Former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Tom Homan criticized the decision by a federal grand jury to acquit a man who offered a $500 reward to anyone who would kill an ICE agent, The Daily Caller reports.
Brandon Ziobroski was acquitted of charges relating to a tweet he posted in July 2018, saying that he would “scrounge and literally give $500 to anyone who kills an ice agent.” Although Ziobroski had posted numerous other violent threats from his Twitter account that later got him permanently banned, it was the ICE tweet that led to his arrest the following month.
His acquittal marks the end of the year-and-a-half-long trial. Ziobroski’s defense argued that his tweets were simply “hyperbolic political statements” and protected by his First Amendment right to Freedom of Speech.
Homan reacted to the decision by calling it “disgusting,” adding “this is clearly a terroristic threat…in any state in the union…offering someone to kill somebody is a felony.” Homan also accused Boston of having “a different set of rules in place” because of its status as a sanctuary city.
Homan additionally referred to the more mainstream criticisms and insults towards ICE by leading political figures, including “[Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and the rest of these people who push the false narrative about ICE and what they do.”
There has been an increase in attacks by far-left terrorists on ICE facilities and other immigration authorities within the last year, including a shooting at a San Antonio ICE office that resulted in no injuries. An immigration facility in Florida was attacked by a woman who threw a Molotov cocktail into the building before being arrested, also resulting in no injuries.
In July, an Antifa member opened fire on an ICE facility in Tacoma, Washington before being gunned down by police. He left behind a manifesto that explicitly cited the words of Ocasio-Cortez, who labeled ICE facilities as “concentration camps.”