No deportation officer has been killed in the line of duty since ICE’s creation

Only one person working job that today would be called ‘deportation officer’ has died from act of violence, Guardian review shows

Since Donald Trump returned to the presidency, homeland security officials have consistently argued that deportation officers are facing unprecedented threats.

To better understand the dangers facing those officers, the Guardian examined the agency’s own tracking of its fallen officers, as well as recent violent incidents targeting immigration officers flagged by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The analysis showed that no deportation officer has died a violent death in the line of duty since US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was first created in 2003. Of the 15 officers who died in the line of duty while working for Enforcement and Removal Operations, the ICE branch charged with detaining unauthorized migrants within the interior of the US, all but two died of Covid.

One deportation officer, Brian Beliso, died of a heart attack in 2020 during a foot chase. The other deportation officer to die of something other than Covid, Lorenzo Roberto Gomez, experienced heat stress during a training exercise in El Paso, Texas, leading to hospitalization. He died of kidney failure in 2003.