Joining ICE to bring the war home
Video of the arrest of Amanda Trebach, a member of the immigrant rights’ group Unión del Barrio and an ICU nurse, who was monitoring ICE operations in the Los Angeles, begs many questions not the least of which is this: who is ICE recruiting?
One of the ICE applicants I spoke with seemed to have an insatiable desire for conflict… All his life, he said, he had hoped to fight wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. He’d joined the army hoping to fulfill this desire. But our foreign wars had wound down by the time of his enlistment, and he never got a chance to fight abroad.
He said his wife had almost been assaulted in Texas, and when she’d called the police they arrested a man who turned out to be an “illegal alien” and who was promptly deported. He said he’d seen videos of a member of the Taliban getting into an argument at a fast-food restaurant in California (I couldn’t find any evidence of this—not even as a conspiracy), and that he wanted to join ICE to protect his family.
“I learned all these skills in the army—smash and grabs, site exploitation—and never got to use them,” he said. “So I’m here to kind of do what I learned to do over there, but this time here, defending my country.”
Previously impressed by the connections between war and domestic policy elucidated by the historians Kathleen Belew and Stuart Schrader, I found this man’s account almost embarrassingly transparent. This was the most straightforward articulation I’d ever heard of someone bringing the war home.
Other applicants offered similar explanations for their motives.
There was the young, taciturn southerner managing a batting cage near New Orleans, and the pimply youth from Kentucky, churning out Yahoo Finance content for twenty dollars an hour. Both said they were tired and bored. The latter said his father had been in ICE, but he “didn’t really know what he did.”
I spoke to a gregarious New York police officer who was fed up with patrolling Times Square and all “the savages” there. Another applicant said he was sick of installing office furniture in properties subleased by the United States Marines.
A blind man I spoke to, who was hoping to find a data-centric position with ICE, said he was sick of his current job collecting child support payments from delinquent parents. At present, he said, his “hands were tied” because the law in his state forbade him from sending in sheriffs to collect money from deadbeat dads. In a lilting, basso voice, he told me that “in college, I wrote several papers about the harms of illegals in America.”
The last applicant I spoke to said he didn’t care much about the politics of ICE—it was just that he thought his taxes shouldn’t be used to buy school supplies for “illegal alien children.” What he was really interested in, he said, was parlaying his wages as a deportation officer into buying Airbnbs. “My classmates came up in the same environment as me,” he said, “but now they’re off posting photographs of Lamborghinis on Instagram, standing on balconies of waterfront apartments.”
His dad had also been in ICE and had broken down the doors of a Queens family that had just sat down to dinner when he stormed in. They all happened to be wearing Obama shirts and hats and were eating off of Obama dishware. Once, in the early part of his career, the man had gotten to travel to Southeast Asia on various deportation flights and had sent his son photographs of a beautiful waterfall in Cambodia. “I was like, what the fuck dad?” the young man said. “I thought you were supposed to be deporting people!”
The prospect of travel excited this applicant. And in fact over and over the DHS agents at the fair emphasized how it was the best part of their job.
A longtime ICE agent said he had accompanied undocumented immigrants on deportation flights to more than fifty countries and stayed in numerous three- and four-star hotels. A White House rooftop sniper said that she had had “amazing experiences in foreign countries” and that the camaraderie of her sniper team reminded her of her college volleyball team.
A CBP agent in Arizona said his favorite part of the job was riding horses through the mountains. The staff of the EMT Hazardous Agent Mitigation & Medical Emergency Response team (Hammer) said that he traveled with his ambulance all over the world, loading it into massive C17 airplanes and then sleeping beside it midair. He said it was “almost like camping.”
The motivating force behind American career fascism would appear to be wanderlust. My conversations with prospective Enforcement and Removal Operation officers tended to follow the familiar script of engagement with the most banal people on Tinder, the kinds of people who post airplane emojis in their bios. Granting that the banality of evil, as an explanation, has itself become banal, it was hard to know what else to make of all this. The US is filled with “pretty nice guys” who are ready to inflict, who have already inflicted, senseless and life-shattering violence on innocent, impoverished people. [Continue reading…]
Last month, Nick Miroff wrote:
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.” [Continue reading…]
As morale among U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel sinks to new lows, the Trump administration hopes spending more than $120,000 on a pair of high-performance Mustang GT Fastbacks will juice the embattled deportation agency’s efforts to attract new recruits.
Obtaining the vehicles was “an immediate request by the White House, on Thursday August 7, 2025,” according to a federal procurement document reviewed by The Independent.
It says the Mustangs are expected to “enhance” the federal government’s push to add some 14,000 new ICE agents “by serving as a bold, high-performance symbol of innovation, strength and modern federal service,” and that the Mustang’s “eye-catching design increases public engagement at outreach events and helps attract top talent by conveying a culture of excellence and forward momentum.” [Continue reading…]