They Were Charged With Assaulting ICE Agents. The Cases Are Crumbling.
"The Trump administration has lost or abandoned hundreds of criminal cases against protesters and immigrants, a Times investigation found.
In its nationwide immigration crackdown, the Trump administration has charged hundreds of people with assaulting or impeding federal agents. President Trump has branded them “insurrectionists,” “animals” and “thugs,” part of a broader effort by his administration to cast protesters and immigrants as violent criminals.
But a close examination of those cases reveals that in its rush to meet White House demands for deportations, federal law enforcement has engaged in extensive misconduct — ranging from attacking protesters to destroying evidence and misrepresenting facts in court.
The New York Times found that the Trump administration has filed assault charges against more than 550 people who were caught in its immigration dragnet — far more than previously known. Of the more than 400 cases resolved so far, nearly half have unraveled: Juries acquitted defendants, judges threw out charges, or prosecutors withdrew them.
The record is abysmal by the typical standards of federal prosecutions: The Justice Department seldom loses criminal cases, with more than 90 percent of defendants pleading guilty or being convicted at trial.
The Times obtained court filings for every assault case and reviewed hearing transcripts, interviewed witnesses and federal officials and watched videos of dozens of encounters that led to criminal charges. The review, the most comprehensive to date, suggests that the administration’s use of the law has often been less about protecting federal agents than about providing legal cover to cow protesters and immigrants into submission.
“There seems to be a pattern of charges being filed without any merit,” said Jimmy L. Arce, a former federal prosecutor in Chicago who served on a commission that investigated immigration raids in the city last year. He added that some defendants were “having their speech criminalized by the U.S. attorney’s office.”
Earlier this year, the Trump administration dialed back some of its most confrontational tactics, leading to fewer assault charges. But it recently began an aggressive new wave of enforcement, with agents killing two immigrants in Texas and Maine. With hundreds of cases resolved, it is now possible to more fully assess the administration’s conduct and results.
In the half of assault cases that ended in the government’s favor, almost all were guilty pleas. The Times’s analysis of the 213 cases that the government has lost or abandoned found that:
In dozens of cases, court records and videos show that federal agents were the first to get physical — including shoving, tackling or pepper-spraying defendants. Many defendants successfully argued that the assaults they were accused of were actually acts of self-defense.
Judges repeatedly chastised prosecutors and immigration agents for misconduct including distorting facts and withholding evidence. Two judges found that agents purposely destroyed evidence, including ordering a defendant to delete cellphone photos.
Officers charged more than two dozen people who were filming or following agents, often while honking car horns, blowing whistles or shouting warnings like, “La migra is coming!” There was no allegation of physical contact with agents.
In more than 100 cases, prosecutors did not claim that any agents were injured. In at least seven other cases, officers’ injuries were caused by their or their colleagues’ actions. For example, a judge last fall dismissed assault charges against an immigrant, ruling that the agent involved had been cut by shards of glass from a car window he himself had smashed.
Sixty-five times, prosecutors abandoned or downgraded charges before hitting a deadline to present evidence to a grand jury or judge. Former prosecutors said that this pattern of rapid retreat was unusual and signaled that the cases should never have been brought.
Dropping charges
The government has lost or abandoned nearly half of the resolved cases in which it accused people of assaulting immigration agents. Normally the Justice Department wins more than 90 percent of its criminal cases.
The Trump administration’s strategy hinges on a once-obscure statute, 18 U.S.C. 111, that makes it a federal crime to assault or forcibly impede a government officer. Punishments range from a fine to 20 years in prison.
For decades, prosecutors used the law sparingly. One exception was when the Biden administration invoked it to charge hundreds of people involved in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. Prosecutors had a perfect record of winning convictions in those cases, until Mr. Trump returned to office and issued blanket pardons.
As the Trump administration’s efforts to round up undocumented immigrants encountered resistance last year, officials embraced an expansive reading of the assault statute as a way to arrest and prosecute people who got in the way of ICE and Border Patrol agents. The government’s reliance on the statute became so great that agents at times called out “18 U.S.C. 111” as they got into scuffles and made arrests.
Lauren Bis, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, declined to comment on specific incidents but said that “it should come as no surprise that there’s an increase in criminal referrals under 18 U.S.C. 111 as there’s been a massive increase in violence and threats against federal law enforcement.”
A Justice Department spokesman, Wyn Hornbuckle, echoed that. “Federal prosecutors are correct to prioritize these prosecutions and hold individuals accountable to the fullest extent of the law,” he said, adding that prosecutors sometimes downgraded or dropped charges based on “mitigating factors identified in a case.” Another Justice Department official said that in some instances prosecutors dropped charges when defendants were deported.
Gregory Bovino, the former Border Patrol “commander at large” who championed the use of smashmouth tactics against protesters and immigrants, was blunter. He said in an interview that too many “worthless” federal prosecutors chickened out by abandoning assault cases. And he thought more protesters and immigrants should have been prosecuted.
“We were being overly judicious in who we charged with 18 U.S.C. 111,” he said.
On occasion, officers were seriously hurt by protesters or immigrants, The Times found. Last June, Roberto Carlos Muñoz-Guatemala, a sex offender in the United States illegally, drove away while a federal agent had an arm inside the car window. The agent — who months later would kill the protester Renee Good in Minnesota — was dragged about 100 yards.
Mr. Muñoz-Guatemala is one of only four people in the Times analysis who was convicted by a jury. The other 22 who faced jury trials were acquitted. Nearly 200 others had the charges dismissed — including two mothers from Charlotte, N.C.
‘We Need Help Right Now’
Tatyana Reisini and her friend Kristen Roos were cornered. A group of armed men, some wearing masks, had surrounded their car on a dead-end street. The women screamed to a 911 operator for help.
Earlier that November morning, the two young mothers had been on their way to a Christmas market in Charlotte. They saw a car filled with immigration agents pulling into the parking lot of an outdoor shopping mall.
Operation Charlotte’s Web, as the immigration sweep in the city was known, followed a bloody and high-profile operation in Chicago. Ms. Reisini, 36, and Ms. Roos, 33, were wary of what might happen in North Carolina.
Ms. Reisini, an American citizen of Ecuadorean descent, and Ms. Roos had been organizing with other local mothers to be on the lookout for immigration agents. So they steered into the parking lot, stopping about 20 yards from the government vehicles. Other protesters were already gathered. They all began yelling at the agents.
After a few minutes, the agents moved their vehicles in front of and behind Ms. Reisini’s Acura S.U.V., she said. Several agents stepped out. Ms. Roos remembered them shouting at her and Ms. Reisini to leave and “trying to scare us.” The women drove to another part of the parking lot and watched as the agents pinned in another protester’s car.
The agents eventually drove off, and Ms. Reisini and Ms. Roos resumed their trip to the Christmas market, at one point stopping to alert a resident that federal officers were nearby.
Soon the women realized they were being followed by two unmarked cars. They called 911. An operator told them to find the nearest gas or police station, but they didn’t know where one was.
Ma’am,
are you able to safely get to a nearby police station or …
I am trying to …
I’m trying to get to a police station,
but they’re not —
they’re literally following me.
So every time I get to like a stoplight or something, they —
they’re trying to get in front of me.
They’re intimidating us.
Instead they wound up on the dead-end street. They turned into a driveway in a housing development. The unmarked cars blocked them in.
“We need help right now,” Ms. Reisini exclaimed to the 911 operator. “They’re going to [expletive] hurt us!”
Just then, an agent began smashing the driver’s side window — with the barrel of his rifle, which was pointed toward Ms. Reisini, according to footage recorded by a nearby resident.
The women were terrified; their shrieks can be heard on the 911 recording.
I am in an apartment complex right now.
It’s,
it’s
a —
they’re breaking open the window!
“We didn’t do anything,” Ms. Reisini said.
“Yes, you did,” an agent responded. “You impeded. 18 U.S.C. 111. Driving erratic.”
Lawyers said that was a misreading of the statute, which specifies that it applies when people use or threaten force. “It’s not enough to show that they might have been interfering with what was happening,” said Carissa Hessick, a University of North Carolina law professor.
Ms. Reisini and Ms. Roos were led from the car, and their hands were zip-tied behind their backs. One agent noticed a child seat in Ms. Reisini’s car and sarcastically remarked that she must be a “stellar” mother, she recalled.
Ms. Reisini retorted that she was, in fact, a stellar mother, which was why she was protesting against agents who she thought were breaking up families in her community.
The women were taken to the local F.B.I. building, where they spent several hours in confinement and eventually received tickets accusing them of violating 18 U.S.C. 111.
Mr. Bovino, who was running the Charlotte operation, shared a social media post from a far-right account that called the women “liberal terrorists,” and he praised what he called “excellent arrests for assault.” Yet the charges were so weak that the U.S. attorney’s office in Charlotte eventually withdrew them.
Asked about the agent’s use of a rifle muzzle to smash Ms. Reisini’s window, Mr. Bovino said he wasn’t concerned about the risk to the car’s occupants. “I’m more worried about the officer getting hurt or killed or the public getting hurt or killed, not necessarily the suspect,” he said.
Shoved by Bovino
Mr. Bovino’s crackdown soon moved to Minneapolis.
On Jan. 7, hours after Ms. Good was killed, Quentin Williams, a special education assistant at a high school about three miles away, was helping direct students to their rides after school.
He spotted a group of federal agents who had come onto campus while arresting someone. Mr. Williams moved toward a crowd that had gathered to watch. Some were yelling at or filming the agents.
Mr. Bovino ran up and shoved Mr. Williams, videos show. In an ensuing skirmish, agents yanked Mr. Williams by the hair, tackled him and, he said, choked him.
“I could not help but think of George Floyd,” Mr. Williams wrote later that day, memorializing the incident. “I was so scared for my life.”
Mr. Bovino said Mr. Williams was among a group of “rioters and anarchists” who failed to follow orders from law enforcement.
Mr. Williams was arrested, taken to a federal building and released that same day. Agents told him they’d be in touch.
About two weeks later, the U.S. attorney’s office in Minneapolis charged Mr. Williams and 15 others for violating 18 U.S.C. 111. Pam Bondi, then the attorney general, announced the charges on social media, posting photos of Mr. Williams and other shackled defendants, who she said were “resisting and impeding our federal law enforcement agents.” She cited the statute but left out its language about it applying when people “forcibly” interfere.
In a sworn affidavit, an investigator from the Department of Homeland Security said that an agent at the scene had seen Mr. Williams trying to grab and pick up a Border Patrol agent — a claim that Mr. Williams denied and that was not supported by video of the incident that The Times reviewed.
The U.S. attorney’s office later reduced the charge to a misdemeanor and ultimately dropped the case altogether.
The Times identified numerous other cases in which people were charged with assault even though officers were the ones who appeared to have used physical force first.
One involved Jaime Diaz, an undocumented Honduran man who was arrested last July during a traffic stop in Laredo, Texas. Prosecutors charged him with assault, saying he had struck a Border Patrol officer “two to three times.” But during his trial, body-camera video showed Mr. Diaz, who is slightly built and under five feet tall, being grabbed by the neck, forced to the ground and punched by the much larger officer as he tried to handcuff him.
A federal jury acquitted Mr. Diaz in November. He was then scheduled for deportation.
“In the past, this officer could’ve been prosecuted, based on the body cams,” said his lawyer, Roberto Balli. “And instead we have my client being prosecuted.”
A spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney’s office in South Texas said that Mr. Diaz elbowed the officer. “The jury did acquit the defendant, but it was a righteous prosecution,” she said.
In more than 20 cases that the government lost or abandoned, protesters and immigrants argued that what the government said was assault was instead self-defense.
Last May, Josefina Gabriel-Lopez, a Guatemalan immigrant, was pulling into her driveway in Biloxi, Miss., when federal agents suddenly approached and ordered her out of the car.
Ms. Gabriel-Lopez, who doesn’t speak English, didn’t immediately comply. An officer reached through the partly opened window to try to unlock the door, and the window closed on her arm. The agents blamed Ms. Gabriel-Lopez, but she said the officer had accidentally shut the window on herself as she pushed buttons inside the car.
After officers wrenched open the car door, Ms. Gabriel-Lopez struggled against an agent who climbed inside and twisted her arm and wrist before dragging her out. Her 18-year-old daughter ran out of the house barefoot and tugged on an agent’s protective vest.
Both women were arrested and charged with assault. When the case went to trial in September, they argued that they had acted in self-defense.
“I wasn’t resisting,” Ms. Gabriel-Lopez told jurors through an interpreter. She added, “I keep telling him it was painful, it was painful. He did not listen to me.”
The jury found the women not guilty. Ms. Gabriel-Lopez, who had entered the United States illegally in 2005, was later deported.
Scolded by the Court
The Times identified more than 30 instances of judges criticizing prosecutors or federal agents for conduct such as destroying or withholding evidence, violating rules about communications with jurors and making false or exaggerated claims, including some disproved by videos.
Judges have denounced the government’s actions as “flagrant,” in “bad faith” and “shocking to the universal sense of justice.”
One case of evidence being destroyed took place last September in San Bernardino, Calif. Federal agents were following a Nicaraguan man, Joseph Blandon-Saavedra, who was driving to work in a Toyota Corolla. At an intersection, the agents boxed him in with their two cars, smashed his window and arrested him.
All three vehicles were damaged. Mr. Blandon-Saavedra said the agents had hit his car when they cut him off. But the government said he had rammed them, and prosecutors charged him with two counts of assaulting officers with his sedan.
Mr. Blandon-Saavedra’s lawyers asked that the cars be preserved so their expert could examine them. But agents immediately repaired one of theirs.
The judge dismissed the count tied to the repaired vehicle, calling the agents’ actions part of a “growing pattern of mishandling evidence” that might undermine officers’ assault claims. Prosecutors appealed the dismissal. The count related to the other government vehicle is pending.
In April, a federal judge in Los Angeles threw out assault charges against two protesters, in the middle of a trial, after finding that prosecutors had failed to turn over internal “use-of-force” reports that could have been helpful to the defense. A month later, the government dropped charges against six protesters in Chicago after a judge criticized prosecutors for having mishandled a grand jury, partly by speaking to jurors outside the courtroom.
In Laredo, Ariana Guadalupe Garcia, a 19-year-old American, arrived at a border crossing last July to meet her young niece. Ms. Garcia, who had come from the U.S. side, had clothes for the girl to bring back to a relative in Mexico to sell, a common exchange at border crossings.
But Ms. Garcia found that the girl, who had arrived from Mexico, was being held in an inspection area, and when she tried to speak to her through a window, an officer told her to leave. Ms. Garcia did not immediately obey, prompting several other officers to approach her. After some back-and-forth, the officers began escorting Ms. Garcia away, according to court records.
As they passed through a short stretch of walkway with no working security cameras, Ms. Garcia took at least one photo with her phone. An officer swatted it away. Prosecutors said that Ms. Garcia then hit an officer on the arm and another in the ear, which she denied. She was arrested and later charged with assault.
Afterward, an officer told her to delete the photo she’d just taken, going so far as to watch her permanently erase it from the Recently Deleted folder.
The case against Ms. Garcia began to fall apart when the judge asked how prosecutors intended to prove she had hit anyone — especially since security footage from right before the alleged incident showed no sign of her acting violently toward the four male officers.
The deleted photos were the final straw.
“The government acted in bad faith in destroying the evidence,” the judge wrote, “further demonstrating that Ms. Garcia’s constitutional rights have been violated.”
Methodology
There is no simple way to identify immigration-related cases brought under 18 U.S.C. 111. We searched online databases — Nexis, CourtListener and Pacer (the federal judiciary’s electronic docket) — for all such cases since the start of Mr. Trump’s second term.
We used an artificial intelligence model to help remove duplicate cases, as well as cases unrelated to immigration enforcement. We checked the model’s work. We also requested records from the Central Violations Bureau, part of the federal judiciary, which processes tickets issued for violations of 18 U.S.C. 111. Our review was exhaustive, but it is possible that we missed cases.
We confined our analysis to 18 U.S.C. 111, though the government has occasionally invoked other laws to prosecute people for assaulting officers.
We created a database of court records, including hearing and trial transcripts, for the cases that were dismissed or ended in acquittals. With help from an A.I. model, we looked for common characteristics, such as courts admonishing the government for misconduct or agents initiating physical force against people they arrested. We reviewed every case the model flagged.
We also interviewed federal prosecutors and other experts and examined historical statistics about federal prosecutions, as reported by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Alan Feuer and Will Houp contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett contributed research. Produced by Alice Fang and Rumsey Taylor.
Mike McIntire, an investigative reporter, has been with The Times since 2003.
Danny Hakim is a reporter on the Investigations team at The Times, focused primarily on politics.
Alexandra Berzon is an investigative reporter covering American politics and elections for The Times.
Jazmine Ulloa is a national reporter covering immigration for The Times."
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