As Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents embark on countless deportation raids in an effort to meet the White House’s daily arrest quota of 3,000, many officers are becoming completely demoralized, several agents told Nick Miroff with The Atlantic.
“Morale is in the crapper,” a former ICE agent told Miroff on the condition of anonymity out of fear of repercussions. “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.”
President Donald Trump, along with nearly all Republican members of Congress, recently gave ICE a staggering bump in its budget in the budget reconciliation package known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The bill increased annual spending for the agency to $37.5 billion, making ICE’s budget higher than the military budgets of all but 15 countries, including the United States.
Yet despite the increase in funding and constant praise and support from the White House, many agents are becoming disillusioned with daily pre-dawn raids, excessive overtime work, and the moral dilemma of routinely targeting migrants with no criminal histories.
“No drug cases, no human trafficking, no child exploitation; it’s infuriating,” another ICE agent told Miroff, who added that he was leaning towards quitting the agency rather than continue “arresting gardeners.”
While ICE had largely targeted high-risk migrants under the previous administration, Miller’s 3,000-arrests-a-day quota has lead to a significant increase in arrests of migrants with no criminal history, which have increased by 807% since Trump took office, with 65% of all those arrested having no criminal convictions.
Some ICE staff had already jumped ship over Trump’s mass deportation policy, including 33-year-old Adam Boyd, a form ICE attorney who left the agency in June. Boyd told Miroff he ultimately made a “moral decision” in deciding to leave the agency.
“It became a contest of how many deportations could be reported to Stephen Miller by December,” he said. “...We are now focusing on numbers over all else.”
