“Everyone is on edge,” US Attorney Leah B. Foley said in an interview, pointing to the Sept. 24 shooting at an ICE field office in Dallas by a sniper who killed two detainees and wounded another.
Foley said ICE agents and other federal law enforcement have shown “remarkable restraint when being yelled at, spit at, and called some pretty despicable names by people.”
But she said her office will hold people who break the law accountable.
“We understand that some people’s passions are high and it can be hard to see someone you care about being taken into custody,” Foley said. “But there is going to be a line that when they cross, they are going to be charged. And that is to maintain safety in our communities.“
The Department of Homeland Security in September reported a 1,000 percent increase in assaults against ICE officers and facilities this year.
The backlash comes amid rising tensions over the tactics used by masked ICE agents, who have smashed car windows and stopped immigrants on their way to work or school to make arrests. The Trump administration’s crackdown that federal officials say is aimed at “the worst of the worst” has also swept up undocumented immigrants who have lived and worked in the country for years and do not have criminal records.
“It’s not a secret that people’s windows are getting smashed out and people are being essentially manhandled in the middle of the street,” said Victoria Miranda, a senior attorney at Lawyers for Civil Rights. “I think it’s the manner in which they’re doing it that’s creating this havoc of people wanting to fight back.”
In the memo sent Monday to the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the US Marshals Service, Bondi ordered the agencies to protect ICE facilities and personnel and arrest anyone suspected of threatening or assaulting federal law enforcement officers or interfering with their operations.
Bondi said more than 200 rioters blocked access to the gates of an ICE processing facility in the Chicago area, chanting “Arrest ICE” and “Shoot ICE.”
On July 4, about a dozen suspects dressed in black allegedly set off fireworks outside the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, then a gunman wounded a police officer who responded to the scene. At least 11 people have been charged with the attack. Prosecutors allege the group had anarchist and socialist ideologies.
In one of the arrests in Massachusetts, Manolo Morales Lopez, 29, a native of Guatemala who is a lawful permanent resident, is charged with assaulting agents in Woburn on Sept. 12 when they attempted to arrest a woman sitting in the passenger seat of his Jeep.
After agents showed Morales a warrant they had for the woman’s arrest, he “began saying that she was not going by herself and that the agents would have to take him as well,” according to an affidavit filed in court.
Morales is accused of trying to put an agent in a choke hold while resisting arrest. His attorney declined to comment on the charge.
In the other Massachusetts incidents, the person charged was not a protester or bystander who tried to intervene, but rather the target of the immigration detention in the first place.
Foley said her office is focusing on the most “egregious” cases, including the one in which an agent “suffered some serious injuries by a person who was here illegally.”
In that case, Cesar Pena Pimental, 29, who is from the Dominican Republic, was indicted in September on a federal assault charge for allegedly attacking the agent in June while he was being arrested. A warrant has been issued for his arrest, but he has been deported, according to authorities.
In a case brought in June, prosecutors allege Guido Andres Cuellar Batres, a 24-year-old Guatemalan national, bit and head-butted agents in May while being arrested in a Marlborough parking lot for overstaying his visa for more than four years. The confrontation was captured on video, according to a court filing.
Batres pleaded not guilty to the assault charge and his case is pending.
In another case, prosecutors obtained an indictment against Eddy Rafael Matos-Lara, a 35-year-old from the Dominican Republic, for an assault and resisting arrest charge related to a confrontation that occurred three months earlier at Roxbury Municipal Court.
During a hearing last week in federal court, prosecutors submitted a video showing federal immigration agents struggling to take Matos-Lara into custody in June when he appeared at the Roxbury courthouse to face assault and battery charges for allegedly beating a man with a bat. His lawyer declined to comment.
Springfield attorney Charles E. Dolan, who represents Batres, said some immigrants have been advised not to comply with ICE, which he said will only escalate the situation when an officer has a warrant to arrest someone.
“My advice to people is if law enforcement is there to take you into custody, then there is no upside to trying to resist,” Dolan said. “It’s just not going to go well.”
The surge in ICE arrests in New England has spawned neighborhood watch groups, which track and record arrests and post information about ICE sightings.
Lauren Wilton, an attorney who is active in Democratic politics in Milford, said an ICE agent threatened to arrest her for “impeding a federal investigation” on Sept. 10 after she video recorded a couple of arrests made by agents.
She said the agent pulled her car over outside the Milford police station, accused her of following agents while they were making arrests, and said, “If I keep up this kind of behavior, following them around, I’m going to get shot.”
Wilton said another agent quickly assured her he didn’t mean that, but she was rattled by the statement and told the agents that she wasn’t following them, and had a constitutional right to record arrests from a distance.
“It’s just a fear tactic,” said Wilton, who is a US citizen and questioned whether the ICE agent unlawfully detained her by demanding she give him her driver’s license. Minutes later, he handed it back and she was not arrested.
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment on Wilton’s claim.
Foley, the US Attorney, didn’t comment specifically about the incident involving Wilton, but said her office is “acting judiciously” when deciding whether charges are warranted when people have interactions with an immigration agent.
People “have every right to voice their displeasure with federal agents doing their job and they can ask questions” of the agents, Foley said. But, she said, “You cannot put your hands on federal officers and you cannot try to impede them from getting to a target of an arrest warrant or a detainer.”