What is the average age of ICE agents killed in the line of duty since 2020?
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Executive summary
The available reporting does not provide the raw ages needed to compute an average age of ICE agents killed in the line of duty since 2020, so a numeric answer cannot be produced from the provided sources; ICE’s own “Wall of Honor” and secondary reporting document deaths and causes (not a compiled age statistic) and show COVID-19 and 9/11-related cancers among leading causes [1] [2]. Independent memorial databases such as the Officer Down Memorial Page and the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund collect names and circumstances and would be the logical next step to obtain ages for calculation [3] [4].
1. What the question really asks and why current coverage falls short
The user seeks a single statistical summary — the arithmetic mean of the ages at death for ICE personnel killed in the line of duty since 2020 — but the sources provided list deaths, causes, and counts rather than tabulated ages, so the data necessary for that calculation are absent from the set of documents supplied here (ICE’s fallen-officer pages list incidents and narratives but the snippets in this packet do not include the ages needed for a mean) [1] [2].
2. What the official records report about ICE line‑of‑duty deaths since 2020
ICE maintains a “Wall of Honor” and a public fallen-officer list that documents personnel who died in the line of duty, including COVID-19 exposures and cancer linked to 9/11 recovery work, and that record is the primary official source for names and incident summaries [1] [2]. Reporting based on those records and other investigations highlights that many recent ICE line‑of‑duty deaths have been health-related rather than the result of violent encounters during enforcement actions [2].
3. How independent trackers and journalists frame the data and the limitations they note
Journalists and think‑tank researchers use ICE listings alongside memorial databases to analyze patterns — for example, Mother Jones and other outlets emphasize COVID-19 as a leading cause in recent years and note that ICE’s recorded line‑of‑duty deaths rarely involve fatal encounters with detainees or migrants [2]. However, the extracts provided here do not include an age breakdown for each fallen ICE employee that would permit calculating an average age since 2020 [2] [1].
4. Proxy data and what it can and cannot tell readers
National law‑enforcement aggregates report average ages for all officers killed in the line of duty (the Centersquare summary reports an average age of 44 for fallen officers in 2025), but that figure covers a broad set of federal, state, and local agencies and cannot be applied to ICE specifically without risking misleading inference [5]. Similarly, ICE’s cumulative counts since the agency’s founding (cited as 29 on one program) provide scale but not age metrics [6].
5. Why an average age might matter and where bias can creep in
An average age could shape narratives about workforce risk, retirement, and occupational exposure, but classification choices — for example counting COVID-19 deaths as “line of duty” or listing 9/11‑related cancer deaths tied to earlier assignments — materially affect the denominator and composition of such averages; critics and advocates alike have incentives to highlight or downplay those categories when arguing about agency danger or resource needs [2] [1].
6. How to get the number the question requests
To produce the requested average, compile the set of ICE personnel entries dated 2020–present from ICE’s Wall of Honor and cross‑check each fallen officer’s date of birth or age at death using ICE press releases, ODMP profiles, and NLEOMF/agency reports, then compute the arithmetic mean; the sources provided here point to those repositories but do not themselves include the ages required for calculation [1] [3] [4].