PHOENIX — Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche promised to go after every individual who assaults federal law enforcement conducting immigration enforcement “every single time,” standing firm Wednesday on the Justice Department’s intolerance for protesters.
“At my Department of Justice, if a rioter or an illegal alien or somebody you’re trying to arrest touches a federal law enforcement officer in any sort of manner that’s aggressive, we will take that case and prosecute them for assaulting a federal officer,” Blanche told attendees at the Border Security Expo conference in Phoenix on Wednesday morning.
Recommended Stories
“Every single time my team hears about an assault, whether it’s through your agencies telling us, whether it’s through our U.S. attorneys, we always say, investigate and prosecute the case no matter what,” Blanche said to a round of applause from the audience inside the Phoenix Convention Center. “No matter if it takes resources, no matter if it takes time, no matter if it’s a tough case, no matter if the judge is going to give the guy bail, it doesn’t matter. We’re still going to do it.”
Federal police came under attack on numerous occasions while attempting to arrest illegal immigrants in President Donald Trump’s first year in office, particularly while in Chicago and Minneapolis last fall and into the winter under the leadership of former regional Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino.
“It frustrates me that I have to even say that, that you have to take a job putting your life on the line for me and get punched in the face and have some [assistant U.S. attorney] say, ‘Well, we’re not going to charge that,'” Blanche said.
Blanche said the DOJ has brought 1,400 cases over the past year against defendants who were allegedly physically aggressive with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, and Justice Department employees.
“Does that mean that these are easy cases, especially when there’s mass rioters, and you don’t know exactly who punched you? Or you don’t know exactly who threw that brick? No, they’re not easy cases. They take a lot of work,” Blanche continued. “And it doesn’t even mean we have to have success in every case. It just means that the 1,400 cases that we brought in the past year for assault on federal officers is not something we’re going to stop doing.”
An Associated Press report from December 2025 found that the Justice Department had failed to go after people who assaulted federal agents and officers as fully as it could.
The report examined 166 federal criminal cases in four Democrat-led cities and concluded that many had not been held up in court and had been pleaded down.
‘MASS DEPORTATIONS ARE COMING’: HOMAN PREVIEWS ICE SURGE TO SANCTUARY CITIES
Blanche said the success that the Trump administration had seen at the U.S.-Mexico border, where illegal immigrant arrests remain at 56-year lows, was the result of an interagency approach and the Justice Department’s prosecution of criminals and non-U.S. citizens at the border.
“That’s a failure over in the past several years, on the part of the Department of Justice, that you had Border Patrol and CBP … people working their butts off, only to have a prosecutor either just charge a guy, that’s obvious, not charge anybody at all,” Blanche said. “That does not equate to mission success.”
