WATCH: ICE agent sympathizes with protestors but declines to speak due to ‘cameras’

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent appeared to sympathize with a protester on Sunday while in Charlotte, North Carolina, but declined to engage with them out of fear of “video cameras.”

According to Ukrainian-American journalist Oliya Scootercaster, ICE agents were conducting an operation Sunday in Charlotte, writing that agents were “searching through [a] wooded area for a man who was selling flowers on the corner.”

A video of the event shared by Scootercaster shows a group of protesters engaging with an ICE agent – specifically an agent with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) – about the agency’s aggressive operations and its frequent use of warrantless searches and seizures that experts have called unconstitutional.

One protestor asked the agent how they determine a suspected undocumented immigrant’s immigration status before putting them “in handcuffs.”

“That’s a very fair question,” the agent answered. “I think that more of us would like to have a conversation about these things but we can’t because this isn’t a press conference, I can’t go and give official statements in front of video cameras… this is not a conversation, this is a ‘gotcha.’”

Morale at ICE has reportedly been “in the crapper” as agents have expressed frustrations with aggressive quotas, excessive overtime, and the moral dilemma of routinely targeting migrants with no criminal histories. The Trump administration issued ICE a quota to make at least 3,000 arrests a day, with a majority of migrants arrested having no criminal history outside of their immigration status.