As immigration became one of the defining focuses of Donald Trump’s second administration, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has taken center stage. Under the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act, DHS, which oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), and several other agencies, received more than $80 billion in additional funding, and in January the agency announced that it had hired more than 12,000 new agents.
Even as cities like Los Angeles and Minneapolis have seen a surge of immigration officers descend upon them, DHS has maintained a high level of opacity around its operations. Officers carrying out raids and arrests are often masked and driving in unmarked cars. As enforcement has pulled in federal law enforcement personnel from across the government, it has become difficult to tell what agency a given officer works for, let alone who they actually are. Though DHS has been combative with the media, ICE agents themselves have been mostly quiet, even if some have mixed feelings about their work and where the agency is headed.
Karl Loftus, an independent journalist who runs the Instagram account @deadcrab_films, started a new project following the immigration surge in Minneapolis called Confessions of an ICE Agent. There, he publishes interviews with people who work in immigration enforcement across DHS. This includes agents and officers with the two main divisions of ICE—Homeland Security Investigations and Enforcement and Removal Operations—as well as CBP officers. He offers them anonymity and a place to speak their minds outside the structures of traditional media, and in return gets a glimpse of what the people inside the agency are experiencing, creating an archive of this moment in its history.
In one post, a biracial agent speaking shortly after Trump announced that he would be replacing DHS Secretary Kristi Noem told Loftus he believed Noem was a “DEI” hire. In another, an HSI agent called the people leading the US government “imbeciles,” saying they were “disgusted by nearly all of them.” Another HSI agent expressed concerns about DHS colleagues violating the law, and complained of having to pause investigation into child sexual abuse cases to focus on immigration work. “If they gave child exploitation cases a fraction of the attention, funding, resources, personnel, analytical support, etc. that they’re now giving immigration enforcement, we could do so much good,” they said.
WIRED spoke to Loftus about the public response to a polarizing topic, how he vets his sources, and the pressure to pick a side. A DHS spokesperson responded to WIRED’s request for comment saying that they cannot verify anonymous interviews but that DHS and its Homeland Security Investigations unit “is not slowing down and remains committed to all aspects of its mission, leveraging a whole-of-government approach to address threats to public safety and national security."
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
WIRED: Before this project, your account mostly focused on things like disaster recovery after Hurricane Helene and similar topics. How did you start working on ICE?
Karl Loftus: In 2018 I was a volunteer in North Carolina during Hurricane Florence. I was there during the hurricane for four days doing search and rescue. That kind of started my passion for disaster response. I had been in Jamaica for seven weeks responding to Hurricane Melissa, working with a handful of different NGOs. I worked with Global Empowerment Mission repairing roofs of hospitals and medical centers to try to get the medical infrastructure back on track. I worked with World Central Kitchen. I was there documenting. I had planned to go to Wisconsin for the holidays, which is where I'm from, to visit some family, but I ended up staying in Jamaica. In early January, I finally made it up to the Midwest to see some family, and that's when the Renee Good shooting happened. I was like, “Man, I know shit's about to go insane the following day, and there's going to be protests and riots and all this stuff.” So I decided to make the trip to Minneapolis.
I filmed the protest at the Whipple building, which was where ICE headquartered in Minneapolis, the very morning after the Renee Good shooting. It was pretty wild. I got gassed by federal agents. I had a protester spray paint in my face and on my camera lens. I went back, put some stuff out, and that was the first immigration-centric piece I've ever done.
The day Alex Pretti was shot, one of my sources had sent me the video of the first cell phone video footage before any mainstream media outlet had reported on it. I have a pretty good veteran following from working in disaster response. I decided I was going to put this video up in my stories and say, “Hey, any of the veterans out there that follow my page, I want to know your opinion on this. Watch the video, what do you think? Was this wrong, was this just? What would you have done in this scenario?” And through that network I got connected to some ICE agents who were DMing me. So that's where the idea came from. I was like, “Man, no one has interviewed ICE agents. I don't know how exactly I would pull it off, but it would be interesting.”
Not for lack of trying! I’ve definitely tried. They don’t love responding to the media.
They don't. Everyone hates the media. I'm right there with you. I have a media pass and a camera. It's sometimes tough, but I will say, nowadays, I've had amazing responses from people when you specifically say you're independent. One of the main reasons they need to be anonymous is that ICE [agents] can't talk to the media. They will be fired instantly. So this is really the only way they can speak out.
How did you vet people?
From the initial person I interviewed who told me they worked for ICE, the first few interviews with the other ICE agents that I published were set up through that. So that was kind of the basis for my vetting process. I had a handful of people within the agency that I had hard confirmation that that's who they were. Depending on who I'm interviewing, I will [pull] from my vetting sources appropriately, so to speak. So I may send a screenshot, and they may say, “That looks good” or “Nah, this seems suspect,” and if so, they'll give me a question or two to ask that only someone specific to that agency would know the answers to. The interviews are done on Signal, so I don’t have their contact information. So if you want to show up and waterboard me, you're not going to get anything.
How has your audience responded to the project?
As I conducted and published the first handful of interviews, it really became apparent to me, not only because of what I was learning from talking to these people, but also the kind of public response to it, how important it was. Because I was getting comments from people saying, “I'm anti-ICE, but this is eye-opening stuff.” And then people saying the same thing on the other side. This is the most polarizing subject on the planet right now, and I don't think I've ever seen anything so polarizing and not just have the public response in the comments section be an absolute dog fight, you know? I was getting tons of messages from friends, family, random followers that were of all types of political ideologies that were just really connecting and resonating with it. The most common feedback I got that really galvanized how important this work was and inspired me to keep going was, over and over again, people were saying, “I love how you're just talking to them transparently.”
Every time I advertise this project I have so many people who are trying to pressure me to dox my interviewees. I’ve had everything. Protesters, antifa, I had a guy from Border Patrol reach out acting like he wanted to do an interview. He was giving me really short, angry answers, and then eventually he was like, “I need the contact info of that ERO guy you interviewed who talks shit about Border Patrol.” So it's like it's coming at me from all these different angles.
Does that worry you?
I think eventually I'm going to get subpoenaed by the DHS. I think that eventually this whole thing is going to get big enough to where someone internally is going to say, “Hey, don’t fucking do any of these interviews or you’re getting fired.” One thing that these agents and officers from ICE have told me over and over is that anyone who speaks up internally is gone, pretty much. That's not even talking about speaking to the media—that's, like, if they're speaking out against something illegal they've seen. These people have confided a lot of really sensitive information with me, so I don’t worry they’ll dox me or something, but you hear all these things about the DHS subpoenaing people's Instagrams, so that could be a real concern. But some of the HSI agents have really helped me on my opsec.
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