Confessions of the ICE Agent Whisperer
As immigration has become One of the defining axes of Donald Trump’s second administration, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has taken center stage. Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025, DHS, which oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), and several other agencies, received more than $80 billion in additional funding, and in January the agency announced it had hired more than 12,000 new agents.
Even as cities like Los Angeles and Minneapolis have seen an influx of immigration agents descend on them, DHS has maintained a high level of opacity around its operations. Officers who carry out raids and arrests are often masked and drive in unmarked cars. As law enforcement agencies have recruited federal law enforcement personnel from across the government, it has become difficult to tell which agency a given agent works for, let alone who he or she actually is. Although DHS has been combative toward the media, ICE agents themselves have remained relatively quiet, although some have mixed feelings about their work and the direction the agency is taking.
Karl Loftus, a freelance journalist who runs the Instagram account @deadcrab_films, launched a new project following the immigration surge in Minneapolis called Confessions of an ICE Agent. There he publishes interviews with people who work in the field of immigration within the DHS. This includes agents and officers from ICE’s two main divisions – Homeland Security Investigations and Enforcement and Removal Operations – as well as CBP officers. He offers them anonymity and a space to express themselves outside of traditional media structures, and in return he gets insight into what the people inside the agency are experiencing, creating an archive of this moment in its history.
In one article, a biracial agent speaking shortly after Trump announced he would replace DHS Secretary Kristi Noem told Loftus that he believed Noem was a “DEI” recruit. In another article, an HSI agent called U.S. government leaders “imbeciles,” saying they were “disgusted by almost all of them.” Another HSI agent expressed concerns about violations of the law by his DHS colleagues and complained about having to suspend investigations into child sexual abuse cases to focus on immigration work. “If they gave child exploitation cases a fraction of the attention, funding, resources, staffing, analytical support, etc. they currently give to immigration controls, we could do a lot of good,” they said.
WIRED spoke to Loftus about the public’s response to a polarizing topic, how he checks his sources and the pressure to choose sides. A DHS spokesperson responded to WIRED’s request for comment by saying he could not verify the anonymous interviews, but that DHS and its Homeland Security Investigations Unit “are not slowing down and remain engaged in all aspects of our 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 focused primarily on things like disaster recovery after Hurricane Helene and similar topics. How did you start working on ICE?
Karl Loftus: In 2018, I volunteered in North Carolina during Hurricane Florence. I was there during the hurricane for four days doing search and rescue. This is kind of the origin of 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 to repair the 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 to document. I had planned to go to Wisconsin, where I’m from, to visit family for the holiday, but ended up staying in Jamaica. In early January, I finally arrived in the Midwest to see family, and that’s when the Renee Good shooting happened. I was like, “Man, I know shit is about to get crazy the next day, and there’s going to be protests and riots and all that.” » So I decided to make the trip to Minneapolis.
