US President Donald Trump’s wide-ranging immigration crackdown has increasingly led to violent encounters involving migrants as well as American citizens, a trend brought into sharp focus by the fatal shooting of a woman in Minneapolis by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer earlier this week.
Following Trump’s directive to sharply step up deportations, masked immigration agents have intensified operations in Democratic-run cities, deploying tear gas on residential streets, forcibly detaining people in parking lots and pointing weapons at onlookers attempting to record the actions.
In one incident last month, a federal officer was seen dragging a woman through a snow-covered street in Minneapolis, an episode the city’s police chief condemned as showing a “shocking lack of regard for human dignity.”
According to current and former immigration officials, these confrontations stem from a major change in enforcement strategy, coinciding with a rapid drive to hire and train thousands of new officers.
The White House pushed for a sharp rise in immigration arrests in late May, prompting officers to abandon more targeted actions against individuals with serious criminal records in favour of highly visible large-scale raids. Since then, enforcement operations have faced growing public resistance, sometimes escalating into tense standoffs.
“This kind of highly visible, aggressive and contact-heavy approach creates risks,” said Scott Shuchart, a former ICE official who served during the Biden administration.
Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have all publicly defended the ICE officer involved in the shooting of Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, portraying her as someone attempting to obstruct enforcement efforts.
Shortly after the incident, Noem claimed that Good attempted to ram the officer with her vehicle, describing the act as “domestic terrorism.”
Responding to a request from Reuters, White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson accused Democrats and sections of the media of vilifying ICE personnel and fuelling hostility toward federal officers.
”The Democrats’ lies have directly fuelled their supporters to harass and impede law enforcement, which is the cause of any tensions and puts officers at risk,” Jackson said.
The ICE officer involved in the fatal shooting, Jonathan Ross, fired the first of three shots as Good’s vehicle moved past him, a Reuters analysis of the available visuals showed.
Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin defended the Trump administration’s approach and said the officer in Minneapolis feared for his life.
“ICE law enforcement officers are trained to use the minimum amount of force necessary to resolve dangerous situations,” she said.
One former ICE official who spoke with Reuters blamed Democratic leaders for fuelling the backlash by refusing to cooperate with ICE and publicly criticizing their work. Another said it was jarring to see protesters following officers with whistles, trying to disrupt their work. In Minnesota, they have been pelted with snowballs.
ICE poised to ramp up in 2026
The administration is preparing to spend tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to hire more immigration officers and intensify its operations, raising concerns such violence could grow in the coming year. Several current and former ICE officers, speaking on the condition of anonymity to speak openly about sensitive matters, expressed concerns that ICE could bring on less-qualified candidates with its accelerated hiring push.
The US Department of Homeland Security said earlier this month that it had hired 12,000 new ICE officers on top of an existing force of 10,000, although some questioned whether that many were actually fully hired and working.
DHS’ internal watchdog is conducting a review of ICE’s hiring practices, with staff expected to visit the department’s Georgia training facility in coming weeks, one of the former ICE officials said. The new curriculum cuts involved halving training for firearms and tactics, the former ICE official said.
The training for new ICE officers had previously been five months but the Trump administration reduced it to two months as part of its effort to speed up hires, McLaughlin said, adding that it was done to ”cut redundancy” and that candidates still meet the same standards.
Even as immigration enforcement becomes more contentious and ICE adds thousands more officers, the agency will have less oversight than in previous years after several DHS oversight bodies experienced mass staffing cuts last year.
Shootings follow immigration crackdown
Federal immigration officers have shot people in 16 incidents since Trump intensified his crackdown in June, according to The Trace, a non-profit news outlet that tracks gun violence.
In some of the cases, immigration officials said agents were under threat due to vehicles being used as weapons, though video evidence and judges later raised questions about those claims.
The incidents included the fatal shooting in Chicago of a Mexican father of two after dropping off his kids, the shooting of a TikTok streamer in Los Angeles and a U.S. citizen in Chicago.
John Tsoukaris, a former top ICE official who retired in July, said the ICE officer who fired the fatal shots in Minneapolis may have been within the bounds of protocol and that an investigation would be needed to determine the facts.
”In these very stressful and challenging situations, officers have to make a split-second decision,” said Tsoukaris, who was a field office director for ICE’s office in Newark, New Jersey. ”We should not rush to judgment of the officer’s actions without the full picture.”
Kavanaugh stops open door to broad sweeps
The Supreme Court in September said the Trump administration could stop people in U.S. cities for reasonable suspicion of violating immigration laws based on factors such as having brown skin or speaking Spanish, a position defended by Justice Brett Kavanaugh in a concurrence at the time.
Opponents of Trump’s aggressive enforcement say such “Kavanaugh stops” by ICE and Border Patrol have inflamed tensions.
Darius Reeves, a former ICE field office director who retired in 2025, said the Trump administration’s confrontational approach is putting officers at risk and increasing the likelihood of violent interactions.
Reeves, who spent more than two decades at the agency, said ICE historically tried to minimize its public presence and operate in a more targeted manner.
”We should not be flooding these neighbourhoods and antagonizing people,” Reeves said. ”This is not going to go well.”
With inputs from agencies
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