More immigration agents getting hurt
Some experts point to aggressive police tactics
By: Lauren Villagran
and Trevor Hughes
USA Today
..... Masked agents. Terrified suspects. Emotions running high as screaming crowds press in, , cell phone cameras in hand.
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Amid surging immigration enforcement across the country, federal agents are being hurt and hospitalized as they make increasingly - and risky - arrests of people they believe are undocumented.
..... White House officials said 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 unnecessary dangerous encounters.
..... In a recent incident in Nebraska, a female agent with Immigration and Customs Enforcement was thrown to the ground and choked by an accused Ten de Aragua gang member who said he was formerly a Venezuelan soldier, according to t court documents.
..... The suspect escaped and was later captured with the help of local police.
..... Bystanders videos achieve captured agents wrestling suspects to the ground on crowded streets and chasing them through far 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.
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"Just this week, [06/27/2025] an ICE officer was dragged 50 years by a car while arresting an illegal alien sex offender," Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said.
..... "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 promised to deport 1 million immigrant in 2025, ordered ICE agents "to do all in their power to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single larges mass deportation program in history."
..... Art Del Cueto, the vice president of the Nation la Border Patrol Council, said the union's 16,000 members welcome Trump's tough new approach to immigration enforcement.
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Detainees are increasingly fighting back, he said, because they know there's no escape: "That's why you're seeing attacks on agents."
..... But there's growing push-back from the public. Recent mitigation 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.
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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 agents are exacerbating situations with practices many police departments have disavowed.
..... While there's little objection masked agents descending upon Home Depot parking lots to arrest day laborers and food vendors - most with no criminal record - sparks panic.
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"The aggressive police tactics being employed by the federal government are causing the issue," said longtime police supervisor Diana Goldstein, who now directs the Law enforcement Action Partnership, which has spent decades working to develop trust between the public and police.
..... "Shier direction and their leadership is directly putting them in a horrific situation," she said.
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The ICE tactics are a dramatic departure from how cautiously ICE agents previously worked, said Jason Huser, a former Deathtrap of Homeland Security counter-terrorism official.
.... Houser was ICE chief of staff during the Biden administration.
..... Previous, ICE agents prioritized serious primal 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 prioritizing of public safety, risk and immovability," he said.
..... Internal Justice Department training programs stress that police agencies should focus on de-escalation whenever possible and avoid making arrest in public areas, especially whee there's no imminent threat to public safety.
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"Now we have political quotes: 'Give me 3,000 arrest,; (per day). and all gloves are off," Houser said.
..... "It's not about public safety any more."
.... An increase in assaults on officers and agents this year [2025] would reverse a three-year trend of declining incidents, according to internal Department of Homeland Security statistics.
..... Despite millions of daily interaction 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 year 2024, down from 474 incident in fiscal year 2023 and 524 in fistula year 2022, according OT DHS data. White House officials declined to answers USA Today's questions about the number underlying the 500% increase in assaults, including the total number of injuries and their severity.
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ICE officials said advocacy groups are stalking agent as they try to make arrests, putting the agents at risk and allowing their targets to escape.
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Federal agents terrifying before a Senate committee on June 26 [2025] 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.
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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 arrests.
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But before Trump's enforcement ramp-up were transferred directly from the prison system into ICE custody, according to the nonprofit Freedom for Immigrants.
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Trump's new approach has pushed agreements to make more arrests in the community.