ICE Claims Officer Was ‘Assualted’ During An Illegal Search Of A Hospital But The Recording Shows Something Else

Overhype

from the bunch-of-soulless-liars dept

For weeks, ICE and DHS have been claiming there’s been an outsized outbreak in violence against ICE officers. The government preferred to use a misleading stat: the percentage. That way it could claim assaults were up 500, 600, 790%(!!!) in successive press releases and Fox News appearances, leading many to believe being an ICE officer was perhaps the most dangerous job in America.

Unbelievably, it was Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin that finally revealed the actual numbers behind the panicky percentage claims. A 690% increase in assaults meant nothing more than this: ICE officers had been “assaulted” 69 more times since the beginning of this year as compared to the same six-month period last year.

Now, there’s even more bullshit to unpack. “Assault” means something else to law enforcement officers who want to claim they’ve been assaulted than it means to them when they’re filling out paperwork for assaults reported by citizens. According to ICE and other law enforcement officers, “assault” means anything from getting handed a beating to simply being inadvertently bumped when “interacting” with regular people while performing their public duties.

That’s exactly what happened in Ontario, California, when a masked officer claiming to be an ICE officer attempted to enter a private area of a private building — namely, the inner rooms of a surgery center. Employees of the surgery center demanded identification and a warrant — something well within their rights. In response, they got refusals and one employee got an ICE forearm to their throat.

Supposedly, there’s an assault in here but all I see is someone instinctively reacting to an assault by an ICE officer — one in which the employee did nothing more than place a hand on the officer’s arm in hopes of dissuading the officer from further assaulting their coworker:

While the officer was probably salty that the staff managed to separate him from the person he had illegally entered private property to pursue, having someone stand between you and your illegal acts is not engaging in assault. Instead, it’s you — the federal officer — who is both ignoring the constitutional limits on your power as well as refusing to respect the protections extended to the people you actually serve: the general public.

Once this recording began circulating on social media, the Trump administration reacted like it always does: by piling lies on top of lies before scattering some criminal charges on top of its mountain of bullshit. David Bier’s thread on Bluesky unpacks all of it extremely well, but let’s hit some of the high points.

First, there’s the government’s bullshit, which was, of course, delivered by DHS head Kristi Noem’s second-in-command, Tricia McLaughlin:

In a statement to KTLA about Tuesday’s incident at the surgery center, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said: 

“ICE officers conducted a targeted enforcement operation to arrest two illegal aliens. Officers in clearly marked ICE bulletproof vests approached the illegal alien targets as they exited a vehicle. One of the illegal aliens, Denis Guillen-Solis who is from Honduras, fled on foot to evade law enforcement. He ended up near the Ontario Advanced Surgical Center where hospital staff assaulted law enforcement and drug the officer and illegal alien into the facility. Then, the staff attempted to obstruct the arrest by locking the door, blocking law enforcement vehicles from moving, and even called the cops claiming there was a ‘kidnapping.’” 

First off, it’s not “obstruction” to prevent someone from engaging in an illegal act, even if that person claims to be a federal officer. Even federal officers are not allowed to engage in warrantless searches of private areas not open to the general public.

As for “clearly marked ICE bulletproof vests,” don’t make me choke on my own bitter laughter. Anyone with a couple hundred dollars of equipment can crank out an embroidered patch at home that contains the same letter and then attach it to anything they’ve picked up from the local military surplus outlet. ID cards, badges, and warrants might be just as easy to fake, but that still doesn’t explain why this alleged officer refused to provide any of those things when asked to, as though all that was needed was an embroidered patch and the willingness to violate the Constitution.

There’s even more bullshit in this response, but those are the things that can be immediately gleaned from the officer’s actions, the surgical center employees’ response, and the DHS’s belated attempt to paper over a clearly illegal act one of its employees attempted to carry out.

The government is now pressing assault charges against two of the surgical center employees. That affidavit [PDF] directly contradicts the claims made by the soulless cretin currently employed as the assistant secretary of the DHS.

McLaughlin claimed this was a “targeted enforcement operation” seeking a known criminal. The charging documents say otherwise, as KTLA points out in its follow-up reporting:

According to an affidavit filed in the case, the confrontation began after two immigration officers conducting roving immigration enforcement operations in Ontario followed a truck carrying three adult men. The vehicle pulled into the parking lot of a local surgery center, and two of the men fled on foot when approached by agents.

There it is: ICE was just driving around looking for people who looked foreign and then sprung into action when the officers came across a few Hispanic-looking men. There’s nothing illegal about fleeing a non-consensual stop, but the ICE officer who followed the man into the surgical center apparently thought otherwise.

And that’s where the affidavit begins to fall apart. The government claims “exigent circumstances” (namely “hot pursuit”) completely nullified the Fourth Amendment. But the government is wrong. It doesn’t do that automatically in all cases and it especially doesn’t do it when the only suspected crime isn’t a violent offense. Fleeing from an officer isn’t always probable cause for further pursuit and/or arrest. Neither does looking sorta Mexican while doing it, as a federal court in California forcefully pointed out recently.

Even if you ignore those two factors, you’re left with the suspected “crime” of being in the country illegally, which is actually a civil law violation. And civil law violations don’t justify the abuse of warrant exceptions like “hot pursuit.”

The government probably won’t drop these charges because it’s too invested in pushing the narrative that ICE is beset on all sides by assailants. But it would be the smart thing to do because it’s going to have to explain why these officers chose to ignore the Constitution en route to being “assaulted” by people unwilling to be pushed around by thugs pretending to be interested in anything resembling actual law and order. And for the rest of us, we have another data point indicating that the exponential increase in “assaults” on ICE officers is likely just a whole lot of stuff like this where people are reacting normally to masked officers who choose to behave like rogue agents.

Filed Under: assault, bullshit, california, dhs, ice, mass deportation, ontario, trump administration