I saw how leftists scarred our Vietnam vets — anti-ICE mobs are repeating history

A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent punches a protester in the face during a clash outside Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey, U.S., May 28, 2026. REUTERS

Less than five months after the chaotic and deadly anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis, the well-funded, well-organized, disruptive political movement seeks more scalps.

Anti-ICE obstruction and violence always occurs in Democrat-led “sanctuary cities.”

This time, it’s Newark, New Jersey.

The plum target for angry agitators this past week is Delaney Hall, a privately operated 1,000-bed facility where US Immigration and Customs Enforcement oversees one of the largest immigration detention sites in the country.

The Delaney Hall detainees are “the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens,” the Department of Homeland Security says — but that matters little to the hundreds of assembled protesters hurling profanity at uniformed ICE officers and obstructing their movements.

Rioters sprayed a chemical substance on officers during one evening’s clash, and multiple demonstrators have been arrested for assaulting agents.

One was caught on video threatening to kill an ICE officer along with his family: “Your children, your wife — all dead,” he shrieked.

Gangs of masked, keffiyeh-clad radicals are screaming vile slogans — like “Every cop, every fed, shoot yourself in the head” — in agents’ faces. 

And elected officials are egging them on.

Gov. Mikie Sherill, who joined the angry mob on Monday, called ICE a “secret police force” and President Donald Trump’s “personal militia.”  

Sen. Andy Kim (D-NJ) claimed they represent the “lawlessness of the Trump administration.”

The sickening scenes have jolted my memory back to a painful tale my father, a 1960 West Point graduate and US Army officer, reluctantly shared with me as a child.

When he returned home from his tour in Vietnam in late 1967, my dad’s flight out of Saigon overnighted in Guam before its final leg into Los Angeles International Airport.

Between Guam and LAX, the servicemen — a mix of soldiers and Marines, officers and enlisted — received orders to change out of their khaki uniforms and utilities into civilian attire.

The brass hoped a costume change would help them avoid the crowds of angry demonstrators who were gathering at the airport, ready to scream epithets and fling human excrement at these men, these fellow Americans, who had just served a year in hell.

The protesters weren’t fooled — civvies couldn’t disguise their targets’ close-cropped haircuts and military bearing.

Armed with invective and handfuls of human filth, they surged past flimsy barricades to accost the arriving soldiers.

This was my dad’s “welcome home.”

But the demonstrators were beyond foolish for thinking those young men were responsible for American policy in Vietnam.

They weren’t the architects; they were the instruments.

Long before war-related PTSD and emotional scarring were accepted as legitimate, these men were subjected to the worst kind of reintroduction-to-society abuses.

No amount of apologies or “let’s make this right” pledges can ever fix what they endured. 

Today, the left is making the exact same mistake, making the officers enforcing US immigration laws the targets of their misplaced blame.

How is it that history is repeating — not just at demonstrations, but in our local communities?

Case in point: In March my wife, who serves as an attorney for DHS, ran for a part-time, nonpartisan board seat in the Upstate New York village where we live.

A few residents cynically “outed” her employment on social media and vocally opposed her candidacy on that basis.

They claimed she was unfit for office because of her involvement with the legal end of ICE detainers.

One local coffee shop denizen advised me that her affiliation with so loathsome an agency was simply a “stain.”

Our family was forced to swap out vehicles on a daily basis to counter the protesters showing up at her office: Yes, we literally feared for her and her fellow employees’ safety.

This is wrong — and deeply un-American.

Voters in our wonderful village, a bedroom community for West Point, saw through the calculated hysteria and elected her despite the smears.

Yet the logical fallacy that is “blaming the operator for the policy” remains evergreen.

In a healthy republic, citizens can disagree vehemently on policy — but must separate those disagreements, however morally or politically profound, from the government servants tasked to enforce our laws.

The reckoning we experienced over the mistreatment of our Vietnam veterans took time.

The brave men and women of ICE deserve a similar national apology.

James A. Gagliano is a retired FBI supervisory special agent and Fox News contributor.