How many people have been killed or injured by DHS officials in the past year?
Executive summary
Reporting shows multiple deadly and non‑fatal use‑of‑force incidents involving Department of Homeland Security personnel over the past year, but no single, publicly available authoritative tally covers “killed or injured by DHS officials” wholesale; contemporary news counts range from a handful of officer‑involved shootings to broader compilations that suggest a larger pattern of violence and custody deaths [1] [2] [3]. Because DHS and independent outlets use different definitions (officer‑involved shootings, vehicular assaults, deaths in custody), a definitive single number cannot be produced from the available sources alone [3] [4].
1. Reported officer‑involved shootings: small official tallies, larger journalistic counts
An Axios review found at least seven officer‑involved shootings since early 2025, two of which it listed as fatal [1], while The Guardian cited a Trace database that connected immigration officers to 14 shootings during the same period, illustrating a sizeable discrepancy between independent data projects and narrower media tallies [2].
2. High‑profile Minneapolis and Los Angeles cases that anchor the debate
The Minneapolis case in which an ICE officer fatally shot a woman generated immediate national attention; DHS characterized the event as defensive and cited that agents feared for their lives and that a passenger was injured in the related crash [5], while local officials and advocacy groups disputed DHS’s framing and called for investigations [6]. Separately, an off‑duty DHS officer reportedly was involved in a fatal New Year’s Eve shooting in Los Angeles, a local police account summarized by KTLA [7].
3. Injuries, vehicular incidents, and the DHS narrative of rising assaults
DHS publicly highlighted what it described as an “unprecedented surge” in vehicle ramming and assaults on ICE and CBP officers, saying there were 28 vehicular attacks against ICE since January compared with two in the same period of 2024 — a figure DHS used to justify deployments and framing of frontline risk [4] [8]. Those vehicular incidents, DHS and local reporting indicate, produced officer injuries in multiple cases, but news reports do not consolidate a single, cross‑incident injury total [4] [1].
4. Custody deaths versus use‑of‑force fatalities: important but distinct measures
Independent reporting notes 32 deaths in ICE custody in 2025, a separate category from on‑the‑street officer‑involved shootings and one that raises related questions about detention conditions and accountability [2]. Sources caution that “deaths in custody” are not the same as deaths caused directly by an on‑duty DHS officer’s use of force, and the available reporting does not uniformly attribute custody deaths to active force [2] [3].
5. Why a single, authoritative count is unavailable
DHS publishes use‑of‑force datasets and a portal for incidents, but publicly available tables and the department’s definitions can lag and categorize incidents differently (for example, counting both “officer use of force” and “subject assault” in multiple categories), and the official use‑of‑force dataset has not been presented as a comprehensive, year‑to‑date one‑line tally for 2025–26 in the reporting available here [3]. Journalistic compilations and nonprofit trackers (Trace) apply their own inclusion criteria, which explains divergent totals between outlets like Axios and The Guardian/Trace [1] [2].
6. Competing narratives, hidden incentives, and the limits of current reporting
DHS has an institutional incentive to highlight assaults against agents to justify expanded operations and deployments, a framing evident in press releases and public statements about “vehicle weaponization” and rising ramming incidents [4] [8]; advocacy groups and some local officials counter that the same rhetoric can obscure accountability and the scale of civilian harm [6]. Because the sources use different definitions and because independent, systematic DOJ investigations or a single DHS consolidated, up‑to‑date public tally are not present in the material provided, it is not possible here to give a precise, uncontested total of how many people were killed or injured by DHS officials over the past year [3] [6].