The Attacks on ICE Must Stop

National Review Online

Thursday, September 25, 2025

 

This week featured yet another violent attack on Immigration and Customs Enforcement. On Wednesday morning, three detainees of ICE were shot in an attack that appears to have targeted Dallas-based ICE agents. One of the detainees died, and the others are in critical condition. The suspect, identified as Joshua Jahn, was found dead with a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Law enforcement relayed that, like the alleged killer of Charlie Kirk, the shooter in Dallas inscribed political messages on the bullets or their casings. The messages were “anti-ICE” in nature.

 

This has to stop. It’s part of a very disturbing trend.

 

In July, eleven left-wing agitators ambushed an ICE facility in Alvarado, Texas, opening fire on agents and shooting one in the neck. In Portland, Ore., an incendiary device was thrown at officers. That same month, another attacker in McAllen, Texas, shot two police officers and a Border Patrol employee, sending them to the hospital. An ICE facility in Washington suffered an arson attack. The left has tried to popularize a push to unmask and dox ICE agents.

 

This anti-ICE movement has been implicitly cheered on by elected Democrats who adopted a party line of invoking fascism when talking about immigration enforcement. “Donald Trump’s modern-day Gestapo is scooping folks up off the streets,” said Tim Walz at a May commencement address. “When you compare the old films of the Gestapo grabbing people off the streets of Poland,” opined Congressman Stephen Lynch, “and you compare them to those nondescript thugs who grabbed that graduate student, it does look like a Gestapo operation.” Other commentators have called ICE Trump’s Praetorian Guard.

 

The rhetoric that ICE is a lawless or personal force wielded by the president against enemies is not just overheated nonsense — it is hypocritical. All but five Democratic senators voted for a threefold increase in ICE’s annual budget recently. ICE agents are doing a job lawfully and constitutionally given to them by our elected government. The rules and regulations guiding their activity provide for humane treatment of their detainees. Proceedings in our courts are generous to a fault.

 

While the attack in Dallas appears to have been carried out by a self-radicalized lone wolf, other attacks on ICE are clearly organized by groups of people adopting more sophisticated tactics and strategies. Obviously, the federal government must investigate any evidence of planned organized violence against agents of the state, and resources should be dedicated to hardening ICE facilities and providing its agents with the protection they need.

 

The people of the United States elected Donald Trump, in part, because they could no longer abide negligent lawlessness at the border. Similarly, they will not tolerate violence against the forces of law and order. Lax immigration enforcement does not become more tolerable because left-wing fanatics are willing to defend it with murder and mayhem.

 

ICE is doing its job — it’s the terror campaign against it that is the threat to our system.