In March, two months after President Trump took office, I received a
text message from a veteran agent at Immigration and Customs Enforcement
(ICE). I had been trying to find field agents willing to describe what
life was like at the agency in the Trump era. This agent agreed to talk.
Over the past four months, we have texted often and spoken on the phone
several times. Some of our discussions have been about the specifics of
new federal policies aimed at dramatically increasing the number of
deportations. At other times, we’ve talked more broadly about how the
culture at ICE has shifted. In April, the agent texted me a screen shot
of a page from the minutes of a recent meeting, during which a superior
had said that it was “the most exciting time to be part of ICE” in the
agency’s history. The photo was sent without commentary—the agent just
wanted someone on the outside to see it.

The agent, who has worked in federal immigration enforcement since the
Clinton Administration, has been unsettled by the new order at ICE.
During the campaign, many rank-and-file agents publicly cheered Trump’s
pledge to deport more immigrants, and, since Inauguration Day, the
Administration has explicitly encouraged them to pursue the undocumented
as aggressively as possible. “We’re going to get sued,” the agent told
me at one point. “You have guys who are doing whatever they want in the
field, going after whoever they want.” At first, the agent spoke to me
on the condition that I not publish anything about our conversations.
But that has changed. Increasingly angry about the direction in which
ICE is moving, the agent agreed last week to let me publish some of the
details of our talks, as long as I didn’t include identifying
information.

“We used to look at things through the totality of the circumstances
when it came to a removal order—that’s out the window,” the agent told
me the other day. “I don’t know that there’s that appreciation of the
entire realm of what we’re doing. It’s not just the person we’re
removing. It’s their entire family. People say, ‘Well, they put
themselves in this position because they came illegally.’ I totally
understand that. But you have to remember that our job is not to judge.
The problem is that now there are lots of people who feel free to feel
contempt.”

Like many ICE employees, the agent was a critic of President Barack
Obama, whose push to standardize enforcement practice and micromanage
agents, particularly during his second term, was a source of frustration
at the agency. Yet with Obama gone, and the era of micromanagement over,
the agent sees long-standing standards being discarded and basic
protocols questioned. “I have officers who are more likely now to push
back,” the agent said. “I’d never have someone say, ‘Why do I have to
call an interpreter? Why don’t they speak English?’ Now I get it
frequently. I get this from people who are younger. That’s one group.
And I also get it from people who are ethnocentric: ‘Our way is the
right way—I shouldn’t have to speak in your language. This is America.’
” It all adds up, the agent said, “to contempt that I’ve never seen so
rampant towards the aliens.”

The agent’s decision to allow me to write about our conversations came
after learning that ICE was making a push, beginning this week, to
arrest young undocumented immigrants who were part of a large wave of
unaccompanied minors who crossed the border in recent years and who,
until now, had been allowed to live in the U.S. Rather than detaining
these young people, the government had placed them in the care of
families around the country. Most of them are trying to lead new lives
as American transplants, going to school and working. ICE now plans to
pursue those who have turned eighteen since crossing the border, and
who, as a result, qualify for detention as legal adults. “I don’t see
the point in it,” the agent said. “The plan is to take them back into
custody, and then figure it out. I don’t understand it. We’re doing it
because we can, and it bothers the hell out of me.”

The agent went on, “The whole idea is targeting kids. I know that
technically they meet the legal definition of being adults. Fine. But if
they were my kids travelling in a foreign country, I wouldn’t be O.K.
with this. We’re not doing what we tell people we do. If you look next
month, or at the end of this month, at the people in custody, it’s
people who’ve been here for years. They’re supposed to be in high
school.”

The agent was especially concerned about a new policy that allows ICE to
investigate cases of immigrants who may have paid smugglers to bring
their children or relatives into the country. ICE considers these family
members guilty of placing children “directly in harm’s way,” as one
spokeswoman recently put it, and the agency will hold them “accountable
for their role in these conspiracies.” According to ICE, these measures
will help combat “a constant humanitarian threat,” but the agent said
that rationale was just a pretext to increase arrests and eventually
deport more people. “We seem to be targeting the most vulnerable people,
not the worst.” The agent also believes that the policy will make it
harder for the government to handle unaccompanied children who show up
at the border. “You’re going to have kids stuck in detention because
parents are too scared of being prosecuted to want to pick them up!” the
agent said.

U.S. immigration courts are facing a
backlog of half a million cases, with only a limited number of judges available
to hear them and issue rulings. “We still have to make decisions based
on a responsible use of the government’s resources—you can’t lock
everybody up,” the agent said. “We’re putting more people into that
overburdened system just because we can. There’s just this school of
thought that, well, we can do what we want.”

Before this year, the agent had never spoken to the media. “I have a
couple of colleagues that I can kind of talk to, but not many,” the
agent said. “This has been a difficult year for many of us.” These
people, not just at ICE but also at other federal agencies tasked with
enforcing the nation’s immigration laws, are “trying to figure out how
to minimize the damage.” It isn’t clear what, exactly, they can do under
the circumstances. “Immigration is a pendulum—it swings to the left
sometimes, or it swings to the right,” the agent told me last week. “But
there was a normal range. Now people are bringing their own opinions
into work.” In the agent’s view, ICE is a changed agency.

“I like predictability,” the agent said. “I like being able to go into
work and have faith in my senior managers and the Administration, and to
know that, regardless of their political views, at the end of the day
they’re going to do something that’s appropriate. I don’t feel that way
anymore.”