Statute: 18 U.S.C. § 111 — making it a federal crime to assault or forcibly impede a federal officer. Punishments range from a fine to 20 years’ imprisonment. The statute’s text explicitly requires use or threat of force; mere interference is not enough (Prof. Carissa Hessick, University of North Carolina; interviewed by The New York Times, July 18, 2026).

Prior use: For decades, § 111 was invoked sparingly. The most prominent recent exception was the Biden Justice Department’s use of the statute to charge hundreds of January 6, 2021 Capitol-riot defendants — a docket in which federal prosecutors had a perfect conviction record until President Trump’s January 2025 blanket pardons.

Current use: As the Trump administration’s interior immigration enforcement encountered resistance in 2025–2026, federal prosecutors adopted an expansive reading of § 111 as an all-purpose tool against anyone who “got in the way” of ICE and Border Patrol agents — protesters, bystanders, mothers with cell phones, and immigrants during arrest. Field agents at times called out “18 U.S.C. 111” while making arrests (documented in Instagram video, cited by NYT).

The Docket, in Aggregate

A comprehensive New York Times investigation published July 18, 2026 — the most complete accounting to date — reviewed every immigration-related § 111 case brought since the start of the second Trump term. Method: Nexis, CourtListener, and PACER searches; Central Violations Bureau records for ticket-level cases; AI-assisted deduplication, human-checked; hearing and trial transcripts pulled for every dismissal and acquittal.

Headline numbers:

Baseline for comparison: The federal government normally wins its criminal cases. Across all federal prosecutions, more than 90 percent of defendants plead guilty or are convicted at trial (U.S. Courts, statistical tables, Dec. 31, 2025). A ≈50 percent loss/abandonment rate on a headline docket the administration built its enforcement narrative around is, in the Times’s phrasing, “abysmal by the typical standards of federal prosecutions.”

Recurring Misconduct Patterns

The Times review — combined with earlier findings from federal courts in Chicago (Chicago Headline Club v. Noem, N.D. Ill., Judge Sara Ellis, Nov. 2025), Los Angeles, San Bernardino, Laredo, and Biloxi — identifies a set of repeating patterns:

1. Force initiated by officers, then charged as “assault”

• Jaime Diaz (Laredo, TX; July 2025): An undocumented Honduran man under five feet tall was charged with striking a Border Patrol officer “two to three times.” Body-camera video introduced at trial showed the officer grabbing Diaz by the neck, forcing him to the ground, and punching him during handcuffing. Jury acquitted (Nov. 2025). Diaz was then scheduled for deportation. Defense counsel Roberto Balli: “In the past, this officer could’ve been prosecuted, based on the body cams. And instead we have my client being prosecuted.”
• Josefina Gabriel-Lopez (Biloxi, MS; May 2025): A Guatemalan immigrant was arriving home when agents ordered her out of her car; a partially open window closed on her arm. Gabriel-Lopez and her 18-year-old daughter were charged after struggling as agents dragged her out. Both women argued self-defense; jury acquitted (Sept. 2025). Gabriel-Lopez was later deported.

2. Rifle-muzzle window smashes and militarized traffic stops

• Tatyana Reisini and Kristen Roos (Charlotte, NC; November 2025 — Operation Charlotte’s Web): Two American mothers were followed by unmarked vehicles from a Christmas market to a dead-end street, boxed in, and had the driver’s window smashed with the barrel of a rifle pointed at Reisini. On the 911 recording, Reisini can be heard screaming “We need help right now… They’re going to \[expletive\] hurt us!” An agent replied: “Yes, you did. You impeded. 18 U.S.C. 111. Driving erratic.” U.S. Attorney’s Office withdrew the charges. CBP Commander Gregory Bovino — running the Charlotte operation — publicly praised the arrests as “excellent” and amplified a post branding the women “liberal terrorists.” See Gregory Bovino — Border Patrol Commander-at-Large, Trump Immigration Crackdown.

3. Personal force by a senior commander used to originate § 111 charges

• Quentin Williams (Minneapolis, MN; January 7, 2026): A Roosevelt High School special-education assistant helping direct students to their rides after school. Bovino ran up and shoved him after agents arrived on campus arresting someone; agents then tackled and (per Williams) choked him. Charged under § 111 based on a DHS affidavit alleging he tried to “grab and pick up” a Border Patrol agent — a claim video the Times reviewed did not support. AG Pam Bondi announced the charges on X, posting shackled-defendant photos and citing the statute while omitting its “forcibly” element. Charge reduced to a misdemeanor and ultimately dropped. See Gregory Bovino — Border Patrol Commander-at-Large, Trump Immigration Crackdown and Comprehensive Analysis: ICE and CBP Enforcement Tactics in Minneapolis.

4. Evidence destruction

• Joseph Blandon-Saavedra (San Bernardino, CA; September 2025): Nicaraguan man boxed in at an intersection by two agent vehicles; his window smashed and he was arrested. All three vehicles were damaged; each side blamed the other for the collision. Defense counsel asked that both agent vehicles be preserved for expert examination. Agents immediately repaired one of the government cars. The judge dismissed the assault count tied to the repaired vehicle, calling it part of a “growing pattern of mishandling evidence” that could undermine agents’ assault claims. The government has appealed.
• Ariana Guadalupe Garcia (Laredo, TX; July 2025): A 19-year-old U.S. citizen at a border crossing meeting her young niece. In a walkway with no working security cameras, an officer swatted away her phone; she was then charged with assault. Afterward, an officer instructed her to delete the photos she had just taken — watching as she permanently erased them from the Recently Deleted folder. Judge, dismissing: “The government acted in bad faith in destroying the evidence, further demonstrating that Ms. Garcia’s constitutional rights have been violated.”

5. Brady / use-of-force disclosure failures

• Two Los Angeles protesters (April 2026): A federal judge threw out § 111 charges in the middle of trial after finding that prosecutors had failed to turn over internal use-of-force reports helpful to the defense.

6. Grand-jury procedural misconduct

• Six Chicago protesters (May 2026): The government dropped charges after the judge criticized prosecutors for having mishandled a grand jury, in part by speaking with jurors outside the courtroom. (See NYT coverage, May 21, 2026.)

7. Perjury and false testimony by uniformed officers and commanders

• Chicago (October 2025): CBP Commander Bovino personally deployed tear gas in violation of a court TRO in Little Village. He publicly claimed a protester had struck him with a rock before the deployment; video showed the rock came after. Judge Sara Ellis found on the record that “Defendant Bovino admitted that he lied” and issued a preliminary injunction whose findings the Seventh Circuit later described as “voluminous and robust” even while pausing the order as overbroad. See Gregory Bovino — Border Patrol Commander-at-Large, Trump Immigration Crackdown.

The Administration’s Framing vs. The Record

DHS on-record position (Lauren Bis, Acting Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, to NYT, July 2026):

“It should come as no surprise that there’s an increase in criminal referrals under 18 U.S.C. 111 as there’s been a massive increase in violence and threats against federal law enforcement.”

DOJ on-record position (Wyn Hornbuckle, spokesman): federal prosecutors are correct to prioritize these prosecutions, though charges are sometimes downgraded or dropped based on “mitigating factors identified in a case.” Another DOJ official noted charges are sometimes dropped when defendants are deported.

The former commander’s position (Gregory Bovino, then already-announced-out, to NYT, July 2026): too many “worthless” federal prosecutors “chickened out” by abandoning cases; more protesters and immigrants should have been prosecuted; “We were being overly judicious in who we charged with 18 U.S.C. 111.”

Set against the resolved record — 213 of ~400 cases lost or abandoned, 22 of 26 jury trials ending in acquittal, 30+ judicial rebukes documenting evidence destruction, Brady violations, grand-jury misconduct, and perjury — the administration’s framing is that the docket’s problem is prosecutorial timidity rather than the pattern of misconduct the courts have identified in its own filings.

Broader Context: Two More Immigrant Killings in July 2026

The Times piece also notes that after early-2026 pullback of some of the most confrontational tactics — and after Bovino’s removal as Commander-at-Large — a new wave of enforcement produced additional lethal encounters:

• Houston, Texas (July 9, 2026): ICE agents killed an immigrant during an operation; separate NYT witness-account reporting.
• Maine (July 13, 2026): ICE agents shot and killed Guerrero.

These deaths sit outside the § 111 docket per se but underscore the same underlying dynamic: escalation under time pressure to produce enforcement volume.

Cross-References

• Gregory Bovino — Border Patrol Commander-at-Large, Trump Immigration Crackdown — CBP Commander-at-Large who ran the Los Angeles, Chicago, Charlotte, and Minneapolis operations; the most fully documented individual actor in this record.
• Lauren Bis — DHS Acting Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs — DHS Acting Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs; DHS’s on-record framing of the § 111 docket.
• Comprehensive Analysis: ICE and CBP Enforcement Tactics in Minneapolis — Operation Metro Surge, in which the Williams § 111 arrest occurred.
• Alina Habba — Former Acting U.S. Attorney (NJ), Senior Adviser to the Attorney General — U.S. Attorney whose office originated some of the challenged prosecutions.

Methodology Note

The aggregate figures above are drawn from The New York Times, “They Were Charged With Assaulting ICE Agents. The Cases Are Crumbling,” published July 18, 2026. The Times reviewed court filings for every § 111 case, hearing and trial transcripts, video of the underlying encounters, and interviewed federal prosecutors and outside experts. The Times used an AI model to deduplicate cases and to flag common patterns; every model-flagged case was human-reviewed. The analysis is scoped to 18 U.S.C. § 111; other statutes occasionally used against protesters and immigrants (e.g., stalking) are outside its scope.

Historical prosecution baselines (>90 percent conviction/plea rate) are from the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics as reported by the U.S. Courts (statistical tables, Dec. 31, 2025).

Source

• Mike McIntire, Danny Hakim, Alexandra Berzon, Jazmine Ulloa, and Lauren McCarthy, “They Were Charged With Assaulting ICE Agents. The Cases Are Crumbling,” The New York Times, July 18, 2026.