Riots broke out in Minneapolis in 2020 and were revived during 2025 and 2026 in opposition to ICE. Photo courtesy of Swarthmore University. Since 2020, the United States has experienced sustained waves of politically-motivated violence and property crime, from the BLM and Antifa riots following George Floyd’s overdose death, through a surge in urban shoplifting, to the current pattern of assaults on ICE officers during the Trump administration’s deportation operations.Throughout this period, mainstream media and Democratic officials have repeatedly dismissed conservative claims about the scale of this violence and crime as exaggerated, politically motivated, or fabricated.The documented data and government reporting examined in this piece back up what conservative officials and lawmakers have been saying all along. The methods used to dispute those claims, whether comparing incompatible data sets, downplaying a real increase with the word “only,” or citing crime statistics that leave out documented rises in specific offenses, do not hold up once the underlying sourcing is examined directly.During the Summer of Love for St. George Floyd, who became a martyr for the left, violence broke out nationwide and was enabled by the weak law enforcement response of mayors and governors in blue states and cities. In many municipalities where the police or federal officers were able to enforce the law, activist judges and district attorneys released perpetrators who, in many cases, rejoined the riots the following day.The nationwide damage toll was staggering: 8,700 protests across 68 jurisdictions between May 25 and July 31, 2020, 574 of which were violent; 16,241 arrests, including 2,735 felonies; 2,037 officers injured, with 97 police cars burned and 624 arsons among 68 responding agencies; and 60,105 officers assaulted nationwide across all of 2020, up 7.2 percent from 2019. Portland alone saw over 100 nights of consecutive violence and 270 injuries to 140 federal officers, while insured property losses reached $1 billion to $2 billion nationwide, making it the costliest civil disorder in U.S. insurance history.When President Biden came to office, he allowed the disorder to continue and compounded the problem by opening the southern border, allowing an estimated ten million illegals into the country. The two policies together, weak on riots, permissive about no-cash bail and a lack of consequences for criminal activities, combined with passivity regarding illegal entries, established a pattern that emboldened not only lawbreakers but convinced many on the left that it was permissible to ignore laws they don’t like and that the very act of law enforcement is “Nazi” or “fascist.”Shoplifting skyrocketed in many urban areas, with reported incidents up 64 percent in New York and 61 percent in Los Angeles between 2019 and 2023, and surging 46 percent in Chicago in 2024 alone, causing drug and department stores to shut down in many places, while others installed locked plastic shields protecting the goods on the shelves. Store closures tied to theft have continued into 2026: The North Face closed its 50-year-old Berkeley, California location in 2026, citing organized retail theft, part of a broader wave of closures by Target, Walgreens, Whole Foods, Kroger, REI, and other retailers since 2023.Claims of falling crime nationwide typically center on the sharp decline in homicide. A Council on Criminal Justice report released in mid-2026 found homicide had fallen to near century-low levels, with most tracked offenses also declining. Shoplifting, however, was the sole property offense in the study that remained above pre-pandemic levels, running roughly 5 percent higher than 2019 rates even as homicide fell sharply. Sexual assault also rose during the same period, up 3 percent in the first half of 2026 compared to the same period in 2025, even as aggravated assault, robbery, burglary, and other larceny offenses declined.Industry data tells a starkly different story than the police-reported crime statistics cited above. While the Council on Criminal Justice’s police-data analysis found shoplifting nationally about 5 percent above 2019 levels, the National Retail Federation reported a 93 percent increase in shoplifting incidents and a 90 percent increase in dollar losses between 2019 and 2023, with incidents rising a further 18 percent in 2024 alone. Total U.S. retail shrink reached an estimated $90 billion in 2025, according to the Appriss Retail 2026 Total Retail Loss Benchmark Report. Retailers say only about 64 percent of theft incidents are ever reported to police, meaning official crime statistics, drawn entirely from police records, would understate the true scale of shoplifting regardless of jurisdiction.Reported increases in crime, including property crime, may themselves be understated, since national crime data suffers from documented reliability problems at both the technical and classification level. Independent analysis found agencies transitioning to the FBI’s newer reporting system have at times submitted incomplete data, in one case causing LAPD’s reported property crime to show an artificial 52 percent drop that skewed national figures.Separately, a 2015 Los Angeles Times investigation found LAPD had misclassified roughly 14,000 serious assaults as minor offenses over several years, and a 2014 New Orleans Inspector General audit found 46 percent of tested forcible rape cases had been misclassified. A Justice Department investigation confirmed in December 2025 that Washington, D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department had widely misclassified crime reports, making the city’s statistics “artificially lower” than actual crime; a House Oversight Committee report alleged the department’s chief pressured commanders to downgrade classifications and retaliated against those who reported crime spikes. Together, these documented cases, spanning technical reporting gaps and deliberate downgrading at the point of initial classification, indicate the true scale of property crime, assault, and sexual assault is likely higher than official statistics show.Since Trump returned to office and began a deportation regimen to remove the millions of illegals while securing the border, the left has rallied around opposing immigration enforcement, interfering with and attacking ICE agents, which has resulted in increased use of force, acts of violence, and several self-defense shootings. That pattern of attacks on federal officers documented in Portland during 2020 was an early instance of sustained violence against federal law enforcement; that violence has since extended to ICE, with DHS reporting 275 assaults on ICE officers during 2025, versus 19 in 2024, a claimed 1,347 percent increase, along with 66 vehicular attacks on ICE officers from January 2025 to January 2026, versus two the prior year.The left blames Trump or ICE for the violence or for using “violent” tactics during deportations when, in actuality, in most cases the violence wouldn’t have taken place if the protesters hadn’t interfered with or attacked ICE agents.Rather than focusing on an alarming increase in leftist violence, mainstream media have been focusing on “debunking” DHS claims about the increased incidence of assaults on officers. An NPR/CPR analysis of federal court records found a 25 percent rise in charges filed for assault on a federal officer through mid-September 2025.A 25 percent rise is itself a significant increase in violence against federal law enforcement and would be treated as alarming and newsworthy on its own. Some media coverage, however, precedes the figure with the word “only,” framing it as a dismissal of DHS claims.The two figures measure fundamentally different things. DHS’s numbers count incidents reported directly by its own officers, while court-records analyses like NPR/CPR’s can only capture charges that were formally filed, a smaller and structurally distinct category. Not every assault results in a filed charge, and not every filed charge survives to become a completed case.A Reuters review found 31 percent of federal assault-on-officer cases filed since January 2025 were later dismissed, rising to 45 percent for cases tied to immigration enforcement arrests. A San Diego analysis found prosecutors dropped 10 of 22 such cases in the administration’s first year, a higher rate than under the Biden administration. A court-records count will therefore always run lower than an internal incident count, regardless of how many assaults actually occurred, which limits how directly DHS’s percentage can be compared against NPR/CPR’s.The media has intentionally framed the dismissals or dropped charges as proof that the incidents didn’t happen, that DHS lied, or that it filed “bogus” charges. However, dismissal does not necessarily mean an assault did not happen, nor does it mean that the case was too weak to be prosecuted. It certainly doesn’t mean that the incidents were fake.Cases are dropped for a range of reasons, including policy-driven non-prosecution by local officials. In Portland, Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt announced in August 2020 that his office would decline to prosecute most protest-related arrests, resulting in roughly 70 percent of nearly 1,000 cases being dropped regardless of the underlying conduct.Even federal prosecutors, who stepped in after Schmidt’s office declined most cases, later dismissed 31 of 90 protest-related cases, including four felony charges for assault on a federal officer, despite public vows of aggressive prosecution.DHS and federal prosecutors have also declined to pursue charges in cases where video evidence appears to clearly document an assault, likely because the damage involved was too minor to justify the cost and difficulty of prosecution. In Minneapolis, video from a January 13, 2026 confrontation shows Alex Pretti spitting at federal agents and kicking and breaking the taillight of an agent’s SUV.He was not taken into custody and no charges were ever filed. A former federal prosecutor, Fred Tecce, said Pretti should have been charged and that he wasn’t due to the political “environment” surrounding immigration enforcement in Minneapolis.Legal defense, well-funded by activist organizations, also raises the cost and difficulty of securing a conviction, which makes it more likely that DHS will drop charges. Prominent Democratic officials have publicly supported such funds for people arrested in these riots and protests: then-Senator Kamala Harris promoted the Minnesota Freedom Fund during the 2020 unrest, which raised over $41 million that year, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez promoted a legal defense fund covering bail and legal fees for protesters arrested in 2019, including several charged with assaulting police officers. Nationwide, bail funds raised more than $100 million during the 2020 protests alone.These funds remain active. In January 2026, the Legal Rights Center, a Minneapolis nonprofit previously led for five years by current Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, began promoting the newly formed People’s Bail Fund of Minnesota specifically to post bail for people arrested at anti-ICE protests, as charges in the surrounding weeks ranged up to assaulting law enforcement.The Legal Rights Center received nearly $5.7 million in government grants between 2021 and 2024, including at least $400,000 from the Minnesota Department of Public Safety. A Washington Examiner investigation found a broader network of Minnesota bail funds, some taxpayer-funded, working to free anti-ICE activists on a repeat basis.The post Riots, Open Borders, Theft, and Assaults on ICE: How the Media Downplays the Pattern appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.