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Notes -
This is what @StableOutshoot also said.
I agree that "imprison" sounds like it refers to police conduct. Of course, if this was the case, then any policeman who arrests a foreign official (say, because he just shot up a school) is criminally liable under this title, which is likely not what the legislature intended.
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As an aside, it might just be cultural bias, but I find the way laws are written in the US rather opaque, like there is no expectation that citizens should even try to understand what the law is (at least pre-LLM). 18 USC 878 seems a prime example. First off, it is very niche, criminalizing threats of a list of offenses (which themselves are special cases of more general offenses against members of the public instead of foreign officials) -- which I presume is in turn a special case of a more general statue, because it seems unlikely that the US is fine with people threatening other federal crimes.
Then there is the fact that 18 USC 112(1) reads like the result of a brainstorming session without any attempt at deduplication. One would think that the verb "assault" also covers "strike" and "wound". Or the fact that it then includes the local definitions of another section in a way which would never pass any code review if it was software.
The idea seems to be much "let's just frame things broadly and rely on prosecutorial discretion".
If I were a criminal, I would much rather do crimes in Germany where I then have to deal with the Strafgesetzbuch (and the Nebenstrafrecht, sure) rather than doing crimes in the US and deal with a labyrinth of federal and state-level norms. In the long run, this will put the US at serious disadvantage attracting criminal talent.
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