David Brouillette, the ICE agent who fatally gunned down a 25-year-old Colombian immigrant in Maine last month, is far from the only immigration agent with a history of domestic violence, according to a new report.
The Ohio Immigration Alliance flags the cases of 25 federal immigration agents or contractors criminally charged or credibly accused since President Donald Trump returned to power. The cases reveal a pattern of domestic violence, sex offenses against children, abuses of authority and corruption among the federal agents responsible for carrying out the administration’s mass deportation campaign.
While the Department of Homeland Security has claimed it is targeting the “worst of the worst,” some of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol officers charged are accused of predatory behavior against women who are vulnerable because of their immigration status.
The Ohio Immigrant Alliance took notice after Samuel Saxon, an assistant ICE field office director in Cincinnati, was arrested last December for assault and strangulation against his partner, who was revealed to be a non-citizen less than half Saxon’s age when they met.
Saxon’s arrest came on the heels of the federal prosecution of Andrew Golobic, a former ICE deportation officer in Columbus, who was sentenced to 12 years in prison for abusing his authority and forcing undocumented women to have sex with him while they were under his supervision in an alternatives-to-detention program.
“After noticing a trend of Cincinnati ICE agents committing sexual or violent offenses against women, the Ohio Immigrant Alliance began looking deeper into the criminal backgrounds of other agents,” Executive Director Lynn Tramonte said. “An inordinate number of ICE and Border Patrol agents committing sex offenses against children. Rampant domestic violence. Oftentimes, these acts were committed by agents with 10 and even 20 years on the force. There’s been something rotten at these agencies for a long time.”
While ICE is the agency most closely identified with Trump’s mass deportation campaign, the review by the Ohio Immigrant Alliance found that nearly three-quarters of the agents with criminal histories worked for Border Patrol, ICE’s sister agency under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security.
While ICE officers are responsible for the deaths of Johan Sebastián Durán Guererro in Maine, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, Renee Good in Minneapolis and others, one of the agents accused of killing Alex Pretti in Minneapolis was employed by Border Patrol while another worked for Customs and Border Protection.
Over the Border Patrol’s troubled history, agents have committed serial murder, serial rape, and child molestation. One, Juan David Ortiz, confessed to killing four sex workers in Texas in 2018. Another, John Daly III — dubbed the “East Valley Rapist” — was arrested in 2021 and charged with raping eight women in Arizona between 1999 and 2001. A third, Dana Ray Thornhill, was sentenced to 40 years in prison in 2020 after pleading guilty to repeatedly molesting two children between 1995 and 2007. Thornhill was hired by the agency despite having been arrested at the age of 13 for the sexual assault of a young girl.
The agency’s chief, Michael W. Banks, abruptly resigned in May, six weeks after publication of a story by the Washington Examiner citing allegations by former Border Patrol employees who said he had “bragged” to colleagues about paying for sex with prostitutes while traveling in Colombia and Thailand.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection did not respond to questions from Raw Story about whether Banks' departure was connected to the allegations in the Washington Examiner story or whether he faced an internal investigation over the allegations.
But an agency spokesperson told Raw Story, "We thank U.S. Border Patrol Chief Michael Banks for his decades of service to this country and congratulate him on his second retirement after returning to serve during one of the most challenging periods for border security. During his time as chief, the border was transformed from chaos to the most secure border ever recorded."
Banks’ short tenure as chief began with his appointment by Trump in January 2025, after previously serving as “border czar” for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and rising through the ranks of Border Patrol before that.
During the second Trump administration, a host of federal immigration agents and contractors have faced criminal charges, including Luis Uribe, a Border Patrol agent accused of forcing his way into different hotel rooms to rob and sexually assault women of Chinese descent in the Chicago suburbs; Malik Daley, a Border Patrol agent in Vermont charged with sexual assault of a girl under age 16 (he has pleaded not guilty), and David Courvelle, a contract detention officer who pleaded guilty to having sex with a female detainee at the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center.
The Ohio Immigrant Alliance is calling on Congress to freeze funding to ICE and Border Patrol, and to insist that the workforce be re-screened for histories of domestic violence and extremist ideology.
“Officers who abuse women at home are not safe to carry guns in public,” the report said. “Officers who prey on children are not safe to interact with communities. Officers who use their authority to coerce sex cannot be trusted to hold any authority at all.”
Concerns about the federal agencies’ vetting procedures only compounded with the arrest in February of a Department of Defense contract worker tasked with performing background checks for ICE and Homeland Security Investigations. David Brashad was charged with solicitation of prostitution after responding to a decoy ad on a website during a sting operation conducted by local police in the Minneapolis suburbs.
“A recurring theme throughout these examples is the abuse of authority,” the Ohio Immigrant Alliance report found. “These are not simply individuals who happened to work for DHS — many of them used their positions of power to commit, conceal, or contribute to their crimes. Some committed violent and sexual offenses during their terms of employment, yet remained employed and were even promoted.”
Following his arrest for assault and strangulation on state charges, Samuel Saxon, the assistant ICE field officer in Cincinnati, was federally charged with lying about the matter to a federal investigator. A federal prosecutor arguing for Saxon’s pretrial detention presented evidence of years of physical abuse and threats against his partner.
In one of the videos presented in court, a man believed to be Saxon can be heard yelling at a woman: “You stupid f------ b----,” “You got a fat lip, b----,” and “If I see you here in three days, you will be executed.”
Saxon’s partner of eight years was reportedly not a citizen at the time of his arrest. They had met when she was 18 years old and Saxon was more than twice her age, the prosecutor told the court, The woman said she had tried to leave the relationship, but was financially dependent on Saxon.
Police and EMS responded to 911 calls to the address where Saxon and his partner lived in Cincinnati at least 22 times, the prosecutor said. In April 2025, emergency crews transported the woman to the hospital, where she was found to be injured with a fractured hip, bruises all over her body and ligature marks around her throat. Doctors said she could have died or become permanently disabled, according to the prosecutor.
The prosecutor’s presentation during Saxon’s detention hearing suggests ICE missed significant red flags.
Prior to moving to Cincinnati, Saxon was assigned to an ICE field office in San Diego, and his boss there called the police to do a welfare check on him 16 hours after he didn’t show up for work. A police report indicates officers found him naked on the toilet while holding a knife to his own neck. Saxon’s supervisor in Cincinnati reportedly told prosecutors that he had a bad temper and would “go off” for no reason, while describing him as a “loose cannon.”
“There’s no way ICE was unaware of Saxon’s history of violence,” Tramonte said. “His victim had broken bones that required surgery…. The police came to his home 23 times in less than a year and a half. He had a DUI.
“This went on for years, ICE knew about it, and they kept promoting Saxon instead of firing him,” Tramonte added. “That’s not how a law enforcement agency should operate.”
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson responded, "The ICE Office of Professional Responsibility diligently applies the proper personnel vetting regulation, including guidelines for national security, and evaluates all available information for every applicant based on these factors."