Of the 26 incidents that the Department of Homeland Security has held up as proof of a wave of "vehicular attacks" targeting immigration agents, the overwhelming majority have not withstood legal scrutiny — with court records and prosecutorial disclosures showing just a single assault conviction across the entire set, the Guardian found.
That solitary guilty plea involves a man who allegedly reversed his vehicle into an ICE officer's leg during a traffic stop. Meanwhile, 15 of the 26 individuals identified in the cases were never charged with a federal crime at all, and eight of the eleven who were charged ultimately had their cases dismissed — one through a deferred prosecution arrangement under which charges will be dropped if the defendant satisfies specified conditions. One person still faces a pending assault count, and another was convicted not of assault but of destroying government property, having been acquitted on the assault charge itself.
The findings emerge as DHS and Immigration and Customs Enforcement are under mounting pressure over the fatal shootings of two men during traffic stops in Texas and Maine. Authorities maintained in both instances that the men had put officers in danger with their vehicles — a characterization eyewitnesses have disputed.
DHS has repeatedly asserted that its personnel have experienced a "3,300% increase in vehicle attacks" since President Donald Trump's second term began, yet the agency has offered no supporting data for that figure. The Guardian's examination focused on the most granular accounting DHS has made public: a February press release claiming agents had endured "more than 180 vehicle attacks" since Trump's inauguration, which included summaries of 23 incidents spanning June 2025 through January 2026. Across those cases, 26 individuals were identified as having allegedly used vehicles to threaten, assault, or injure immigration officers; five were shot by agents during the confrontations, one of them fatally.
Among those on DHS's list who were never federally charged is a man the agency described as "at large" and another who was killed by ICE during the encounter itself. The review also found that DHS has continued publicizing cases as evidence of anti-officer violence well after the underlying allegations collapsed — with dropped or uncharged matters spanning California, Colorado, Arizona, Illinois, Minnesota, North Carolina, Maryland, and Washington, D.C.
The agency's accounting is also incomplete. Left off the list are several notable episodes from the same period, including other dismissed vehicle-attack prosecutions, the case of a Minneapolis woman accused of "weaponizing" her car before an ICE officer shot and killed her, and a man charged with "dragging" an agent — a case that did end in an assault conviction in December.
California attorney Margaret Hellerstein, who represents a TikTok streamer shot by an officer during an October traffic stop, was blunt in her assessment. The notion that all of these individuals were deliberately trying to run down officers is, she said, "frankly bizarre and laughable." Her client was charged with assault after DHS alleged he had begun "ramming" agents, but footage of the incident showed the car appeared stationary at the moment he was shot. A judge dismissed the case on the grounds that his rights had been violated during prosecution; the U.S. attorney's office has since appealed that ruling.
A broader pattern emerged from the review: DHS has routinely issued press releases and social media posts portraying traffic-stop subjects as violent attackers — sometimes labeling alleged conduct "intentional" or "deliberate" without substantiation — and has consistently failed to issue corrections once those narratives unraveled. Reasons for dismissals and non-prosecutions varied: in one case agents gave contradictory accounts of what occurred; in another, prosecutors missed evidence-disclosure dEADlines; in others, video recordings directly contradicted the agency's version of events.
Nine of the 26 cases originated in Illinois, connected to Operation Midway Blitz, the Trump administration's heavily promoted immigration enforcement push in Chicago last autumn. Of those nine, only one person faced assault charges — and in March a judge deferred that prosecution, putting it on course for dismissal. DHS did not respond to the Guardian's questions about the review's findings or about individual cases.
This article is based on reporting by the Guardian. No additional facts have been introduced.