The View From Inside Trump’s DHS

November 5, 2024

Bitta Mostofi, former senior official at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (U.S.C.I.S.): The Biden administration was so worried about talking about immigration that every day it wasn’t in the news was a good day. But you can’t implement a vision in silence. The anti-immigrant narrative was effectively weaponized against us, with lots of resources behind it, and we did not tell a different story.

Blas Nuñez-Neto, former chief operating officer of Customs and Border Protection (C.B.P.): The vast majority of people who cross the border illegally don’t try to evade the Border Patrol. They go right up to agents and turn themselves in to make an asylum claim. There was a lot of frustration with the way that our asylum system had just become a front door. Agents were aware that the vast majority of people they’re processing are not actually fleeing persecution — they’re economic migrants.

Mark Koumans, former deputy executive assistant commissioner for operations support at C.B.P.: In 2022 and 2023, C.B.P. encountered 5,000 to 10,000 undocumented migrants a day. Out of necessity, our bread and butter was providing temporary housing, food, medical and other care and relieving the overcrowding. Everyone coming has to be fed. The kids need diapers. The diabetics need medication. And the pregnant women need prenatal care.

When we hit 10,000 encounters per day in December 2023 — the highest ever, by far — the wheels were starting to come off. It’s a wonder more people didn’t die in custody, but it’s also a testament to the efforts of the Border Patrol.

Ryan Schwank, former ICE attorney: The Biden administration teed up the tragedy we’re seeing now, including by pushing immigration courts to leave asylum cases in limbo. Once the Trump administration began, the goal was to find a way to remove these individuals — not at all costs, but pretty close to it.

January 20, 2025

Mark Koumans, former deputy executive assistant commissioner for operations support at C.B.P.: Asylum was basically turned off. Everyone was sent back to Mexico or from whence they came. Trump’s appointees thought it all through, and that showed in the president’s executive orders. Very rapidly, the migrants and cartels understood it’s a different game now.

Rafael Reyes, former Border Patrol agent in charge in Deming, N.M.: For Border Patrol, it came as a relief. They went from catching thousands to hundreds to close to zero. The spaces in downtown El Paso where migrants congregated — the churches, parks, bus stations — they started to clear out. That was the honeymoon period. Then it turned into something different. No one expected the volume of deportations.

January 25

Jason Marks, former supervisory refugee officer at U.S.C.I.S.: At Secretary Noem’s first D.H.S. town hall, she came out onstage to the theme song “Hot Mama,” spoke for maybe a few minutes and took no questions and left. I wasn’t in the room, but it was something everyone was talking about in real time. It felt like a “South Park” moment.

Danny Chin, former associate counsel at U.S.C.I.S.: We were disappointed that someone was chosen with so little relevant experience. Her claim to fame was killing a puppy, so there were a lot of morbid jokes about how she could apply that philosophy to immigrants.

Former D.H.S. executive 1: When Noem came in, she wanted a quote-unquote “background” done on new hires to know that you’re actually an administration supporter.

Former employee in the D.H.S. policy office: Lewandowski would take some phone calls on Noem’s behalf. It seemed like he was making decisions. There were rumors that he would troll the halls and see empty desks and check the name plates and submit them for a purge of employees. So people started leaving Post-it notes on their desks, like: In a meeting. In the restroom.

Early February

Mark Koumans, former deputy executive assistant commissioner for operations support at C.B.P.: Offices all over the country were asked to provide dozens of agents to go help ICE. Then we saw D.E.A. and F.B.I. and A.T.F. — everyone — in the streets. The joke in the hallways became, We all work for ICE now.

ICE agent: Most ICE agents were happy to be doing actual law enforcement, but there were others who were very nervous. They were like, Bro, I don’t know what I’m doing out on the street. I would get a lot of calls from people asking questions like, Hey, when I knock at the door, what do I tell them?

Teresa Pedregon, former deputy chief patrol agent at the northern border: Going into Walmart parking lots, setting up a checkpoint — I’ve never seen anything like this in my career. It’s a complete shift in the way Border Patrol has historically conducted enforcement operations.

Homeland Security Investigations (H.S.I.) agent 1: They changed the mission of Homeland Security Investigations, which falls under the ICE umbrella. Under President Biden, H.S.I. was entirely focused on transnational crime, ranging from human trafficking and smuggling to narcotics trafficking, money laundering and child exploitation. Essentially, we were told to pause all those criminal investigations, unless they have a nexus to an illegal alien. Instead, we’d be doing civil immigration enforcement.

ICE lawyer: H.S.I. used to investigate companies that were violating labor laws. Now, instead of going after the business owners, they would be going after the employees. They had to hit five workplaces every single day. It started with anything that sounded even vaguely Hispanic and then became completely indiscriminate.

(Bis, the D.H.S. spokeswoman, claimed that H.S.I. has no quotas and said The Times was “peddling a FALSE narrative.”)

H.S.I. agent 2: We pulled over a guy on our list we’d been surveilling. There’s a kid in the back of the car, about 8 years old. He’s crying. It’s clear that he’s distressed. He’s not really comprehending what’s going on. The dad tells me he’s autistic.

I’m like, We’re not arresting this guy. So I told the guy in Spanish: Get an attorney, whatever you got to do. You’re here unlawfully. You’re subject to deportation. The guy started crying. I said: Look, I get it. I’m a dad. Just go. I know for a fact that there are agents that would not have done that. They would have been like: Somebody else can take care of the kid. We can bring Child Services.

ICE agent: Bystanders were recording agents and doxxing them. One of us would get photographed and put on Instagram, and you’d send the link around like, They got so-and-so. Then the mask thing started. I’d try to explain what was going on to the people we were arresting in a less threatening way, like, We’re just going to bring you in because you have a final order of removal, and when we get there, we’re going to review everything. But it was harder to calm the person down if I had somebody with me that’s in a mask. I like not being a hypocrite, and I would be nervous to open my door to a dude in a mask.

H.S.I. agent 1: There was an incredible amount of pressure for numbers. Publicly, the administration was saying we’re going after hard-core criminals. But in reality, day to day, we were doing everything but that. If we arrested a hundred individuals, maybe 10, 15 had serious criminal violations.

At times, there was borderline profiling. One time, my guys were assisting agents sitting on an address because they had a specific target package for an individual who was a Hispanic male. A different Hispanic male comes out of the house, jumps into a car, drives away, and the agents initiate a car stop. Just because he’s also Hispanic. I told my agents, Do not engage in this type of behavior. We had a lot of agents retire or leave because of the moral dilemma.

(“Any allegations ICE law enforcement engages in racial profiling are FALSE,” wrote Bis, the D.H.S. spokeswoman.)

February 9

Former ICE technology official: Leadership told us to start asking for data from Social Security and Medicare — places that historically have been firewalled from immigration. Like, Hey, open the doors to Medicare so we can figure out the last three hospitals this person went to. They’re trying to pull as much information as they can to track these folks down, but that data was walled off for a reason. For example, if you think your Medicare data might be shared, you might not go to the doctor when you have a highly communicable disease, and that harms the whole community. I think data privacy is going to be one of the bigger casualties of not keeping the adults in the room.

​​Sarah Pierce, former policy analyst at U.S.C.I.S.: In meetings, the career staff above me started saying our programs were riddled with fraud. I was shocked. They were trying to save their jobs by showing the administration they wanted to come down hard on asylum seekers. But it didn’t pay off. My division no longer exists.

Susan Raufer, former supervisory refugee officer and former head of the Newark asylum office: We were assigned to go through old files and do more security checks and vetting after they paused all the refugee applications.

I remember a case from Central America of a woman who had been sexually trafficked by her spouse and had fled from him. The way the law is written, you can show fear of persecution if the persecutor is your government or an entity your government is unable to protect you from. She’d gone to the authorities in her country, and they sent her home. So she went into hiding. She went through all the hoops and was granted refugee status, but because of the pause, she’s still there, waiting.

March 10

Danny Chin, former associate counsel at U.S.C.I.S.: These are countries with no real asylum process and rampant human rights violations. But the Board of Immigration Appeals approved removals to these countries, and then immigration judges said they had to grant the government’s motions. A lot of people will be detained indefinitely in these countries where they have no ties. The administration uses these removals to instill fear. They want people to self-deport.

Kerry Doyle, former chief of ICE’s legal branch and former immigration judge: Before the current administration, there were a handful of examples of third-country removals, but never anything like this volume. The government is also not sharing the agreements with the third countries in court. For immigration judges to go along with that is highly suspect, in terms of due process and our international obligations.

March 21

Sarah Pierce, former policy analyst at U.S.C.I.S.: This administration isn’t prioritizing oversight. There’s a strong relationship between that and the record number of nearly 50 deaths in detention on Trump’s watch.

I think what has scared me the most is how incentivized the administration seems to be to make the conditions poor. They want detention to be a place you can’t stand to be. That’s why we’re hearing about overcrowding, poor sanitary conditions and no temperature regulation.

Immigration detention is not supposed to be prison. It’s civil, not criminal. But these places are like prison, or worse. And there are thousands of children there.

Rebekah Tosado, former section director in the D.H.S. Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties: Our job was to conduct oversight over how D.H.S. carries out its mission. They called us “internal adversaries.” We had 147 employees. Now detention has exploded, and there are two full-time employees, a handful of contractors and a political appointee with no civil rights experience.

D.H.S. attorney: I saw a handwritten letter from dozens of people at a detention facility. They all signed their names. They made allegations about the food, medical care and sanitation, and they said their use of the law library was heavily restricted, which would be a violation of the department’s standards. The field office said there were no issues — and that’s it. It doesn’t matter if the field office is lying. And they know that.

March 25

Former policy analyst at U.S.C.I.S.: Unfortunately, I was part of the team that dismantled temporary protected status. Countries I’d written up as unsafe a few months earlier were supposed to be safe now. It was a complete farce. Even if it was still unsafe to return, they said it was not in the national interest to continue the programs. Haiti in particular felt very wrong. They terminated the program without any wind-down period. It was just, Get out of the country.

(Bis, the D.H.S. spokeswoman, noted that Haitians were granted temporary protection after an earthquake 16 years ago. “It was never intended to be a de facto amnesty program,” she wrote. “Temporary means temporary.”)

Jason Marks, former supervisory refugee officer at U.S.C.I.S.: When those protections are suddenly terminated, you’re effectively shifting large groups of people from legal status to no legal status. And there’s a principle of international law here: non-refoulement — you don’t send someone back if that means putting them in harm’s way.

April 7

Kate Angustia, former U.S.C.I.S. lawyer: In the first Trump administration, these kids were in detention without care and support, with the government arguing in court about whether toothpaste was a valid health need. It took forever for their parents to find them.

Michelle Brané, former ombudsman for the Office of Immigration Detention: I led the Family Reunification Task Force under Biden. Hundreds of children hadn’t seen their parents for years. Depending on their age, the kids separated under “zero tolerance” had a lot of different responses — all of them traumatized. They regressed in toilet training, in speech, in behavior. Every health care professional we consulted agreed that forced separation from a parent is extreme trauma.

Former D.H.S. policy official: We had a meeting early in the year about these families with D.H.S. lawyers who had been working on this case for years. There was one guy there from the director’s office who wanted to prove how gung-ho he was, and he kept saying there has to be a way to deny all these people, as he put it. We’re saying, No, that is a violation of the settlement agreement. But he kept hammering.

The judge who was overseeing the settlement later ordered the government to restore services and bring back the families who were deported. But so far they haven’t been returned.

April 11

Mimi Tsankov, former immigration judge: When people file their own cases, or their lawyers miss something, their asylum applications often don’t tell their whole stories. The message of the April memo was to speed through the cases quickly without giving people a second chance to fix their mistakes.

ICE lawyer: I think it’s a great idea for judges to have that authority. Lawyers used to apply for asylum for their clients and leave the form completely blank as to what the reasoning is. So the client would get years in the United States before they had to show up at a hearing and give a rationale. There are cases where the lawyers literally write “gangs” as the rationale. One word.

Amanda Ceja, former interpreter in the Denver immigration court: We were directed to give out forms in English and also told that we couldn’t offer any additional explanation. People didn’t know what the rules were. Our lines at the window went all the way down the hall, and the phone calls were incessant. All we could say was, You need to talk to an attorney. I saw a lot of people get scammed by people who fraudulently represented themselves as attorneys. I felt I could no longer carry out my role to ensure meaningful communication. That’s why I chose to leave.

May 21

Former ICE senior executive: We knew we were going to get a tongue lashing. We’d already been hearing, You’re not doing enough. The expectation was that someone was going to read us the riot act.

Todd Lyons, the ICE director, introduced the secretary. She says to us, If I get fired in six months, I’m going to make sure you get fired in six months. And I’m like: Hold on a second. I’ve been doing this for over 30 years, and you just got six months under your belt. You should get fired because you don’t know how to run the mission.

Then Stephen Miller goes up next, and he chastises our director. He dresses him down in front of us. And I’m like, This is so unprofessional. A field office director says: We’re working through the list, but we’re having some challenges with the list. We’re going to get it done. We’re trying our hardest.

And Miller looks at Todd and says: What are you telling your people? I told you — there is no list. Everyone is fair game.

Once that happened, I knew it was time for me to go. When he said, There is no list; you’ve just got to go and get them — well, define “them.” How do I know who “they” are? I’m brown, so what, you’re just going to approach every brown person and ask them what their citizenship is?

(A White House spokesperson said Miller was highlighting the need to implement the president’s agenda, not chastising Lyons.)

Former ICE field office director: Stephen Miller was like: Reasonable suspicion is all you need. You have that authority.

He’s very savvy, very smart. I have a lot of respect for him. He had his pulse on everything from the interior enforcement to the border.

He gets very frustrated. This is what I want done, and why isn’t it done already? When agents lost track of a Columbia student who protested in support of Palestinians that Miller wanted arrested, he blew a gasket. He said: You’re telling me that an antisemitic hater of the Western world was able to outmaneuver, outsmart, outflank, outthink federal agents? I’m supposed to go back to the president of the United States and tell him that you don’t know where an 18-year-old person is on campus?

(A White House official said the president has pledged to revoke visas for “anyone who hates America, undermines our country and poses a risk to our national security.”)

May 25

D.H.S. official: Noem’s team was suspicious of the careers, so they hadn’t been involved in strategic planning for her trip. Right before she left, on a Saturday, the director who was responsible for the region got a voice mail saying: Hey, the advance team has just booked another meeting with an Israeli minister. The meeting is tomorrow. You need to write a memo. But this guy was in a U-Haul driving his kid’s stuff home from college. So the person above him, who doesn’t specialize in the region, offered to step in. He was at dinner with his wife, got this call and said: I’ll go home. I’ll do it.

Noem’s team hadn’t mentioned the minister’s name. So he looked up the ministry and plugged in what he saw. A number of Trump appointees cleared it. The secretary reads the memo, goes into the meeting — and it’s a different minister because Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had recently shuffled his cabinet and the website hadn’t been updated.

Two people were removed from their positions. One, the director who was driving the U-Haul, because he should have been available, and then his boss, who had stepped up. This was one of the people key to implementing Trump’s policy initiatives during his first term. They just pushed him out without even thinking strategically: Wait a minute. What experience and background are we losing if we get rid of this guy?

Former employee in the D.H.S. policy office: One of the other Middle East experts had already left. It had been such a hostile work environment. They had let all this expertise leave, and then they’re pissed that they don’t have it. After this happened, it caused paranoia. There were people who, if they were asked to provide information, would print it out and cut out the names of all the people who worked on it and walk it over to the front office. Because they were like, If they get upset about something that’s in here, we don’t want them to be able to immediately know who to fire.

May 27

Mimi Tsankov, former immigration judge: For fear of repercussions, people started avoiding exercising their rights by coming to court. But if they fail to appear, they can receive an order for removal.

George D. Pappas, former immigration judge: When ICE officers started entering the courthouse, I was told by my assistant chief judge, Stay out of the way and grant the government’s motion to dismiss the case.

No, I’m not going to do that. Now this person would not have legal status. They would lose their work authorization. They’re susceptible to arrest at any point. We had a duty to give them their day in court.

Jeremiah Johnson, former immigration judge: In one case, I denied the motion to dismiss. It was a 20-year-old Sikh man from India who was seeking asylum based on persecution for his political activism. They arrested him in the hallway outside my courtroom.

Michael Knowles, former asylum officer: Asylum offices have always been physically separate from ICE and other enforcement. The idea was to communicate that it’s OK to show up, even if you entered illegally or overstayed your visa, because our job is to ascertain your claim. That’s in the law: Everyone gets a shot.

But ICE was pulling people out of interviews or apprehending them on their way out. Some of them didn’t have criminal records, and there was no warrant out for their arrest. Asylum officers told me that if they finished the interview before ICE arrived, they were told to keep the applicant longer. They were being made part of a setup.

I retired even though I wasn’t ready.

(“Any application for asylum does not preclude immigration enforcement,” Bis, the D.H.S. spokeswoman, wrote. “Nothing prohibits arresting a lawbreaker where you find them.”)

June 6

Teresa Pedregon, former deputy chief patrol agent at the northern border: Greg Bovino reported directly to the D.H.S. secretary. He was essentially not even under the chain of command. He doesn’t believe in intelligence-driven operations. That was clear when he was in New Orleans, where I worked with him. He was putting people in gas stations and telling his agents, See how many illegals you can round up. I felt he was auditioning to get Trump’s attention.

(Pedregon sued D.H.S. in 2020 over its personnel practices, alleging, among other claims, that Bovino gave preferential treatment to white male agents in New Orleans. The case was settled out of court two years later.)

Darius Reeves, former ICE field office director in Baltimore: Anytime you engage the Border Patrol in interior enforcement, the wheels are going to fall off. It’s not to disparage them. It’s totally different tactics and totally different training.

Rafael Reyes, former Border Patrol agent in charge in Deming, N.M.: I always told my agents, This is a career, not a crusade. My ancestors, my family, we feared the Border Patrol. That’s the stigma that came with that job. We’ve been struggling for a very long time to move away from the stigma of the mass raids of the 1950s. After 9/11, we started professionalizing. We evolved from this 9,000-man agency to the largest law enforcement agency in the federal government. Border Patrol is now more than 50 percent Hispanic. Interior enforcement isn’t our responsibility, and we don’t like the blowback that comes from it.

Former D.H.S. executive 1: When Los Angeles happened, they made all these arrests. They’re like, We can’t process them fast enough, so put them on the plane. We had a total of 13 planes that we were using. You can fit roughly 128 people on one of these planes. They didn’t care if a plane flew with three people. The secretary wanted to see 13 planes in the air every day, no matter what. That cost a lot of money.

(Bis, the D.H.S. spokeswoman, disputed these numbers and wrote that “the operation of a flight with lower numbers can still be more cost effective than the cost of detaining aliens additional days to fill a flight.”)

ICE agent: When people started making comments like, ICE is disappearing people, They’re Nazis, They need to get out — politicians would even say that — that empowered people to act more aggressive toward us. Now you’re taking eight, 12, 15 people to arrest one guy. And you’re doing it for safety. But at the same time, when you show up with that amount of people, everything is automatically heightened — because somebody else looks at it like, Why do you need 15 people for one guy?

June 6

Sarah Krieger, former policy analyst at U.S.C.I.S.: I led the portfolio for all of these vulnerable young people. One day, I looked at the D.H.S. website, and it says we’re no longer granting them deferred action — the form of relief that they had. I was like, What? It turned out there was a policy manual update I didn’t know about.

These young people each went in front of a state court judge, who determined that they were abused or neglected and that it’s not in their best interests to return to their home country. They’ve also all gone through security checks.

July 4

D.H.S. attorney: One of the most disappointing experiences I’ve had here is watching career staff who believe this warehouse plan is a disaster — one that will cause suffering and increased death — work their hardest to make the plan happen. I’ve really struggled with how to deal with that.

It’s true that for optimizing efficiency, the warehouses make sense. But Fort Bliss in Texas, the closest analogue for the warehouses, is a goddamned nightmare. I went there after it opened. It was planned and built by a company that has zero experience in detention of any kind. It’s a giant tent with partitions, so it’s incredibly loud. You could lose your mind in that cacophony.

Claire Trickler-McNulty, former senior ICE official: In March, a 19-year-old committed suicide at the Glades facility in Florida. That was a facility that we had closed under Biden because it had such persistent problems. They reopened it. They reopened many of the facilities that were closed because of longstanding concerns about conditions.

July 8

Adam Boyd, former ICE attorney: If you have a criminal record, we need to detain you. But when ICE didn’t have the bed space, you could release lower-risk people, let’s say a mom and her kid. We don’t have this idea of discretionary release anymore. You could have been here for 15 years, but you came across the border and didn’t have an admission at the port of entry. You didn’t get a visitor stamp or anything, and you snuck across. Here you are 15 years later, and we are saying we can detain you until the end of your hearings.

Assistant U.S. attorney: Now that Congress has given ICE all this funding for mandatory detention, that allows the Trump administration to interpret this draconian law in a way that hasn’t been done for 30 years.

But that means treating people who have been here for 20 years, and have no criminal record, the same as people who have been here for 20 days.

ICE lawyer: Mandatory detention is the dream of every hard-line anti-immigration activist. This is as big a deal as ending birthright citizenship. If the Trump administration does that, then they have changed immigration law forever. If the Supreme Court signs off on this, it’s effectively saying we don’t do asylum here anymore.

July 29

Ryan Schwank, former ICE attorney: I started as an instructor at the academy in September 2025. On Day 1, we started on Page 70 of the materials, did about 30 pages, then skipped another hundred. It went on like that. The longtime instructors said they used to run practice drills and grade them. They used to do shooting exercises. Now we’re not doing it or we’re not grading it. There are multiple-choice tests, but they’re open-book. They removed most of the practical exams. Before, you had to show you could conduct an arrest at a business, a home and a vehicle stop. If you failed the class, you failed out of the academy. Now there is no grade given, so no one fails a practical exam.

I know there’s a concern that the ICE recruits are white nationalists, and I saw some that fit that concern. But by and large, people were there because they saw an opportunity for a high-paid job in federal law enforcement. A lot of them were first- and second-generation immigrants. There was no indication that the cadets didn’t want to learn. But the way we were rushing them through, they walked out not remotely prepared to do the job.

ICE agent: Every police department has a field training program, where you learn most of your stuff from another decent cop. When I joined ICE a few years ago, I got no field training. It’s overwhelming, because you get out of the academy and it’s: OK, here you go. You start.

Now, you could tell the new guys from their mannerisms or even how they talk when they’re getting ready to go out. They’d have their tac vests with every pouch known to man — 10,000 things on their belt. They haven’t done enough to know you don’t want all that on you while you’re running after somebody or fighting with somebody.

Senior ICE officer: ICE is quickly hiring people with little to no experience and training them on PowerPoint and then giving them a badge and gun. I’m going to be honest with you, there are some really old people and some really out-of-shape people.

(“This is completely false. Students must meet all requirements, otherwise they will not be made law enforcement officers,” Bis, the D.H.S. spokeswoman, wrote.)

November 20-21

Jeremiah Johnson, former immigration judge: On Nov. 21, I heard my afternoon case. It was a family of four Indigenous Guatemalans, a mother and father and two children. They were refugees who had suffered physical abuse. The father’s leg had been broken, and his brother had been killed. They were targeted for their race and ethnicity. They had a fear of persecution, based on past persecution, which the government didn’t rebut.

I granted them asylum. D.H.S. waived the appeal. My last words on the bench to that family were: You’ve been granted asylum in the United States. That decision is final. Welcome to the United States. One of the kids — I think he was in fifth grade — jumped up and clapped his hands together.

Later, I went to my office and signed onto my computer and found out I’d been fired. I was escorted out without time to print the letter they sent me.

Early January , 2026

ICE agent: People were nervous about getting sent to Minneapolis. I got the notice and had to show up less than a week later. I didn’t want people to know I was with ICE. I even intentionally took one of my wife’s girly suitcases to make it look like I was traveling with a woman. Everyone’s Midwestern nice, so they’re like: Hey, welcome to Minnesota. What brings you to town? I told people I was there to take care of my nephews.

There were protests outside the Whipple Building, which was our operating center. Driving in, I’d try to look straight ahead while I was being cursed out. They would be like: Kill yourself. You’re Nazi trash. I mean, anything you would think of. They’d also protest outside certain hotels and make noise. We’d get messages saying: If you’re at this hotel, just stay in your room. Don’t leave. Guys would book the hotel with their personal credit card instead of their government card because it was safer. One guy put a Harris-Walz sticker on his bags. Another guy put an anti-Trump sticker.

D.H.S. border official: The majority of people were protesting, but a significant number of people crossed the line, which would absolutely negatively impact our ability to get the job done. For example, if you have a child sex offender that you are looking for, and you know where they live, and you’re trying to maintain a discreet presence until you see that person exit a business or exit their house so you can arrest them, but you’re surrounded by a bunch of people honking horns, they’ve effectively blocked that arrest.

Senior ICE officer: We were going around in rental cars arresting people. That was really wild to me. It would trip me out that anyone would pull over to a Nissan Altima with a blue light on it. It doesn’t look legit.

We have no authority to question a United States citizen. And they would do that. I saw officers block someone in, put them in a car, drive away and, once we get to a more secure location, look at the person and say, Oh, shoot, that’s not our target.

January 7-26

Senior ICE officer: The Good shooting was cleared by Secretary Noem like within an hour. There should be a real investigation. For lesser-trained officers, that made them think, OK, we can push the limits. You could really see that in the field in the lack of professionalism. ICE was giving us big cans of pepper spray we were never issued before. I know that if I spray someone, that’s a use-of-force incident that needs to be investigated. But all these new people were emptying out their canisters, driving by and spraying the crowd — no questions asked.

ICE agent: The one thing you’ll always hear cops say is, One bad cop does something, and somehow it becomes a referendum on all cops. It’s the only profession where that happens. You don’t hear that a doctor got drunk and did surgery and killed somebody and have people saying every doctor in America is an [expletive]. We’re being painted with a broad brush.

H.S.I. agent 1: We don’t like working with the Border Patrol agents because they cut corners. They’re reckless and unnecessarily aggressive. And you saw the direct result of that in Minneapolis. The agents who shot Mr. Pretti were C.B.P.

I think the administration realized that what happened in Minnesota was not great. The optics were terrible. So there has been a positive effect in terms of the administration taking a step back from these types of large civil immigration enforcement surges.

Ken Syring, former C.B.P. deputy chief of staff: Some employees are angry at D.H.S. for making prejudicial statements about Good before there was even an investigation. There are others who are really concerned that a loss of legitimacy equals a loss of functionality, and that C.B.P. won’t be able to operate as a law enforcement agency that’s in any way successful after all of this. A lot of them seem to be operational concerns. I haven’t heard many moral concerns.

Senior ICE officer: I think the big difference happened when Homan replaced Bovino in Minneapolis. There were never official quotas, just pressure to produce and a questioning of our tactics if we didn’t arrest. The stress eased up tremendously under Homan.

January 21

Ryan Schwank, former ICE lawyer: My supervisors at the academy showed me this memo telling officers they can go into a home using an administrative warrant from D.H.S. instead of a judicial warrant. They say: You can’t keep a copy of the memo. You’re going to teach this to cadets, but we won’t put in writing anywhere that we’re training them on this.

That’s an illegal way to teach. When you train law enforcement officers, everything is in writing. If they ever want to discipline an officer for not following orders, they have to prove they gave the instructions.

I talked to my wife. I said I’d stepped into a bear trap. I needed to report it, but I had to figure out how. Should I go to the Office of the Inspector General or the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties or the ombudsman? I knew people in those offices who’d lost their jobs. I didn’t think those offices were effective anymore. I found Whistleblower Aid, and we made the disclosures.

Former D.H.S. executive 2: That memo is going to reach the Supreme Court and get struck down. They took 40 or 50 years of policy and just disregarded it. Quite frankly, the people who signed that have legal exposure. They better get good lawyers. They need to have discussions about getting a pardon before they leave.

There’s a few unfortunate folks out there who have gone in with administrative warrants, but I’ve heard that it’s hardly ever done because people at ICE understand that it’s incredibly dangerous. People who do it are going to be personally, civilly and criminally liable.

Late January into February

Adam Boyd, former ICE attorney: It’s interesting to see ICE and D.O.J. complaining they’re overwhelmed, but this was their own making. If you are going to have tens of thousands of people being detained, you’re going to have a lot more habeases being filed, because you are going against decades of what the policy used to be.

Assistant U.S. attorney: This is a slow-moving train wreck. When D.H.S. sends agents in for these surges and makes all the arrests, they never check with us about whether we can handle the scale of court cases that will follow. And we don’t have the capacity. This isn’t just in a few places. It’s Los Angeles, Chicago, Charlotte, New Orleans and also the rural districts, like in Texas and northern Michigan, with large detention facilities where they ship a lot of people from blue states that don’t allow the jails to house ICE detainees.

ICE lawyer: The average length of detention I’ve seen is around 400 days — so, over a year. I have never seen anything like this. We’ve got an order from a federal judge saying, Hey, show why this guy’s detained. We’re like, We don’t actually know.

Former assistant U.S. attorney in Colorado: I think a lot of the attorneys defending these cases think they are morally repugnant. I had eight of these cases before I left. One was a DACA recipient who came here years ago and worked in construction. I thought we would let him out because he had a valid DACA application, but no. It just felt terrible. What are we doing and why?

March 3

D.H.S. official: They had, without telling anybody, decided to run these ads in Mexico. They ran a commercial in prime time during a soccer game — the equivalent of “Monday Night Football.” Which just led to outrage in Mexico.

After the ad ran, I heard that the State Department called over to our political leadership and just lit into them. Like: What the hell are you guys doing? Because of the contiguous border, it’s exceptionally important that we maintain good relations with Mexico. We want to deport people there. They were just beyond irritated that whoever made the decision hadn’t cleared it with State.

Kerry Doyle, former chief of ICE’s legal branch and former immigration judge: Noem broke the cardinal rule: Never throw the president under the bus, and never upstage him. I also think the women in this MAGA universe are expendable in a way the men don’t seem to be.

I think they understand it’s bad for their polling and for the midterm elections to be as aggressive as they were. So they’ve stopped saying “mass deportations.” But it’s not a policy change.

March 5

ICE lawyer: Some of the ICE agents who lean MAGA cannot wait for this administration to be done. I know the guys are tired. For the first time this month, I am hearing guys questioning what they’re being asked to do. They’ve had a year now of people spitting on their feet and constantly calling them pigs and fascists, even when they’re just standing there at the airport. It’s having a real impact on people.

Former D.H.S. executive 1: The people that are working don’t disagree with strong enforcement, consequences and deterrence. But you don’t have to go about it looking so unhinged. It’s causing huge problems and creating distrust in law enforcement, in ICE especially. I don’t know if we can come back from this.

D.H.S. attorney: The ultimate goal of this administration is nothing less than deporting every immigrant it possibly can by the end of the term while shutting down incoming legal immigration other than rich people they want and white South Africans. The whole D.H.S. project needs to be viewed in those terms: as forcing a mass exodus and shutdown of the entire U.S. immigration system.

Kerry Doyle, former chief of ICE’s legal branch and former immigration judge: I’m heartened that Mullin sounded conciliatory at his confirmation hearing, but it’s hard to know what that will mean. The people driving these policies are still very much in the administration. There will have to be massive upheaval to set things right again.