THE VIOLENT RESISTANCE TO ENFORCING IMMIGRATION LAW. One troubling subset of the political violence coming from the Left these days is violence directed at federal immigration enforcement officers. There is a group of people in this country who so vehemently oppose the enforcement of federal immigration law that they will take up arms against it.
They might be called the armed extremist wing of sanctuary Democrats, who in big cities across the country have put in place measures designed to frustrate the enforcement of federal immigration law. Those sanctuary laws are the basis of legal battles, as the Trump administration pushes to enforce the law against migrants in the United States illegally. But beyond the legal battle are the armed extremists.
The latest example of violence targeting immigration enforcement came on Wednesday in Dallas. We now know enough to say that a shooter, 29-year-old Joshua Jahn, fired a number of rifle rounds from a rooftop into an ICE facility. With Jahn “firing indiscriminately” at the ICE building, as described by an ICE press release, several rounds hit the structure and others hit a van used to move detainees. Shots that Jahn fired to kill ICE officials ended up instead killing one detainee and wounding two others in the van. No law enforcement officials were hurt. A short time later, Jahn killed himself.
In the moments after the attack, there was some confusion about Jahn’s motive. But later Wednesday, FBI officials put out a photo of some unused shells on one of which Jahn had written “ANTI ICE.” On Thursday, FBI director Kash Patel released several other pieces of evidence that pointed to the fact that Jahn was very specifically attacking ICE.
“The perp downloaded a document titled ‘Dallas County Office of Homeland Security & Emergency Management’ containing a list of DHS facilities,” Patel wrote. “He conducted multiple searches of ballistics and the ‘Charlie Kirk Shot Video’ between 9/23-9/24. Between 8/19-8/24, he searched apps that tracked the presence of ICE agents. One of the handwritten notes recovered read, ‘Hopefully this will give ICE agents real terror, to think, ‘is there s sniper with AP [armor piercing] rounds on that roof?’ Further accumulated evidence at this point indicates a high degree of pre-attack planning.”
Not much ambiguity there. The new evidence puts the Dallas attack squarely in line with the antifa attack on the ICE Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, on the 4th of July. In that incident, 10 antifa extremists wearing body armor shot fireworks at the building in an attempt to draw ICE officers outside. The antifa attackers had two AR-15s and a pistol. When a local police officer arrived, they shot him, while also firing between 22 and 30 rounds at ICE officers and at the building. The police officer survived, and it was very fortunate that no one else was hit. But there is no doubt that with the guns, the body armor, helmets, and hand-held radios, the antifa extremists came to kill.
It was the most serious anti-ICE attack up to that point. Now, an attacker has killed someone. The victim was, ironically, one of the detainees on whose behalf the shooter apparently thought he was acting. But someone is dead.
There have also been several protests or outright riots in the campaign against ICE. The Los Angeles riots in June were the biggest, of course, but there have also been incidents in Austin, Chicago, Las Vegas, New York, Atlanta, Philadelphia, and other cities. Beyond that, a number of Democratic members of Congress have gotten into confrontations with authorities over the enforcement of the law. And in President Donald Trump’s anti-crime effort in Washington, D.C., the federal action that seemed most to anger local protesters was the enforcement of immigration law.
It might seem odd that so much anger and violence have been directed at lawful authorities on behalf of lawbreakers, but there it is. In one of the biggest battles of the Trump administration, many Democrats have positioned themselves solidly on the side of migrants who are in the United States illegally. And now their extremist followers have brought violence into the picture.
