Top officials in the Trump administration rushed Wednesday to claim that a shooting at the Dallas Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office was part of a wider trend of violence targeting law enforcement.
It’s still unclear what the shooter’s motive was, or their intended target, but none of the victims of this shooting were ICE personnel. All three people injured were immigrant detainees who were being processed at the field office, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Two of those victims have died, and the shooter died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, according to NBC.
Without knowing any information about the shooter, and with no acknowledgment that the victims weren’t actually law enforcement, officials quickly painted a picture.
“While we don’t know motive yet, we know that our ICE law enforcement is facing unprecedented violence against them. It must stop,” wrote Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on X. “Please pray for the victims and their families.”
Vice President JD Vance echoed Noem’s attempt to tie the incident to a wider trend. “The obsessive attack on law enforcement, particularly ICE, must stop. I’m praying for everyone hurt in this attack and for their families,” he wrote on X.
These officials’ statements are just the latest in a series of attempts by the Trump administration to craft a narrative that law enforcement officers are under a broader attack.
Immigration authorities have put forward inconsistent claims about the rising rate of assault against ICE officers. In July, DHS claimed a nearly 700 percent increase in assaults against ICE officers—which is technically true, but raw data showed that was the result of low overall numbers. There were just 79 assaults against immigration enforcement agents between January 21 and June 30, up from 10 during the same period last year.
The actual figure wasn’t all that terrifying, especially when considering ICE’s embrace of warrantless arrests, masked agents, and aggressive policing tactics as part of its sweeping immigration raids. It’s also unclear whether this figure includes patently phony allegations of assault, which have become all too common. Across the country, Trump’s Department of Justice has repeatedly struggled to secure indictments against protesters accused of assaulting immigration officials.
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