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Leading officials in the Trump administration have been aware of the skyrocketing use of violent force by federal agents, according to newly unearthed emails, with the trend being known well before two U.S. citizens were gunned down in Minnesota.
According to a Tuesday report from Politico, the emails were obtained by American Oversight — a "liberal leaning watchdog nonprofit" — using Freedom of Information Act requests. They reveal that instances of "lethal force or non-lethal efforts to physically restrain or subdue people or neutralize threats" began to increase "rapidly" among federal immigration officers after Trump's return to the White House, and that officials in charge of these agents were aware of it.
The Department of Homeland Security has maintained over the last year, in the face of mounting reports of ICE agents' harassment and brutal physical tactics, that its agents were acting in accordance with the standards set during training and using "incredible restraint" to avoid force in the field.
"Our ICE agents are following the law and are running their operations according to training," DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said last month, following the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti at the hands of ICE and CBP agents.
The emails, however, show that instances of violent force quadrupled in the early months of Trump's second term.
"Caleb Vitello, at the time the official tasked with overseeing field and enforcement operations at ICE, was informed on March 20 that ICE officers had reported 67 incidents where they had used force in the first two months of Trump’s term, according to the emails," Politico's report detailed. "In the same time frame in 2024, that number was 17 incidents, representing a nearly four-fold increase. Days before, Vitello was informed that the use of force in the first two weeks of March alone had quadrupled compared with the same timeframe the year before, per another email."
The emails also reveal the priorities of those in charge when faced with this trend. According to Politico, ICE officials had no "particular urgency" as far as addressing the use of force by agents. Instead, they were more interested in shifting the narrative to assaults on ICE agents, which were also up more than fourfold in the early months of 2025. Officials also deflected blame onto Democratic leaders in the cities where their agents operated, accusing them of "stoking tensions."
"The email indicated that ICE leadership was keen to prosecute those cases," Politico explained. "With a unit chief writing to Vitello that a team in a regional office could 'package up a summary of the needed elements of the crime, definitions of what constitutes assault, etc with the intent of broadcasting to the workforce in an effort to drive more presentations for prosecution.'”
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President Donald Trump's second term will enter its second year on January 20, and there is already a running tally on the number of people who have been either killed or wounded by U.S. immigration agents.
Nonprofit gun violence news outlet The Trace reported Wednesday that after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent fatally shot a U.S. citizen in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Trump administration immigration officials have so far killed four people and shot five others since Trump officially took office last year. There have also been 28 incidents in which federal agents held people at gunpoint during immigration operations, and 14 shootings.
"They include the shootings of three people observing or documenting ICE raids; the shootings of five people driving away from traffic stops or evading an enforcement action; and the September 30 raid on a Chicago apartment building, during which half-asleep tenants and their children were held at gunpoint," wrote The Trace's Jennifer Mascia.
Mascia noted one particularly controversial shooting in which U.S. citizen Marimar Martinez was shot by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents in Chicago, Illinois last October. Martinez was shot five times but survived.
"I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes," read a text message from the officer who shot Martinez. "Put that in your book boys."
According to The Trace, there have also been 13 incidents in which federal immigration agents fired less-than-lethal munitions (like pepper balls and rubber bullets) at both suspects and the public. Mascia wrote that those munitions "can cause welts and burning in the lungs and eyes."
"[The Trump administration is] describing what’s happening to cities across the United States as an invasion and using language and imagery that’s evocative of war," Ohio State University law professor César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández told The Trace. "The fact that immigration agents are responding in a way that is more aggressive than what is customary cannot be divorced from the fact that the rhetoric that leading figures in the Trump administration, including the president himself, are using is far more aggressive than what is customary."
Click here to read The Trace's report in full.