An 18-year-old in Oregon was arrested last week with knives, materials used to manufacture Molotov cocktails, and a manifesto allegedly outlining a plan to gun down and firebomb ICE agents at a Portland office. The Department of Homeland Security is now investigating — and pointing the finger directly at the Democratic politicians whose rhetoric, officials say, is fueling the violence.

Rayden Coleman, a U.S. citizen, was stopped by the St. Helens Police Department during a routine traffic stop north of Portland. What officers found in that vehicle wasn't routine at all. Coleman reportedly told investigators he planned to pick up an AR-15 from a licensed dealer the next day to carry out the attack. He reportedly admitted to making statements about beheading ICE agents.

Fox News reported that he now faces six counts of manufacturing a destructive device and two counts of conspiracy to commit first-degree assault. He's being held in the Columbia County jail on $400,000 bail.

DHS Draws a Straight Line From Capitol Hill to the Crime

The day before DHS went public with its response, House Democrats sat across from acting ICE Director Todd Lyons in a congressional hearing and compared his agents to Nazis and the Gestapo. Several Democrats referenced the deaths of two anti-ICE activists, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, who were killed while opposing federal immigration authorities.

Assistant DHS Secretary Tricia McLaughlin didn't mince words in a statement to Fox News Digital:

"Every day there are more assaults, more vehicle-ramming attacks, more attempts to kill our officers. Now, we have an American citizen planning to kill ICE officers with Molotov cocktails and gun them down. It's disturbing."

Then she connected the dots that Washington politely pretends aren't there:

"Sanctuary politicians comparing ICE day-in and day-out to the Nazi Gestapo, the Secret Police and slave patrols have real-world consequences. The men and women of ICE and CBP are fathers and mothers, sons and daughters. They get up every morning to try and make our communities safer. Like everyone else, they just want to go home to their families at night. The violence and dehumanization of these men and women who are simply enforcing the law must end."

This isn't an abstraction. DHS says assaults against ICE officers have surged more than 1,300 percent. Death threats have exploded by 8,000 percent. Those numbers aren't accidents. They're the downstream output of a political class that decided law enforcement officers make useful villains.

The Feedback Loop Nobody on the Left Will Acknowledge

There's a pattern here, and it's worth spelling out because it repeats in nearly every cycle of Democratic immigration politics.

Step one: Democratic politicians compare ICE agents to history's worst monsters — Nazis, slave patrols, secret police. Step two: activists absorb those comparisons as literal. Step three: someone acts on them. Step four: Democrats express no accountability and pivot to the next round of comparisons.

An 18-year-old allegedly sat down and wrote a manifesto about killing federal agents. He gathered the materials to build incendiary weapons. He had a plan to acquire a rifle. This wasn't idle chatter on social media. This was operational planning.

And the political environment that nurtured it isn't hard to trace. Portland — the same city where Coleman allegedly planned his attack — saw hundreds of protesters march from City Hall to an ICE center on February 1, a confrontation that escalated until agents deployed pepper balls, tear gas, and flashbang grenades. Minneapolis saw protesters using whistles to alert neighborhoods to ICE activity, facing off with police in late January. This is the climate.

When you tell people for months that federal officers are the moral equivalent of the Gestapo, some of those people will believe you. Some of them will act on it. You don't get to shrug that off.

A Funding Fight With Security on the Line

All of this collides with a congressional deadline: lawmakers have until Friday at midnight to fund DHS. Democrats are threatening to shut down the government if their demands for ICE reforms — demands they haven't publicly specified in detail — aren't met.

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem framed the stakes in an exclusive statement to Fox News Digital last week:

"I think they (Democrats) are using families as political weapons. And this is a little bit different, because when it's the whole government that they shut down, they're not necessarily just attacking security."

"This feels like a direct attack on the security of our country, our homeland. And it's almost as though they've gotten so extreme, they don't care if we're out there on the front lines keeping our country safe from terrorists, keeping our country safe from murderers and rapists."

Consider the sequence: Democrats spend a hearing calling ICE agents Nazis, then threaten to defund the very department investigating a plot to murder those agents. The left frames this as principled resistance. It looks more like a protection racket — demonize the officers, then hold their funding hostage.

Words Have Consequences But Only When Conservatives Say Them

The same political movement that spent years lecturing Americans about the power of words — that speech is violence, that rhetoric has consequences, that language creates "unsafe environments" — has decided none of that applies when the target wears a DHS badge.

Compare ICE to the Gestapo on the floor of Congress? That's speaking truth to power. A conservative uses a pointed metaphor at a rally? That's incitement.

The standard was never about protecting people from dangerous rhetoric. It was about controlling who gets to speak sharply and who gets silenced. The inconsistency isn't a bug. It's the entire architecture.

Meanwhile, an 18-year-old sits in a Columbia County jail cell, and the agents he allegedly planned to kill still go to work every morning in Portland. They enforce laws that Congress passed. They execute warrants that courts approved. For this, they are compared to history's greatest criminals by the same legislators who control their paychecks.

The investigation is ongoing. The rhetoric isn't slowing down. And the men and women of ICE still have to make it home at night.