Morale is “plummeting” among federal law enforcement officers tasked with carrying out the Trump administration’s aggressive anti-immigration operation, as they complained that long hours, ambitious arrest quotas and hatred from the public, according to reports.
While officers at Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Patrol, overseen by the Department of Homeland Security, said they supported the administration’s goal of deporting undocumented migrants, many of them have grown “disillusioned” with the tactics being implemented by leadership.
More than 20 current and former immigration officials told The New York Times of their discontent in the hours following the fatal shooting of 37-year-old nurse Alex Pretti by a federal agent in Minneapolis.
It was the second deadly shooting of a U.S. citizen carried out by a federal agent in weeks, as officers clashed with protesters following intense public anger over the violence in Minneapolis.
“You’re not addressing the problem by throwing a 500-pound gorilla into these inner cities,” Oscar Hagelsieb, a former immigration officer and special agent, told the Times. “They’re causing chaos, and unfortunately it’s costing lives.”
“It’s completely unfair to the agents who have been put in this position,” he added. “There’s only so much they can handle before bad things start to happen.”
Border patrol agents, who generally operate at Ports of entry, have been assisting ICE with raids and deployed to support amid the protests. The agency is overseen by Gregory Bovino, who has previously described the border patrol’s tactics of arresting individuals rapidly before protesters can move in as “turn and burn.”
Bovino oversaw operations in Chicago, where agents deployed tear gas in neighborhoods and hit protesters with pepper balls. These tactics were “far outside standard practices in law enforcement,” Gil Kerlikowske, who led Customs and Border Patrol during the Obama administration, told the Times.
“Morale is in the dumpster,” he added.
Senior Trump officials were quick to blame Pretti for Saturday’s violence. They painted him as an individual who “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement” before an investigation had taken place.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem faced calls to resign after she claimed Pretti “brandished” a weapon before an officer with Border Patrol “fired defensive shots.” The narrative has been undercut in video footage of the incident.
Current and former ICE officials who spoke with the outlet anonymously said they were “unhappy with the sharp rhetoric” coming from top White House and Homeland Security officials.
One agent with the department told the Times that he had “always given the benefit of the doubt to the government in these situations,” but that he now no longer believed “any of the statements they put out anymore.”
“We lost all trust,” a current ICE official added. “I’m not sure I can see how we exist three years from now.”
