ICE Claimed The Cartel Have Put $50k Bounties On Agents, They Lied
When ICE wants sympathy, it doesn’t go to therapy. It goes to the press.
By André Costa | 17 October 2025
This week, the Department of Homeland Security began pushing a story that Mexican cartels have placed bounties on ICE and CBP agents, with tiered payments, they said, like some deranged loyalty program for assassins. Two thousand for information, five thousand for assaults, fifty thousand for killings. The issue with all of this, is that it’s complete and utter bulls***.
Claudia Sheinbaum said her government had received no intelligence and no communication from the United States, the Mexican president learned about it through American media like everyone else. The odds of the Mexican government not knowing about such an organised scheme by the cartels is so close to zero that it can be entirely discounted.
Experts in organised crime have also shared their utter disbelief that such a scheme exists, with the Guardian citing a former Mexican cartel trafficker, two former DEA agents and a drug policy scholar as opposing the idea of these bounties existing.
ICE has a long history of crying wolf when its reputation starts to collapse. In July, the agency accused us at the Crustian Daily of “helping cartels” because we began documenting ICE abuses, agents and exposing its network of private contractors through our ICE List project. The statement was published in Newsweek and was an open attempt to throw us into bed with the cartels, despite us never having contact with the cartels. It said that publicizing information about ICE raids, detention centers, or contractors “aided transnational criminal organizations,” in other words, if you report on ICE, you’re helping the cartels.
We're Building a Database of ICE Identities, Here's Why.
The United States government has deployed agents into its own communities to carry out raids, separate families, and detain people with little to no accountability. These agents often work behind layers of bureaucracy, hidden from the public, shielded by uniforms, badges, and vague press releases. They act with power, but without visibility.
This is what happens when an agency born in the shadows tries to survive public scrutiny. It lies and invents enemies, as without those enemies, it’s hard to justify many of the awful actions undertaken by the Trump regime’s private army.
For years, ICE has operated like an unregulated paramilitary force inside the United States. It was created after 9/11, when fear was the currency of power, and it never stopped spending. Under both Republican and Democratic administrations, ICE became the go-to tool for political theater, it raids homes at dawn, drags families from beds, and calls themselves law enforcement. ICE hides behind “national security” whenever anyone asks for transparency, and when it’s caught, it blames someone else.
Now, with public opinion at record lows, the agency is trying to change the script again. The “cartel bounty” doesn’t exist, but the claim that it does allows ICE to paint themselves as soldiers on the front line, matching up to the wartime rhetoric that has become the norm for the US regime. ICE are not on the frontline of a war, they are on the frontline of an authoritarian takeover, that’s why they need these lies.
If any of this were real, there would be arrests, investigations, and briefings with Mexico’s security agencies. There would be a shred of evidence.
Let’s be clear, there is absolutely no proof of any bounty system, and the US government will not share any proof, no matter how many journalists ask them to. This has absolutely nothing to do with fact sharing, this doesn’t even have anything to do with the cartels or Trump’s political enemies in the USA, this is all about Trump’s base.
So much of the rhetoric from the US ruling party is designed to cause rage within the MAGA base, a base that a deleted US government study showed are more prone to violence.
The US Government Deleted Its Own Study Showing Far-Right Violence Dominates Domestic Terrorism
The U.S. Department of Justice quietly scrubbed a study from its website that confirmed that far-right extremists have carried out more ideologically motivated killings in the United States than any other group. An archived version of the study still remains online.
Trump’s desire to call on the insurrection act and install himself as the US dictator relies on a campaign of violence and disruption. Trump’s big issue on that front, is that the American public have been almost entirely peaceful in their protest of the regime’s takeover. In the absence of genuine uprising, they need to try provoke one.
We have seen the consistent shootings by the American right this year, almost all of which can be tied to extremist rhetoric from the ruling regime. Political violence is at its highest in centuries in the USA, and that is by design. When the political left won’t rise to the violence that Trump wants, they know they can spin the media to encourage the right to fill in the void of violence.
Every time ICE faces accountability, it manufactures a threat. When immigrants die in detention, it claims the attacker was shooting at agents. When protests expose its abuses, it blames activists. When journalists uncover its operations, it blames the press. And now, when the agency’s credibility is evaporating, it blames the cartels.
But the reality doesn’t match the rhetoric. There have been no attacks, or plots and there is no evidence. Just a story built for the cameras, told by an agency desperate to justify its own existence.
ICE was never meant to protect people. It was created to protect a system built on fear. And when that system starts to crumble, it does what all empires do. It invents an enemy.
Until they produce a shred of evidence, the only bounty here is the one they’ve placed on the truth itself.