Much of the outcry stirred by the harsh policies of the first Trump Administration was quelled by Joe Biden’s promise of a more measured approach. His Presidency saw a record increase in migrant encounters at the border, a fact that is often attributed to lax enforcement. In fact, the Biden Administration left several of Trump’s restrictionist policies in place, and detentions at the border increased twelvefold while total removals tripled. Still, there was a feeling among immigration agents that they were being shackled by the new Administration. By 2024, the Border Patrol had lost a quarter of its workforce, with many longtime agents opting for early retirement. They often blamed the President. “Under Biden, things are the worst they have ever been by far,” one agent told the Washington Examiner, adding, “Agents are afraid of ending up on the news for doing their job or getting in trouble for doing their job. There is no morale.”
With Trump back in the White House, many agents now regard the Administration as once again on their side. But the demands of meeting its overarching goal—deporting a million people a year, per Trump’s top domestic-policy adviser, Stephen Miller—have led to a new form of strain. In 2025, The Atlantic reported that ICE’s workforce “has never been so miserable.” Employees have become burned out and morally conflicted as their focus has shifted from pursuing drug smugglers and human traffickers to apprehending asylum seekers in courthouses and arresting day laborers at their worksites. Another agent said that he was contemplating quitting rather than continuing to spend his days “arresting gardeners.”
In early 2026, after the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti during Operation Metro Surge, in Minneapolis, the journalist Ken Klippenstein reported that many immigration agents were “getting seriously paranoid” about the public backlash to the shootings. The operation was so unpopular with the rank and file that Border Patrol and ICE struggled to find personnel for the deployment. By July, morale among immigration officers had dipped below its nadir during the Biden Administration, with agents now complaining of being overextended, inundated with novice recruits, and undermined by inflammatory rhetoric from on high. Agents said that they had previously found motivation in their jobs by “being able to stop bad people and narcotics from coming in,” and expressed frustration that the Administration’s political posturing was distracting from their duty to “protect the public” and to focus on “the very worst of the worst.”
The sociologist Irene Vega, in her 2025 book “Bordering on Indifference,” draws on a series of interviews with Border Patrol and ICE agents to analyze the “moral economy” of the immigration-enforcement workforce. From the moment agents arrive at the federal law-enforcement academy, she writes, they “are trained and socialized as police officers, and taught that their raison d’être is to protect America by preventing the entrance and executing the removal of noncitizens deemed unwanted by the state.” The inherently bureaucratic nature of enforcing immigration law has always been at odds with the paramilitary image that is sold to most recruits. Agents prepare for violent criminal encounters and cultivate a “warrior mentality” despite the fact that they are most often, as Vega writes, “at war with an enemy that does not fight back.”
Many agents who have quit for moral reasons cite this tension. In a 2019 article for The American Scholar, Brendan Lenihan, a former Border Patrol agent, wrote, “The federal government taught me how to shoot an assault rifle from a moving vehicle and how to fast-rope from a hovering helicopter, but never did anyone explain how to go home at the end of a shift and forget about the migrants I’d apprehended and their stories.” As with Childress, the accumulation of nonthreatening encounters eventually made his job untenable. “I left the Border Patrol because I was exhausted by the tragic stories,” he wrote, “and because the more I saw, the less affected I was by events that had once seemed shocking.”
How is it, then, that so few agents seem to arrive at this moral breaking point? Nearly two-thirds of Americans disapprove of the Trump Administration’s immigration crackdown. It has become customary for agents to mask their faces from public view—D.H.S. maintains that this is to prevent doxing, but it is also emblematic of a growing perception of this work as shameful. In off-duty social situations, agents often obscure what they do to avoid awkwardness and scorn, even hiding the nature of their employment on dating apps. “We can’t always support what happens just because it’s one of us,” a Border Patrol agent had told a private group chat in the wake of Pretti’s killing. And yet, even as their work has grown increasingly cruel, there has been no exodus of agents who reject it.
