Nick Miroff profiles ICE agents and officers for The Atlantic (Apple News+ link):

Officers and agents have spent much of the past five months clocking weekends and waking up at 4 a.m. for predawn raids. Their top leaders have been ousted or demoted, and their supervisors—themselves under threat of being fired—are pressuring them to make more and more arrests to meet quotas set by the Trump adviser Stephen Miller. Having insisted for years that capturing criminals is its priority, ICE is now shelving major criminal investigations to prioritize civil immigration arrests, grabbing asylum seekers at their courthouse hearings, handcuffing mothers as their U.S.-citizen children cry, chasing day laborers through Home Depot parking lots. As angry onlookers attempt to shame ICE officers with obscenities, and activists try to dox them, officers are retreating further behind masks and tactical gear.

“It’s miserable,” one career ICE official told me. He called the job “mission impossible.”

Pete Prodoehl on Mastodon:

Oh sure, ICE is miserable… but could we make them even more miserable?

The headline implies poor morale because of the evil these agents are doing, but it’s as much about them feeling underpaid and unappreciated while they commit evil. Most of these folks seem otherwise fine being the baddies.

A common theme of my conversations was dissatisfaction with the White House’s focus on achieving 1 million deportations annually, a goal that many ICE employees view as logistically unrealistic and physically exhausting. The agency has never done more than a quarter of that number in a single year. But ICE’s top officials are so scared of being fired—the White House has staged two purges already—that they don’t push back, another official told me.

Today’s version of “I was just following orders” is “I was just making a living.”

I also enjoyed this little dig at Kristi Noem:

While tagging along on a predawn operation early this year, Noem posted live updates on social media, blowing the team’s cover for the rest of the day.

This administration is filled with some of the dumbest people on Earth.