How does ICE agent fatality rate compare to other federal law enforcement agencies since 2020?

1. What the reader is really asking — and why the public record is thin

The question seeks a rate — deaths per number of officers or per hours worked — which requires standardized, comparable datasets for ICE and its peers (FBI, ATF, CBP, DEA, Border Patrol); the sources provided do not supply a consistent numerator-and-denominator series for deaths and workforce size since 2020, and multiple reporting outlets explicitly warn that up‑to‑date, comprehensive federal use-of-force and line‑of‑duty death data are hard to find, limiting any precise statistical comparison ^{[3] [4]}.

2. What reporting says about causes of ICE agent deaths since 2020

Investigations and reporting found that the leading recorded causes of death among ICE personnel in the period examined were COVID-19 and illnesses linked to the 9/11 attacks rather than fatal shootings during enforcement actions; a Mother Jones review of ICE’s own data concluded that deaths and assaults were not “outsized” compared with law enforcement generally and that violent deaths in the line of duty are rare for ICE relative to other causes ^{[1] [2]}.

3. Violent incidents and high-profile shootings by immigration agents — frequency versus context

Independent trackers and news investigations document a cluster of high-profile shootings and use-of-force episodes involving ICE and other DHS officers in 2025–2026 — including multiple fatal encounters and several people shot while evading enforcement actions — but those pieces also note it is difficult to judge whether the recent tally is historically high because federal use-of-force reporting is incomplete and fragmented ^{[5] [3] [6]}.

4. Comparing ICE agent risk to other federal agencies — what evidence exists

Where comparisons are drawn in the reporting, they tend to be qualitative: outlets found that assaults against immigration agents rose with expanded street arrests but noted that nationwide assaults on law-enforcement officers remain orders of magnitude larger (for example, FBI figures of tens of thousands of assaults) and that ICE does not show an outsized risk profile in publicly released data, suggesting ICE agent fatality rates are not demonstrably higher than peers — again, caveated by patchy data ^[2].

5. Political context, institutional posture and how that skews perceptions of risk

Multiple sources point out an explicit political motive in portraying ICE as exceptionally dangerous: the administration’s expansion of ICE, publicized militarized operations, and promotion of officer risk have been used to justify rapid hiring and more aggressive tactics, even as independent reviewers (Mother Jones, OPB) argue the agency’s own statistics do not substantiate the claim of uniquely elevated officer fatalities, an argument that affects how casualty counts are interpreted and reported ^{[1] [2] [7]}.

6. Data gaps, accountability and the journalistic bottom line

The clearest finding in the available reporting is a negative one: there is no reliable, public time-series that allows a direct calculation of ICE’s agent fatality rate and its statistically valid comparison to other federal agencies since 2020; investigative work to date suggests ICE deaths are more often from illness than in‑action violence and that, on the measures reporters could check, ICE does not appear to have an outsized line-of-duty fatality problem — but the absence of transparent federal datasets and consistent oversight remains the decisive caveat ^{[1] [4] [8]}.