US sees surge in violence against journalists under Trump, report says

The United States has seen a dramatic increase in violence against journalists since Donald Trump again took office. Protesters help a photojournalist during a protest in Compton, California, on 7 June 2025.Photograph: Ethan Swope/AP Most of the reporters and photographers who were allegedly attacked by law enforcement officials were covering protests over the Trump administration’s efforts to deport undocumented immigrants, according to the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a non-profit that tracks such incidents. The US press have suffered about as many assaults this year as in the previous three years combined, the organization states in a new report . That rise is largely because whenever there is significant civil unrest, journalists cover it, which makes them more vulnerable to attacks. But anti-media rhetoric from the US president and other public leaders has also increased hostility towards journalists, which can lead to more violence, according to press freedom advocates and journalism researchers. Trump has repeatedly lambasted the mainstream US media, baselessly accused it of lying about him and his policies and repeatedly insulted several journalists in public. “When the president models ridicule and delegitimization, it signals to supporters that journalists are fair targets,” said Lars Willnat, a Syracuse University professor who has studied the impact of political polarization on perceptions of journalists. “That shift matters because violence becomes easier to justify once journalists are seen as political combatants rather than neutral observers.” In 2025, millions of people protested against what they saw as the administration’s authoritarian actions , including allegedly deporting people without due process. Law enforcement ostensibly seeking to control crowds have instead sometimes indiscriminately used batons or fired at journalists, even though it was obvious they were there to document the events, according to reporters who have been struck. The foundation has reported 170 assaults against journalists - most of which occurred at protests concerning the administration’s immigration policies - this year before 16 December. From 2022 to 2024, there were a total of 175 assaults. The foundation states that it only reports “incidents that can be verified by first-person accounts or cross-referenced by multiple news sources”. During “Operation Midway Blitz”, an immigration crackdown in the Chicago area, journalists were assaulted 34 times over six weeks outside a detention facility in Broadview, Illinois, according to the foundation. While it is, of course, Trump behind the deportations, journalists’ treatment at protests cannot necessarily be connected to the president’s words, the press advocates say. The foundation launched an incident tracker in large part because of journalists who were arrested and assaulted during 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri, said Stephanie Sugars, a senior reporter with the foundation who authored the recent report; Barack Obama was then the president. “We have routinely found” since the tracker launched in 2017 “that protests are the most dangerous place for journalists in the US”, Sugars said. While Trump has called journalists the “ enemy of the people ”, it’s hard to determine whether there is a “direct line of causation” between his rhetoric and the...

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