Alleged war on federal agents forged by Trump’s Republican policies that provoked it

By the reckoning of the Department of Homeland Security, a war is being waged on America’s immigration officers. DHS reports a staggering 1,153 percent increase in assaults against Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel this year, with 238 attacks from January through November compared to 19 in the same period of 2024.

Officials decry a climate of hatred, blaming inflammatory rhetoric for endangering those who enforce the law.

Yet a closer examination reveals a more complicated, and arguably self-inflicted, wound.

The surge in reported violence coincides precisely with the most radical overhaul of interior immigration enforcement in a generation—a sweeping campaign of raids and arrests ordered by President Donald Trump that has swept thousands into detention, including U.S. citizens, and transformed once-quiet communities into flashpoints.

The administration, in essence, is citing the predictable friction from its own policy as proof of a nation turned against its guardians. Community terrorization raids include state-sanctioned abductions, human displacement, and family separation.

Claims of misconduct supported by video evidence reveal that agents have used excessive force, misrepresented incidents, and even used AI tools to write use-of-force reports.

Andrea Velez, a 32-year-old U.S. citizen, was tackled and detained by plainclothes ICE officers in downtown Los Angeles, leading to her being charged with—and later cleared of—assaulting a federal officer after she said she simply froze in confusion during the chaotic scene.

Four masked, plainclothes ICE agents pushed 23-year-old U.S. citizen Luis Hipolito to the pavement, piling on top as he seemed to struggle to breathe for more than two minutes, as the agents attempted to cuff him.

Federal immigration agents pepper-sprayed Rafael Veraza and his US citizen family, including his one-year-old daughter, through their car window during a shopping trip to a Sam’s Club in the Chicago suburb of Cicero.

“We don’t just need calls for accountability. We need good neighbors, and we need those good neighbors to be protected,” said Presbyterian Rev. David Black, who was shot in the head with a pepper ball by federal agents while protesting at ICE’s Broadview detention facility on Sept. 19.

Black urged officials to defend “those who are trying to protect their neighbors, instead of repressing the few people who are willing right now to step up and put their own lives at risk to stop these masked kidnappers.”

Investigative reporting has found that more than 170 U.S. citizens have been held by immigration agents, in some cases being kicked, dragged, or detained for days before release. These figures are likely undercounts because the federal government does not systematically track such incidents.

The raw numbers of the enforcement push are unprecedented.

Where ICE once averaged about 300 arrests per day in 2024, that figure surged to over 800 daily by early 2025 and peaked above 1,000. To meet ambitious targets, the agency pivoted from a focus on individuals with criminal convictions to a broader net.

Data analyzed by researchers shows that by September 2025, 65 percent of detainees arrested by ICE had no criminal record, a dramatic reversal from October 2024, when 65 percent did have a conviction.

The agency’s own detention population swelled to over 65,000, with nearly three-quarters held for petty immigration violations alone.

This shift in strategy, from targeted operations to what critics call indiscriminate sweeps, has moved enforcement from the shadows into the streets, workplaces, and homes of American communities.

It is a conscious policy choice that has exponentially increased the number of tense, volatile encounters between armed agents and a terrified public.

As a former ICE head under President Barack Obama noted, when you shift tactics to have agents in broad daylight in public spaces, “it’s just going to increase the number of incidents where some sort of an assault happens.”

The administration’s portrayal of a 1,000 percent surge in violence, however, obscures as much as it reveals. An analysis by the Los Angeles Times of federal court records found that the majority of alleged assaults resulted in no injury to an agent.

Cases have been built around actions such as being shoved, spat on, or having a water bottle or even a sandwich thrown. In several jurisdictions, more than a third of such cases have been dismissed or ended in acquittal.

While DHS highlights severe incidents, including officers injured by a metal coffee cup or beaten, the broader data suggests the inflammatory statistic is built on a vastly expanded definition of “assault” occurring during a vastly expanded number of enforcement actions.

The agency itself has encouraged a broad interpretation; a Border Patrol commander in California told his agents to “arrest as many people that touch you as you want to,” adding that “everybody… gets it if they touch you.”

In New Jersey, a member of Congress is being prosecuted for her reaction to the illegal arrest of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka outside a facility that is illegally housing migrants because it opened without city permits.

Baraka was arrested in May for trespassing after federal agents invited him onto the property.

The true collateral damage of this aggressive campaign extends beyond bruised knuckles and hurt feelings.

A 41-year-old man from Haiti, Jean Wilson Brutus, who had been detained at Delaney Hall in Newark, died one day after he was arrested by federal authorities in December.

Investigative journalists have documented more than 170 cases this year in which U.S. citizens were detained by immigration agents.

These Americans describe being kicked, dragged, tackled, and held for days without access to a lawyer or a phone call.

In one account, a 79-year-old car wash owner was knocked over and knelt on, his lawyer says, despite recent heart surgery.

In another case, a disabled military veteran was pepper-sprayed, pulled from his car, and held for three days incommunicado after being caught near an immigration operation.

The Department of Homeland Security flatly denies any systemic problem, stating “ICE does NOT arrest or deport U.S. citizens” and that any citizens detained were arrested for obstructing or assaulting law enforcement.

It attributes poor conditions in detention centers as “false.”

Yet these citizen accounts are numerous and specific, and the government admits it does not systematically track how often its agents detain Americans.

A libertarian analyst observed that when the government rolls through communities with sweeps, “the constitutional rights of both citizens and noncitizens are inevitably violated.”

The human and political cost is becoming clear.

Public opinion has turned against the scale of the operation, with 53 percent of Americans now saying the administration is doing “too much” to deport immigrants, up from 44 percent in March.

Concern is most acute among Latinos, 52 percent of whom now worry that themselves, a family member, or a close friend could be deported.

The administration thus finds itself in a paradox of its own making.

It has unleashed a brutal deportation machine of historic scale and ambition, a machine that operates by creating fear, conducting thousands of unpredictable raids, and, according to myriad reports, regularly exceeding its legal authority.

The natural byproduct of that fear and those confrontations is resistance—sometimes violent, often not.

The administration then points to that resistance as justification for the very tactics that incited it, creating a cycle where enforcement and backlash fuel one another.

The president promised a ruthless campaign against those living in the country illegally. He is delivering it. But with that delivery comes a bill, presented in the currency of community trauma, wrongful detentions, and yes, increased violence against the agents ordered to carry it out.

To blame the violence solely on political opponents is to ignore the fundamental law of physics—and human nature—that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

The action here is a policy of widespread fear. The reaction, it appears, is a wave of anger that has crashed back upon its authors. Comparing ICE to the Nazi Gestapo and slave patrols may be unflattering, but it is also fair.