In an Attempt to Enforce Civil Laws, ICE Agents Keep Killing Us. Newsweek Just Found the “Office of Professional Responsibility” Buried 148 Abuse Cases

Yesterday, Newsweek revealed that ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility is sitting on 148 open misconduct allegations filed between fiscal years 2023–2025, including sexual assault, bribery, drug smuggling, domestic violence, and intentional service weapon discharges. This data does not include abuses by Border Patrol agents, overseen by a separate Office of Professional Responsibility.

“This is outrageous,” said Lynn Tramonte, Executive Director of the Ohio Immigrant Alliance and the author of the August 2026 report, “The Worst of the Worst: 152 Sexually and Physically Abusive ICE and Border Agents.”

“These are 148 additional allegations of rape, shootings — including killings — bribery, drug smuggling, domestic violence, and other serious crimes committed by ICE agents, and we are the victims. These cases have technically been ‘under investigation’ for up to four years, with no resolution or criminal charges.” There is no overlap between Newsweek’s cases and the OIA report, because they are open investigations and haven’t been brought to the charging stage.

“Some of these cases were reported four years ago. If it took four years for local police to investigate a known abuser, they’d have to answer to everyone from the public and media, to the mayor and city council,” said Tramonte. “But the federal government takes victims’ complaints and agents’ names and seals them in a little black box called the ‘Office of Professional Responsibility.’ Then they demand more of our taxpayer money to hire and hand guns to abusive, unaccountable, and criminal agents. Congress needs to stop funding ICE, make civil immigration enforcement a desk job, rescreen the entire workforce, and finally assert control.”

It took the government 19 months to return even this paltry amount of data to Newsweek. Writes Billal Rahman, “Newsweek requested records under the Freedom of Information Act relating to ICE agents nationwide under investigation for criminal or misconduct allegations. In response, ICE provided a log of what it called ‘open allegations.’”

The government gave minimal details about the crimes, and no details about the officers’ areas of assignment. It didn’t include information about closed investigations or their results. We don’t know how many agents remain employed, paid, or actively working as these investigations continue. “It stands to reason that more than 148 complaints were lodged during this time period, unless the OPR has a 0% closure rate, which would be troubling in and of itself,” added Tramonte. “Once again, we are not getting a true picture of what is going on within our own government.”

The data provided to Newsweek covers Fiscal Years 2023 through 2025, which is the calendar year October 2022 through September 2025. As Rahman writes, “The period includes the start of a rapid rise in ICE agent recruitment. The Homeland Department said in January that ICE bolstered its ranks of officers and agents from roughly 10,000 to 22,000 in less than a year.”

But this leaves a gap of roughly 11 months — from October 1, 2025 through September 2026 — unaccounted for. This period coincides with the most aggressive phase of Trump’s immigration policy: an agency has more than doubled in size, from 10,000 to 22,000 agents; civil immigration arrests that are off the charts; and a public that is watching U.S. citizens and immigrants die at the hands of ICE via medical neglect, car crashes, and shootings every single week.

“Newsweek’s data about internal investigations stops at the end of September 2025. That’s right when the hiring spree kicked into high gear, so we’re missing a huge amount of information. We know ICE doesn’t care if their agents have a history of domestic violence. The agency don’t require agents to pass a psychological fitness test before they hand them guns. And ICE certainly can’t be trusted to police its own — just look at what Newsweek uncovered, and what we found in our own report,” Tramonte said.

“I blame the Trump administration, but I also blame Congress. The legislature keeps writing blank checks to an agency that is literally killing us. And every time someone dies, Congress says ICE needs more training, transparency, and accountability. It does, but that won’t stop the killing. ICE deportation agents enforce civil laws. People who enforce civil laws shouldn’t have guns. They shouldn’t be able to roam our communities and arrest us, and they shouldn’t be allowed to pull over our cars or shoot at us. No other civil law is enforced by putting someone in a criminal jail, and no one should die over a paperwork problem. Congress, this is on you. Get your heads out of the sand and stop ICE, instead of letting these agents run free in our communities and kill us,” Tramonte concluded.

Newsweek’s report comes weeks after the Ohio Immigrant Alliance released “The Worst of the Worst: 152 Sexually and Physically Abusive ICE and Border Agents,” proving yet again that the Department of Homeland Security is failing to vet the agents it hires, and intentionally attracting predatory people who want to harm members of the public with impunity. The OPR data analyzed by Newsweek confirms this point.

In response to OIA’s report, ICE OPR wrote: “We take allegations regarding misconduct seriously and cherish the public’s trust. We work tirelessly to uphold the rule of law and hold ourselves accountable.”

“I call bullshit,” Tramonte said. “By now, we can all translate the language of the Trump administration, led by a man convicted of 34 felonies, whose name appears thousands of times in Epstein files. ‘Tirelessly uphold the rule of law and hold ourselves accountable’ means ‘tirelessly lie to the American people and never hold ourselves accountable.’ What Newsweek uncovered are over 100 cases that will eventually be added to our report after the administration is done slow-walking them. In fact, our list has already grown; within 72 hours of publication, Louisiana ICE agent Thomas Bailey was arrested for breaking into his ex-girlfriend’s apartment. Thomas Bailey is Agent 153.”

Here is how the OIA and Newsweek investigations connect, offense category by offense category.

Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence

In the open investigations obtained by Newsweek, there are two sexual assault allegations and two sexual harassment allegations. OIA’s report found 131 agents — 86 percent — charged with crimes of sexual violence. More than half involved child victims. Should someone query the Border Patrol’s Office of Professional Responsibility and the Department of Health and Human Services, or refresh the time period of allegations at ICE, the number of rape, sexual assault, and harassment allegations will climb.

There have already been thousands of allegations of child sexual abuse in government-run shelters under HHS’ purview. As OIA’s report makes clear, the Border Patrol culture is not only anti-immigrant, but abundantly misogynistic. Former Border Patrol agent Jenn Budd was raped at the Border Patrol Academy and pressured to stay silent. She has spent years publicly exposing the culture inside this agency — one where women make up the lowest share of agents out of any federal law enforcement force, for a reason.

Between Newsweek and OIA’s reports, domestic violence is another through-line. David Brouillette was hired by ICE despite his documented history of racism, family violence, death threats, and protection orders. He threatened a protester with a gun, kept his job, and went on to kill Johan Sebastián in Maine. The police were called to the home of Samuel Saxon, an assistant ICE field office director in Cincinnati, 23 times for domestic violence. He broke his partner’s pelvis in 2025. He broke her nose in 2018. He told her, “If I see you here in three days, you will be executed.” Saxon was finally prosecuted and found guilty for lying to a federal officer, but it’s inconceivable that his ICE superiors didn’t know who he was and how he was treating his partner years before.

OIA’s report explains that domestic violence is not screened for during DHS hiring, and not measured pro-actively across all levels of law enforcement. However, Brouillette’s history was documented in court records years before he was given an ICE badge and a gun. As the Trump administration has plainly shown, the agency hires these men without scrutiny, arms them, and is ready to back them up when they shoot, maim, or kill.

There are three open domestic violence allegations among the pending internal investigations reported to Newsweek, and potentially thousands of ICE agents with domestic violence histories on the job today.

Misuse of Government Computers

“Misuse of government computers” sounds administrative and fairly benign. Who hasn’t used their work computer to do some holiday shopping? But immigration agents also used government-issued computers to access child sexual abuse material, stalk victims, and carry out other nefarious crimes.

Jeffery Short used his government computer in the ICE office to show pornography to his own children. He was investigated by the Oklahoma Department of Human Services — not ICE — but not fired. Years later he left ICE, voluntarily, and went on to sexually assault two teenage girls. Timothy Ryan Gregg, an ICE agent in Minnesota with the Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) unit, exploited his access to law enforcement databases to stalk a teenager. He was sentenced to seven years in federal prison for a single count of transportation of visual depictions of a minor engaging in sexual conduct. Mississippi Border Patrol agent Nicholas Ryan Bolden was caught with child sexual abuse material on his government computer and in his office.

With Newsweek’s data showing 15 “misuse of government computer” allegations, and former ICE acting director John Sandweg calling this “fairly routine,” we have to ask: “routine” according to who? OIA’s report shows agents have used government technology to facilitate some of the most serious crimes imaginable. And with the proliferation of license plate reader technology, the problem of abuse of technology is only growing worse.

Intentional Weapon Discharges

The pending internal investigations ICE finally gave to Newsweek include ten intentional service weapon discharge incidents, five of which ended in serious injury or death. Given the timeframe of the data request, these incidents do not include the many civilians that ICE and the Border Patrol have injured or killed in 2025 and 2026, in full view of the public. While Renee Good and Alex Pretti, Johan Sebastián, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, and Keith Porter, Jr. may be the most “famous,” this is a grim popularity contest. There are literally dozens of others whose names few people know.

These are not justifiable uses of force. At the time federal agents injured or killed U.S. Americans and immigrants, they were attempting to enforce civil laws — paperwork violations. But the agents were carrying guns, and empowered to make community arrests and dangerous traffic stops. They ended up killing people, whether by shooting them, inciting dangerous car chases, or other misuses of force. Dr. Linda Davis’ death rarely gets mentioned, but she was the victim of an ICE-initiated car chase in what local police had already designated a “no-chase zone” in Georgia.

Former Border Patrol Commissioner Gil Kerlikowske said these tactics “are so far outside the standard practices and policies of any professional law enforcement agency that it shocks the conscience.” Indeed.

Civil laws should be enforced in courtrooms and office buildings, not on U.S. streets with deadly force. The federal government doesn’t arm IRS agents, and shouldn’t arm ICE agents making civil arrests either. ICE’s rapid expansion — from 10,000 to 22,000 agents in under a year — and poor hiring standards have flooded communities with undertrained, unqualified, and gun-happy agents. The result is predictable, documented, deadly, and will not change until Congress steps in.