Immigration
why is this important?
The truth is that there is no evidence to support that American-born workers are now entering jobs vacated by immigrants who have been forced out – as evidenced by the fact that job growth in industries that rely heavily on immigrants has been hit the hardest. By the end of 2025, not only were U.S.-born workers more likely to be unemployed than the year before, but unemployment was higher among U.S.-born workers than among foreign-born workers.
Throughout 2025, the Trump/Vance administration kept trying to use federal data to show that there had been an increase in employment for U.S.-born workers and a decrease in employment among foreign-born workers, claiming “all net job creation” since inauguration day had been for citizens.
This is inaccurate because the figures they used were based on predetermined population estimates for 2025 that the Census Bureau had calculated in 2024. Plus, the administration tried to make “foreign-born employment” synonymous with “migrant workers” and/or “illegal aliens” – but the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) foreign-born category also includes large numbers of naturalized citizens, permanent residents, refugees, and temporary residents (i.e., students and temporary workers).
The truth is that the U.S. labor market lost substantial momentum in 2025. For the first time since 2021, the number of people looking for work was more than the number of job openings. By the end of 2025, the number of Americans who had been unemployed for 27 weeks or more rose almost 400,000 from a year earlier, and the number of people who were working part time but wanted a full-time job had risen by almost a million.
Wage gains slowed and the unemployment rate rose, hitting its highest level in four years. In the end, the number of unemployed Americans increased by over 700,000 to 7.8 million. Despite Donald Trump’s promises to reinvigorate it, the manufacturing sector alone lost over 70,000 jobs in the one-year period ending in November 2025.
The American people are – and will always be – our number one priority. So, it’s super important that we all thoroughly understand the impact immigrants have on the American workforce in terms of jobs and wages – and really on the overall economy – to make sure every single American is protected to every extent possible.
This is tricky to measure, but some super smart people have tried. A report released during the first Trump administration by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) – which was created in 1863 by President Lincoln to be the collective scientific national academy of the United States – concluded “that the long-term impact of immigration on the wages and employment of native-born workers overall is very small, and that any negative impacts are most likely to be found for prior immigrants or native-born high school dropouts… First-generation immigrants are more costly to governments than are the native-born, but the second generation are among the strongest fiscal and economic contributors in the U.S.” Their conclusion was that “immigration has an overall positive impact on long-run economic growth in the U.S.”
In February 2026, the Cato Institute updated the NASEM report and found the following:
For each year from 1994 to 2023, the U.S. immigrant population generated more in taxes than they received in benefits from all levels of government.
Over that period, immigrants created a cumulative fiscal surplus of $14.5 trillion in real 2024 U.S. dollars, including $3.9 trillion in savings on interest on the debt.
Without immigrants, U.S. government public debt at all levels would be at least 205 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) –nearly twice its 2023 level.
Cato reiterates that, since these results don’t account for any of immigration’s “indirect, tax-revenue-boosting effects on economic growth,” they represent the lower end of the positive fiscal effects. But, they say, “even by this conservative analysis, immigrants may have already prevented a fiscal crisis."
A study from the nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) revealed that “H-1B-driven increases in STEM workers were associated with significant increases in wages paid to college educated natives. Wage increases for non-college educated natives were smaller but still significant.”
From a broader perspective, two studies from IZA World of Labor – a German-based economic research institute – addressed the question of whether immigrants take the jobs of native-born workers. The first study, conducted with George Washington University and Temple University, found that “immigrants – of all skill levels – do not significantly affect native employment in the short term and boost employment in the long term.”
The report goes on to say that “immigrants who are self-employed or entrepreneurs directly create new jobs. Immigrant innovators create jobs indirectly within a firm, leading to long-term job growth. New immigrants fill labor shortages and keep markets working efficiently. High-skilled immigrants contribute to technological adaptation and low-skilled immigrants to occupational mobility, specialization, and human capital creation; both create new jobs for native workers. By raising demand, immigrants cause firms and production to expand, resulting in new hiring.”
The second study, conducted jointly with the Univ. of California, Davis, said this: “Politicians, the media, and the public express concern that immigrants depress wages by competing with native workers, but thirty years of empirical research provide little supporting evidence to this claim. Most studies for industrialized countries have found no effect on wages, on average, and only modest effects on wage differentials between more and less educated immigrant and native workers. Native workers’ wages have been insulated by differences in skills, adjustments in local demand and technology, production expansion, and specialization of native workers as immigration rises... Immigration has a very small effect on the average wages of native workers. There is little evidence of immigration lowering wages of less educated native workers. In the long term, immigration, especially of high-skilled workers, increases innovation and the skill mix, with potentially positive productivity effects. In many countries, the share of graduate workers is higher for immigrants than for native workers. Firms have absorbed immigrants by adopting appropriate technologies, expanding production, and moving native workers into more communication-intensive jobs.”
Researchers from UC Davis released another report in April 2024, this time as a NBER working paper series, that “extended and updated a framework that has been broadly used since the 2000s-2010s, to enrich and update our understanding of the recent national effects of immigration on U.S. wages, employment and labor markets.” They concluded that “immigrants have a substantial degree of productive complementarity (i.e., a complementary relationship) with natives. This offsets the competition effect, resulting in a boost of native wages and in an increase of natives’ employment-population ratio in response to inflows for most native workers.”
The researchers continued: “We also show that after the year 2000, inflows of immigrants became more concentrated among college educated compared to the past, and that their complementarity with skilled natives was large enough not to harm, but rather to boost the wages of less educated American workers. Additionally, we find that one possible mechanism through which immigration results in a positive complementarity and a wage boost for natives is through positive occupational responses among natives. This is consistent with specialization between natives and immigrants along the lines of comparative advantage, so that an increase in immigration prompts natives to upgrade and specialize in terms of occupations.”
In July 2024, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a report saying that the immigration surges the United States experienced under President Biden “boosted federal revenues as well as mandatory spending and interest on the debt in CBO’s baseline projections, lowering deficits, on net, by $0.9 trillion over the 2024–2034 period. Some of the effects on the budget result from the increase in the number of people paying taxes and collecting federal benefits. Other budgetary effects stem from changes in the economy over that period that are brought on by the surge, including increases in interest rates and in the productivity of workers who are not part of the surge.”
Lastly, a 2024 analysis by the nonpartisan think tank Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy discovered this:
Undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022. Most of that amount, $59.4 billion, was paid to the federal government while the remaining $37.3 billion was paid to state and local governments.
Undocumented immigrants paid federal, state, and local taxes of $8,889 per person in 2022. In other words, for every 1 million undocumented immigrants who reside in the country, public services receive $8.9 billion in additional tax revenue.
More than a third of the tax dollars paid by undocumented immigrants go toward payroll taxes dedicated to funding programs that these workers are barred from accessing. Undocumented immigrants paid $25.7 billion in Social Security taxes, $6.4 billion in Medicare taxes, and $1.8 billion in unemployment insurance taxes in 2022.
At the state and local levels, slightly less than half (46 percent, or $15.1 billion) of the tax payments made by undocumented immigrants are through sales and excise taxes levied on their purchases. Most other payments are made through property taxes, such as those levied on homeowners and renters (31 percent, or $10.4 billion), or through personal and business income taxes (21 percent, or $7.0 billion).
Six states raised more than $1 billion each in tax revenue from undocumented immigrants living within their borders. Those states are California ($8.5 billion), Texas ($4.9 billion), New York ($3.1 billion), Florida ($1.8 billion), Illinois ($1.5 billion), and New Jersey ($1.3 billion).
In a large majority of states (40), undocumented immigrants pay higher state and local tax rates than the top 1 percent of households living within their borders.
Income tax payments by undocumented immigrants are affected by laws that require them to pay more than otherwise similarly situated U.S. citizens. Undocumented immigrants are often barred from receiving meaningful tax credits and sometimes do not claim refunds they are owed due to lack of awareness, concern about their immigration status, or insufficient access to tax preparation assistance.
Providing access to work authorization for undocumented immigrants would increase their tax contributions both because their wages would rise and because their rates of tax compliance would increase. Under a scenario where work authorization is provided to all current undocumented immigrants, their tax contributions would rise by $40.2 billion per year to $136.9 billion. Most of the new revenue raised in this scenario ($33.1 billion) would flow to the federal government while the remainder ($7.1 billion) would flow to states and localities.
The Moral Cost to Society
Now we know the actual cost of the Trump/Vance administration’s immigration policy as well as the cost to the U.S. economy. Let’s now tackle the moral cost of the policy to society – which is sky high for several reasons: 1) It’s mean. 2) It gives Donald Trump, JD Vance, and their posse a chance to divide Americans by altering reality through blatant lies. 3) It erodes our rights. 4) It promotes bigotry.
1. It’s Mean.
We desperately wish that every person on the planet could live in a place like the United States of America. But not everyone can, and we get that. At the end of the day, even with the most open-armed proposals, there is simply no choice but to turn people away from this magnificent country.
But that DOES NOT mean that we have to be jerks about it. That DOES NOT mean that unqualified masked men have to snatch people from the street to look tough. That DOES NOT mean that we have to terrify people, separate children from their families, and trample on constitutional rights – making a total mockery of what we say this country is all about.
That DOES NOT mean that we cannot have compassion for every single non-criminal person who risks their lives to come to this country. That DOES NOT mean that we can’t show a little empathy for those whose only crime was to not be blessed with the circumstances of our births. Almost all these HUMAN BEINGS come from countries that have been mired in violence and economic and humanitarian crises for decades. THIS IS NOT WHO WE ARE.
Donald Trump, JD Vance and many of their followers say that since it’s against American law to be an undocumented worker in this country, these people are inherently criminals. That is absurd.
Universally, our deepest desire is to create the best life possible for our families. Every person who was born in America needs to answer this question, truthfully: If you were born in Mexico and your children were living in abject poverty [making $13.76 a day, feeding your family nothing but rice for the second month in a row, living in a house with no running water, all while dodging bullets from dangerous drug cartels] – what would you do to create a better life for them?
Easy answer: Every one of us would do anything – anything – necessary to provide them a better future. Build a wall…we would dig a tunnel. And that WOULD NOT make us criminals.
2. It gives Donald Trump, JD Vance, and their posse a chance to divide Americans by altering reality through blatant lies.
On January 7, 2026, 37-year-old mother of three Renee Nicole Good was shot dead by an ICE agent in the streets of Minneapolis. Multiple videos are all over the Internet and, if you haven’t seen them, you should. We watched them from every angle, in slow motion, and this is what we saw.
The 47-second cellphone video recorded by Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who shot Renee Good, shows her sitting inside her Honda Pilot SUV speaking to him in the moments before he shot her. As he passes her driver’s side door, she says to him through her open window, “That’s fine dude, I’m not mad at you.”
As Agent Ross walks behind the SUV, Renee’s wife Rebecca says, “We don’t change our plates every morning. Want to come at us? I say go get yourself some lunch, big boy.” (another video angle shows Ross and Rebecca both pointing phones towards one another, apparently recording each other)
Additional agents arrive on the scene and tell Renee to get out of her vehicle (on another video, a voice can be heard saying to “get out” of the car at least two times). Rebecca then attempts to open the front passenger side door, but the door does not open. One of the agents attempts to open Renee’s door. Renee puts the vehicle in reverse and Rebecca says, “Drive, baby, drive.”
As Renee talks with agents at her window, Agent Ross crosses in front of the vehicle as it moves into reverse and Renee turns and looks through the windshield. She then looks down and shifts the vehicle into drive before looking up again as she turns the steering wheel to the right, away from Ross.
Ross is standing near the driver’s side front corner as the vehicle moves forward and someone yells, “Whoa.” Ross’s camera then turns skyward but does not fall to the ground. One shot can then be heard before two more shots in rapid succession. Ross’ camera then refocuses on the SUV right before the vehicle crashes into a car parked on the opposite side of the street a short distance away. At that point, a male voice says: “Fucking bitch.”
From what we could tell, the 47-second cellphone video recorded by Jonathan Ross doesn’t show whether Renee’s SUV comes into contact with him. However, a video shot from another angle shows that, although Renee’s SUV did move toward Ross as he stood in front of it, he was able to move out of the way before firing at least two of the three shots from the side of the vehicle as it veered past him.
The Minneapolis Fire Department incident report said that, when emergency responders first arrived on scene, Good was in the driver’s seat with blood on her face and torso. She was “unresponsive, not breathing, with inconsistent, irregular, thready pulse activity.” Officials reported finding two gunshot wounds to Renee’s right chest, one to her left forearm, “a possible wound with protruding tissue on the left side of the patient’s head, bulging eyes with dilated pupils and blood discharging” from her left ear.
Emergency responders “continued the patient assessment” but found Renee was still not breathing and had no pulse. Renee Nicole Good was taken to the hospital in an ambulance, where “resuscitative efforts were discontinued” at 10:30 a.m.
Putting it all together, the footage shows Jonathan Ross filming with his phone at the front corner of an SUV that is trying to make a three-point turn to get out of a tight space. Ross is positioned to the side of the SUV’s hood, and the wheels were turned away from him as Renee drove forward. Ross leans over the hood from a side angle to shoot through the windshield, before firing the second and third shots into the car from the side. After he fired, the officer is clearly shown walking around, uninjured.
Eyewitnesses seem to back this assessment. One recounts the incident this way: “It appeared to me that she was endeavoring to kind of adjust her car so that it was facing more south. And then it was clear at one point that she started to accelerate, trying to move her vehicle out of the cluster of cars south on Portland Avenue.” The witness continued: “It was such a betrayal, and the woman who was driving the car… I just can’t be more clear that she posed absolutely no threat at all. From what I could tell it looked like she was attempting to leave.” Another eyewitness, who observed the scene from a second-floor window in his home, said, “It looked solidly like she was attempting to escape.” He also said that he saw agents run to the car after it crashed, but none tried to help Renee.
This is another disturbing thing. Video footage also shows that the federal agents appear to be in no hurry to provide Renee medical care and even prevent bystanders from helping her – even though one repeatedly tells them he is a doctor: “Can I go check a pulse?,” the man asks. “No,” an agent says and tells him to back up. “I’m a physician,” the man replied. “I don’t care,” one agent says, while another says that EMS is on the way and that they had their own medics on scene. A woman then yells, “Where are they?” and is told to relax. “How can I relax when you just killed my fucking neighbor?” she responds.
The shooting of Renee Good was unjustified. Period. This is not a commentary on law enforcement overall. It’s a commentary on this one incident. The idea that every law enforcement agent must be supported without accountability is not only irrational; it’s extremely dangerous. Believe us when we say you don’t want to live in that country.
It has been reported that Agent Ross was seriously injured several months before he shot Renee when he hooked his arm into a car window as the suspect sped off and dragged him down the street. If that’s the case, we're sorry that happened. But if it’s true that, as DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said, that is “why he would be in fear of his life,” it was obviously too soon for him to be back in the streets.
It has also been reported that Renee and Rebecca Good were part of a network of so-called “ICE watchers,” or citizens who use cameras, text alerts, whistles and Google documents to shadow federal agents. In fact, Rebecca said in a statement that, before the fatal shooting, she and Renee had “stopped to support our neighbors” after they dropped their son off at school.
To that end, President Trump said that, “At a very minimum, that woman was very, very disrespectful to law enforcement” and Vice President JD Vance said Renee was “there to interfere with a legitimate law enforcement operation” and was “part of a broader left-wing network” that is trying to “make it impossible for our ICE officers to do their job,” which – even if that were true, which it wasn’t – is a strange thing for our vice president to say because surely an attorney who went to Yale Law School understands that being disrespectful or being “part of a broader left-wing network” does not carry the death penalty.
This whole thing is just tragic. But it brings up troubling issues that extend far beyond that street in Minneapolis.
For one, to rapidly ramp up its workforce – which included hiring 20,000 to 30,000 agents – ICE reduced its training time and watered-down its hiring requirements, including lowering age minimums and offering signing bonus of up to $50,000 for anyone and everyone.In an interview with Politico in August 2025, ICE Deputy Director Madison Sheahan revealed that, out of 110,00 ICE applications, only 30 percent of the respondents were military veterans and only around 10 percent came from other federal law enforcement agencies.
In August 2025, The Atlantic’s Nick Miroff reported that “new deportation officers at ICE used to receive about five months of federal-law-enforcement training. Administration officials have cut that time roughly in half.” “Academy training was shortened to 47 days,” three officials told Miroff, “the number picked because Trump is the 47th president.” Oh, good Lord.
Ryan Schwank, an ICE attorney who worked at the government’s law enforcement training academy, resigned in February 2026 from his job instructing new recruits and came forward as a whistleblower. He described a “deficient, defective and broken” training program with a scaled-back curriculum. For example, ICE eliminated 240 hours of “vital classes” from a mandatory 580-hour training program, including how to safely handle firearms; instruction about the legal boundaries for the use of force; and the appropriate way to detain and arrest immigrants.
He also accused the administration of lying: “Law enforcement is a deadly serious business. It is not a place for shortcuts. Deficient training can and will get people killed. … ICE is lying to Congress and the American people about the steps it is taking to ensure that 12,000 officers can faithfully uphold the Constitution and perform their jobs.”
Naturally, the Department of Homeland Security quickly denied any reduction in the amount or quality of training provided to ICE recruits; however, dozens of pages of internal ICE records corroborate Mr. Schwank’s account.
ICE’s rushed approach has led to trouble on several levels. An A.I. tool used to help the agency identify recruits who already have law enforcement experience, for instance, wrongly categorized hundreds of applicants. So, new recruits with no law enforcement experience were mistakenly placed in ICE’s “LEO” program, a program for people who are already Law Enforcement Officers. < The LEO program requires only four weeks of online training while applicants without law enforcement backgrounds are required to take an in-person course at ICE’s academy in Georgia. >
A DHS spokesperson called the A.I. debacle a “technological snag.” We call it a disaster waiting to happen.
Even congressional Republicans started to understand that more training is needed. “The more training they could have, the better it’ll be, because they’re dealing with some strange stuff going on that’s coming at them in a lot of different directions,” said Senator Jim Justice (R-WV). Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) expressed that, “They need to show more balance in enforcement and more compassion and empathy in enforcement.”
Beyond law enforcement tactical concerns, the shooting of Renee Good perfectly exemplifies the rage and division the Trump/Vance administration’s incendiary policies have caused in many cities, stoking strong resistance and widespread protests.
We don’t use the word “incendiary” as commentary; we think the entire administration would be very proud of being described by this term. It feels like, in almost everything they do, their goal is to divide us. This was never clearer than when the administration declared they were deploying federal troops to Democratic-led cities to conduct civilian law enforcement – portraying American cities as lawless, depraved, and out-of-control… expertly exploiting anger and fear to perpetuate and intensify the growing divide between progressives and conservatives.
These actions – taken under the false pretense of “emergencies” and against the wishes of state governors and without congressional authorization – corrode civil liberties, destabilize communities, stoke instability, escalate tensions, and erode public trust. They are also highly damaging to our military, which has a long-standing history of being non-political and certainly non-partisan. Using the military as pawns in political games hurts morale and drives out experienced service members.
It certainly didn’t help matters when President Trump posted things on social media like these cities “are the core of the Democrat Power Center, where they use Illegal Aliens to expand their Voter Base, cheat in Elections, and grow the Welfare State,” or when he suggested to military leaders that “some of these dangerous cities” should be “used as training grounds for our military.”
So, it’s easy to see why, even before Renee’s death, Minneapolis was already on edge after lurching from crisis to crisis for months, dealing with the shooting of state senator John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette and the assassination of state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark; a shooting at a school mass at the Church of the Annunciation, where two children died and thirty others were injured; and a sprawling welfare fraud scandal that caused President Trump to become fixated on the city’s Somalian population and made Minneapolis the new epicenter of the Trump/Vance administration’s immigration crackdown (2,000 more agents were sent to Minneapolis in the days before Ms. Good’s death, and then Secretary Noem announced more were on the way after her death).
Much of the anger in the streets of Minnesota was driven by the fact that the people who live there didn’t understand why ICE was there in the first place – because the reality on the ground didn’t match the Trump/Vance administration’s rhetoric and response. In the eyes of many of the citizens of Minnesota, the federal government was unfairly targeting their friends and neighbors – and that understandably upsets people terribly.
While federal officials were saying ICE was there to find “criminal illegal aliens hurting Americans” – supposedly because the state’s welfare-fraud scandal involved Minnesotans of Somali descent – Minnesota’s population of illegal immigrants was just an estimated 2.2 percent, about half the national average. Out of around six million residents, Minnesota has roughly 130,000 who are in the U.S. illegally – far fewer than many states. Plus, over 90 percent of the Somali population in the state have some kind of permanent legal status.
Add to the mix the little to no coordination immigration officials had with state and local officials and law enforcement agencies – a scenario that is still playing out across America – and the violent collision seems almost inevitable… with hundreds of infuriated citizens flooding the streets and Mayor Jacob Frey demanding that the feds “get the fuck out of Minneapolis” and condemning the “garbage narrative” and “bullshit” from the Trump/Vance administration.
True to form – before any investigation had a chance to even start much less finish – instead of helping dial down the temperature like real leaders do after a shocking tragedy like the death of Renee Good, our president and vice president did just the opposite. In addition to his comments I shared earlier, Vice President JD Vance said Renee’s death was a “tragedy of her own making” and that she was a “victim of left-wing ideology,” and President Trump posted on social media that Renee “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense.”
“The reason these incidents are happening,” he said, “is because the Radical Left is threatening, assaulting, and targeting our Law Enforcement Officers and ICE Agents on a daily basis. They are just trying to do the job of MAKING AMERICA SAFE.” Escalating things even further, President Trump then threatened that a “DAY OF RECKONING & RETRIBUTION” was coming to Minnesota before announcing that the U.S. Justice Department was criminally investigating Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act in response to Minneapolis protests.
At the same time, the Trump/Vance administration declared that state and local officials would be blocked from accessing evidence and investigating Renee Good’s shooting themselves.
Vice President Vance confirmed this when he said that “the idea that Tim Walz and a bunch of radicals in Minneapolis are going to go after and make this guy’s < Agent Ross > life miserable because he was doing the job that he was asked to do is preposterous.”
After Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon – who heads the Civil Rights Division’s criminal section, the division of the Justice Department that regularly handles investigations of police shootings – decided not to investigate Renee’s shooting, at least six leaders of the department resigned in protest. The departures included the chief of the section, the principal deputy chief, deputy chief and acting deputy chief.
Likewise, multiple prosecutors from the U.S. attorney’s office in Minneapolis, including the second-in-command, announced they were leaving the department over the Justice Department’s refusal to include state officials in the investigation, the push to investigate Renee’s widow Rebecca, and the department’s reluctance to investigate Jonathan Ross.
Five days after the shooting, the state of Minnesota and the cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul filed a lawsuit demanding an end to the Trump/Vance administration’s immigration enforcement actions there. At a press conference, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison accused the federal government of an “unlawful, unprecedented surge of the federal law enforcement agents into Minnesota” and said that the cities and state were suing “because this has to stop. It just has to stop.”
Stoking an already roaring fire is bad enough. But, many high-ranking Trump/Vance administration officials also outright lie. Repeatedly.
Immediately after Renee’s death – again, before any investigation had a chance to even start much less finish, and in addition to all their other vile comments – then DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, the president, vice president, and many other members of the administration twisted themselves into pretzels trying to frame the tragedy as “domestic terrorism.” Then DHS assistant secretary for public affairs Tricia McLaughlin – yes, her again – said that Renee “weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them – an act of domestic terrorism” and JD Vance called the incident “classic terrorism.”
Even though Jonathan Ross was clearly seen on video walking around after the shooting, uninjured, Noem said he was “treated” for “injuries” and Donald Trump posted, “It is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital.” A total lie.
This gaslighting technique was already a despicable habit of theirs.
In September 2025, ICE agents pulled over a Mexican immigrant named Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez – a father of two who had lived in Chicago for nearly two decades. He was shot in the neck and killed less than a minute later. The officers involved claimed that Mr. Villegas-Gonzalez had hit and dragged one of the officers with his car, causing “serious injury.”
But – again – video footage and interviews contradicted their account.
Although Mr. Villegas-Gonzalez did back up around 50 feet and then began to drive forward, none of the videos show him hitting any officer with his car. Plus, after the incident, the officer who supposedly had “serious” injuries said they were actually “nothing major.”
In January 2026, an immigration agent shot Julio C. Sosa-Celis, a Venezuelan immigrant, in the leg in Minneapolis. Two hours later, a DHS spokeswoman claimed that three people had attacked an agent with a broom and snow shovel, and that the agent “fired a defensive shot to defend his life” because he was “being ambushed.” The next day, then DHS Secretary Kristi Noem accused the three men of trying to kill the agent, saying agents had fended off an “attempted murder” and that one officer had fired in self-defense.
Within days, the government’s story had unraveled. A federal prosecutor asked a judge to drop the case, saying “newly discovered evidence in this matter is materially inconsistent with the allegations.” The following month, acting director of ICE Todd Lyons said two agents had been placed on leave for providing accounts that appeared to conflict with video footage of what actually happened, confirming they could eventually face termination and prosecution.
In fact, analysis by The New York Times of the 16 shootings by on-duty federal immigration agents patrolling American cities and towns from inauguration day to February 10, 2026 revealed that claims by Trump/Vance administration officials “fell apart quietly when the cases went to court.” From the report: “In four of the shootings where prosecutors brought assault or other charges, the cases fizzled after evidence emerged that contradicted the administration’s initial description of events. The charges were either dismissed or prosecutors dropped the case. Charges against six other people who were shot at by immigration agents are pending. Five of the defendants have denied aspects of the DHS accusations or presented differing accounts in court. Two cases are going to trial in April 2026.”
Likewise, in March 2026, The Wall Street Journal analyzed over 1,400 social media posts from U.S. government social-media accounts that said federal law-enforcement officers were under attack by terrorists, rioters and agitators. They found that most people accused in these posts were Americans, including Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both killed by federal agents in January.
The WSJ discovered that under the Trump/Vance administration, immigration law-enforcement agencies have pursued federal assault charges against U.S. citizens more frequently (an increase of more than 300 percent compared with the previous year). Also, they found that most of the accusations against U.S. citizens for attacking immigration officers were unsubstantiated:
“The Journal reviewed more than 100,000 posts on X from the Trump administration and found that of 279 people accused of attacking federal officers in the past year, 181 were U.S. citizens. Close to half of the accused Americans were never charged with assault. None have been convicted at trial... As in other federal assault cases, bystander videos as well as police-camera and surveillance footage cast doubt on agents’ claims, in some cases leading to the exoneration of citizens. Yet unlike the accusations posted on X, the outcome of those cases wasn’t mentioned on government X accounts.”
Every single time this happens is horrific, but perhaps the most clear-cut example is the shooting of 37-year-old Alex Jeffrey Pretti, an intensive-care nurse, in Minneapolis – which ended up being the straw that broke the camel’s back in the state.
Within hours after Alex died, then Secretary Kristi Noem declared – with zero evidence – that he had “committed an act of domestic terrorism.” Gregory Bovino, the then commander of the U.S. Border Patrol who likes to wear olive wool, double-breasted overcoats that make him look like a Nazi, then offered his own assessment: “This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” In a separate statement, DHS said, “The officers attempted to disarm the suspect, but the armed suspect violently resisted.”
It was immediately apparent to anyone with eyes and a brain that these were outright lies. Multiple videos from multiple angles clearly show what happened: Alex was standing in the street with a small group of civilians, where a person was detained on the ground. Members of the group were speaking to federal agents, and Alex was filming the scene with his cellphone. After other people approached the agents, he approached the group, shouting, “Hey!” As he continued to film, an agent shoves two civilians from one side of the street to the other, pushing them toward a white SUV. Alex and two other civilians then walk away. One of the agents follows them. The agent that followed Alex and the two other civilians pushed one of them down. Pretti quickly put himself between the person on the ground and the officer, who appears to spray something on all three of them. Alex is holding his phone in one hand while he holds his other hand up to shield himself from the spray. Alex then appears to try to help the civilian on the ground stand back up as the agent continues to spray the group. Agents then pull Alex, who is still holding his cell phone, from the others and at least seven DHS agents surround him and force him to the ground. One agent draws his firearm and points it at Alex while another agent strikes Mr. Pretti repeatedly with the spray canister.
An eighth agent joins the fray while another appears to pull a gun from near Alex’s right hip. The agent with Alex’s gun begins to move away from the scene with the weapon. At the same time, another agent unholsters his firearm and points it at Alex’s back. Then, while Alex is clearly on his knees and restrained, the agent standing directly above him fires one shot at him at close range, before firing three additional shots. As several agents move away, another agent (the same one who shoved the civilians into the street and sprayed Alex) unholsters his gun and fires at Alex while he lies motionless on the ground. At least ten shots appear to have been fired within five seconds.
The fact that Gregory Bovino flat out lied should have come as no surprise. In November 2025, U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis called him out – when he was still a senior U.S. Border Patrol commander in charge of Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago – saying he “admitted that he lied” under oath about getting struck by a rock in the head before deploying tear gas. Bovino originally claimed he used tear gas on protesters only because he was hit by a rock, but video evidence and his own later admission proved that story was total b.s.
“I find the defendants’ evidence simply not credible. Overall, this calls into question everything the defendants are doing,” Judge Ellis said, adding that the government is using force “untethered” to any specific threat: “I see little reason for the use of force that the federal agents are currently using. I would find the use of force shocks the conscience.”
Emails reviewed by The Washington Post make clear that many ICE videos are edited to support the administration’s false narratives – many of which revolve around the lie that the administration is only using aggressive tactics against “the worst of the worst” criminal illegal aliens (i.e., murderers, rapists, gang members, child predators, drug traffickers, etc.).
In one message, Emily Covington, ICE’s assistant director for public affairs, asked on behalf of the White House if a video of a deportation flight could be re-edited so that the clips “don’t feature tons of females?” Of course, an ICE official responded!... reassuring her that a video producer would “re-edit the b-roll to exclude the females.”
A former Department of Homeland Security media team member told the Post that the LA immigration protests were “the turning point to get even more aggressive with their messaging, and to paint pictures of these places as war-torn. There was a much more blustery edge, and a need to put stuff out as quickly as you can. You’re steamrolling everything.”
Retired Marine Corps Colonel David Lapan, President Trump’s initial DHS press secretary in his first term, highlighted the difference between Trump’s first term and now: “We were supposed to present the facts, not hype things up. But this veers into propaganda, into creating fear. We didn’t have this meme-ification of various serious operations, these things that are life or death… It’s not a joking matter. But that’s the way they’re treating it now.”
Time after time in situation after situation, it’s evident that truth and accuracy matter little to the Trump/Vance administration. In yet another example, they repeatedly use videos that supposedly show “recent” immigration operations, but the footage is sometimes months old or not even recorded where they claim. The Washington Post reports that one video that has been viewed over 1.4 million times on Instagram, TikTok and X declared Chicago was “in chaos” but used footage from other states.
In another example, the Department of Homeland Security “posted a swaggering montage to social media in August declaring it had triumphed in its takeover of Washington, D.C. It showed footage of federal agents fighting what a DHS official called a ‘battle for the soul of our nation’ and working ‘day and night to arrest, detain and deport vicious criminals from our nation’s capital.’”
However, “there was one problem. Several of the clips had been recorded during unrelated operations months earlier, in Los Angeles and West Palm Beach, Florida. The official’s sound bite about deportations in D.C. played over a clip from May showing detainees on a Coast Guard boat off the coast of Nantucket, the Massachusetts island 400 miles away.”