Federal officials have been sounding alarms about soaring assaults on immigration officers, touting eye-popping percentage jumps. But when you drill down into San Diego court records, the story looks a lot less like a tidal wave of violent crime and more like a modest bump in cases that often fizzle before they ever reach a jury.
Local filings and courtroom activity help explain the disconnect. According to The San Diego Union-Tribune, the U.S. attorney’s office in the Southern District of California charged about 22 defendants in Department of Homeland Security-related assault matters in 2025, after recording 19 prosecutions in fiscal 2023 and 11 in fiscal 2024. The Union-Tribune’s review also found roughly 24 prosecutions in the first 13 months of the current administration and reported that prosecutors have dismissed roughly 10 assault charges after re-evaluating cases in court filings.
DHS’s headline numbers and how they’re counted
The Department of Homeland Security has relied on internal tallies and public statements that show increases in the hundreds, and sometimes more, depending on the time frame it chooses. DHS and ICE cite incident reports, safety logs and internal classifications when they roll out those dramatic percentage spikes. In one July release, the department highlighted surging counts of assaults against ICE personnel, pointing to what it described as an 830 percent increase, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
Why charging decisions don’t always follow incident tallies
Translating a rough encounter in the field into a federal felony conviction is not as simple as copying an incident number into a press release. Prosecutors have to meet statutory elements and evidentiary standards that, in the Ninth Circuit, are shaped by case law. The Ninth Circuit has held that a conviction for assault on a federal officer requires “some form of assault,” not just interference with an officer’s duties, a principle reflected in the circuit’s model jury instructions and its discussion in United States v. Chapman. That requirement narrows the reported incidents that can realistically become federal assault cases, as outlined by the Ninth Circuit model jury instructions.
What’s happened in San Diego courtrooms
That gap between what gets reported in the field and what can be proved in court is on full display in recent San Diego cases. The Union-Tribune reported that several assistant U.S. attorneys moved to dismiss assault counts after reviewing the evidence, telling judges that dropping the charges was in the best interest of justice. In another example, a local defendant, Jeane Wong, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor assault and is scheduled to be sentenced in March. Taken together, those motions, plea deals, and dismissals show how many alleged run-ins with officers end without a felony conviction or a jury trial.
Arrests rose, but charges and convictions lag
At the same time, administrative arrests and field encounters in the San Diego region have climbed sharply, which helps explain DHS’s swelling pool of incident numbers. Local reporting and public-data analyses found big jumps in ICE and CBP arrests in San Diego and Imperial counties in mid-2025, with one analysis showing a roughly 1,500 percent spike in certain months, but many of those arrests were administrative or civil rather than criminal cases brought as federal felonies, according to CalMatters. That split goes a long way toward explaining why DHS’s incident counts look far larger than the number of sustained federal prosecutions.
Legal and policy implications…