White House claims “more than 1,000%” rise in assaults on ICE agents, data says otherwise : NPR

Immigration, Customs and Enforcement officials have said attacks on their own officers have risen sharply since June, with the White House pushing back. September decree the number of attacks has increased by “more than 1,000 percent.”

Although attacks on ICE agents have increased, there is no public evidence that the increase has become as dramatic as the federal government claims.

An analysis of court records shows that by mid-September, assault charges against federal officers were up about 25 percent compared with the same period a year ago.

It is undeniable that ICE agents have at times encountered increasingly dangerous work conditions and attacks across the country, including some that could prove fatal.

The agency promises that anyone who assaults an ICE agent will “face the full extent of the law,” according to an executive order signed by President Trump.

But a Colorado Public Radio examination of federal court records of assault charges against a federal officer over the past five years found no evidence of an increase in assaults on the scale claimed by the White House.

Despite repeated requests for data to back up its eye-popping statistics, the US Department of Homeland Security has repeatedly refused to provide any substantiation to CPR or NPR to continue its claims.

Going back five years, CPR News found that while the number of attacks on federal officers has increased, it has fallen far short of the pace claimed by the federal government.

ICE is under pressure to find and remove from the country millions of people here without legal status. As operations and protests have increased, it is not surprising that assault charges against federal agents have risen by at least 25% this year – with confrontations between them and protesters in Los Angeles and Chicago intensifying. It may take several weeks for charges to be filed, so the latest figures may not reflect the total number of attacks that have occurred recently.

Recent alleged attacks on ICE agents

This summer, fifteen people were charged after what authorities called a Fourth of July plot to lure ICE agents out of a detention center in Alvarado, Texas, where they were then shot at. A civilian police officer was wounded. In other cases, testimony in criminal cases shows that Customs and Border Protection officers were struck while on patrol. Another ICE agent in California said he was dragged through by a car. In Omaha, an ICE agent was knocked to the ground during an arrest and had to be hospitalized. Last month, a sniper opened fire at an ICE detention center in Texas, killing two detainees, although federal officials believe he targeted immigration agents.

But even taking these serious incidents into account, together they still don't come close to the administration's claim of a 1,000 percent increase in attacks in just a few months.

Former FBI agent and director Bob Pence said that when law enforcement officials engage in hype or make outright misleading statements, it threatens trust in the criminal justice system.

Pence, a 30-year veteran of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, wrote a book published in 2020: “My Non-Political FBI: From Hoover to Violent America.”

Exaggerating claims of attacks on ICE officers comes at a cost, Pence said.

“There are a number of consequences: If the public cannot trust what law enforcement is saying, then law enforcement probably cannot count on citizens' cooperation in accurately communicating information to them,” he said.

Across the country, assault allegations against all federal officials in all agencies have only recently begun to rise.

In the past three months, assault cases against all police officers nationwide have risen 74 percent compared with the previous quarter, according to CPR analysis. Much of the increase can be attributed to clashes in Los Angeles, where ICE has been conducting large-scale enforcement operations since June.

These incidents led to protests throughout the city. But both have also given signs at the national level that the public at large is beginning to question the credibility of some of the federal government's claims.

In August, a man threw a ham sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection officer in Washington and was charged with assaulting a federal officer. But prosecutors, a couple of weeks later, was unable to get a grand jury to indict him.

In Los Angeles, federal prosecutors sought to bring criminal charges against at least 38 people involved in these protests and civil unrest or involved in immigration raids. They convinced the townspeople bring charges against your neighbors According to local sources, only seven times. The remaining charges were dropped, reduced to misdemeanors or resolved through plea bargains.

For Homeland Security and ICE's claims of a 1,000 percent increase in attacks to be true, there must also be thousands of other attacks that have not resulted in criminal charges. This is despite the government's statement that all attacks on federal agents will be prosecuted.

But requests for any of the data held by the agency were denied, and a Department of Homeland Security spokesman declined to say the source of the data or the methodology used to achieve the 1,000 percent increase it announced in August.

They sent one email with six links to previously issued press releases, again citing a 1,000 percent increase in attacks without explanation. DHS later sent out an email with press releases about 12 incidents of attacks on agents.

Even in cases where the attack is clearly visible on video (though perhaps not as dramatic as ICE claims), there is no guarantee that the case will result in a conviction.

Take, for example, Venezuelan Abraham Gonzalez-Romero.

Gonzalez-Romero's initial criminal cases in Colorado were shaky. State prosecutors charged him with attempted murder with little evidence other than that he had a firearm at the scene where the shots were fired. The only witnesses in the case were also in the country without permission and had credibility issues.

Local charges were eventually dropped.

On Feb. 28, ICE agents were waiting for him as he left the Denver County Jail, having been notified of his impending release by the Denver Sheriff's Office after ICE inquired about him. They showed their badges and walked towards him, he ran and was captured on prison video knocking the immigration agent to the ground.

It was a minor skirmish in which no one was injured. But that hasn't stopped his case from entering the national immigration debate.

Just a week later, House Republicans convened a group of mayors from major cities, including Denver, Chicago and Boston, to discuss the so-called sanctuary policy.

Colorado Rep. Jeff Crank told the Gonzalez-Romero story, but it went far beyond the ICE agent's story.

“In Denver, you are demanding that the Denver Police Department let members of the Tren de Aragua gang onto the streets without handcuffs,” Crank said animatedly to Denver Mayor Mike Johnston at a House hearing. “Just last week this resulted in an illegal member of Tren de Aragua attacking and biting – and biting! – an ICE agent…You're putting police officers at risk to score political points, and that's outrageous.”

But in court, federal prosecutors made no effort to prove that Gonzalez-Romero bit or even attempted to bite, and the agent and his lawyer said it never happened. Federal public defender Kelly Christle also said in court that there was “no evidence that” he was a member of the Tren de Aragua gang. Crank's office did not respond to questions about where he got information about the bite.

Then, despite promising that all attacks on ICE agents would be prosecuted to the fullest extent, the government dropped the assault charge against an officer as part of a plea deal. Gonzalez-Romero was sentenced to prison on a firearms charge but remains in ICE custody in Denver.

View from a former ICE agent

Scott Mieczkowski, a former deputy director of ICE's New York field office, said court records will never fully reflect the frequency of attacks on immigration agents.

“The way this is presented and dealt with in federal court is different for us,” he said. “What we were told—most of the time our guys were bitten or hit—and we were told (by federal prosecutors) that it was part of the job.”

Mieczkowski said the only person who fully compiles data on attacks on ICE officers is ICE.

Other federal jobs are more dangerous, according to charges.

While the federal data doesn't confirm the huge increase in attacks claimed by ICE and Homeland Security officials, it does make one thing clear: In Colorado at least, being an employee of the Federal Bureau of Prisons or the Bureau of Indian Affairs has become far more dangerous in recent years than being an ICE agent.

Between 2015 and June 2025, the largest number of attacks on federal officers in Colorado occurred in Indian Country and in the state's federal prisons.

But Denver immigration attorney Christine Hernandez said that in cases where federal officials exaggerate statistics or agents misrepresent facts, federal law enforcement has to pay a price for trust.

Just this year, she has represented people when judges ask for evidence of gang ties and other alleged facts and prosecutors can't provide it.

“We’ve never seen anything like this before,” Hernandez said. “You don’t know what the government is going to say. Often they have no evidence, they do not present evidence to support the indictment document. You must have evidence. This is their job. And this is not happening.”