Internal emails reveal that a top Department of Homeland Security (DHS) attorney suggested federal agents should have physically attacked anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) protesters in Los Angeles last summer — comments that a government watchdog group says the agency tried to hide.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the emails were obtained by the nonprofit watchdog group American Oversight through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and shared exclusively with the paper. The emails show that Joseph Mazzara, then-acting DHS general counsel, wrote on June 11 last year that agents should have “just started hitting the rioters and arresting everyone that couldn’t get away from them” during a protest near a federal building in Los Angeles.
In the same email, Mazzara wrote: “No one likes being hit by a stick, and people tend to run when that starts happening in earnest.” The DHS did not respond to requests for comment on the emails.
The email thread appears to have been part of a broader internal discussion about a lawsuit filed by California Governor Gavin Newsom over President Trump’s deployment of thousands of California National Guard troops to Los Angeles. The subject line of the chain read “California DOD Lawsuit.”
Mazzara’s comments referred to what became known as the “battering ram incident,” in which protesters allegedly used large rolling commercial dumpsters to try to breach the parking garage of a federal building. A June 19 order from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals confirmed that protesters threw objects at ICE vehicles, pinned down several Federal Protective Service officers, and hurled “concrete chunks, bottles of liquid, and other objects” at agents.
American Oversight said the agency had tried to withhold Mazzara’s specific comment. The watchdog received two versions of the documents — one with the statement visible but watermarked for withholding, and one with the statement fully redacted.
Chioma Chukwu, executive director of American Oversight, said the administration’s attempt to suppress the comments raises serious concerns. “They reveal a level of hostility toward protesters that is deeply at odds with the government’s obligation to protect civil liberties — and there’s no FOIA exemption that justifies hiding them,” she said.
Kerry Doyle, the former top ICE attorney during the Biden administration, said Mazzara’s words show a “shocking carelessness” about the potential for harm to both the public and the officers he was meant to counsel. The email, she said, “seems to encourage, or, at the very least, support constitutional violations by the operators that are supposed to be getting legal counsel from him to avoid violating the law.”
Doyle added that Mazzara overstepped his role by commenting on operational tactics. “He’s doing a disservice to the people that are on the front line, that rely on him and his colleagues to give them the parameters of what they can and can’t do,” she said. “If you give them bad legal advice, you are setting them up for liability.”
Mazzara was later appointed deputy commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Politico reported that Mazzara is among 10 staffers who followed former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem to the State Department after she was fired from DHS this month and reassigned as special envoy for the Shield of the Americas.
The protests last summer caused significant property damage in a small section of downtown Los Angeles. However, grand juries refused to indict many demonstrators accused by federal prosecutors of attacking agents. A Times review also found that most of the alleged assaults resulted in no injuries.
The broader controversy over the use of federal force during immigration enforcement has drawn scrutiny from civil liberties groups. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has separately filed FOIA requests demanding transparency about DHS policies targeting people who film immigration enforcement activity in public — a right the group says is protected by the First Amendment.
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