The leading cause of death for Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers is COVID-19 followed by cancer linked to the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, according to a Mother Jones report. ICE data reviewed by the outlet showed that deaths and assaults at the agency are not outsized compared to other law enforcement, despite the Trump administration’s claims that their work is exceptionally dangerous. Noah Lanard is a reporter for Mother Jones and covered the story. He joins us with details of what he found in the data.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. A new Mother Jones’ report looked into the Trump administration’s claims that working for ICE is a dangerous job that needs reinforcement from the National Guard. This is a central piece of the administration’s justifications for trying to deploy troops in Portland and in other cities all across the country. But the outlet found little evidence in ICE’s own data that its agents face more severe dangers than those in other law enforcement agencies.
Noah Lanard is a reporter for Mother Jones. He joins us now. It’s great to have you on the show.
Noah Lanard: Thank you for having me on.
Miller: So I want to start with your starting point. What exactly made you want to look into the dangers that ICE officers are facing right now? What has the administration said?
Lanard: Yeah, so I often write about immigration, and as part of doing that you hear all the time from ICE about a very large increase in assaults on ICE officers. They often say it’s up more than 1,000%. And they use that as a justification for two things: sending the National Guard into cities across America and also for ICE officers wearing masks now. So from that, I wanted to look into what the data actually said about just how dangerous it is to be an ICE officer.
Miller: So in that data, I want to start with the most dramatic category, which is the deaths of officers. What are the leading causes of death of ICE agents?
Lanard: Yes, so ICE lists deaths of ICE officers who died in the line of duty on its website on something called its Wall of Honor, and that shows that 29 ICE officers have died since the agency was created after September 11. Fifteen of those deaths – so a majority of the deaths – are attributed to COVID-19. And then the second leading cause of death is cancers that are attributed to the cleanup efforts at the World Trade Center site and the 9/11 cleanup. So that’s about 75% of all deaths. And in those deaths, there’s not a single death on that ICE list that was caused by an immigrant killing an ICE officer. There are only two officers who were killed, but both were killed, one in Mexico, and one was killed by a U.S. born fugitive.
Miller: Deaths are the most extreme version of violence, but not the only one. How big an increase in assaults has the administration cited in recent weeks?
Lanard: ICE often says the increase is more than 1,000%, but it’s often very cagey about what that actually means. And what I mean by that is that I reached out to ICE, I said, “OK, you’re saying more than 1,000%. How many assaults is that? What was the number previously? How many of those led to criminal charges, criminal convictions?” ICE and DHS did not get back to me on that.
They did provide, in July, information to a Fox News reporter. And that showed that assaults had gone up in about the first five months of the Trump administration, from about around 10 or about eight, to 80 or 79 in the first five months of the administration. So it’s actually not that large of a number. It works out to about 15 assaults per month. And you can also compare this to FBI data which showed that there were more than 85,000 assaults against law enforcement officials at agencies and police departments across the country. Based on that data you can figure out that the assault rate per capita against regular law enforcement, other law enforcement, is much higher than the one against ICE officers.
Miller: I want to hear more about what you found when you looked into some specific cases that have stemmed from this. But first, you did talk to David Bier. He’s the director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. He talked about how ICE’s own changes in approaches to enforcement and arrests [have] led to more chaos on the street. Is there a connection between that and the increase in reported assaults on agents?
Lanard: Yeah, I think you can draw a line between them. A couple of things that have shifted. One, David Bier’s analysis for the Cato Institute showed about a 500% increase in what are called “street arrests.” So these are the arrests you’re seeing probably in viral videos or in your social media feeds of ICE going out into communities and arresting people off the street. That’s distinguished from a lot of the arrests which ICE has traditionally done, which would be in a jail or some sort of handoff between two law enforcement agencies. Those tend to be far less dangerous for everyone involved, but that has contributed to it.
And then also the fact that ICE has become such a polarizing agency, the fact that officers are wearing masks, the fact that ICE and DHS are releasing very inflammatory videos that, for example, show agents rappelling from Black Hawk helicopters, as they did in one Chicago raid. So that has led to a lot of high stress situations where people see a masked agent snatching someone on the street and maybe they try to intervene to stop the arrest because they’re outraged or they don’t know if the person is real law enforcement. Then that leads to an assault or a physical altercation.
Miller: Can you tell us the story of one alleged assault? This involved a woman in D.C., named Sidney Lori Reid.
Lanard: Yeah, so this was a woman in her 40s who lives in Washington D.C., and ICE and the Department of Justice made a big deal out of this. They blasted her photo across social media, and it said basically, assault on a federal agent, get arrested. It’s that simple. It actually didn’t turn out to be that simple because the case was initially tried to be charged as a felony, a felony assault, but the prosecutor and the Justice Department failed to get an indictment from a grand jury on three separate occasions. So that’s really rare. It’s really rare to not get a grand jury indictment once … there’s a famous expression or kind of joke that you can indict a ham sandwich, because it’s very easy to get an indictment. So to fail three times is really rare. But they didn’t give up at that point. They then chose to charge it as a misdemeanor assault, which means you don’t have to go to a grand jury – and still, they lost. A jury found her not guilty.
And then just quickly, some of the details were quite striking. ICE had to turn over evidence as part of this, and they got text messages where the officer who was allegedly assaulted was saying things … He was referring to them as her “boo boos” on her hand. When she wrote about an assault, she put it in quotation marks, kind of belittling it and basically saying, “I don’t think this should have ever been brought or someone arrested.” Even the person who was allegedly assaulted, seemed very skeptical and dismissive of the case.
Miller: You looked into the aftermath of another major announcement from the DOJ: felony assault charges against four people who were protesting outside an ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois. What did you find?
Lanard: In that case, this is the facility outside of Chicago that has been the site of a lot of conflict and tension. Listeners may have seen videos that were taken there. ICE, in late September, put out a press release announcing felony assault charges against four people and then another charge against a fifth person. And again, these are the kind of things that are being counted most likely in this 1,000% increase that ICE talks about. But once you file charges, you have to go to court. And what happened very quickly was that most of these cases fell apart.
In two cases, they presented these felonies to a grand jury. The grand jury declined to indict, and they ended up dropping the charges. In two others, they dismissed the charges on their own. They didn’t say exactly why, but they noted in court filings that they did so after prosecutors reviewed body cam footage. And the implication was that the body cam footage undermined the case that they initially charged.
That leaves one individual who is still facing a charge. He was initially charged with a felony. That’s been downgraded to a misdemeanor, so that’s already a pretty significant change. But this individual’s name is Dana Briggs. He’s a 70-year-old man who is a retired U.S. Air Force officer. In videos, you see him being pushed over by a border patrol agent. He falls onto his back. And then he tries to give his phone to someone who’s standing right next to him and kind of swats at the arm of a border patrol agent who tries to grab that phone. Now, that movement towards the arm is what’s being charged as the assault.
People can find the video for themselves if they just Google “Dana Briggs” online. And you can assess it for yourself and determine whether you think that is the type of thing that should be brought to court, particularly after a 70-year-old man was pushed onto his back.
Miller: Did the administration say anything to you about the number crunching that you did for this article?
Lanard: They did not. They did not respond. I reached out to both DHS and ICE and reached out many days before publication. I knew that there was number crunching involved. I wanted to make sure that they had sufficient time to respond. They did not respond to me at all, nor did they respond after the article was published. And in this case, some of the assault data is very opaque. They don’t share it. The last time I saw them share it was on “Background” to this Fox News reporter.
But when it comes to the ICE death data, that’s very clearly laid out on their website. It’s there for anyone to see and it’s just not that large of a number. We’re talking about 29 deaths over about two decades, so people can look at those for themselves. The cases are very clear. Absolutely no doubt, according to ICE’s own data, that COVID-19 accounts for a slim majority of deaths and that other causes are also not related to violent attacks by immigrants over the course of immigration enforcement operations.
Miller: So, as you noted, when you look into just even a small number of the incidents that are classified as assaults, a lot of them start to evaporate or look much less serious than the administration initially says, or they’re unable to even get indictments for those, or felonies become misdemeanors and misdemeanors become a lack of conviction.
But let’s just accept the higher rates of assaults that the administration has been talking about. Let’s say that they are real. Even so, how do the rates of assault or the possibility of injuries compare to those of people who work for other law enforcement agencies?
Lanard: That’s a good question. So yeah, let’s take all of those assaults, say they all happened … and of course, ICE officers have been assaulted before. Certainly, it is not zero. But let’s take it at the full number. It’s a little bit hard to make an exact comparison, again, because ICE doesn’t provide the data of just how many officers they’re including in this total. But what you can see is, according to FBI data, the assault per capita rate on law enforcement agents across the country is about 13.5. And when I did the math, assuming a generous calculation for ICE, it would have been closer in the neighborhood of three or four. That’s not exact because DHS and ICE weren’t giving all the numbers you would need to make that calculation properly, but certainly far less for ICE agents than it was for other law enforcement officials across the country.
Miller: Noah, thanks very much.
Lanard: Thank you for having me on.
Miller: Noah Lanard is a reporter for Mother Jones.
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