This article is published in partnership with The American Prospect.
President Trump’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) claims that making and posting videos of ICE agents as they disappear tens of thousands of immigrants from America’s streets, workplaces, and courtrooms without due process is an act of “violence” to be dealt with accordingly.
DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin told the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) that “videotaping ICE law enforcement and posting photos and videos of them online is doxing our agents,” and added: “We will prosecute those who illegally harass ICE agents to the fullest extent of the law.”
In one incident, ICE targeted a Georgia-based journalist, Mario Guevara, for videotaping enforcement operations. Guevara has legal work authorization in the U.S., according to his attorneys, and has been held in ICE detention for more than two months.
McLaughlin’s statement comes on the heels of a little-noticed press briefing in July where DHS Secretary Kristi Noem stated that “violence” is “anything that threatens [DHS agents] and their safety. It is doxing them. It is videotaping them where they’re at.”
That expansive definition is likely driving the department’s claims of escalating “violence” against ICE agents, which purportedly rose from an alleged 700 percent increase on July 11, to 830 percent four days later, and to 1000 percent by August 7. When asked by CMD to provide concrete examples of violent assaults on personnel, the DHS spokesperson pointed to an incident of trash dumped on an ICE agent’s lawn and a sign with a profanity directed at an agent by name.
Peter Eliasberg, an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Southern California attorney representing journalists and observers who were attacked and injured by DHS officers in Los Angeles, told CMD that this definition bears “no relationship to what violence actually is. I don’t think there’s any evidence that… there is truth [in] those numbers.”
Meanwhile, DHS agents have repeatedly resorted to violence, assaulting and injuring journalists and legal observers doing their jobs. The lawsuit filed by the Los Angeles Press Club, the NewsGuild–Communications Workers of America, and individual plaintiffs alleges that DHS agents used targeted, unchecked, and officially sanctioned violence against them, including “smashing the hands of people recording events with their phones” and shooting reporters with “less lethal” munitions.
Statements like Noem’s and McLaughlin’s raise serious concerns about the Trump administration’s lack of respect for First Amendment rights, experts argue.
DHS appears to “fundamentally misunderstand the First Amendment,” said David Cole, a First Amendment scholar and law professor at Georgetown. “The First Amendment is designed above all to give citizens the right to criticize and report on government abuse. There’s not only no law against recording law enforcement officers doing their job, but it is a First Amendment protected right to do so in public in ways that don’t interfere with them carrying out their tasks. It reflects a failure [on the part of] the administration to understand the central role that watchdogs play in our democracy [and any] attempt to restrict [that] goes against the First Amendment.”
While the Supreme Court has rarely ruled on the matter, Cole said, a number of lower courts have concluded that as long as you are not interfering with the ability of law enforcement officers to do their jobs, “the government cannot stop you from recording, either in memory, or [on a] legal pad, or… video recorder.”
There is limited capacity for DHS to police itself. In March, the department shut down its Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, abruptly closing 500 investigations into public complaints of violations in the process. In August, a report issued by the office of U.S. Senator Jon Ossoff (D–GA) disclosed more than 500 incidents of rights violations in immigration detention facilities in the first seven months of Trump’s second term. In July, U.S. Representative Dave Min (D–CA) led a group of congressional Democrats in asking the Inspector General to investigate various assaults by ICE agents on civilians and members of Congress.
In response to a request for comment from CMD, ACLU Senior Staff Attorney Scarlet Kim dismissed assertions by DHS that video recording is an act of violence. “The right to photograph, film, and publish publicly visible law enforcement activity is a core First Amendment right,” she maintained. “It creates an independent record of what officers are doing, and it is no accident that some of the most high-profile cases of misconduct have involved video recordings. The burning question is why ICE officers feel the need to hide who they are and what they do from the public—masking their faces, lacking visible ID, driving unmarked vehicles, and now attacking those who document their activities.”
While no state legislature has passed laws equating the video recording of police officers with “violence,” some states have made the practice more difficult by mandating buffer zones to keep observers a certain distance away from officers and first responders when they arrive on a scene.
DHS, the third-largest Cabinet department after the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs, is a sprawling 260,000-employee operation that includes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), the Coast Guard, the Federal Protective Service, the Secret Service, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and the Transportation Security Administration.
With the recent passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill, DHS is set to receive another $44 billion on top of the $115 billion it had requested as part of the routine budgeting process. Within that, the budget for ICE has now skyrocketed to triple what it was in FY 2024, making it larger than the military budgets of all but 15 other countries around the world.
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