Despite Trump administration claims that attacks on federal immigration personnel have drastically increased, last year as the second-safest year on record for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol agents, a new study shows.
The agencies only reported one death between them in 2025, putting the year even with 2013 and 2005, according to a data analysis by the libertarian CATO Institute. Only 2015, a year of no fatalities, was lower.
The agencies’ single fatality last year occurred in Vermont when a Border Patrol agent was shot during a traffic stop — that agency’s first violent death in more than a decade. Rather than an undocumented migrant or domestic terrorist, the alleged shooter is German national in the country on what the FBI called a current visa.
Indeed, only two ICE agents have been murdered in the line of duty since 2003, neither while carrying out immigration enforcement operations, CATO’s data show. And only seven Border Patrol agents have been killed in the line of duty since then.
What’s more, the annual chance of dying from any cause as an ICE or Border Patrol agent is about one in 9,250 per year — a rate 6.3 times lower than members of other types of law enforcement. The majority of fatalities at the two agencies, in respective order, have been from COVID-19, vehicle accidents and catastrophic health issues such as heart attacks.
CATO’s numbers also show the chance of an ICE or Border Patrol agent being murdered in the line of duty is about one in 94,549 per year, about 5.5 times less than that of a civilian.
“Border Patrol and ICE agents are rarely the victims of deadly violence because illegal immigrants are much less likely to commit murder and other crimes than native-born Americans,” writes study author Alex Nowrasteh, CATO’s senior vice president for policy. “Convictions and arrest data from Texas, incarceration data from Oklahoma, Georgia, and nationwide, victimization survey data, and recent ICE arrest data of illegal immigrants confirm this.”
Even so, White House officials including Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Border Czar Tom Homan have argued that immigration agents do a dangerous job and are under daily threat.
In October, Assistant DHS Secretary Tricia McLaughlin claimed the feds had tallied an 8,000% increase in death threats targeting ICE officers. The month prior, DHS fired off a tweet that stated without backing evidence that rising anti-ICE sentiment had led to a “more than 1000% increase in the assaults on enforcement officers.”
“From bounties placed on their heads for their murders, threats to their families, stalking and doxxing online, our officers are experiencing an unprecedented level of violence and threats against them and their families,” McLaughlin said.
CATO said it chose to focus on deaths rather than threats or allegations of assault in its study because it’s the “most trustworthy, costly and important” measure.
“The trustworthiness of measuring death matters most because ICE, Border Patrol and federal prosecutors lie about being assaulted, so nobody can verify how many times they’ve actually been attacked,” study author Nowrasteh noted.
To that point, an NPR investigation that aired last month found that in many cases when the Trump administration accused people of violently attacking federal immigration agents or impeding operations, “criminal charges were quietly dropped or never filed.”
The Trump administration faced searing criticism for trying to justify the shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by alleging without waiting for an investigation to unfold that the two were executing acts of domestic terrorism. However, the NPR report asserted that those statements were “part of a much broader, months-long communication pattern by the administration on immigration related issues.”
“Every unjust death is a tragedy, but we can’t make wise decisions about public policy or how to allocate scarce resources without understanding the facts and shunting aside the rhetoric,” CATO’s study concludes. “Being a Border Patrol or ICE agent earns many insults, but words aren’t violence. Neither are they dangerous jobs.”
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