By: Aaron Reichlin-Melnick | americanimmigrationcouncil.org | Editorial credit: Phil Pasquini / Shutterstock.com

On September 24, 2025, a disturbed young man climbed to the roof of a building outside the Dallas Field Office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and opened fire. Before he took his own life, his bullets struck three handcuffed immigrants. Norlan Guzman-Fuentes died at the scene and a second man, Miguel Ángel García, died at the hospital days later. A third man, Jose Andres Bordones-Molina, remains hospitalized.

Like multiple shootings in recent months, finding the truth about a motive may never be possible among the fog of internet memes and punditry hypothesizing. Nevertheless, the Trump administration has seized on the moment to declare that the cause is clear; “hateful rhetoric” that is “demonizing” ICE.

The Dallas shooting, in the view of the Department of Homeland Security, is one of many acts of “political violence” inspired by “rhetoric” that has led to “assaults against our brave DHS law enforcement.” In a video entitled “Dangerous Democrat Rhetoric Against ICE” posted by the White House, the administration suggests that everything from California Governor Newsom calling for ICE agents to “unmask yourselves,” to more aggressive comparisons between secret police and internment camps, are a direct cause of violence against ICE.

It’s true that heated rhetoric around immigration has increased in recent years. During the Biden administration and presidential election cycle, this involved candidates and politicians making xenophobic claims of Great Replacement, migrant “invasions,” and Haitian refugees eating pets. Under Trump, the rhetorical battle around immigration has worsened, with public officials calling for “remigration,” Cabinet secretaries accusing opponents of supporting pedophiles, and where even America’s legal immigration agency is now hiring “homeland defenders” to “protect our nation and defend your culture.”

But it is not the words of politicians which are driving some people to become increasingly opposed and outspoken against federal immigration enforcers. Nor is it political rhetoric which has been met with an unprecedented street-level pushback against immigration law enforcement. It is the Trump administration’s radical shift away from standard law enforcement principles and toward a “mass deportation” agenda, as well as the related tactics which are focused more on creating content and hitting arrest quotas than on public safety and national security.

We all want to be safe, and we want law enforcement to adopt policies that keep us safe — and make communities feel safe. It’s also true that ICE officers have a genuine concern for their own safety. Yet the Trump administration’s aggressive mass deportation operations are premised on an explicit goal of making immigrant communities feel unsafe; to frighten millions of immigrants into “self-deportation.” And when communities feel unsafe, the natural reaction is to direct blame towards the most visible cause — increased immigration enforcement and the people carrying it out.

The Trump administration’s campaign of fear is being carried out through aggressive changes in immigration enforcement. Thousands of federal agents from the DEA, ATF, FBI, and other law enforcement agencies have been reassigned to carry out immigration enforcement. The White House has set politically motivated arrest quotas and ordered ICE to stop focusing on people with criminal records and instead raid businesses and trawl public places. DHS is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on nationwide ad campaigns telling people to self-deport. The man in charge of the Los Angeles and Chicago raids has openly told reporters that agents are targeting people for stops based on “how they look.”

This mass deportation effort has led to images and videos of law enforcement agents taking actions that shock many Americans to the core — as it is explicitly intended to do. In the United States, we have little history of masked federal agents jumping out of unmarked vehicles to arrest people at Home Depot, or detaining sobbing immigrant families at courthouses. This clear break from American norms is increasingly unpopular, and has caused President Trump’s polling average on immigration to fall by more than 15 points since taking office.

As federal agents become more aggressive in public spaces, both physically and verbally, images and videos of these operations are circulating social media and going viral. Like the video of George Floyd slowly being starved of oxygen as a police officer sat on his chest, these videos motivated many who might not otherwise care about the issue to be shocked into action. The administration’s constant propaganda about the “worst of the worst” and smearing people who support due process as terrorist-lovers raises the temperature even further. By doubling down whenever challenged, the Trump administration is creating a negative feedback loop which is leading both sides to harden their opposition.

Opaque, aggressive, and seemingly indiscriminate acts of immigration enforcement are now creating new scandals on a near-daily basis, with a growing number of U.S. citizens and others with legal status alleging lengthy detentions and racial profiling. But instead of taking accountability for the inevitable consequences any such abuse of law enforcement power, the administration is instead unabashedly disregarding oversight requirements and blaming others for any unrest.

One of the most egregious examples of this lack of accountability came in late September, where DHS initially suspended an officer for violently shoving a sobbing woman onto the floor of the New York Immigration Court, sending her to the hospital. On September 26, the officer responsible was suspended and DHS’s own spokesperson declared that his conduct was “unacceptable.” Yet by September 29, he was reportedly back on duty.

Unsurprisingly then, the number of protestors and activists opposing ICE’s actions have continued to grow — not top down, from the mouths of politicians, but from the grass roots. This is a direct response to the actions that normal people are seeing in their communities, as well as the rhetoric and lack of accountability they are seeing from the leaders in the White House and DHS. Adding to the sense of anger is the fact that the Trump admin is diverting extensive resources away from other public safety priorities, including political violence, terrorism, and child exploitation while simultaneously undermining public trust in all law enforcement.

Beyond acknowledging the need for accountability, the government could also protect its people better if it didn’t continue to push them to engage in behaviors which Americans view as fundamentally antithetical to professional law enforcement — like masking, refusal to provide identification, and racial profiling. We all have a responsibility to speak out against things we believe the government is doing that are wrong. That should never mean violence. But in a world in which every person can see daily violations of the basic norms of American law enforcement, an official position of impunity is going to radicalize people further. And that is a problem that cannot be solved by chastising Democratic politicians.

In short, the administration’s mass deportation is creating a tinderbox that makes all Americans less safe — including DHS officers themselves. And if the administration keeps barging forward without any changes, there is a real risk that this cycle will keep growing until another tragedy like Dallas occurs.

  #DallasShooting, #GrassrootsProtest, #ImmigrationEnforcement, #LawEnforcement, #MassDeportation, #PoliticalRhetoric, #PublicSafety, #USImmigration, DHS, ICE