Since Donald Trump returned to the presidency, homeland security officials have consistently argued that deportation officers are facing unprecedented threats.
To better understand the dangers facing those officers, the Guardian examined the agency’s own tracking of its fallen officers, as well as recent violent incidents targeting immigration officers flagged by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
The analysis showed that no deportation officer has died a violent death in the line of duty since US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was first created in 2003. Of the 15 officers who died in the line of duty while working for Enforcement and Removal Operations, the ICE branch charged with detaining unauthorized migrants within the interior of the US, all but two died of Covid.
One deportation officer, Brian Beliso, died of a heart attack in 2020 during a foot chase. The other deportation officer to die of something other than Covid, Lorenzo Roberto Gomez, experienced heat stress during a training exercise in El Paso, Texas, leading to hospitalization. He died of kidney failure in 2003.
Nearly 200 law enforcement officers were “feloniously killed” in the line of duty between 2021 and 2023, according an FBI report published two years ago. More than 79,000 officers were assaulted in 2023 alone. Federal law enforcement officers from branches that deal directly with enforcement of criminal laws, such as the FBI and the DEA, each saw several officers killed in the line of duty over the last two decades.
Four ICE officers have died violent deaths in the line of duty. But all of them worked for ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) division, which targets criminals and did not historically carry out routine arrests of immigrants until the second Trump administration began detailing them to do so last year.
None of the investigators’ deaths occurred while carrying out routine immigration arrests.
James Holdman Jr died after negligently discharging a rifle into his chest in 2021. A drunk driver killed HSI agent J Scott McGuire in 2016. Agent Jaime Jorge Zapata was killed by cartel members in Mexico while working undercover. And a criminal assailant murdered investigator David Gray Wilhelm in his home after killing three others in an Atlanta courthouse.
Three people working jobs analogous to today’s Enforcement and Removal Operations died in the line of duty during the days of ICE’s predecessor, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS).
Detention officer Tommy Kwok Chin died of a bacterial infection on the island of Tianian in 1999. Immigration officer Albert Feld drove a van into a parked truck in 1974, killing himself and 13 others and injuring six passengers. In 1948, a chartered plane crashed after its wing caught fire, killing INS security officer Frank Chaffin and the 28 Mexican nationals he was escorting to El Centro, California.
Only one person working the job that today would be called “deportation officer” has ever died in the line of duty from an act of violence. A detainee stabbed INS security officer George Joyce four times in the neck with a knife, leading to his death five days later, on 24 January 1949.
The White House has repeatedly glorified immigration officers as heroes performing a dangerous job that exposes them to both dangerous criminals and “deranged leftists”. JD Vance went as far as to blame Renee Good for her own death at the hands of ICE, and the far left for marshaling a “lunatic fringe against our law enforcement officers”.
“I want to address the dangerous environment that our ICE officers face on the streets today,” the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, said this week at a hearing before the House judiciary committee. “They are facing a serious and escalating threat as a result of deliberate mischaracterizations of their heroic work and rhetoric that demonizes our law enforcement.”
Homeland security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in January that agents faced a 1,300% increase in assaults and 3,200% increase in vehicular attacks as they “put their lives on the line to remove murderers, pedophiles, rapists, terrorists and gang members.”
The Guardian requested the underlying data to help assess those purported increases, but the DHS declined to provide it.
McLaughlin also cited nearly two dozen specific incidents of violence faced by deportation officers over the last two years.
A review by the Guardian found that 10 of those incidents involved immigration officers clashing with protesters – a unique phenomenon of the second Trump administration, which has deployed deportation officers en masse to blue cities to carry out at-large arrests. Deportation officers have not historically policed protests or played a significant role in crowd control.
“The reality is that the admin has decided to thrust federal law enforcement, ICE and the US border patrol into city streets across the country, and they have escalated conflict with people they’ve interacted with in these cities,” said former homeland security attorney Spencer Reynolds.
“We’re seeing ICE agents using military equipment, unleashed by a White House that has told them they have total immunity,” he added. “It’s an obvious outcome that there would be violent confrontations.”
Two immigration officers were bitten on their fingers in Minneapolis by protesters, according to the DHS and federal court records. Those incidents occurred at the scene where border patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez shot and killed Alex Pretti last month, setting off immediate protests. Both protesters were US citizens.
The DHS also highlighted the mass shooting at a Dallas detention facility that resulted in the deaths of two immigrant detainees, where a rifle casing was retrieved with the message “anti-ICE” scrawled on it. The suspect, Joshua Jahn, was a US citizen whose writings indicate he intended to target ICE officers, the acting attorney of the northern district of Texas, Nancy Larson, said at a press conference last year.
In another case, prosecutors accuse John Curcio of stalking and “doxing” a DHS employee. Curcio, a US citizen, appeared to have known the employee’s mother, whom he had also harassed, according to court records.
Only six of the two dozen incidents cited by the DHS directly involved deportation officers making immigration arrests, and only four of those six resulted in officer injuries. Walter Leonel Perez Rodriguez, a Salvadoran migrant with a long rap sheet including multiple convictions related to sexual abuse, struck a deportation officer with a metal coffee mug during an arrest, severely splitting his upper lip and burning his face, according to the DHS. In two separate incidents, the DHS says migrants targeted in immigration arrests attacked officers with their cars.
Deportation officers have a lower risk profile because of the people they target, noted Alex Nowrasteh, a policy analyst with the Cato Institute. Police officers, FBI agents and special agents with ICE’s investigative division, HSI, all target criminal suspects for arrest. Deportation officers, on the other hand, carry out administrative arrests of people accused of violating civil immigration laws. Many ICE arrests take place in jails, where the likelihood of resistance is very low.
While previous administrations have focused the agency’s limited resources on immigration offenders with serious criminal records, Trump’s mass deportation campaign has used a glut of new funding to target migrants more indiscriminately – including people applying for asylum and a growing number of families.
“You’re dealing with a safer population,” Nowrasteh said. “Most of them have essentially broken immigration laws. The chances that you’re going to go in and arrest a criminal that will fight you to the death with a weapon – it’s just less.”
Thirty-two people died in immigrant detention facilities run by ICE last year, the highest number in two decades.
