‘The public thinks, well, if a member of Congress can attack ICE, why can’t we?’
T he sun had not yet peaked above the horizon over a U.S. Customs and Border Protection facility in McAllen, Texas, when the first shots rang out.
At around 6 a.m. on Monday, CBP officers hit the ground as “many dozens of rounds” were fired at the building and the agents inside, according to McAllen Police Chief Victor Rodriguez. The officers reclaimed the initiative and returned fire, killing their attacker, 27-year-old Ryan Louis Mosqueda. No federal officers were injured in the attack, but one local police officer is recovering today after taking a bullet in the knee.
Mosqueda’s motives have not yet been determined, but we can hazard a guess. “Images from the scene show the driver’s side door of the vehicle was spray-painted with “Cordis Die,” a Latin phrase meaning “Day of the Heart,” the BBC reported. “In the Call of Duty: Black Ops II video game, Cordis Die is a revolutionary movement that aims to cripple capitalist governments, according to gamer websites.”
The attack on immigration law enforcement follows what authorities have called a “planned ambush” on an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Alvarado, Texas.
The “organized” and “coordinated attack” took place at around 10:30 p.m. on July 4 when between ten and twelve individuals in “black, military-style clothing began shooting fireworks at the facility,” a Dallas-Fort Worth Fox affiliate reported. About ten minutes into the attack, “One or two others broke off from the group and began to damage vehicles and spray graffiti. Officials say the graffiti said things like ‘ICE pig,’ ‘traitor,’ and profanity.”
Officials believe the fireworks were meant to draw ICE agents outside the building where they would be easier targets. The plan nearly worked. When one Alvarado police officer approached the facility to investigate the disturbance, the tree line erupted in gunfire. That officer was hit in the neck. An additional “20 or 30 rounds” were fired at the unarmed correctional officers who had stepped out of the facility to confront their harassers.
In the sweep of the surrounding area, police recovered jammed rifles, handguns, several magazines of ammunition, and twelve sets of body armor. There were propagandistic materials as well. Law enforcement found fliers that read “Fight ICE Terror with Class War” and “Free All Political Prisoners,” as well as a flag that read “Resist Fascism. Fight Oligarchy.”
Once again, we might draw some informed inferences about the attackers’ motives.
All of this occurs against the white-hot backdrop of a growing cultural conflict over the Trump administration’s program of capturing, detaining, and deporting illegal migrants. The president’s border czar, Tom Homan, was quick to allege that Democratic rhetoric had contributed to the atmosphere of menace. “We have senators, we have congresspeople [who] compare ICE to the Nazis, compare ICE to racists,” he said on Monday afternoon. “So, the public thinks, well, if a member of Congress can attack ICE, why can’t we?”
“The public” is not on the hook for these attacks. It does, however, appear that these attackers shared some assumptions and ideological proclivities that might have led them to be exposed to the Democratic Party’s hostile anti-ICE rhetoric.
The mayors of dark blue locales like Chicago and Los Angeles increasingly talk about ICE as though it is an invading foreign army. “Our local police department will never cooperate with ICE, whatever their constitutional authority is,” Chicago’s Brandon Johnson shockingly declared. “What I saw in the park today looked like a city under siege, under armed occupation,” L.A.’s Karen Bass said of an ICE sweep through MacArthur Park.
Local activist groups have formed rapid mobilization cells designed to spot and thwart ongoing ICE raids on businesses believed to be employing illegal aliens, some of which have been successful. They utilize an evolving set of tools — one of which, the app ICEBlock, has been singled out by Trump’s Justice Department for putting federal agents in jeopardy. Indeed, that seems to have been the point of the application. “I wanted to do something to fight back,” said the app’s developer, Joshua Aaron. His explicit goal is to help illegal residents evade detection, but the app could and has been used by U.S. citizens to harass and intimidate ICE officials.
It was already getting hot out there before ICE officers came under armed assault. “My officers and agents are already facing a 500% increase in assaults,” said ICE acting director Todd Lyons in a statement last week. Indeed, violence should have been expected because that was what we experienced the last time progressive activists convinced themselves that enforcing immigration law was tantamount to implementing the Wannsee Protocol.
In July 2019, 69-year-old Willem Van Spronsen loaded himself up with a rifle, ammunition, and “incendiary devices” and mounted a one-man raid on an immigration detention center in Tacoma, Wash. He managed to set one vehicle alight and continued to throw firebombs at secondary targets, including cars and propane tanks, until he was shot and killed.
We’re no longer fast approaching the point at which vanguard elements take the activist class’s rhetorical flourishes literally and execute the imperatives embedded within the subtext of their bombast. We’re already there. The vanguard’s goal is always to ignite a broader conflict that attracts the proletarian masses who, they assume, are on their side. That assumption usually proves unfounded, but the radicalized and violent can do a lot of damage in their effort to foment insurrectionary civil unrest. That violence can have a reciprocal effect on the radicals’ similarly radical opponents, creating the potential for a cascading cycle of vengeance and reprisals. The time to arrest that vicious cycle is now, before it careens out of anyone’s control.