Around 6:30 a.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 24, 2025, a shooter opened fire on people at a federal Immigration & Customs Enforcement facility in Dallas, killing three (including himself) and injuring one. The shooter, later identified by law enforcement as Joshua Jahn, was not known to have participated in any previous political expression other than simply voting.
Jahn, who was 29 years old and born in Texas, was registered as an “independent” voter (not a member of the Democratic nor the Republican Party) in Oklahoma, where he had also lived, and his only prior interaction with police had been a 2015 drug arrest for possession of marijuana, for which he was on probation until 2017. He had most recently voted in the 2024 general election.
In the immediate aftermath of the attack, it was unclear what Jahn’s motivations were, as the three victims of the shooting were all detainees who were in ICE custody at the time. However, after a search of his car and of unspent bullet casings at the scene (one of which read “ANTI-ICE”), it became clear that he intended to target and “terrorize” agents themselves, according to NPR.
Jahn reportedly fired “indiscriminately” at the facility, prompting it to go into an apparent lockdown and agents to rush bystanders to a secure area, before shooting and killing himself. He wished to “maximise lethality against ICE personnel and…minimise any collateral damage or injury to the detainees and any other innocent people,” Nancy Larson, acting US attorney for Northern Texas, told Ben Hatton of the BBC. “No evidence was found to suggest [that] Jahn was a member of any specific group…but he did express a hatred of the federal government,” Hatton added.
While attacks on ICE facilities have been increasing in frequency, so have incidents of violence and indiscriminate arrestssnatching by ICE agents. In Washington, D.C. alone, the New York Times reports that ICE arrested at least 1,200 people from “early August until mid-September,” most of them immigrants from more vulnerable areas of the world with no criminal record. An immigrants’ advocacy group sued the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in late September, accusing them of racial profiling, indiscriminate detention and “[causing] terror in Latino and other communities across the District [of Columbia].”
A previous article in the Acorn from April 2025 gives another example of this in the case of Kilmar Abrego García, a resident of Maryland for almost 15 years. García was arrested by DHS on March 12, despite the fact that he had a court order legally protecting him from being deported to his native El Salvador. Ever since, even though he has never been charged or convicted of a crime in the United States, he has been denied his Constitutional right to due process and has been embroiled in a bitter legal battle with the federal government to be allowed to return home to his family in Prince George’s County. The government has repeatedly ignored and violated court orders to return him to the U.S. and free him from custody.
“Our friends, neighbors, and families are told to ‘do it the right way’ – to follow the legal process. They’re doing just that – showing up to court, complying with the law,” said interim CEO Priyanka Gandhi of the Immigrant Advocates Response Collaborative to the National Immigrant Justice Center. However, even when they do in fact follow purely lawful pathways to remain in the U.S. like García and so many others, ICE has begun to arrest them without cause as they enter a courtroom for their immigration hearings – “weaponizing immigration courts by threatening people who follow the law and appear for their hearings as directed,” said Skye Perryman of Democracy Forward. The administration has essentially built a trap where immigrants are stuck in a self-fulfilling prophecy and are detained regardless of whether they follow the law or not.
Furthermore, just this past week, TIME reports that armed ICE agents “rappelled from helicopters” onto the roof of a Chicago apartment building in the city’s South Shore neighborhood, indiscriminately breaking down doors and using flashbang grenades designed to blind people. Agents rounded up “adults and screaming children alike,” ransacking homes, separating kids from their families and binding American citizens for hours outside (many without clothes) with zip ties in a “military-style” raid. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker decried the operation, dubbed “Midway Blitz” by the Trump administration, as a “manufactured performance,” calling it, along with Trump’s demands to activate the Illinois National Guard, “absolutely outrageous and un-American.”
Not many state and local government officials are happy about this sudden blitzkrieg of ICE operations in their territory. Many across the country have begun holding town halls with their constituents to clarify “what they look like – and, more pointedly, what ICE does not,” reports Meg Anderson of NPR. “Whatever happens around the country…you are our community. We are your officers,” said police chief Paul Joye of Santa Fe, New Mexico. “It is a fundamental human right that you feel safe in your home regardless of where you’re from.” Leaders anxiously told NPR that they are already noticing a downtick in immigrants reporting crimes, citing research that shows that immigration status “can be a barrier to calling the police.”
Many communities and their representatives across the country have begun to question their previous trust in and reliance on the American justice system, especially amid the warrantless raids and constant flagrant violations of Constitutional due process laws that have become synonymous with the agency’s name in recent months. Given this flurry of recent conflict and turmoil caused by the federal government’s new immigration policies, it is clear that violence and authoritarianism have become almost the defining characteristics associated with ICE. Amid the relentless political uproar that continues to surround immigrants’ rights today, it remains to be seen how long these waves of violence will persist.
Sabr Keres-Siddiqui is a junior majoring in political science and double minoring in journalism and sociology.
