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The US white homicide rate is about 4/100k per year (the overall rate has been around 6 since the end of the 1990's crime wave, with the fluctuations dominated by the black homicide rate), so at first glance 30k ICE agents committing 1-2 homicides a year makes them about as dangerous as the average white American. But of course the homicide rate includes domestics, bar fights etc, and I don't think anyone is tracking the number of ICE agents who kill their wives, and nor does it affect the napkin math, for which the relevant number isn't total homicides - it is killings of strangers. Per the FBI about one in five homicides is a stranger killing (heavy missing data bias, and no racial crosstabs, so take with a pinch of salt) which would make ICE agents significantly more likely to kill a stranger than the average white American (c 0.8 stranger killings/100k) or even the average white male American (c.1.6/100k), and probably slightly more likely than the average male American regardless of race (c.2.4/100k).
Also the corollary is the napkin math on how safe it is to be ICE. If there are 30k ICE agents and about 700k LEOs nationwide (unsophisticated AI guess), then you expect to see a few percent of cop deaths being ICE deaths. In fact (per the National LEO Memorial Fund) we have 152 LEO deaths in 2023 and 148 in 2024 (the pandemic years are distorted by the large number of deaths due to occupational COVID-19 exposure). ICE report 1 death each in 2023 and 2024, but neither are duty deaths - they are both cancers allegedly caused by exposure to toxic waste in the 9-11 cleanup. They report zero deaths in 2025.
An alternative data source is the FBI which only counts felonious and accidental deaths (i.e. it excludes diseases, even if exposure happened on duty). This shows just over 100 deaths per year, with slightly over half being felonious. By these criteria, there have been just 2-3 ICE deaths in the last decade. (James Holdman shot himself "accidentally" in 2021, Brian Beliso had a heart attack while chasing a suspect on foot in 2016 (not sure if this counts as "accident" or "disease"), and Scott McGuire was in a taxi which was hit by a drunk driver in 2016. Zero felonious deaths in ten years, when we should be expecting 1-2 a year if the risk is proportional to other LEOs.
In other words, contrary to the "ICE need to be treated as speshul snowflakes because of the massive campaign of left-wing political violence they are facing" rhetoric of the administration, ICE are an order of magnitude safer than beat cops. The reason is obvious - they are spending a lot less time dealing with dangerous criminals than beat cops do. This implies that beat cops will also engage in a lot more justified shootings than ICE (and the vast majority of shootings by LEOs are uncomplicatedly justified), so trying to compare the lethality of ICE to other law enforcement agencies isn't going to be particularly helpful.
Of course none of this is going to matter to the optics. People (of both tribes - modulo the degree to which the victims are outgroup) care far more about organised violence (including both state violence and non-state political violence) than disorganised criminal violence, and far more about violent deaths of both types than other avoidable deaths like car crashes or industrial accidents. This appears to be true at all times and places, at least within the WEIRD world.
This is an argument for ICE, not against. Most people don't have to detain people (many of whom are violent criminals) over the course of their day.
Which is why the ICE death rate is critical to the argument - it shows that ICE are not detaining violent criminals in large numbers, unlike local police.
ICE are mostly detaining two groups of people who don't fight back:
That said, I agree with you that ICE are violence professionals and should be more dangerous than the average male American - this comparison was a standard suggested by @coffee_enjoyer, and I was doing the napkin math he suggested. What ICE are doing is not friendly and neither its supporters nor opponents have any delusions about this, but given who is being targetted the number of "combat" deaths is negligible - I suspect @coffee_enjoyer may be overestimating the normal level of violence in nonblack America, which is even more negligible. I think some of the confusion is deliberate, in that large parts of MAGA Twitter want to see ICE go full brownshirt against Blue cities, and Trump admin poasters are trying to provide social media kayfabe to meet this demand (and also to scare immigrants into self-deporting, and possibly to encourage brownshirt-wannabees to work for ICE), but ICE are not in fact, as of early 2026, doing that.
No it doesn't. If the entire police force were deployed as nothing but SWAT teams, their death rate would go down too. Further, arresting someone, even a normal person, is already a violent action on par with a bar fight, so excluding those in favor of "murder by a stranger" makes no sense.
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