For the past 15 months, the Department of Homeland Security has carried out the harshest crackdown on illegal immigration since the 1950s. To understand what it has been like at the center of this effort, we interviewed more than 80 former and current department employees for our magazine article, including agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement tasked with executing President Trump’s campaign of mass deportations.
The administration says it’s targeting violent individuals who pose a danger to their communities. In response to a request for comment on our story, Lauren Bis, acting assistant secretary of public affairs for the department, wrote in an email that federal immigration officers are arresting “the worst of the worst including murderers, rapists, pedophiles, gang members and terrorists,” while facing “a coordinated campaign of violence against them.”
The current and former employees we interviewed, however, said the administration is mostly ensnaring people who have no criminal convictions, instilling fear to induce them to leave on their own and cutting services to legal immigrants. They also described a frustrating sense of whiplash as policy swung drastically between Republican and Democratic administrations, and called on Congress to pass new immigration laws that would bring compromise and stability.
The Trump administration set an aggressive target of 3,000 arrests a day and a million deportations a year.
In February 2025, the Trump administration began to order sweeping raids and street-level enforcement to arrest undocumented people. ICE was joined by agents from Customs and Border Protection, who were used to operating with fewer restrictions. The pressure led to questionable practices, according to Teresa Pedregon, a former deputy chief patrol agent at the northern border:
Going into Walmart parking lots, setting up a check point — I’ve never seen anything like this in my career. It’s a complete shift in the way Border Patrol has historically conducted enforcement operations.
A Homeland Security Investigations agent told us:
There was an incredible amount of pressure for numbers. Publicly the administration was saying we’re going after hard-core criminals, but in reality, day to day, we were doing everything but that. If we arrested a hundred individuals, maybe 10, 15 had serious criminal violations.
At times, there was borderline profiling. One time, my guys were assisting agents sitting on an address because they had a specific target package for an individual who was a Hispanic male. A different Hispanic male comes out of the house, jumps into a car, drives away, and the agents initiate a car stop. Just because he’s also Hispanic. I told my agents, Do not engage in this type of behavior. We had a lot of agents retire or leave because of the moral dilemma.
Conditions in detention centers for migrants are ‘like prison, or worse.’
Since last July, when D.H.S. received a large spending increase from Congress, ICE has been buying warehouses in different parts of the country, which it plans to convert into large-scale detention centers.
A D.H.S. attorney said:
One of the most disappointing experiences I’ve had here is watching career staff who believe this warehouse plan is a disaster — that will cause suffering and increased death — work their hardest to make the plan happen. I’ve really struggled with how to deal with that.
It’s true that for optimizing efficiency, the warehouses make sense. But Fort Bliss in Texas, the closest analogue for the warehouses, is a goddamned nightmare. I went there after it opened. It was planned and built by a company that has zero experience in detention of any kind. It’s a giant tent with partitions, so it’s incredibly loud. You could lose your mind in that cacophony.
Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former senior ICE official, told us about a death at one of the older detention centers:
In March, a 19-year-old committed suicide at the Glades facility in Florida. That was a facility that we had closed under Biden because it had such persistent problems. They reopened it. They reopened many of the facilities that were closed because of longstanding concerns about conditions.
The crackdown included detaining many more people without criminal convictions.
Last July, the Trump administration began arguing in court that nearly everyone who crosses the border illegally is subject to mandatory detention. This was a significant and unexpected shift, according to Adam Boyd, a former ICE attorney:
If you have a criminal record, we need to detain you. But when ICE didn’t have the bed space, you could release lower-risk people, let’s say a mom and her kid. We don’t have this idea of discretionary release anymore. You could have been here for 15 years, but you came across the border and didn’t have an admission at the port of entry. You didn’t get a visitor stamp or anything, and you snuck across. Here you are 15 years later, and we are saying we can detain you until the end of your hearings.
Agents fear that the violence in Minneapolis in January has badly damaged the department’s legitimacy.
In January, ICE and the Border Patrol sent thousands of agents to the city, an influx that caused turmoil and protest as officers arrested at least 2,300 people and killed two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
An ICE agent said:
People were nervous about getting sent to Minneapolis. I got the notice and had to show up less than a week later. I didn’t want people to know I was with ICE. I even intentionally took one of my wife’s girly suitcases to make it look like I was traveling with a woman. Everyone’s Midwestern nice, so they’re like: Hey, welcome to Minnesota. What brings you to town? I told people I was there to take care of my nephews.
A senior ICE officer told us he saw his colleagues violating the rights of American citizens:
We were going around in rental cars arresting people. That was really wild to me. It would trip me out that anyone would pull over to a Nissan Altima with a blue light on it. It doesn’t look legit.
We have no authority to question a United States citizen. And they would do that. I saw officers block someone in, put them in a car, drive away and, once we get to a more secure location, look at the person and say, Oh, shoot, that’s not our target.
Ken Syring, former C.B.P. deputy chief of staff, said some in his agency are concerned that
C.B.P. won’t be able to operate as a law enforcement agency that’s in any way successful after all of this. A lot of them seem to be operational concerns. I haven’t heard many moral concerns.
The administration fired more than 100 immigration judges it viewed as too lenient.
As these judges left the bench, the rate of grants of asylum plummeted. Last week, two more judges were dismissed; they had stopped the deportations of a couple of international students who showed support for Palestinians.
Jeremiah Johnson, a former immigration judge in San Francisco, told us:
On Nov. 21, I heard my afternoon case. It was a family of four Indigenous Guatemalans, a mother and father and two children. They were refugees who had suffered physical abuse. The father’s leg had been broken, and his brother had been killed. They were targeted for their race and ethnicity. They had a fear of persecution, based on past persecution, which the government didn’t rebut.
I granted them asylum. D.H.S. waived the appeal. My last words on the bench to that family were: You’ve been granted asylum in the United States. That decision is final. Welcome to the United States. One of the kids — I think he was in fifth grade — jumped up and clapped his hands together.
Later, I went to my office and signed onto my computer and found out I’d been fired. I was escorted out without time to print the letter they sent
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