feel threatened.
"If you have masked people running out at you, someone's going to pull a gun out and someone's going to get hurt," she said.
Trump's Homeland Security leadership appears to have no plans to back down.
"Federal law enforcement is facing an ever-escalating increase in assaults," DHS posted to X, "but we will not be deterred."
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