Federal agents, including members of the Department of Homeland Security, Border Patrol and police, try to hold back protesters outside a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility downtown on Oct. 4, 2025, in Portland, Oregon. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Members of the U.S. House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee condemned the violence against law enforcement but appeared to make little headway in resolving the issue at a hearing Wednesday where the parties often leveled edged recriminations at each other.
Chairman Andrew Garbarino of New York tried to strike a balanced tone in an opening statement at his first hearing since taking over for retiring Mark Green of Tennessee, condemning violence against police while pointing out that officers have a responsibility to maintain the public’s trust.
“Law enforcement officers are public servants, not public figures. They stepped forward to protect our nation and uphold the laws promulgated by this agency,” Garbarino said. “But that alone does not absolve them of all responsibility. Public trust and public safety go hand in hand.”
But other members of the panel were less even-handed: Democrats sharply criticized some of the tactics used by federal law enforcement officials under President Donald Trump, and Republicans characterized those criticisms as fueling violence against police.
Several members of the panel from both parties confirmed the two West Virginia National Guard members who were shot and killed in a suspected ambush in Washington, D.C. on November 26th
Police witnesses criticize Nazi comparisons
Witnesses from three police organizations, the Fraternal Order of Police, the National Sheriffs’ Association and the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, largely agreed that increased rhetoric about law enforcement activities posed a danger to their members.
“The rhetoric from above calling officers Nazis and Gestapo better stop now,” said Jonathan Thompson, executive director of the National Sheriffs’ Association.
“They are fomenting dangerous circumstances. They are attacking people who wake up every day and do one thing: They put on their uniforms, they put on their star and … enforce the laws of this country.”
Daniel Hodges, a D.C. Metropolitan Police officer who responded to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack and whom Democrats invited on Wednesday to testify before the panel as a private citizen, said federal officers’ record under Trump invited the settlement.
“There is a semi-secret police force that kidnaps people based on the color of their skin and sends many of them to extraterritorial concentration camps through state-sponsored human trafficking,” he said.
“Before we walk around the room with our pearls wondering how people might compare law enforcement in this country to the Gestapo, perhaps we should take a moment to ask ourselves whether there is any recent conduct on the part of the government that might encourage such a comparison,” Hodges said.
Patrick Yoes, national president of the Fraternal Order of Police, said violence against officers is a bipartisan issue.
“My members are both Democrats and Republicans,” he said. “And we all have the same problem.”
ICE under the microscope
Several Democrats said the tactics of officials at Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, undermined their law enforcement mission and endangered them, while Republicans blamed that rhetoric for making police targets.
New York Democrat Daniel Goldman, a former federal prosecutor, objected to Thompson’s statement that police officers were “putting on their uniforms.”
“The problem is that’s not the case,” Goldman said. “They don’t wear a uniform, they don’t carry ID, and they go out with masks to arrest, in many cases violently, unsuspecting immigrants, many of whom are actually here legally.”
Goldman said that as a federal prosecutor, he worked with DHS officials “who represented the very best of our country.” But under Trump, the department’s behavior has become irresponsible, he said.
Illinois Democrat Delia Ramirez went further, calling DHS “the single greatest threat to public safety right now.”
“They use their anonymity to terrorize our communities and violate our rights,” she said. “They reject accountability. They ignore court orders and violate consent decrees. Bottom line: DHS agents lie. They act with impunity. They reject checks and balances and ignore Congress and the courts.”
GOP defends DHS
Republicans on the panel deflected blame from DHS and drew a direct line from the rhetoric of some Democrats opposing ICE’s tactics to physical attacks on law enforcement.
Tennessee Republican Andy Ogles said Ramirez’s comments “upset me” and described DHS agents as people who abide by the rule of law.
“This is about anti-law enforcement rhetoric, anti-law enforcement violence,” Ogles said. “This is not about ICE. This is not about deportations or about the (Homeland Security) secretary doing her job, securing the border and deporting those who are here illegally.”
Rep. Eli Crane, a Republican from Arizona, played a video showing Rep. LaMonica McIver, a New Jersey Democrat who also sits on the panel, confronting ICE agents at a detention center in her district.
“What do you think it means to the people who are out there watching and listening, watching social media, watching the news and seeing a congressman who sits on that committee go out there and behave like that?” Crane asked the witnesses.
Thompson responded that he was “horrified.”
“Honestly, I think it’s reprehensible and it’s obviously dangerous,” he said.
McIver said she did her job to provide oversight.
It’s about pardons from January 6th
Democrats also cited Trump’s pardons of people convicted of crimes in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol as condoning violence against law enforcement.
McIver suggested that Republicans on the committee were being hypocritical by condemning some anti-police rhetoric while remaining noiseless or praising Trump’s decision to pardon rioters on Jan. 6.
“It is not Democrats who are praising, let alone pardoning, people who stormed this very Capitol complex to beat up police officers and prey on elected officials,” she said.
