Confessions of an ICE Whisperer Agent

As immigration has become One of the most important points that Donald Trump’s second administration is focusing on is Department of Homeland Security (DHS) took center stage. Under the Big Beautiful Bill of 2025, the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Immigration and customs (ice), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), and several other agencies have received more than $80 billion in additional funding, and in January, the agency received more than $80 billion in additional funding. Announce It has hired more than 12,000 new agents.

Even as cities like Los Angeles and Minneapolis have seen an increase in immigration officers, DHS has maintained a high level of ambiguity about its operations. Often officers conduct raids and arrests Masked And driving in Unmarked cars. As did the implementation Withdrawn federal law enforcement personnel From across the government, it has become difficult to know which agency a particular officer works for, let alone his or her actual identity. Although DHS was Fighting with the mediaThe ICE agents themselves were mostly calm, even if some of them were Mixed feelings About their work and where the agency is headed.

Carl Loftus, a freelance journalist who runs the Instagram account @deadcrab_films, has started a new project in the wake of the immigration surge in Minneapolis called Confessions of an ICE Agent. There, he posts interviews with people who work in immigration enforcement across the Department of Homeland Security. This includes agents and officers in ICE’s two main divisions – Homeland Security Investigations and Enforcement and Removal Operations – as well as Customs and Border Protection officers. It offers them anonymity and a place to express their thoughts outside of traditional media structures, and in return gets a glimpse into what people inside the agency experience, creating an archive of this moment in its history.

In one post, a biracial client spoke out shortly after Trump announced he would be one To replace Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem He told Loftus he believed Noem was a DEI employee. In another article, an HSI agent described the people leading the US government as “idiots,” saying they were “disgusted by almost all of them.” Another HSI agent expressed concerns about his colleagues at DHS violating the law, and complained about having to stop investigating child sex abuse cases to focus on immigration work. “If they gave child exploitation issues a fraction of the attention, funding, resources, staffing, analytical support, etc., that they now give to immigration enforcement, we could do a lot of good,” they said.

WIRED spoke to Loftus about the public’s reaction to a polarizing topic, how he vets his sources, and the pressure to choose a side. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson responded to WIRED’s request for comment saying they cannot verify anonymous interviews but that DHS and its Homeland Security Investigations Unit “are not slowing down and remain committed to all aspects of their mission, leveraging a whole-of-government approach to addressing threats to public safety and national security.”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

WIRED: Before this project, your account was mostly focused on things like disaster recovery after Hurricane Helen and similar topics. How did you start working on ICE?

Carl Loftus: In 2018 I was a volunteer in North Carolina during Hurricane Florence. I was there during the hurricane for four days conducting search and rescue operations. This kind of started my passion with disaster response. I was in Jamaica for seven weeks responding to Hurricane Melissa, working with a few different NGOs. I worked with the Global Empowerment Mission to repair the roofs of hospitals and medical centers to try to get the medical infrastructure back on track. She worked with Global Central Kitchen. I was there to document. I had planned to go to Wisconsin for the holidays, where I’m from, to visit some family, but I ended up staying in Jamaica. In early January, I finally made it to the Midwest to see some family, and that’s when Rene is a good shooter It happened. I was like, “Man, I know things are about to get crazy the next day, and there’s going to be protests and riots and all this stuff.” So I decided to make the trip to Minneapolis.