Tampa, Florida — Secretary Kristi Noem issued an alert in Tampa on Saturday as ICE deals with an increase in violence and growing public backlash, despite record funding.
Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem spoke to the media in Tampa on Saturday about the recent increase in attacks on US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.
According to the Department of Homeland Security, attacks will increase by 700% in 2025 when compared to 2024.
According to CNN, the agency’s funding has increased from $8 billion to roughly $28 billion under the Trump administration, and it now has more agents and resources than the FBI and DEA combined.
Despite these resources, ICE is still vulnerable to public outrage, with many agents bearing the brunt of the consequences.
“Violence is anything that threatens them and their safety, so it is doxing them, it’s videotaping them where they’re at when they’re out on operations, encouraging other people to come and to throw things, rocks, bottles,” the secretary of state said to the press. “We have seen Molotov cocktails thrown at them.
On Thursday, protesters and border patrol clashed during an immigration raid on a marijuana farm in southern California, with one unidentified suspect firing a pistol at ICE agents.
“If you watch the video from what happened in California at that marijuana grow facility, that was horrendous,” Noem told me. “That was horrendous to me those individuals that were attacking those officers were trying to kill them.”
A new law allocates $75 billion to ICE through 2029 to hire more than 10,000 new agents and construct new detention facilities for more than 100,000 detainees.
As ICE’s presence in major cities grows and operations become more intense, it remains unclear what additional measures will be put in place to ensure agent safety in the face of growing unrest.
