Outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices, President Donald Trump showers “heroic” agents with praise. Inside, that adoration is nowhere to be found.
Trump has hailed ICE agents as brave, determined and “the toughest people you’ll ever meet.” They are, after all, tasked with carrying out one of his key policy goals: mass deportations.
Campaigning for his second term, Trump promised to execute “the largest deportation program of criminals in the history of America." Since taking office, the president has made it a goal to deport 1 million people per year. Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, has demanded 3,000 arrests per day. ICE raids have since disrupted the country.
Despite Trump casting a bright light on the immigration enforcement agency, the reality inside ICE offices is very dark. With high expectations, shifting priorities and a heightened fear of losing their job, morale is low and the pressure is high, officials told The Atlantic.
“It’s miserable,” a career ICE official told the magazine, characterizing the task as “mission impossible.”
Another former investigative agent told the magazine: “Morale is in the crapper.”
The ex-official added: “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.”
Although the administration pledged to arrest “the worst of the worst,” data last month shows ICE has arrested just a small fraction of those convicted of serious crimes, such as murder and sexual assault. For example, of the 13,000 undocumented immigrants in the U.S. who were convicted of murder, the agency had arrested just 752 of them from October 1 to May 31.
Instead, data suggests the agency has arrested a large portion of non-criminals since Trump took office. Of the arrests from Trump’s inauguration through early May, 44 percent had a criminal conviction, 34 percent had pending charges and 23 percent had no criminal history, ABC News reported. After Memorial Day, the portion of non-criminal arrests spiked; 30 percent of those arrested had criminal convictions, 26 percent faced pending charges, while 44 percent had no criminal history.
Then there’s the plain-clothes arrests, including of international students in the U.S. for college, that
There’s a notable shift in priorities from trying to keep the nation safe to being quota-driven, some officials said. “No drug cases, no human trafficking, no child exploitation,” a veteran agent told The Atlantic. “It’s infuriating.” The agent is considering quitting rather than having to continue “arresting gardeners.”
Some have actually quit.
Adam Boyd, an attorney who resigned from the agency’s legal department in June, said he left because of the change in mission. “It became a contest of how many deportations could be reported to Stephen Miller by December,” Boyd told The Atlantic.
“I had to make a moral decision,” Boyd continued. “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.”
Others fear losing their jobs, seeing as there have been two major shakeups in the span of a few months. Two top officials were removed from their posts in February; two directors at the agency were ousted from their leadership roles in May. That same month, Miller imposed his 3,000-arrests-per-day quota. The staff shakeups combined with lofty goals have put agents on edge.
“No one is saying, ‘This is not obtainable,’” one official told the magazine, referring to Miller’s quota. “The answer is just to keep banging the field”— an agency term for rank-and-file officers — “and tell the field they suck. It’s just not a good atmosphere.”
Still, the Trump administration has maintained that morale is sky-high.
“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,” Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for DHS, ICE’s parent agency, told the outlet.
Last week, Congress passed Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” his sweeping legislation that includes a massive funding — $165 billion — for the Department of Homeland Security. It allocates $45 billion for immigration detention centers and roughly $30 billion to hire more agents.
“One of the most exciting parts of the “ONE BIG BEAUTIFUL BILL ACT” is that it includes ALL of the Funding and Resources that ICE needs to carry out the Largest Mass Deportation Operation in History,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Our Brave ICE Officers, who are under daily violent assault, will finally have the tools and support that they need.”
The newly passed legislation also provides money for “well-deserved bonuses,” a White House spokesperson told The Atlantic. That allegedly includes $10,000 annual bonuses for ICE personnel.
Working in the agency has always come with some amount of pressure, some officials told the magazine, but the Trump administration has brought new challenges.
John Sandweg, who served as acting ICE director for part of President Barack Obama’s second term, told The Atlantic that employees voiced concerns common in most workplaces, such as getting paid for overtime work.
The concerns now are a bit different. ICE attracted people who “like the mission of getting bad guys off the street,” Sandweg said. Now, the agency is“no longer about the quality of the apprehensions” but about quantity.
A former official during the Biden administration told The Atlantic that the agents were appreciated, which “went a long way.”
“Giving people leave, recognizing them for small stuff, that kind of thing. It went a long way,” the ex-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.”
