Posted on Wednesday, June 11, 2025
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by Sarah Katherine Sisk
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1 Comments
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Over the past several days, left-wing rioters in Los Angeles have clashed with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials and local police, at one point even hurling bricks at federal agents. The violence unfolding in America’s second-largest city has only further underscored the recklessness of Democrats’ crusade to publicize the names and faces of law enforcement personnel working to enforce immigration law.
Just before the first cars were set ablaze in LA, Democrats were howling about ICE agents making arrests with masks on. Boston Mayor Michelle Wu likened ICE to “secret police,” invoking comparisons to authoritarian regimes. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, in a recent commencement speech at the University of Minnesota Law School, called ICE agents “Trump’s modern-day Gestapo.”
Other Democrat leaders vowed to publicize the identities of ICE agents – which Trump administration officials said was effectively an invitation for the same left-wing extremists now wreaking havoc in LA to threaten, harass, and potentially harm the agents and their families.
“Every single ICE agent who’s engaged in this aggressive overreach and who are trying to hide their identities from the American people will be unsuccessful in doing that,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said last week. “This is America. This is not the Soviet Union. We’re not behind the Iron Curtain. This is not the 1930s. And every single one of them, no matter what it takes, no matter how long it takes, will, of course, be identified.”
Jeffries is threatening what’s known as “doxxing,” or exposing someone’s personal information to harass or otherwise personally damage them. It’s become a popular intimidation tactic online in recent years, but now Democrats are deploying the strategy in their capacities as elected officials.
For some Democrats, it hasn’t just been talk. Late last month, Democrat Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell began publishing details of interactions between ICE and Nashville emergency services departments that included the names of agents. In response, Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn, a Republican, proposed new legislation that would punish anyone who publicly identifies a federal law enforcement officer with up to five years in prison.
In another case from this February, anti-ICE activists in Southern California distributed flyers with photos and personal details of ICE personnel. Border Czar Tom Homan strongly condemned the act and vowed legal action. Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin shared images on X of the flyers, revealing names, faces, and phone numbers of ICE and Homeland Security Investigation(HSI) agents.
The posters notably included warnings in Spanish reading: “These armed agents work in Southern California. ICE and HSI racially terrorize and criminalize entire communities with their policies. They kidnap people from their homes and from the streets, separating families and fracturing communities. Many people have died while locked up in jails, prisons, and detention centers.”
Scott Mechkowski, a retired ICE agent who served from the mid-1990s until 2019, told Newsweek that the need for masks is obvious – to protect agents and their families from harm. Just imagine what would happen if a swarm of the left-wing radicals burning cars on the streets of LA knew where the ICE agents they are openly threatening to kill live.
In a recent press conference announcing 1,500 arrests in Massachusetts, Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons also explained that officers wear masks to protect themselves after instances of being doxxed and publicly labeled as “terrorists.”
“I’m sorry if people are offended by them wearing masks, but I’m not going to let my officers and agents go out there and put their lives on the line, their family on the line because people don’t like what immigration enforcement is,” Lyons said.
The threats to law enforcement from doxxing aren’t just theoretical, either. The Department of Homeland Security has reported a 413 percent increase in assaults against immigration agents.
“Make no mistake, Democrat politicians like Hakeem Jeffries, Mayor Wu of Boston, Tim Walz, and Mayor Bass of Los Angeles are contributing to the surge in assaults of our ICE officers through their repeated vilification and demonization of ICE,” Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security Tricia McLaughlin said. “From comparisons to the modern-day Nazi Gestapo to glorifying rioters, the violent rhetoric of these sanctuary politicians is beyond the pale. This violence against ICE must end.”
The LA riots aren’t occurring in a vacuum – they are the direct consequence of a political culture that vilifies law enforcement and glorifies lawlessness. When Democrat leaders call ICE agents the “Gestapo” and threaten to dox them, they are pouring gasoline on an already-burning fire. It’s no coincidence that masked radicals now roam the streets with bricks and firebombs, hunting for scapegoats while politicians cheer from the sidelines.
Doxxing ICE agents isn’t “transparency” – it’s a blueprint for violence and an effort to intimidate agents into not doing their job. As LA smolders, the public should understand exactly who lit the match, and what more violence they’d like to unleash on the men and women working to enforce the law.
Sarah Katherine Sisk is a proud Hillsdale College alumna and a master’s student in economics at George Mason University. You can follow her on X @SKSisk76.
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