Earl Ofari Hutchinson
After the slaying of Renee Good, Keith Porter, and Alex Pretti, Trump, ICE and Homeland Security officials loudly screamed that ICE agents are being attacked, assaulted, and physically endangered in record numbers. The fantastic figure they routinely toss out is that attacks on ICE agents have increased upwards of one thousand percent since 2020.
There are two colossal problems with this. The first is obvious. It’s a crass, cynical and yet another insulting effort to somehow justify the murders of Good, Porter, and Pretti. The other problem is like just about everything else out of Homeland Security officials mouths it’s a crude self-serving lie.
Here’s the checklist of reasons why. Neither ICE nor Homeland Security have produced a single count of or identification of the ICE agents who have supposedly been attacked. They have provided no details of just where and when the alleged attacks supposedly occurred.
The few actual number of alleged assaults on ICE agents they do cite paint a far different picture. During the few time periods that Homeland Security did name the number of alleged attacks, the number of agents cited was minuscule. An example. In the period between January 21 and June 30, 2024, there were a grand total of ten reported assaults.
But even with this paltry number, no details were given about the alleged nature of the attacks. Its citing a specific number was a rare exception. Homeland Security does not and never has uniformly published the specific number and types of alleged attacks on its agents. This makes it impossible to determine the honesty and accuracy of the number of alleged assaults.
Independent fact checking and investigative groups have found absolutely no public evidence presented by ICE, Homeland Security, or anyone in the Trump administration to back the set in stone one thousand percent increase in assaults on ICE agents. That’s the figure it routinely tosses out to the public and especially the press.
ICE and Homeland Security stretch to the break point its definition of what it considers an “assault” on an ICE agent. Even here, there is no cite of an actual injury to an ICE agent. No ICE agent has been killed during this six-year alleged spike in assaults on ICE agents. It is all a case of take our word for it—and Fox and the right-wing media, and some mainstream media outlets gleefully have.
In the absence of a HS supplied consistent, publicly available dataset that provide verifiable, specific incidents of attacks on agents since 2020, there is absolutely no way to verify the truth of Trump, ICE and Homeland security’s claims that their agents are in mortal danger. That being so, they will continue to claim that their killing of Good, Porter and Pretti in were lawful, protective, and self-defense acts.
And it will continue to be the ICE big lie.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His latest book The ICE Shooting Scorecard (Amazon ebook and Middle Passage Press)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GH9RN5ZS
He hosts the weekly news and issues commentary radio show The Hutchinson Report Wednesdays 6 PM PST 9 PM EST at ktymgospel.net.