ICE Agents in Despair Under Stephen Miller's Impossible Orders

Yahoo

a day ago

A new report from The Atlantic's Nick Miroff finds morale at Immigration and Customs Enforcement is suffering as the agency, under the direction of President Trump and Homeland Security adviser Stephen Miller, targets undocumented immigrants who haven't committed crimes.
While the Trump administration may claim its deportation campaign prioritizes violent criminals and gang members, in reality, it has focused on arresting noncriminals, evidently to hit quotas passed down by Trump and Miller.
And while the administration may claim ICE agents are happier than ever, Miroff's report—based on conversations with 12 current and former ICE personnel—shows that the change is frustrating many agents and officers.
One ICE veteran finds the job so 'infuriating' that the agent is considering quitting. 'No drug cases, no human trafficking, no child exploitation,' said the agent, who complained about having to focus instead on 'arresting gardeners.'
A former agent told Miroff that 'morale is in the crapper,' and '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.'
Another former ICE official suggested that this shift is vindicating criticisms the agency has faced in the past, observing, 'What we're seeing now is what, for many years, we were accused of being, and could always safely say, 'We don't do that.''
One of Miroff's interviewees was Adam Boyd, a young attorney who resigned from the agency's legal department because it's no longer focused on 'protecting the homeland from threats.' Instead, he said, 'It became a contest of how many deportations could be reported to Stephen Miller by December.'
Boyd told Miroff: '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.'
One former ICE official said that there are now 'national-security and public-safety threats that are not being addressed,' as the agency moves staff from its Homeland Security Investigations division, focused largely on transnational crime, to its Enforcement and Removal Operations division—a move that many perceive as retaliation for HSI in recent years distancing itself from the agency's deportation arm.
When Miller issued his demand for 3,000 arrests per day, he reportedly steamrolled any veteran officials who dared to speak up about its impracticality, which has led many to keep silent since then for fear of drawing his ire, Miroff writes. This means that 'no one is saying, 'This is not obtainable,'' an ICE official told him. 'The answer is just to keep banging the [ICE rank-and-file] and tell [them] they suck. It's just not a good atmosphere.'