Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security have repeatedly cited an increase in assaults against federal agents conducting immigration enforcement to justify agents concealing their identities (and thereby conveniently avoiding accountability) while making arrests.
Newly reported data sheds clearer light on these figures.
On Tuesday, Bill Melugin of Fox News reported on X that DHS told him assaults against ICE and federal immigration enforcement are now up 690 percent from last year. While ICE has previously stuck to publishing percentages, Melugin was given raw data, reporting 79 assaults against immigration enforcement agents between January 21 and June 30, up from 10 that took place in the same time last year.
For comparison, from January through May, the New York Police Department reported 970 assaults on uniformed officers in the city (granted, the NYPD employs about 15,000 more officers than ICE does—though Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” would lessen the gap).
It’s also worth noting that the increase comes at a time when, under Trump, the number of ICE encounters taking place has increased staggeringly—a fact that criminal justice journalist Jessica Pishko said makes the figures “uniquely unimpressive.”
And the increasingly common encounters have been accompanied by increasingly aggressive policing tactics.
According to USA Today, law enforcement experts say that, by employing “practices that many American police departments have largely disavowed,” immigration enforcement agents “are exacerbating tense situations” and “provoking unnecessarily dangerous encounters.” Regarding these tactics, retired law enforcement veteran Diane Goldstein told USA Today that immigration enforcement officers’ “direction and their leadership is directly putting them in a horrific situation.”
The practice of wearing masks and making arrests that are virtually indistinguishable from kidnappings also increases the likelihood of confusion and bystander intervention, according to former ICE acting Director John Sandweg.
Further, reckoning rationally with ICE’s data would require scrutinizing what constitutes an assault in ICE’s eyes, as the agency has done itself no favors by making dubious assault accusations. Take, for example, those it made against New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, who was arrested “for assaulting law enforcement” earlier this month—a claim that The Washington Post’s Phillip Bump likened to a bully accusing his victim “of having gotten in the way of his fist.”
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