By Pawel Styrna
FAIR
Assaults on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) personnel are skyrocketing. In fact, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recently revealed that such attacks are up by a terrifying 830 percent in the first half of 2025 compared to the same time period last year.
While this is disheartening and demonstrates flagrant disregard for the rule of law by illegal immigration activists, it is sadly not at all surprising. Anti-borders radicals have worked themselves up into a frenzy in opposition to the enforcement of our nation’s immigration laws.
Their reckless, irresponsible, out-of-control rhetoric – depicting ICE as evil, immoral, and cruel reincarnations of the Nazi Gestapo – has facilitated and encouraged violence against ICE agents. That makes both native-born Americans and law-abiding legal immigrants less safe.
Examples of dangerous and utterly irresponsible rhetoric coming from politicians are legion. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, like many of his colleagues, has called for the unmasking of ICE agents, threatening to put them and their families in danger of reprisals by brutal foreign gangs and cartels. Boston Mayor Michelle Wu compared ICE agents to neo-Nazis. Minnesota Governor and 2024 Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz called them a “modern-day Gestapo.” The vice mayor of Cudahy, California, Cynthia Gonzalez, dubbed ICE “the biggest gang there is” and dared violent street gangs to fight targeted ICE enforcement operations in the streets.
Fanning the flames of toxic anti-American identity politics, one congressman even asserted that ICE removals were an attempt to “ethnically cleanse this country of certain types of immigrants,” and a Princeton professor claimed that the goal was to “make America white again.”
Such rhetoric is a clarion call to action for unhinged extremists. The violent and destructive Los Angeles riots were one just example of anti-immigration-enforcement agitation having real-life harmful consequences. Another occurred, of all days, on the Fourth of July in Alvarado, Texas. Almost a dozen armed individuals attacked an ICE detention center, using fireworks to lure agents into an ambush, and striking a local police officer in the neck. Three days later, another individual opened fire at a Border Patrol annex in McAllen, Texas, injuring two Border Patrol members and a police officer.
Dangerous criminals feel emboldened to violently resist apprehension. For instance, last month in Nebraska, one member of the brutal Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, who had been released into the country in 2024 under the Biden Administration, assaulted an FBI agent and viciously attacked a female ICE agent attempting to arrest him, slamming her head into the pavement and attempting to remove her body armor. The illegal alien criminal and attempted murderer then escaped and had to be tracked down by ICE.
Enablers of this lawlessness share in the belief that ICE is supposedly doing something so vile, immoral, and beyond the pale as to merit violent “resistance.” In reality, ICE is simply enforcing the law, and this benefits our society as a whole. Picking up visa violators protects the integrity of our immigration system. Worksite enforcement protects American jobs, wages, and working conditions – something leftists claim to care about until immigration is involved.
The benefits of apprehending national security and terror threats are obvious. Similarly, the great public safety advantages of apprehending and removing foreign nationals who happen to be murderers, rapists, child predators, gang members, drunk drivers, domestic abusers, or fraudsters should also not require explanation. Of course, in their hatred for ICE operations, radicals forget that it is their own sanctuary policies that release so many bad actors into local communities, thereby forcing ICE to enter neighborhoods and clean up their mess.
At its heart, the radical anti-borders ideology that drives violence against ICE and civil unrest flips common sense and traditional priorities on their head. Those enforcing the law and protecting Americans are vilified and slandered – all too often even doxed or attacked – while immigration violators, including criminals, are wrongly framed as poor victims of a supposedly mean, unjust, and racist immigration system.
The Trump Administration is pledging to prosecute anti-ICE violence, in DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s words, “to the fullest extent of the law.” That approach is both right and necessary to deter assaults. But the philosophy underpinning such violence – rooted in American self-hatred – is not likely to go away anytime soon, at least not until supporters of that radical philosophy finally realize they are defending the indefensible.
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