Despite criticism, assaults of ICE officers are rare
President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions said this week that Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf ’s decision to warn the public ahead of a Northern California immigration sweep put federal agents’ lives at risk.
“Here’s my message to Mayor Schaaf: How dare you?” Sessions said Wednesday in Sacramento. “How dare you needlessly endanger the lives of law enforcement just to promote a radical open-borders agenda?”
Thursday, Trump said, “What she did is incredible and very dangerous . ... She really made law enforcement much more dangerous than it had to be.”
But the agency that conducted the four-day enforcement operation, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has experienced relatively few line-of-duty deaths and assaults, federal records show. No one was hurt during the sweep last week.
According to federal records, a handful of ICE officers are injured in assaults each year, on average. James Schwab, an agency spokesman in San Francisco, said agents face “the same dangers as any other law enforcement officer out in the field.”
No ICE officers were injured or killed in line-of-duty assaults in 2016, the last year for which FBI data are available. In 2015, four officers were injured and none killed in assaults. Seven officers were injured in assaults and none killed in 2014, records show.
However, the FBI records do not appear to reflect some onduty deaths. Absent, for instance, was the death of San Francisco-based deportation officer Brian Beliso, who according to the agency died of a heart attack he suffered during a foot pursuit in Redwood City on June 8, 2016. And a special agent in New Orleans, J. Scott McGuire, died Jan. 24, 2016, after being injured in a hit and run in Miami Beach, the agency stated on its website.
The reported injuries to ICE officers were among the lowest in federal law enforcement, FBI figures show. In 2016, 484 Customs and Border Protection officers were assaulted. The Bureau of Indian Affairs saw 504 assaults, while the Marshals Service saw 266 assaults.