The White House on Wednesday posted an article to its official site, titled “Democrats Inspire Vicious, Escalating Attacks on ICE.” The Department of Homeland Security — which oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement — has said attacks on ICE agents and other federal officers working in immigration enforcement are up 700% over the same six-month period a year ago, which the White House article says is “a direct consequence of dangerous, inflammatory rhetoric from Democrat politicians.”
The White House’s article shows 14 quotes from Democratic lawmakers, which are mostly benign criticisms of ICE’s violent, secretive tactics.
Regarding the provenance of “700%,” Fox News reported earlier this month that “DHS recorded 10 assault events from Jan. 21, 2024, to June 30, 2024. From the day after President Donald Trump took office earlier this year until Monday, the department recorded 79 assault events, representing a 690% increase year over year.” I’ve reached out to DHS and ICE requesting the raw data to back up the new “700%” statistic, but received no response.
Still, whether it’s 690% or 700%, that’s certainly a marked increase, and a number of these assaults on federal agents have included potentially deadly violence — including shooting at officers, throwing Molotov cocktails and dragging an officer with a car. Assaulting a federal officer is a felony, and as I’ve written many times, violence is both strategically stupid and morally wrong.
But statistics can be misleading when stripped of valuable context. The levels of alleged violence against federal officers vary widely. For example, a 22-year-old in Oregon, who after officers chased someone they saw spray-painting a building, allegedly “kicked the officer in the leg, causing the officer to trip,” according to the U.S. attorney’s office.
Each of the 79 assaults on federal officers over a six-month period is too many, just as each of the over 140 assaults on police officers by rampaging Trump supporters on Jan. 6 were unacceptable crimes. However, the same president who incited that bloody riot at the Capitol pardoned nearly every one of those assailants, lauding them as American heroes. Now, in his second term, Trump’s White House blames “inflammatory rhetoric” by Democrats for the recent spate of assaults on federal officers.
And a scan of the White House’s article shows 14 quotes from Democratic lawmakers, which are mostly benign criticisms of ICE’s violent, secretive tactics — or political criticisms of the agency itself.
Among the supposed “inflammatory rhetoric”:
“Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said ICE ‘should not exist.’”
That’s not a call for violence; it’s a call to abolish a wildly unpopular federal agency that’s existed for 22 years. The Trump administration is currently trying to abolish (or effectively abolish) the Department of Education and the Federal Emergency Management Agency — policy decisions that no one is likening to a call for violence.
“Rep. Dan Goldman compared federal agents to ‘secret police’ who must be unmasked.”
Masked ICE agents violently arresting people — including U.S. citizens — without identifying themselves can reasonably be described as secret police, even if the White House doesn’t appreciate the historical comparisons to rogue regimes. (ICE insists agents must be allowed to wear masks in public to prevent “doxxing” and other harassment.)
As for cherry-picked quotes from Democrats like Reps. Hakeem Jeffries and Kweisi Mfume — who called for the public to “fight” the administration’s lawlessness “in the streets” — the quotes in full context clearly show they’re calling for nonviolent protest, alongside legislative and legal “fights.” The Trump administration is not only defining down completely legitimate and lawful political speech as ‘inflammatory rhetoric,” it’s defining down violence itself. If it weren’t already evident that the White House doesn’t have the receipts to back up its claims against Democrats, Wired reported on Thursday that the national security nonprofit Property of the People used public records requests to obtain DHS bulletins “urging local police to consider a wide range of protest activity as violent tactics, including mundane acts like riding a bike or livestreaming a police encounter.” So the Trump administration is not only defining down completely legitimate and lawful political speech as “inflammatory rhetoric,” it’s defining down violence itself to include taking photos or recording videos of police, which is a constitutionally protected right. Meanwhile, Trump and other Republicans grow more brazen by the day with their inflammatory rhetoric. Rep. Randy Fine, R-Fla., in a post to X called Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., a “Muslim terrorist.” Rep. Andy Ogles, R-Tenn., last month called New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani “little muhammad” and demanded the U.S. citizen’s denaturalization and deportation. Then there’s the fact that ICE is openly engaging in racial profiling — even if officials won’t use that phrase to describe its actions. (Both Republicans later doubled down on their incendiary comments.) Among the White House’s list of “naughty” Democratic rhetoric is a comment by Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., who likened masked ICE agents to “some 1800s bank robber or some KGB officer in Russia.” I very much doubt either comparison would incite extremist violence in the street. The White House’s article is another case of MAGA crybullying — they’re allowed to be as vicious, lawless and inflammatory as possible, but they need to fetch the fainting couch any time they’re called on it.
Anthony L. Fisher is a senior editor and opinion columnist for MS NOW, often covering free speech, civil liberties and extremism. He was previously the senior opinion editor for The Daily Beast and a politics columnist for Business Insider. 
