Hannah Critchfield

Can you introduce yourself and tell us what you cover?

Sure.

I'm Hannah Critchfield, and I'm a reporter on the investigations desk here at The Journal.

I and a team of other reporters have been looking into claims that the government has made in the last year about an increase in assaults on federal officers, oftentimes immigration officers.

Government officials were talking about seeing a 300% increase in assaults, a 500% increase in assaults on officers.

Our team analyzed more than 200 videos associated with these assault allegations, from police body camera footage to bystander recordings from social media, and many of them cast doubt on the federal government's claims that agents were assaulted.

We also found that of the 181 American citizens that the Trump administration accused of attacking federal officers, close to half were never charged with assaults, and none had been convicted at trial.

What did these findings tell you?

You know, they show that U.S.

citizens are caught in the crosshairs of an aggressive government campaign to detain and demonize detractors, including by calling them terrorists, rioters, and agitators.

The Department of Homeland Security, which was created in 2002 to protect Americans, has turned its force against U.S.

citizens.

Each time the government identified a person on a post, we tracked that case through the legal system.

So, you know, what charges were brought?

Under what statute?

Were those charges later modified?

What happened to the person in the case?

So she ends up going over there to record what's going on.

Essentially, she has her phone out, and she is documenting...

So there's this handful of federal agents at the jail and she's recording them and she moves for a clear review and an agent grabs her and pins her to a wall.