A Portland, Oregon, man pleaded guilty to his role in the violent assault of a U.S. Immigration and Customs (ICE) officer in June 2025. Robert Jacob Hoopes pleaded guilty to aggravated assault of a federal employee with a dangerous weapon resulting in bodily injury on Wednesday.
According to court documents, the ICE field office in Portland had been under constant siege of protests for several weeks before the incident involving Hoopes occurred on June 14, 2025. Protesters and agitators were known to have engaged in acts of aggression involving violence towards ICE employees and actions that caused damage to personal and government property at the facility, according to the criminal complaint filed against Hoopes.
According to the FBI, the violence against ICE agents involved throwing rocks, trash, and bricks pulled from the facility driveway. Hoopes was observed by security cameras engaging in similar behavior at the time he committed the assault at the facility, court documents revealed.
Stationed near a doorway to the facility, cameras captured images showing Hoopes throwing a rock into the building, striking an ICE Enforcement and Removal officer in the face, causing significant facial injury. Later, Hoopes would join other agitators at the facility in using a metal pole from a damaged stop sign as a makeshift battering ram to strike the facility’s front door.
In addition to a felony Aggravated Assault of a Federal Officer with a Dangerous Weapon, Hoopes was charged with Depredation of Federal Property in Excess of $1,000 for his role in using the metal pole to ram the doorway of the facility. According to court documents, the estimated repair cost for the facility door exceeded $7,000.
Photos of Hoopes taken on the day of the assault were used to identify him using facial recognition software, the FBI reported. The facial recognition software returned probable matches to existing photos online, culled from various public databases. One photo most resembling the suspect, later identified as Hoopes, was tied to Reed College and showed a similar tattoo on Hoopes left arm captured by security footage at the time of the assault.
The FBI contacted the Reed College Director of Community Safety, who provided the last known address for Hoopes, who graduated with a degree in computer science from the institution in 2023. According to a report on Oregon Live, the community safety director was later fired by Reed College for providing information to the FBI about the former alumnus’s address and phone number.
Hoopes is scheduled for sentencing before a U.S. District Court Judge on May 12, 2026. He faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, a $250,000 fine, and three years of supervised release.
Randy Clark is a 32-year veteran of the United States Border Patrol. Before his retirement, he served as the Division Chief for Law Enforcement Operations, directing operations for nine Border Patrol Stations within the Del Rio, Texas, Sector. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @RandyClarkBBTX.
