By The New York Post Editorial Board
Gavin Newsom, AOC, LaMonica McIver, Brad Lander and all the other politicians (and talking heads) who relentlessly villainize ICE didn’t tell Joshua Jahn to go up on that roof and start firing away — but the nonstop bigoted, hateful and false rhetoric surely played a role in what looks to be the horrific decisions of a troubled young man.
Just the night before, Newsom vented to Steven Colbert’s viewers about “authoritarian actions by an authoritarian government,” thundering that the “ICE issue is alarming beyond words.”
“Anti-ICE” was scrawled on an ammo clip found by Jahn’s body; he killed himself after firing dozens of rounds wildly into an ICE facility in a residential Dallas neighborhood.
His only victims turned out to be three detainees hit (at least one fatally) when he shot up a blacked-out van, but several agents were in the same vehicle: Despite what lefty doubters may want to believe, he was plainly trying to slaughter ICE personnel — why else spray the building’s lobby and windows?
Public figures who keep chorusing “Nazis!” about some identifiable group are in fact encouraging targeted violence: All of us want to believe we’d have fought to prevent Hitler’s rise.
But the demonization is wildly off-base: Unlike some Border Patrol operations, ICE agents right now are exclusively engaged in intelligence-based, data-driven enforcement targeting known, identifiable “bad guys.”
That means going after the 1.5 million individuals who haven’t left the country months after receiving a final order of deportation (meaning they’ve exhausted all appeals) as well as the roughly 700,000 illegal migrants who’ve committed or at least been charged with a felony in this country or (in many cases) back home — plus working with other agencies hitting Tren de Aragua hideouts, businesses with records not just of illegal hiring but also other crimes, including child labor, and so on.
By the way, “sanctuary” restrictions on local law enforcement cooperating with ICE only increases the dangers of ICE operations, and boosts the odds that “innocent” illegal migrants will get arrested.
In jurisdictions that honor ICE requests to detain perps, agents rarely have to pursue anyone “in the community” — it’s an easy, peaceful handoff.
But risks rise when they have to knock on, or knock down, doors — and they’re far more likely to encounter others here illegally in such incidents, leading to more “collateral” arrests.
None of these facts penetrate the left-liberal media and political echo chambers, where everyone’s busy repeating and amplifying whatever assertions confirm their biases.
And so on Wednesday, as details of the Dallas attack slowly surfaced, progressives kept falsely “fact checking” Vice President JD Vance and anyone else who treated a gunman firing wildly into an ICE facility as motivated by anti-ICE sentiment.
All this, barely a week after the left had fallen for the fiction that Charlie Kirk’s killer was a far-righty.
Rather than try to explain away the truth, why don’t Democrats try taking some of their own advice. They railed endlessly that “reckless rhetoric” was fueling violence, but won’t take responsibility for their own radicals.
Why don’t they stop using dishonest terms like “Nazi,” “fascist” and “slave patrols” and denounce those who do — to prevent the next person who would kill in their name.
Democrat ‘Nazi’ rhetoric about ICE has inspired tragic violence https://t.co/fxSCkEsKZn pic.twitter.com/HbzslSf6Zz
— NY Post Opinion (@NYPostOpinion) September 24, 2025
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