If immigration be one of the important aspects of the second administration of Donald Trump Department of National Security (DHS) has taken a major step. Under the One Big Better Bill 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. he announced that it had hired more than 12,000 new agents.
Even as cities like Los Angeles and Minneapolis have seen an increase in immigration officials reaching out to them, DHS has maintained a high level of transparency around its operations. Officers conducting raids and arrests often it is covered and go inside unmarked vehicles. As the implementation is attract federal law enforcement personnel from across the government, it has been difficult to tell which agency an official works for, let alone who they really are. Although DHS has been fight the mediaICE agents themselves have been quieter, even as others have mixed feelings about their work and where the agency is headed.
Karl Loftus, a freelance journalist who runs the Instagram account @deadcrab_films, started a new project following the immigrant boom in Minneapolis called Confessions of an ICE Agent. There, he posts interviews with people who work in immigration enforcement across DHS. This includes agents and officers with ICE’s two main divisions—Homeland Security Investigations and Enforcement and Removal Operations—as well as CBP officers. He gives them anonymity and a place to speak their minds outside of traditional media structures, and in turn he gets a glimpse of what people inside the agency are going through, creating a memory of this moment in its history.
In one post, the biracial agent spoke shortly after Trump announced he would be replacing DHS Secretary Kristi Noem he told Loftus he believed Noem was an employee of “DEI”. In another, the HSI agent called the people running the US government “idiots,” saying they were “disgusted by almost everyone.” Another HSI agent expressed concern about DHS colleagues breaking the law, and complained about having to stop investigating child sexual abuse cases to focus on immigration work. “If they would give child exploitation cases a fraction of the attention, funding, resources, staff, analytical support, etc. that they now give immigration enforcement, we could do a lot of good,” they said.
WIRED spoke with Loftus about the public’s reaction to the divisive topic, how he researches his sources, and the pressure to pick sides. A DHS spokesperson responded to WIRED’s request for comment saying that they could not confirm interviews with anonymous individuals but that DHS and its Homeland Security Investigations division “are not slowing down and remain committed to all aspects of its mission, using a whole-of-government approach to address threats to public safety and national security.”
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
WIRED: Before this project, your account mostly focused on things like disaster recovery after Hurricane Helene and similar topics. How did you start working at ICE?
Karl Loftus: In 2018 I was a volunteer in North Carolina during Hurricane Florence. I was there during the hurricane for four days doing search and rescue. That kind of started my passion for disaster response. I was in Jamaica for seven weeks responding to Hurricane Melissa, working with a few different NGOs. I worked with the 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 writing. I had planned to go to Wisconsin for vacation, where I’m from, to visit some family, but I ended up staying in Jamaica. In early January, I finally made it to the Midwest to see some family, and that time Renee Nice shot what happened I was like, “Man, I know things are going to be crazy the next day, and there’s going to be protests and riots and all this stuff.” So I decided to make a trip to Minneapolis.
