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.
