How many incidents did ICE lie about being physically threatened by people they assaulted or arrested?

1. What the sources actually document: scattered instances, not a census

Reporting from The Guardian and a related Los Angeles Times investigation documents specific episodes in which immigration officers’ accounts of being injured or threatened did not match evidence in files or video — describing “false and misleading statements about several Los Angeles protesters” and noting that a “majority of alleged attacks resulted in no injury to an agent” in the files those outlets reviewed ^[1]. Civil‑rights organizations and court records cited in multiple pieces also recount episodes where ICE or DHS narratives describe threats or injuries that later proved exaggerated or contradicted by medical records, video, or magistrates’ rulings ^{[1] [2]}.

2. Official claims that expand the narrative without a public audit

At the same time, the Department of Homeland Security and related official communications have issued broad numeric claims — for example, DHS releases asserting huge percentage increases in assaults on ICE officers and statements citing hundreds of incidents and dramatic examples such as agents allegedly dragged by cars or hit with metal cups — but those releases do not appear to be accompanied by a public, independently verifiable incident‑by‑incident accounting in the materials provided ^{[3] [4]}. The DHS narrative functions as an aggregate policy argument and public‑relations case but does not settle whether each reported incident was truthful ^{[3] [4]}.

3. Why available datasets don’t answer the “lied about threats” question

Large datasets and transparency projects — including ICE’s own statistics pages and post‑FOIA compilations such as the Deportation Data Project — document arrests, detentions and other enforcement actions but are not built to adjudicate contested claims about whether officers’ threat or injury reports were truthful; those datasets lack the whistleblower explanations, redacted affidavits, body‑camera footage, and remedial findings needed to calculate a reliable count of false threat claims ^{[5] [6]}. Journalistic explanations for how to interpret ICE data underline the difficulty of drawing forensic conclusions about individual encounters from macro datasets alone ^[7].

4. Independent vetting has found problems but not a comprehensive total

Investigative reporting and court records provide corroborated examples where ICE or related officers made misleading statements — enough to show a pattern of concern that merits oversight and independent review — yet those investigations examined subsets of cases (for example, protests in Los Angeles or specific case files in several cities) and did not claim to produce a national tally of false threat claims ^{[1] [2]}. Likewise, civil‑rights letters alleging coercive threats inside detention (such as those described at Fort Bliss) document serious abuses but do not equate to a verified count of “lies about being threatened” across the agency ^[8].

5. Competing incentives and agendas shape the public record

The discrepancy between DHS’s aggregated, alarmist framing (large percentage increases, vivid examples) and selective journalistic court‑file findings (many alleged attacks showing no injury) reflects competing institutional incentives: DHS and ICE have reasons to emphasize danger to justify enforcement policies, while local reporting and civil‑rights documentation spotlight misconduct and procedural contradictions — neither side, in the materials provided, has produced a neutral, auditable roster of incidents that proves how many false threat claims occurred ^{[3] [4] [1] [2]}.

6. Bottom line answer

From the sources supplied, no authoritative number can be given for “how many incidents ICE lied about being physically threatened by people they assaulted or arrested.” The reporting documents multiple verified instances of misleading or false statements by ICE officers and a broader pattern of inconsistent narratives, but it does not provide a comprehensive, verified count ^{[1] [2] [8]}. To reach a numeric answer would require either an independent audit of ICE use‑of‑force and incident reports cross‑checked against medical records, body‑cam footage and prosecutorial outcomes, or aggregated case‑level findings from investigative journalism focused on producing a national tally — neither of which is present in the provided materials ^{[6] [5] [7]}.