By Nathan Worcester
Contributing Writer
WASHINGTON — By early summer this year, a trend became clear across the United States. Some opponents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other immigration law enforcement were moving from words to violence.
The Sept. 24 sniper attack on an ICE facility in Dallas marked a grim milestone: It was the third such shooting this year in the Lone Star State. In separate incidents in July, attackers targeted a Border Patrol station in McAllen, Texas, and the Prairieland ICE Detention Facility in Alvarado, Texas.
As protests pop up across the nation, the rate of assaults against ICE officers has grown by more than 1,000%, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
Both DHS and the Justice Department have vowed to boost protection for ICE. Attorney General Pam Bondi has pledged to wage an intensive legal campaign against political violence that targets the agency, issuing a memorandum telling multiple federal law enforcement agencies to safeguard ICE “whenever and wherever they come under attack.”
President Donald Trump issued an executive order on Sept. 22 designating the far-left extremist group Antifa as a terrorist group. He also issued a memorandum, “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” which directs the FBI to investigate those committing and funding political violence.
Critics of ICE operations, meanwhile, have accused ICE officers of being overly aggressive. They have also raised concerns over the use of masks and other tactics to hide the identities of immigration law enforcement officers.
An ICE officer caught on video shoving a woman to the ground at an immigration court in the New York City borough of Manhattan was relieved of his duties.
DHS has said that ICE officers who wear masks nevertheless “clearly identify themselves as law enforcement” and obscure their faces only to shield themselves from reprisal by members of the MS-13 gang and other criminals.
The escalation accompanies a war of words between the parties.
Some Republican elected officials, along with Trump and DHS, have linked certain rhetoric against ICE and Customs and Border Protection to the rise in attacks on these agencies.
A Sept. 17 statement from DHS highlights comments from Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, and other elected Democrats likening ICE agents to Nazis, among other things.
“This must stop,” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said on Sept. 24 in an X post after the Dallas shooting. “To every politician who is using rhetoric demonizing ICE and demonizing [Customs and Border Protection], stop.
“We ought to come together and have some decency across the political aisle to say, ‘This violence is wrong and needs to stop.’”
When asked on Sept. 25 about some Democrats’ rhetoric and the Dallas attack, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., condemned political and ideological violence “directed against anyone at any time for any reason in the United States of America.”
He went on to say that the White House must “take the temperature down for everybody.”
Bloody Texas
Tension over ICE has simmered for months, sometimes erupting into violence. For the Trump administration, the Dallas sniper attack appears to be the final straw.
On the morning of Sept. 24, a gunman fired shots from a nearby rooftop at an ICE office and transport vehicles.
The suspected shooter, Joshua Jahn, used a bolt-action rifle obtained through legal channels, said Joseph Rothrock, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Dallas field office, at a news conference. Jahn was subsequently found dead with “an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.”
“We believe Jahn acted alone, but I will stress [that] our investigation continues,” Rothrock said.
Hours after the shooting, FBI Director Kash Patel posted an image on X of an unspent shell casing with the phrase “ANTI ICE” written on it.
Although Jahn apparently failed to injure any ICE agents, he killed one detainee and critically injured two others, one of whom died later.
Marcos Charles, acting executive associate director for ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, told reporters on Sept. 25 that the Dallas suspect “used the ICE tracking apps.” These are mobile applications through which people can update each other on the locations of ICE officers.
“The media has been amplifying these apps even as we warned them it would only lead to more attacks on law enforcement,” Charles said.
Highlighting CNN coverage of those apps, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt accused media outlets of complicity in “the increased threats and violence against ICE.”
Two such apps, downloaded from the Apple App Store before publication of this story, were functional as of Monday.
The evidence of anti-ICE messaging in the Dallas shooting appeared to mirror elements of the Sept. 10 assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, another watershed tragedy of political violence.
Bullet casings collected from the weapon allegedly used in that slaying were engraved with messages, including antifascist references and slogans.
In a Sept. 25 post on X, Patel outlined further evidence that he said links the two killings, writing that Jahn “conducted multiple searches of ballistics and the ‘Charlie Kirk Shot Video’” before the Dallas shooting.
In the post, Patel wrote that one of the handwritten notes recovered reads, “Hopefully this will give ICE agents real terror, to think, ‘is there a sniper with [armor-piercing] rounds on that roof?’”
In the July attack in Alvarado, for which a dozen individuals were charged, a police officer was wounded in the neck. The McAllen shooter, who was shot and killed by Border Patrol agents, injured multiple agents and a police officer who responded to the scene.
Federal Crackdown Unfolds
In a Sept. 27 post on X, Bondi said she was sending federal agents to ICE facilities throughout the United States.
Bondi released a memo on Monday spelling out more of that response.
The letter directs the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Marshals Service, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to assist in protecting ICE. In addition, it directs two Justice Department components to help train, fund, and otherwise support the local, state and federal authorities involved in defending ICE and its operations.
It also calls on the U.S. attorneys for Chicago and Portland, Oregon — two hot spots for anti-ICE protests and violence — to charge those assaulting federal law enforcement “with the highest provable offense available under the law.”
Bondi specified on Saturday that assaults on ICE officers would lead to federal charges, a move in line with a broader effort by the administration to crack down on ideological violence, including from Antifa.
For domestic groups, there is no federal equivalent to the State Department’s Foreign Terrorist Organizations list, which includes groups such as the Hamas terrorist group and the transnational street gang Barrio 18, which was added just days ago.
Trump also issued a national security memorandum directing the FBI to pursue the actors behind political violence.
Prospective targets include “institutional and individual funders,” as well as “officers and employees of organizations” that the administration believes to be advancing political violence.
The New York Times reported that the Justice Department is instructing U.S. attorneys’ offices to investigate the Open Society Foundations, a group created by financier George Soros.
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., lauded the report, alleging on X that left-wing demonstrations “weren’t organic” and were “backed by dark money.”
Critics such as the American Civil Liberties Union said the president’s memorandum and similar moves amount to intimidation of the president’s political opponents.
A few days after the Dallas shooting, signs of a more assertive posture from the administration were cropping up across the country.
On Tuesday, armed immigration agents patrolled the streets of downtown Chicago, an action that Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson condemned.
In Los Angeles on Sept. 26, a federal grand jury unsealed an indictment of three activists who allegedly doxed an ICE agent.
Federal immigration agents did not respond to requests for comment.
