https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/07/trump-ice-morale-immigration/683477/
Trump Loves ICE. Its Workforce Has Never Been So Miserable.
A “mission impossible” deportation campaign has left many employees burned out and morally conflicted.
By Nick Miroff
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ICE
occupies an exalted place in President Donald Trump’s hierarchy of law
enforcement. He praises the bravery and fortitude of Immigration and
Customs Enforcement officers—“the toughest people you’ll ever meet,” he
says—and depicts them as heroes in the central plot of his presidency,
helping him rescue the country from an invasion of gang members and
mental patients. The 20,000 ICE employees are the unflinching men and
women who will restore order. They’re the Untouchables in his MAGA crime
drama.
The
reality of Trump’s mass-deportation campaign is far less glamorous.
Officers and agents have spent much of the past five months clocking
weekends and waking up at 4 a.m. for predawn raids. Their top leaders
have been ousted or demoted, and their supervisors—themselves under
threat of being fired—are pressuring them to make more and more arrests
to meet quotas set by the Trump adviser Stephen Miller. Having insisted
for years that capturing criminals is its priority, ICE is now shelving
major criminal investigations to prioritize civil immigration arrests, grabbing asylum seekers at their courthouse hearings, handcuffing mothers as their U.S.-citizen children cry, chasing
day laborers through Home Depot parking lots. As angry onlookers
attempt to shame ICE officers with obscenities, and activists try to dox
them, officers are retreating further behind masks and tactical gear.
“It’s miserable,” one career ICE official told me. He called the job “mission impossible.”
I
recently spoke with a dozen current and former ICE agents and officers
about morale at the agency since Trump took office. Most spoke on the
condition of anonymity, for fear of losing their job or being subjected
to a polygraph exam. They described varying levels of dissatisfaction
but weren’t looking to complain or expecting sympathy—certainly not at a
time when many Americans have been disturbed by video clips of masked
and hooded officers seizing immigrants who were not engaged in any
obvious criminal behavior. The frustration isn’t yet producing mass
resignations or major internal protests, but the officers and agents
described a workforce on edge, vilified by broad swaths of the public
and bullied by Trump officials demanding more and more.
Despite
Trump’s public praise for ICE officers, several staffers told me that
they feel contempt from administration officials who have implied they
were too passive—too comfortable—under the Biden administration.
Some ICE employees believe
that the shift in priorities is driven by a political preoccupation
with deportation numbers rather than keeping communities safe. At ICE’s
Homeland Security Investigations division, which has long focused on
cartels and major drug-trafficking operations, supervisors have waved
agents off new cases so they have more time to make
immigration-enforcement arrests, a veteran agent told me. “No drug
cases, no human trafficking, no child exploitation,” the agent said.
“It’s infuriating.” The longtime ICE employee is thinking about quitting
rather than having to continue “arresting gardeners.”
The
administration argues that morale has actually never been higher—and
will only improve as ICE officials begin spending billions in new
federal funding. Tricia McLaughlin, the spokesperson for the Department
of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, said in a statement the
agency’s workforce has welcomed its new mission under Trump. “After four
years of not being allowed to do their jobs, the brave men and women at
ICE are excited to be able to do their jobs again,” McLaughlin said.
But ICE’s physical infrastructure is buckling. The agency is holding nearly 60,000 people in custody, the highest
number ever, but it has been funded for only 41,000 detention beds, so
processing centers are packed with people sleeping on floors in
short-term holding cells with nowhere to shower.
“Morale
is in the crapper,” another former investigative agent told me. “Even
those that are gung ho about the mission aren’t happy with how they are
asking to execute it—the quotas and the shift to the low-hanging fruit
to make the numbers.”
A
common theme of my conversations was dissatisfaction with the White
House’s focus on achieving 1 million deportations annually, a goal that
many ICE employees view as logistically unrealistic and physically
exhausting. The agency has never done more than a quarter of that number
in a single year. But ICE’s top officials are so scared of being
fired—the White House has staged two purges already—that they don’t push
back, another official told me.
Miller
has made clear that not hitting that goal is not an option. He and DHS
Secretary Kristi Noem called ICE’s top leaders to Washington in May and
berated them in a tense meeting. Miller set a daily arrest quota of
3,000, a fourfold increase over the average during Trump’s first few
months. Veteran officials murmured and shifted in their seats, but
Miller steamrolled anyone who spoke up.
“No
one is saying, ‘This is not obtainable,’” the official told me. “The
answer is just to keep banging the field”—which is what ICE calls
rank-and-file officers—“and tell the field they suck. It’s just not a
good atmosphere.”
Several
career officials have been pushed out of leadership roles. Other
employees have decided to quit. Adam Boyd, a 33-year-old attorney who
resigned from ICE’s legal department last month, told me he left because
the mission was no longer about protecting the homeland from threats.
“It became a contest of how many deportations could be reported to
Stephen Miller by December,” Boyd said. He told me that he saw
frustration among ICE attorneys whose cases were dismissed just so
officer teams could grab their clients in the hallways for fast-track
deportations that pad the stats. Some detainees had complex claims that
attorneys have to screen before their initial hearings, to ensure due
process. Others with strong asylum cases were likely to end up back in
court later anyway. The hallway arrests sent the message that the
immigration courts were just a convenient place to handcuff people. Some
ICE attorneys “are only waiting until their student loans are forgiven,
and then they’re leaving,” he said.
Boyd, who worked at the Department of Justice after law school, said
he’d always envisioned a long career in public service. “I had to make a
moral decision,” he told me. “We still need good attorneys at ICE.
There are drug traffickers and national-security threats and
human-rights violators in our country who need to be dealt with. But we
are now focusing on numbers over all else.”
Over the holiday weekend,
Trump wrote a gushing “THANK YOU!” post to the ICE workforce that
acknowledged the strains of the job and promised that relief was on the
way. The Republican spending bill he signed on Independence Day will
give the agency “ALL of the Funding and Resources that ICE needs to
carry out the Largest Mass Deportation Operation in History,” he wrote.
"Our
Brave ICE Officers, who are under daily violent assault, will finally
have the tools and support that they need,” Trump said.
The
amount of money for ICE in the bill is staggering: A $170 billion
package for Trump’s border-and-immigration crackdown, which includes
$45 billion for new detention facilities, more than doubling the number
of available beds, and $30 billion for ICE operations, including hiring
thousands more officers and agents. To put those sums in perspective,
ICE’s entire annual budget is about $9 billion.
Abigail
Jackson, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement that the
legislation includes money for “well-deserved bonuses.” Trump officials
said they’ll provide $10,000 annual bonuses for ICE personnel as well as
Border Patrol agents, along with $10,000 for new hires.
ICE
officials say it takes roughly 18 months to recruit, screen, hire,
train, and deploy a new officer. The White House doesn’t plan to wait
that long. The administration is preparing a plan to assign military
personnel to help with enforcement work, one official who wasn’t
authorized to talk about the plan told me. They will primarily help with
processing new detainees and preparing deportation paperwork for those
in custody. And the additional billions in the Republican funding bill
will allow ICE to hire private contractors to prepare target lists and
other administrative tasks.
“We’re trying to keep morale up,” one official told me. “We’re telling everyone, ‘The cavalry is coming.’”
Some
ICE officers have been thrilled by Trump’s changes and what they
describe as newfound free rein. They chafed at rules set under the Biden
administration, which prioritized the deportation of serious offenders
but generally took a hands-off approach to those who hadn’t committed
crimes. Officers said they used to worry about getting in trouble for
making a mistake and wrongly arresting someone; now the risk is not
being aggressive enough.
Other
ICE veterans, who long insisted that their agency was misunderstood and
unfairly maligned by activists as a goon squad, have been disturbed by video clips of officers
smashing suspects’ car windows and appearing to round up people
indiscriminately. They worry that ICE is morphing into its own
caricature.
“What
we’re seeing now is what, for many years, we were accused of being, and
could always safely say, ‘We don’t do that,’” another former ICE
official told me.
John Sandweg, who served as
acting ICE director during part of President Barack Obama’s second
term, told me he remembered conducting town-hall meetings with the
agency’s workforce along with Tom Homan, a former ICE leader who is now
Trump’s “border czar.” Morale was a challenge then too, Sandweg said,
but the problems were more related to lunch-pail issues such as overtime
compensation and employee–management relations.
Those
who signed up for ICE “like the mission of getting bad guys off the
street,” Sandweg told me, but what they’re doing now is “no longer about
the quality of the apprehensions.”
“It’s more about the quantity,” he said. “And senior leaders are getting ripped apart.”
The
agency is split primarily into two branches: Enforcement and Removal
Operations, which has about 5,500 immigration-enforcement officers, and
Homeland Security Investigations, whose roughly 7,000 agents investigate
drug smuggling, human trafficking, counterfeit goods, and a range of
other cross-border criminal activities.
Even
at ERO, many officers have spent their career doing work more akin to
immigration case management: ensuring compliance with court orders,
negotiating with attorneys, coordinating deportation logistics. There
are specialized “fugitive operations” teams that go out looking for
absconders and offenders with criminal records, but they are a subset of
the broader workforce.
There
have long been tensions between ICE’s two divisions, and during Trump’s
first term, the leaders of HSI began pushing more formally to break
away from ERO, to forge their own identity. The stigma of ICE’s
deportation work was undermining their ability to conduct criminal
investigations in jurisdictions with sanctuary policies—including nearly
every major U.S. city—that limit police cooperation with ICE.
Some
at ICE ERO viewed this as a betrayal, akin to HSI agents looking down
their nose at immigration enforcement. In recent years, HSI’s reputation
was bolstered by the role its agents played in dismantling Mexican
cartel networks and busting fentanyl traffickers. Alejandro Mayorkas,
Joe Biden’s homeland-security secretary, expressed support for making
HSI an independent agency, and last year, he allowed it to rebrand with its own logo and an email domain scrubbed of the “ICE” identifier.
Those
efforts have now backfired. HSI agents have been told to shift their
focus to civil immigration enforcement and assisting ERO, effectively
relegating them to be junior partners in Trump’s mass-deportation
campaign. Some agents and officials told me they suspect HSI is paying a
price for wanting to distance itself from immigration enforcement.
“Their
personnel are being picked off the investigative squads, and there’s
only so many people to go around,” another former ICE official told me.
“There are national-security and public-safety threats that are not
being addressed.”
Noem has made clear
that it’s her job to carry out Miller’s demands, no matter how
unrealistic, and she has joined in the criticism of the agency she
oversees. While tagging along on a predawn operation early this year,
Noem posted live updates on social media, blowing the team’s cover for
the rest of the day. And Noem has installed a former political aide,
Madison Sheahan, to be the agency’s deputy director, a position
typically held by veteran ICE officials. Sheahan, 28, formerly ran the
Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries but has little experience
in law enforcement. Some ICE officers have nicknamed her “fish cop.”
One
former ICE official told me that the Biden administration treated the
agency’s workers with more basic decency and appreciation, even as their
caseload grew.
“Giving
people leave, recognizing them for small stuff, that kind of thing. It
went a long way,” the official said. “Now I think you have an issue
where the administration has come in very aggressive and people are
really not happy, because of the perception that the administration
doesn’t give a shit about them.”
About the Author
Nick Miroff is a staff writer at The Atlantic
who covers immigration, the Department of Homeland Security and the
U.S.-Mexico border. He can be reached on Signal at NickMiroff.78
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