Kill the ICE men
Cops bust Mass. man in threat vs. fed agents
Federal authorities arrested a Massachusetts man in Queens on Thursday for allegedly using social media to threaten the lives of immigration officers.
Brandon Ziobrowski, of Cambridge, was arrested by the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force at 7:15 a.m. on a streetcorner.
Authorities said Ziobrowski, under the Twitter name @Vine_II posted a threat last month in which he wrote that he was willing to pay someone to murder an immigration agent.
“I am broke but I will scrounge and literally give $500 to anyone who kills an ice agent,” the tweet said. “@me seriously who else can pledge get in on this let's make this work.”
According to an indictment, the tweet, dated July 2, was designed to “encourage violence and the murder of law enforcement agents” and that Ziobrowski “intended that his tweet communicate a threat and knew that it would be interpreted” as such.
Court records also said Ziobrowski, 33, once tweeted that he wanted to "slit" U.S. Sen. John McCain's throat.
"To have people posting on social media trying to incite others to bring harm to the agents, it's something that we take very seriously, because it not only affects the agents, it affects their families at home, their children, their husbands, their wives, their mothers and fathers," Anthony Scandiffio, deputy special agent in charge at Homeland Security Investigations, told NBC News.
Ziobrowski's Twitter account was suspended last month at the request of law enforcement.
Ziobrowski was arraignment in Brooklyn Federal Court on charges of using interstate commerce to transmit a threat to injure another person. He was released on $50,000 bond. He is scheduled to appear in federal court in Boston Aug. 15.
He was asked outside of court if he would pay someone to kill an ICE agent. Ziobrowski said, “No.” He was wearing a monitoring device on his right ankle.
The suspect was in the process of moving from Massachusetts to Queens for a job. He was arrested in Long Island City, where he was moving into a new apartment. Federal agents surrounded him on a street corner.
His travel was restricted to New York and Massachusetts, and he was required to surrender his passport. A federal judge said Ziobrowski cannot travel anywhere else without the permission of the court.
He is subject to location monitoring and computer monitoring.