What incidents in 2024 involved threats or attacks on ICE agents?
Executive summary
Reported incidents in 2024 involving threats or attacks on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were limited in the federal tallies released and in mainstream reporting: the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) records reflect just 19 reported assaults on ICE law enforcement during much of 2024 [1], and contemporary press accounts note a small number of confrontations during enforcement operations, including at least two Los Angeles episodes in which agents fired at drivers said to have threatened them [2]. Independent and local reporting and watchdog outlets warn that national claims of dramatic year‑to‑year surges are tied to how incidents are counted and to broader definitional expansions of what constitutes a “threat” [3] [4].
1. DHS’s baseline for 2024: 19 reported assaults and its limits
DHS public statements used 2024 as the baseline year, reporting that from Jan. 21 through Nov. 21, 2024 there were 19 reported assaults against ICE law enforcement, a figure central to later federal comparisons showing steep increases in 2025 [1]; those raw counts are what administration officials have cited when describing a rise in assaults, vehicular attacks and death threats in later periods [5] [6]. Independent reporters and local officials caution that those federal snapshots do not map cleanly onto publicly available datasets and that local law‑enforcement assault statistics vary by jurisdiction, making national extrapolations difficult to verify from outside DHS [3].
2. Specific confrontations reported in news coverage in 2024
Contemporaneous press accounts identify discrete confrontations during enforcement operations: for example, BBC reporting notes two incidents in Los Angeles in October in which agents fired at drivers after DHS said the drivers had threatened the officers with their vehicles [2]. Those episodes are documented in national media accounts and were described by DHS as defensive use of force in response to vehicular threats [2]. Beyond such episodic clashes, reporting assembled by outlets and summarized by DHS highlighted assaults during arrests — spitting, hitting and other physical resistance — but most of the widely publicized spike narratives reference 2025 comparisons rather than a long catalogue of separate 2024 attacks [1] [6].
3. Widening the definition: threats beyond physical assaults
Federal officials and some political leaders expanded the agency’s notion of “violence” to include doxxing, photographing or otherwise documenting officers, which broadened the categories of “threats” that DHS and ICE tracked or publicly condemned [4] [7]. That redefinition has been invoked in public statements and press briefings and plays into claims about rising harassment and intimidation of personnel, even when physical assaults remain numerically small in 2024’s reported federal totals [4] [7].
4. Warnings to agents and the atmosphere around enforcement actions
Internal DHS communications and reporting in national outlets described an uptick in protest activity and threats that prompted advisories to personnel to “maintain a heightened sense of awareness,” with specific references to warnings that “criminal entities” had circulated violent instructions in some contexts [8]. Those warnings indicate heightened concern within DHS about safety during operations, even if the publicly reported number of assaults in 2024 remained relatively low by the agency’s own baseline [8] [1].
5. Conflicting narratives and the caution urged by local reporting
While DHS and later federal releases have emphasized steep percentage increases when comparing 2025 to the 19‑assault 2024 baseline, local reporting and data skeptics note that such dramatic percent changes can overstate the underlying scale and that available external data do not uniformly corroborate the federal rhetoric [3]. Journalists and data analysts have highlighted that different reporting standards, shifts in what counts as a “threat,” and selective time windows can produce sensational percentage increases even when absolute counts are small [3] [4].
Exact, independently verifiable public listings of every 2024 incident labeled as a threat or attack on ICE agents are not available in the supplied reporting; the clearest published facts in the provided sources are DHS’s 19 reported assaults during the referenced 2024 period [1] and media accounts of specific October Los Angeles incidents involving agents firing at drivers they said posed vehicular threats [2]. Other sources describe broader patterns or policy shifts that affected how threats were framed, and some local reporting questions the magnitude of the national claims [8] [4] [3].