ICE shooter’s writings were ‘definitively anti-ICE’ and included ‘hatred for the federal government,’ prosecutor says

By Amanda Musa, Chris Boyette, Priscilla Alvarez, Leigh Waldman, Elizabeth Wolfe, Leigh Waldman CNN

(CNN) — Handwritten notes left behind by the man who shot at a Dallas ICE field office on Wednesday indicated “hatred for the federal government” and led investigators to believe he intended to target ICE personnel and property, even though all three victims were detainees.

“The tragic irony for his evil plot here is that it was a detainee who was killed and two other detainees that were injured” during the attack, said Nancy Larson, acting US attorney for the Northern District of Texas.

The shooter, who fired indiscriminately at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility from the roof of another building, appears to have extensively planned the attack in advance, authorities said.

A collection of “crude notes” that included a “game plan of the attack and target areas at the facility” were found at the suspect’s home, Larson said.

“His words were definitively anti-ICE,” Larson said, adding, “He also hoped his actions would give ICE agents real terror of being gunned down. … What he did is the very definition of terrorism.”

The shooter was found dead at the scene, and no ICE agents or other law enforcement personnel were injured. The attack was at least the fourth instance of violence or a threat at an ICE or Customs and Border Protection facility in Texas this year.

Here’s what we know about the investigation, the victims and the suspect:

Shooter planned extensively, officials say

The shooter, who died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, has been identified by investigators as Joshua Jahn, 29, from Fairview, Texas, Larson said.

He appears to have acted alone when he drove to a building neighboring the ICE facility and likely used a large ladder to position himself on the roof, Larson said. Jahn was seen driving with the ladder on his car at about 3 a.m., hours before the attack, she added.

The shooting began at about 6:30 a.m. and bullets “sprayed the length of the building, the windows and law enforcement vans that were in the sally port area” of the ICE facility, the prosecutor said.

Gunshots slicing through the air from above sent visitors running for cover or peering out of their cars to investigate – some worried for family members inside the facility.

When Dallas police arrived at the scene, they found the shooter’s body and some bullets on the roof, one of which was labeled “ANTI ICE,” Larson said.

The gun, an 8mm bolt-action rifle, was obtained legally by the suspect in August, said FBI Agent in Charge Joseph Rothrock said.

Evidence so far indicates a “high degree of pre-attack planning,” and it appears the shooter conducted extensive research on ICE, ballistics and the September 10 sniper shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk in Utah, FBI Director Kash Patel said in a post on X.

Notes laid out targeted ‘game plan’

Loose notes found during a search of the shooter’s home provide the “clearest motivation” investigators have found for the attack, Rothrock said.

“It’s clear from these notes that he was targeting ICE agents and ICE personnel,” Larson said.

Larson detailed several revelations found in the notes:

• In one note, the shooter wrote, “Yes, it was just me and my brain.”
• The notes provided a “game plan of the attack and target areas at the facility.”
• The attacker referred to ICE employees as “people showing up to collect a dirty paycheck.” Larson added: “He wrote that he intended to maximize lethality against ICE personnel and to maximize property damage at the facility.”
• “He hoped to minimize any collateral damage or injury to the detainees and any other innocent people. It seems that he did not intend to kill the detainees or harm them,” Larson said.
• The writings suggest he hoped the shooting would “terrorize ICE employees and interfere with their work, which he called ‘human trafficking.’”

The attacker also wrote, “good luck with the digital footprint,” Larson said, noting that investigators believe this means he wiped data from his devices.

In addition to the shooter’s writings, Patel laid out multiple pieces of evidence that show the attack was premeditated, including records that he searched for information on ballistics and videos of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, as well as a downloaded document titled “Dallas County Office of Homeland Security & Emergency Management,” which contained a list of DHS facilities.

Investigators spent much of Wednesday scouring the scene of the shooting for evidence, with a CNN team recording video of authorities searching a Toyota at an office building near the field office. One side of the car displayed a United States map with the words “Radioactive fallout from nuclear detonations have passed over these areas more than 2x since 1951.”

It is not immediately clear what connection the vehicle has to the shooting investigation.

Who are the victims?

When the victims were shot, they were in a van at the facility’s fortified entryway, DHS said. Shots were fired across the length of the facility, with bullet holes found throughout the building, officials have said.

The three people shot while detained at the Dallas field office had been arrested and were awaiting transfer to a longer-term facility, ICE Deputy Director Madison Sheahan told Fox News.

DHS said they were shot while in a van in the sally port, a controlled entry point commonly found in prisons and on military bases. This is an area where agents typically will bring in detainees, ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons told Fox News.

Authorities have not named the victims. They were in the country illegally, Sheahan said.

One of the injured detainees is a Mexican national, according to a statement from Mexico’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The ministry said the head of its North American Unit expressed concern for the wounded Mexican national and requested clarification of the shooting’s events and unrestricted access to the person, the statement reads.

While DHS called the shooting “an attack on ICE law enforcement,” none of the people shot were members of law enforcement, Rothrock noted during a news conference Wednesday.

What is the suspect’s background?

Jahn does not appear to have affiliations with specific groups or entities, nor did his writings mention government agencies other than ICE, Larson said.

Jahn had lived in a Dallas suburb and was charged a decade ago with delivering marijuana, according to court records.

In 2016, when he was 19, Jahn was charged with delivering more than one-fourth of an ounce of marijuana, according to Collin County court records. He pleaded guilty and the case against him was deferred, with Jahn being placed on probation.

The charge is classified in Texas law as a “state jail felony,” the least severe type of felony in the state.

In late 2017, Jahn drove cross-country to work a minimum-wage job harvesting marijuana for several months, Ryan Sanderson, owner of a legal cannabis farm in Washington state, told The Associated Press.

“He’s a young kid, a thousand miles from home, didn’t really seem to have any direction, living out of his car at such a young age,” Sanderson told the AP.

A Joshua Jahn studied at Collin College in the Dallas suburb of McKinney “at various times” between 2013 and 2018, a school spokesperson told the AP via email.

Jahn voted in the Democratic primary in March 2020 and hasn’t voted since then in Collin County, according to records provided to CNN by the county Elections Department. Voters in Texas don’t declare a political party when registering to vote but choose a party’s ballot when voting in primaries.

Who is detained at the facility?

On any given day, people detained by ICE are processed at the agency’s field office in Dallas – a rectangular, brick building tucked between a busy highway, several law offices and a luxury apartment complex.

Detainees are typically held at the field office for a short time during processing before they are transferred to a detention center, according to a former senior ICE official. The building contains three or four holding cells, the official said.

More than 8,000 detainees have been temporarily held at the facility over the first six months of the Trump administration, according to a CNN analysis of ICE data obtained by the Deportation Data Project, a research group associated with the UC Berkeley School of Law.

On average, detainees stayed about 14 hours in the Dallas office, according to the data, which runs through late July.

ICE has kept detainees for days or longer in some hold rooms around the country, CNN reported earlier this month.

A longstanding ICE policy restricted the agency from keeping detainees in hold rooms for more than 12 hours, but the agency amended that in June to allow stays of up to 72 hours in hold room facilities like the Dallas field office.

People who were detained at the facility have been moved to a different Texas detention center to complete processing, according to George Rodriguez, an immigration attorney and ICE liaison for the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

Meanwhile, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said agencies will continue to “arrest, detain, and deport any individuals in this country illegally — without interruption.”

This story has been updated.

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CNN’s Dakin Andone, Chris Boyette, Casey Tolan, Curt Devine, Maureen Chowdhury, Alisha Ebrahimji, Elise Hammond, Graham Hurley, Holmes Lybrand, Tori B. Powell, Taylor Romine, Aditi Sangal and Cindy Von Quednow contributed to this report.