A Massachusetts man was arrested and charged Thursday after he allegedly offered to pay anyone $500 for murdering an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, the Justice Department announced Thursday.
“I am broke but will scrounge and literally give $500 to anyone who kills an ice agent. @me seriously who else can pledge get in on this let’s make it work,” Brandon Ziobrowski of Cambridge, Mass., tweeted in July.
As a result, Ziobrowski was charged in an indictment unsealed Thursday with one count of use of interstate and foreign commerce to transmit a threat to injure another person.
“There is a rising trend upward in threats against the lives of law enforcement officers, especially those [who] are involved in enforcing federal immigration laws,” U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling said a
t
a press conference Thursday, per the Boston Globe. “He appears to just be some guy living in Cambridge who feels strongly on this subject. Feeling strongly on this subject is fine. Putting peoples’ lives in danger, not fine.”
Ziobrowski first created a Twitter account in 2009 and has historically posted tweets backing violence against law enforcement.
“Guns should only be legal for shooting the police like the second amendment intended,” he tweeted in February.
Violent posts continued in March, when he specifically started targeting ICE agents.
Ziobrowski faces a maximum sentence of five years behind bars, three years of supervised release, and a $250,000 fine.
The arrest comes amid calls from lawmakers to abolish ICE. The agency has come under scrutiny this summer due to the Trump administration’s zero tolerance policy to prosecute all illegal immigrants, which resulted in thousands of children being separated from their accompanying adults.
Nearly 2,000 children have been reunited with their families or released from government custody, but more than 500 are still separated from their families as of Aug
.
1, according to the Washington Post.
