Posted by PZ Myers
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/07/11/make-them-cry/
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/?p=76916

The word is that ICE agents are sad. You don’t like them!
he reality of Trump’s mass-deportation campaign is far less glamorous. 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.”
Poor babies.
Recently, they’ve been whining about a “700%” increase in assaults on ICE agents, but that isn’t as bad as it sounds — they’re phrasing the numbers to make them sound much, much worse than they are. It’s just the standard conservative persecution complex.
While ICE has previously stuck to publishing percentages, Melugin was given raw data, reporting 79 assaults against immigration enforcement agents between January 21 and June 30, up from 10 that took place in the same time last year.
For comparison, from January through May, the New York Police Department reported 970 assaults on uniformed officers in the city (granted, the NYPD employs about 15,000 more officers than ICE does—though Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” would lessen the gap).
They’re not getting beat up. ICE is recognizing that the general public holds them in contempt and that their own organization is authoritarian and abuses its own members. I’m not going to feel sorry for them, though.
I recently spoke with a dozen current and former ICE agents and officers about morale at the agency since Trump took office. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity, for fear of losing their job or being subjected to a polygraph exam. They described varying levels of dissatisfaction but weren’t looking to complain or expecting sympathy—certainly not at a time when many Americans have been disturbed by video clips of masked and hooded officers seizing immigrants who were not engaged in any obvious criminal behavior. The frustration isn’t yet producing mass resignations or major internal protests, but the officers and agents described a workforce on edge, vilified by broad swaths of the public and bullied by Trump officials demanding more and more.
No mass resignations yet? That’s too bad. Crank up the pressure, everyone — not in the form of physical violence, but do let America’s brown shirts know that they are hated, that they are despised and hurting the America they claim to love. More effective than punching them (I know, that would be so satisfying, even if it puts you in jail) would be looking them in the eye, shaking your head sadly, and walking away to phone your representative and write a letter to your local newspaper explaining how wretchedly criminal the thugs of ICE are.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/07/11/make-them-cry/
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/?p=76916