Why Immigration Agents Don’t Quit in Protest

Before he became an author and professor, Francisco Cantú was a border patrol agent. He’s written extensively about his experience, and here, he tries to understand why more of his one-time colleagues haven’t quit as the second Trump administration has ramped up its draconian immigration enforcement:

Officers are acculturated to see migrants as entirely unlike them, despite the fact that more than half of Border Patrol’s twenty-one thousand agents and nearly a third of ICE’s twenty-two thousand agents are Latinos, many only a generation or two removed from their own family’s migration. They come to think of migrants and asylum seekers as potential gangsters, rapists, or petty criminals, whose asylum claims are almost always suspect, their stories exaggerated to take advantage of the freedoms and generosity of the state.

It’s one thing to theorize about this dehumanization but something else to hear it plainly acknowledged by the people enacting it. One former Latino colleague who still works as an agent told me that, at the height of COVID, “we were deporting everybody, and there was this mother who coughed on me in front of her kids, and I was like, ‘Don’t fucking cough on me!’ ” He shook his head recalling the encounter. “It was like a seesaw battle—I’m yelling, then I’m apologizing, then I’m giving all these people food, then I’m saying, ‘Shut the fuck up.’ ” After a pause, he continued, “You see these people like cattle. So I remember I went home and I cried. You don’t want to treat humans like that.”