Are DHS Agents Under Attack? We Investigated the Claims

We've seen violence against our officers go up over 830%. >> Our law enforcement officers are getting hurt. There's a thousand% increase in assaults against them. Domestic terrorists who are attacking law enforcement and attacking the public. This kind of messaging has been coming out of the Trump administration for months. Our immigration agents are under attack. We have been noticing these claims and how they often come after public backlash to enforcement surges, including after Renee Good and Alex Prey were killed by federal agents. In many posts on X, DHS officials would specifically site one charge, 18 USC 111, assault on a federal officer, which can carry a felony sentence of up to 20 years in prison. >> Anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop you or tries to obstruct you is committing a felony. We looked at over 60 ex accounts linked to DHS in the White House and found that they posted about assaults on officers about 1,500 times. We wanted to understand our federal agents really under attack. First, we looked at the numbers. We analyzed Department of Justice data and found that since Trump took office, immigration agencies have attempted to bring federal assault charges against US citizens far more frequently than they had before. an increase of over 300% from the previous year. So on the one hand, the administration is talking a lot about their agents being assaulted and on the other more US citizens are being arrested for assault. But are Americans actually attacking immigration agents? To find out, we turned back to X. In the posts, we found 279 people who administration officials alleged had assaulted an immigration officer. We had to figure out who each of these people were. Sometimes the posts explicitly mentioned a name, but often they were vague, including a location or date or a descriptor like quote 11 violent riers. In those instances, we looked at local news stories, arrest reports, and court filings to identify the civilians involved. Then we had to find out what happened during those incidents. We spoke with prosecutors and defense attorneys and people who were arrested. We also reviewed court documents and gathered over 200 videos, including body camera footage and bystander videos showing the alleged assaults. After looking at all of this, we found some really important trends. First, nearly 23 of the 279 people accused on X of attacking federal immigration officers were indeed US citizens. But we found that almost half of those Americans were never charged at all. Of the people who were charged, none had been convicted. And when we reviewed video of these incidents, we found that the footage often undermined the government's claims.

Government officials have accused U.S. citizens hundreds of times on X of assaulting immigration agents. WSJ's Brenna T. Smith explains how reporters investigated every claim. #DHS #Immigration #WSJ