When you’re shooting for 3,000 arrests a day, it seems kind of pathetic to complain about being mildly bruised a few times a week.
DHS and ICE have constantly used a supposed massive increase in assaults on ICE officers to justify ICE’s tactics: the masks, the unmarked vehicles, the refusal to present IDs or warrants, and untargeted raids of any place the DHS (and its assembly of federal law enforcement officers from the FBI, ICE, CBP, HSI, US Marshals Service, ATF, DEA, and even the fucking IRS) feels its might find some Latino-looking foreigners.
ICE and DHS insist on using only percentages in their press releases and official statements on preferred government jawbone, X. It’s far more impressive to say there’s been a 700% increase in assaults than to say there have been 69 more assaults on ICE officers during the first six months of this year as compared to the same time period last year.
Another 14 assaults have allegedly occurred, which means the increase in assaults now tops 800%. This will only alarm the willfully ignorant, which is pretty much who it’s meant to alarm: the chorus of bigots who fully support an administration composed mainly of bigots.
But those numbers are pathetic, especially given how many officers are in the field. ICE has about 20,000 officers (although not all of them do field word) and is being assisted by another few thousand federal officers pulled from several agencies, in addition to the another few thousand military troops. And yet, as Aaron Reichlin-Melnick points out on Bluesky, regular police officers are being assaulted far more frequently than ICE officers and no one’s issuing daily press releases about that:
As this post points out, NYPD officers have been assaulted nearly 200 times per month since the beginning of the year. That’s according to the NYPD’s stats, which are reported in its usual alarmist fashion by the NY Post. According to that reporting, NYC law enforcement officers have been assaulted 970 times since the beginning of the year. Even at its pre-pandemic lows, NYPD officers were getting assaulted far more often (595 times in five months in 2019) than this supposed War on ICE that federal officials keep tweeting about.
And let’s not forget that the word “assault” is extremely slippery when used to reference attacks on officers. According to the government’s own representations and reports about “violence” perpetrated against federal officers (including ICE), the term covers everything from actual violence resulting in injury to things that just might be mildly annoying for federal cops.
Among more than a dozen other allegations facing protesters, federal officers say one person shined a “high-powered handheld laser” in their eyes and that people have kicked tear gas canisters back at them. One criminal complaint says a protester “fell back and donkey-kicked’ (an agent) in the shin.”
While there have been an extremely small number of truly violent attacks on immigration enforcement officers, there’s been far more incidental contact — something that has been provoked by officers seeking to escalate situations, as well as by officers who look more like criminals than cops when they carry out raids and arrests.
The amount of ICE activity has increased exponentially over the past six months. Assaults on officers have only increased incrementally, even given the expansive definition of “assault” law enforcement officers deploy to generate criminal charges against people who have done nothing more than come into contact with ICE against their will.
And that’s why ICE and DHS officials will continue to use the percentage, rather than the actual numbers, when issuing press releases and public statements. 830% sounds impressive. Ninety-three total alleged assaults — against a combined force seeking to perform 3,000 arrests per day — sounds like a rounding error.