A rioter was charged Friday “for allegedly kicking and biting ICE officers” at a New Jersey illegal immigrant holding center on Thursday, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said on X. Another individual was arrested after threatening to murder an immigration officer and his family, Blanche said Friday. The Department of Homeland Security arrested at least six rioters last Wednesday alone for allegedly assaulting law enforcement, while others were arrested in the subsequent days, ABC 6 reported.
The attacks took place outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in New Jersey called Delaney Hall. Fox News reported that “agitators…were seen establishing a highly organized logistics and support operation before protests began at the site. Stockpiles of masks, duct tape, hard hats and medical supplies were laid out near the facility.”
By Sunday a curfew was imposed near the facility, with Democrat Gov. Mikie Sherill saying, “It has grown unsafe, and that’s completely unacceptable.”
The arrests are welcome. But the Trump administration cannot stick to occasional prosecutions while allowing the broader ecosystem of anti-ICE extremists to operate with relative impunity. Otherwise, such violence will only continue and expand.
The Newark violence is eerily reminiscent of the riots against Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis just a few months ago. During those riots, one rioter bit the finger off an ICE agent, while others blocked and obstructed roadways and federal law enforcement, threatened authorities, and attempted to interfere with immigration enforcement.
As The Federalist’s Joshua Monnington noted, those riots came after other riots in which “Young men cavalierly chucked rocks at law enforcement vehicles; protesters with freshly ordered (and unironed) Mexican flags blockaded highways. Tennessee congressional candidate Aftyn Behn gleefully announced on Facebook that she and her ‘girl squad’ were ‘bullying the ICE vehicles.’ A government bureaucrat in D.C. heaved a hoagie at agents and walked free.”
Four far-left extremists were also arrested, in December. They were allegedly planning a series of New Year’s Eve bombings and an ambush on ICE officers in Los Angeles.
“In any case,” Monnington wrote, “the administration failed to carry out justice in a manner that was sufficiently swift, decisive, and visible enough to dissuade obstructionists from engaging in reckless, anti-ICE behavior of the kind that ultimately led to Renee Good’s death.”
As has been widely covered, in Minneapolis an ICE agent fatally shot protester Renee Good after she appeared to accelerate her vehicle toward the agent. The shooting spurred additional violence and riotous behavior. As Monnington wrote, the escalation highlighted “the need for a just and decisive crackdown on anti-ICE obstruction…that parallels the Jan. 6 manhunt, not in the corrupt politicization, but in its scale and effectiveness.”
As Monninton wrote shortly after Good’s death, “Now only a law enforcement effort with the magnitude of that launched by the Biden administration in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 protests will have any chance of restoring the law and order ICE needs to enforce immigration law effectively. Leaving aside the Jan. 6 prosecutions’ largely corrupt and politically weaponized underpinnings, the Trump administration needs to imitate its scale justly.”
In fact, the riots outside Delaney Hall happened precisely because the Trump administration has not responded strongly enough to the previous violence. Much like the riots outside Delaney Hall, the riots in Minnesota appeared to be well-funded and planned.
The New York Post reported that Indivisible Twin Cities “led many of the protests against ICE raids in Minnesota.” Indivisible “is an offshoot of the Indivisible Project in Washington, DC, which bills itself as a movement to defeat the ‘Trump agenda,’ and received $7,850,000 from [George] Soros’ Open Society Foundations between 2018 and 2023…”
Fox News reported that another financial backer of the protesters is a Chinese Communist Party “advocate traced to a multitude of dark money organizations known to fuel far-left, CCP-influenced extremism in the U.S. and across the globe.” One of the groups Neville Roy Singham reportedly bankrolled is the Party for Socialism and Liberation, which the House Oversight Committee flagged as having “organized” and engaged with “a series of destructive protests and civil unrest,” according to Fox News.
Taken together, it’s clear ongoing violence against ICE agents and facilities is not from isolated grassroots protesters but a coordinated, well-funded network willing to use disruption, intimidation, and outright violence to make following federal immigration laws logistically difficult and even impossible.
To the administration’s credit, President Donald Trump has recognized the seriousness of the threat to an extent. Trump announced he was designating Antifa as a terrorist organization just days after Charlie Kirk was murdered by a radical left-winger who engraved bullet casings with slogans including, “Hey fascist! Catch!” The announcement also followed an Antifa cell’s attempt to assassinate police officers outside of ICE’s Prairieland Detention Center in July.
That action suggests the administration understands the underlying problem, but the question is whether it is willing to act with sufficient and necessary force to solve it.
The Biden administration used the full weight of federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies to relentlessly pursue Jan. 6 defendants, including defendants whose offenses were far less serious than assaulting federal officers. In fact, some people Biden targeted had committed no crimes at all, such as parents who peacefully showed up to school board meetings, traditional Catholics, and even innocent grandmothers.
If the Biden administration can weaponize federal agencies to target innocent political dissidents, the least the Trump administration can do is crack down on violent criminal organizations.
