A Florida Traffic Stop Left an ICE Officer Injured. The Assault Numbers Behind It Went From 19 to 275.
On June 16, 2026, a Florida Highway Patrol team working alongside ICE pulled a vehicle over at Americana Boulevard and Pointe Vista Circle in Oak Ridge, an unincorporated pocket of Orange County southwest of Orlando. The occupants got out and ran.
One of them, according to the Florida Highway Patrol, struck a pursuing ICE agent hard enough to cause a significant head injury and disappeared. It took two days and four agencies to find him.
That arrest is one incident. The number the federal government has been putting behind incidents like it is far larger, and far more contested.
- 275 assaults on ICE personnel reported by DHS for January 21 through December 31, 2025 — against 19 over the same window in 2024 — DHS, January 8, 2026
- 66 vehicular attacks on ICE personnel in that same 2025 window, against 2 the year before — the department calls it a 3,200% increase — DHS / Fox News Digital
- 325 active 287(g) agreements Florida holds with ICE — the most of any state, and a 577% increase since January 2025 — U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement
The Criminal Alien Apprehension Team is a Florida Highway Patrol unit that works immigration cases alongside federal agents. One of those teams made the June 16 stop with ICE. According to FHP, the man who struck the pursuing agent was Elias Bautista, 35, a Mexican national the agency says entered the United States illegally.
Locating him took four agencies. FHP’s Bureau of Criminal Investigations and Intelligence worked the case with the Criminal Alien Apprehension Team, ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, and Homeland Security Investigations, running surveillance, intelligence work, witness interviews, and database checks. On June 18, a targeted operation in Levy County — assisted by the Levy County Sheriff’s Office under Sheriff Robert “Bobby” McCallum Jr. — took Bautista into custody after, FHP says, he resisted again.
He was charged with aggravated battery on a law enforcement officer — a Florida state felony. That is the entire charge. No federal count has been filed in this case. And one thing is conspicuously absent from every release and every news report: ICE disclosed no prior criminal record, no prior deportation, and no entry date for Bautista. The version of this story that usually comes with a rap sheet does not have one here, and we are not going to invent it.
“Assaults on our officers will not be tolerated. Irresponsible rhetoric has contributed to a massive increase in violence and threats against federal law enforcement officers performing their Congressionally-mandated duties.”
Matthew Elliston · Field Office Director, ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations Miami
Elliston’s phrase — “a massive increase” — points at a specific tally. On January 8, 2026, DHS published assault counts for ICE personnel covering January 21 through December 31, 2025, and set them against the same window in 2024. The raw figures: 275 assaults in 2025, against 19 the year before. Vehicular attacks, meaning incidents in which a car was used against an officer, went from 2 to 66. The department framed those as increases of 1,347% and 3,200% respectively, and reported separately on January 26 that death threats against officers and their families were up 8,000% — without publishing the underlying counts for that one.
The percentage escalated in public all year as DHS kept revising it. In June 2025 the department put it at 500%. By July it was roughly 700%, then 830% for the period ending July 14. In December, ICE’s own account posted 1,070%, then 1,170%. The January 8 full-year release settled on 1,347%. That release went out while then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem (R) still ran the department; DHS has since been led by Secretary Markwayne Mullin (R-OK), confirmed 54–45 on March 23, 2026, and ICE by Acting Director David J. Venturella since June 1.
“This unprecedented increase in violence against law enforcement is a direct result of sanctuary politicians and the media creating an environment that demonizes our law enforcement.”
Tricia McLaughlin · Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, U.S. Department of Homeland Security
Attacks on our ICE officers are up over 1070% and death threats are up over 8000%. But that will not stop us from enforcing federal immigration law and Defending the Homeland.
Those percentages are the department’s own, and they have not gone unchallenged. NPR and a joint investigation by the Project On Government Oversight and the Investigative Reporting Workshop reported that the available case data does not substantiate the scale DHS claims. The objection is not that assaults are being fabricated. It is that an “assault” in these counts is a report, not an adjudicated finding — and that when the reports reach a courtroom, a striking share of them do not survive contact with a prosecutor or a judge.
Reviewing 92 federal assault cases arising from immigration operations in Chicago, POGO and the Investigative Reporting Workshop found that charges were never filed in 54 of them. Prosecutors declined 20 more. Thirteen were charged and then dismissed. U.S. Magistrate Judge Gabriel Fuentes said the government had “swung and missed — multiple times.”
That is why the raw counts matter more than the headline percentage. 275 against 19 is a published, year-over-year comparison from the agency that keeps the records, and it is the number a reader can check. Whether it means violence against federal officers rose roughly fourteenfold in a single year, or that reporting and charging practices changed underneath the count, or both at once, is a question the January 8 release does not answer and its critics say the case files do not support. The Oak Ridge arrest sits inside that argument as a single data point — one that, unlike most of the Chicago sample, produced a filed felony charge.
Florida is the reason a state trooper unit was on that stop at all. The state holds 325 active 287(g) agreements with ICE — the delegated-authority partnerships that let state and local officers perform federal immigration functions — a 577% increase since January 2025 and more than any other state. All 67 county sheriffs carry that authority. Florida was the first state assigned a dedicated ICE 287(g) liaison officer. Operation Tidal Wave, the joint state-federal enforcement push under Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), passed 10,000 arrests by January 2026 and more than 25,000 immigration-related arrests statewide by May.
The agency that made the arrest is run by Dave Kerner (D), executive director of the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles — a former Democratic state representative from Palm Beach County, appointed by DeSantis, now overseeing the troopers at the front edge of the state’s immigration enforcement. It is a detail worth pausing on: the partisan geography of this fight is not as tidy at the administrative level as it is on cable.
“Every day, our State Troopers and law enforcement partners demonstrate exceptional professionalism and courage as they carry out their duties to protect the people of Florida.”
Dave Kerner · Executive Director, Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles
Florida also built the first state program to shield federal officers from doxxing. Attorney General James Uthmeier (R-FL) launched “Protect Florida’s Protectors” on June 12, 2025, making Florida the first state to extend that protection to federal immigration officers — a year and four days before the Oak Ridge stop.
ICE’s stated posture is that assaulting an officer draws a federal charge. In Florida, some of these cases do carry one and some do not, and Bautista’s does not. Two other Florida matters do — and both need to be kept clearly separate from his.
Anyone who assaults an ICE officer WILL face federal felony assault charges and prosecution to the fullest extent of the law.
Jennifer Susan Cruz of Jacksonville pleaded guilty on June 18, 2026 — the same day Bautista was arrested — to assaulting officers during an immigration operation. Prosecutors said she boxed in a vehicle near a traffic stop and then struck an FHP trooper, a CBP agent, and an ICE officer. She faces up to 20 years. Assistant U.S. Attorney Arnold B. Corsmeier is prosecuting the case under U.S. Attorney Gregory W. Kehoe in the Middle District of Florida. Separately, Leonardo Gomez Hernandez, 40, a Mexican national, was charged after an October 20, 2025 traffic stop in Hillsborough County in which he allegedly choked and punched an FHP trooper during a 287(g) detention.
Bautista faces neither of those. His single count is state aggravated battery on a law enforcement officer, filed in Florida, still pending, and he is presumed innocent of it. What all three cases share is the setting: an ordinary roadside stop, which the president has publicly defended as the enforcement tool he is least willing to give up.
We must be strong, tough and smart and we CANNOT give up one of ICE's most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!
An ICE agent left a Florida roadside with a head injury, and the man accused of causing it faces one state felony count and is presumed innocent. The federal government says assaults on its immigration officers went from 19 to 275 in a year. Outside reporting says most of those reports never became charges. Both of those things can be checked. Neither one is being checked by the agency making the claim.
