Arrest made in Molotov attack on Atlanta ICE building

Good evening. I'm Theodore Hertzberg. I'm the United States Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia. I'm joined today by FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge Sean Matthews, FBI Acting Assistant Special Agent in Charge Joseph Zadik, HSI Acting Special Agent in Charge Ellen Johnson, and Atlanta Police Department Assistant Chief Charles Hampton Jr. Three days ago, at approximately this exact time, an individual hurled a Molotov cocktail at the ICE building located at 180 Ted Turner. The ICE building is an immigration and customs enforcement building that houses the Atlanta Immigration Court and the offices of the principal legal advisor to ICE and HSI, as well as enforcement and removal operations under ICE. The individual was caught on camera, and APD saw the incident happen and tried to pursue the individual responsible. Unfortunately, they were not able to apprehend him that day, but due to the exemplary work of the FBI working together with APD and the Joint Terrorism Task Force, a suspect was identified quickly. Earlier today, my office obtained a criminal complaint in federal court charging an individual named Inique, or Enique, I'm not sure of the pronunciation, I-N-I-Q-U-E, Hinton, with two federal crimes, essentially damaging a building by use of fire or explosives, colloquial called arson, as well as damaging government property. The arson charge carries a mandatory minimum penalty of five years and a maximum penalty of 20 years in federal prison, and the other offense can be punished by up to 10 years in federal prison. After identifying this suspect, they were able to quickly locate him, and he was arrested earlier today by FBI agents, and he is now in federal custody. This is an outstanding result within three days to identify and apprehend a suspect for this attack on the ICE building. Unfortunately, this is not the first time that the ICE building has been attacked. This happened approximately six years ago during the summer of 2020. But I want to make very clear we are not going back to that. In this city, in the northern district of Georgia, we will not tolerate attacks on government property and attacks against federal law enforcement. We take that absolutely seriously and we have no tolerance for it. And the actions of the agents and the police officers this week demonstrate that we are going to go after this and we are going to move very quickly. We are going to respond rapidly and we are going to hold people accountable. I want to note before I turn it over to Assistant Special Agent in Charge Matthews that I learned about this attack when I was out of town. Earlier this week, I stood with Vice President Vance and Attorney General Blanch in Ohio to announce a fraud case that my office is prosecuting against a scammer known as Shorty Dredd. I was in Ohio when Chief Shearbaum from APD called me to tell me about the attack on the ICE building. The partnership between APD and FBI and my office is outstanding. And I was glad to hear from Chief Shearbaum that he had already been in touch with the FBI and let them know that FBI was en route to pick up the investigation. The result of that coordination can be seen today. I am deeply appreciative to Chief Shearbaum, to the FBI, to everybody who worked on this investigation. There's more to come. This is the very beginning. And so there's a lot that we will not be able to say because the investigation is ongoing. There are warrants that are being executed today as we speak. But I wanted the community to know how quickly everyone responded to address this attack on our system of government. And that's what this was, an attack on this building. An attack on federal property is an attack against our democracy. It is an act of terrorism. It is an act of political violence. and it cannot stand. With that, I'll turn it over to Assistant Special Agent in Charge Matthews. Good evening. I just want to start by thanking our partners with the Atlanta Police Department and HSI and the GBI, GSP, and Cobb County who assisted us over the last several days during this investigation. This was a quick response by FBI Atlanta, and again, as was highlighted earlier, our partnership with APD couldn't be stronger. Within an hour of this incident occurring, We had agents on scene, our evidence response team, and investigative teams from our JTTF, along with HSI, on the scene collecting evidence and beginning to work this case. Over the next several days, we followed all logical leads, continued to pursue information, work with the community and our partners to identify the subject, and successfully took him into custody without incident today. So, again, this is an absolute highlight of the partnerships we have here in Atlanta and the state of Georgia. and I'm very pleased that we were able to arrest this subject within three days and again send the message that this type of behavior will not be tolerated in the city of Atlanta or the state of Georgia and if it occurs we will swiftly work with our partners to put an end to it. So thank you very much. With that I'll hand it over to my partner from HSI. Just to echo what the U.S. Attorney said and the FBI acting special agent in charge, violence towards law enforcement and our institutions is something we will never tolerate. Homeland Security Investigations special agents will pursue and investigate threats of violence against our personnel, DHS personnel, and our institutions and our facilities to protect the rule of law. We will use every available resource to bring those responsible to justice. I want to express our thanks to all the law enforcement partners that participated in this, particularly the U.S. Attorney's Office, the Atlanta Police Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and through our strong Joint Terrorism Task Force partnerships. Additionally, I want to thank our Department of Homeland Security partners, the Federal Protective Service as well as enforcement removal operations. Thank you. We'll take a few questions if there are any over the last for quite a while now. Are there going to be any enhanced security measures at that ICE facility after this attack place? So the ice facility is a secure facility and the ice facility was not incinerated as a result of this, but this was obviously an attack directed at the ICE facility, and that's why we need to respond very quickly. I'm not going to speak to what security measures exist or what we're going to do as a result of this attack, except to say that we are going to respond with extreme severity when it comes to prosecuting this conduct, because we need to send the message that this is not okay. You say that immigration is a hot topic, and that's fine. We can talk about immigration we can have civil discourse but we cannot allow our criminal acts terroristic acts like the one that was committed three days ago in our city let me allow uh Assistant Special Agent in Charge Matthews to speak to the context of the arrest yes ma'am he was arrested uh just after 6 p.m in a suburb here of Atlanta in Cobb County was it a home or was it who shared those details yeah it was it was a residence uh in Cobb County on Panda Lane and it was not his primary residence, but it was a residence he was familiar with. Was he willing to go peacefully into custody or was force necessary to apprehend the individual? He did go into custody peacefully without any type of resistance or incident. We don't know. This is a continuing investigation. We just got him into custody just a few hours ago. We'll conduct the interviews and continue to process evidence and look at all the materials in the case, so that's yet to be determined. Did you guys share? And again, we don't know that yet either, right? We've not spoken with him in detail. We've just had him in custody for a few hours, and so I can't answer that question. Are you going to face, besides federal charges, are you going to face any local charges from APD or any other agency? We don't anticipate that there will be local charges. The federal charges, as I said, carry a mandatory minimum of five years in federal prison. There's no parole in the federal system, and so there's sufficient penalty available through the federal system. And this was a federal investigation assisted by APD. So I don't anticipate that there will be additional charges in the state. Does he have any other prior criminal or any other prior record of him being apprehended? Or do you kind of share with us what his record may be, if he has any type of record? I can't speak to his arrest history, but I'm not aware of him having any history of criminal convictions. All right, one more question, anybody? What is his age? 31 years old. Resident of Douglasville, Georgia. Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you.