First of two stories looking at the role of ICE in the changing landscape of immigration enforcement.
KANSAS CITY, Missouri – Back when he was in uniform, everywhere the airman went Americans adored him, thanked him for his service, offered to buy him lunch.
Then he joined ICE.
Now – in the midst of newly aggressive immigration enforcement – the U.S. Air Force veteran is more likely to hear insults and slurs from the public than thanks. He became an ICE deportation officer because he thinks of himself as "a law-and-order guy." And because ICE is the family business.
His father is an ICE deportation officer. And his sister. And his twin brother.
"All we want to do is create a safer America," said John, who asked that USA TODAY withhold his full name for fear of being targeted for his work. His fellow officers and family "put their lives on the line," he said, "and I'm willing to do the same."
PresidentDonald Trump, acting with broad voter support, has made deporting millions of immigrants the centerpiece of his second presidency. Masked ICE agents have become the face of that nationwide deportation campaign.
Trump supporters view the effort as a necessary response to historically high migration under PresidentJoe Biden. An influx ofroughly 6 million migrants between 2021 and 2024pushed the percentage of foreign-born people in the United States to a century high and drove a political crowbar into an America sharply divided by immigration.
Millions of Americans now support mass deportation at whatever cost. Polls, protests and viral videos suggest millions of others believe the efforthas already gone too far, and organized resistance is growing.
John and his family have long considered themselves public servants charged with enforcing the law Congress enacted.
But this view is increasingly at odds with the shocking headlines and viral videos of detentions many Americans see as unjust or overly violent.
Agents smashing car windows.Piling out of a Penske truckto grab workers at a Home Depot. Pursuingfarmworkers through strawberry fields. Rappelling from aBlack Hawk helicopterinto an apartment building.Chasing a caregiver into a daycare, hauling her out by force.
ICE is taking the heat, though most of those incidents were led by U.S. Border Patrol, a separate agency under the Department of Homeland Security. But for a growing number of Americans, especially in immigrant communities, the insignia on a badge matters less than the tactics they see as overly aggressive, even unjust.
John and his family agreed to talk to USA TODAY – with permission from their superiors – to counter what they see as false impressions of their work.
To cover their perspective, which has been largely absent from the public debate on immigration, USA TODAY went behind the scenes of the Trump administration's deportation campaign. In November, we spent three days with ICE in Kansas City, part of the Chicago field office tasked with immigration enforcement in a sprawling, six-state region of the Midwest that includes Missouri, Kansas, Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin.
USA TODAY withheld the full names of family members at their request, given the charged climate around immigration enforcement and because they are not official spokespeople for their agency. They each used one of their given names.
John recalled that, as an airman, "I had people wanting to buy me lunch in an airport or, you know, looking at me like I'm some sort of hero.
"Then when I come to this side of the aisle – where I'm still putting my life on the line to enforce the law and wanting to create a safer America – now all of a sudden, I'm not that hero."
More:Exclusive look inside ICE: How the agency operates in Trump's America
ICE on a recruitment push
In August, amid an $8 billion hiring spree, Homeland Securityposted an ICE recruitment flyerthat depicted a grizzled agent with a salt-and-pepper beard beside a fresh-faced youth in camo and body armor.
The tagline read: "We're taking father/son bonding to a whole new level."
Nationwide, ICE is working to hire as many as 10,000 deportation officers in addition to the nearly15,000 federal law enforcement officersdetailed to immigration enforcement. A year ago, ICE had 6,000 deportation officers in total.
We're taking father/son bonding to a whole new level.https://t.co/nZkBEj3GGipic.twitter.com/sg5QwuDDwG
— Homeland Security (@DHSgov)August 6, 2025
John, his brother James, and their sister Danielle had already followed in their father Robert's footsteps, graduating the ICE training academy during a 2024 presidential election dominated by the immigration debate.
As a family, they hold the gamut of jobs within ICE.
Robert drives a commercial van transporting ICE detainees between facilities or medical care. John, briefly detailed to Kansas City from his home base in Florida, makes street arrests as a deportation officer. James picks up immigrants arrested on criminal charges from area jails. And Danielle works a desk job arranging the travel documents required for immigrants to be deported
Inspired by their dad's quarter-century of service, the siblings landed at ICE after other careers. John spent six years in the Air Force, including one overseas deployment. James, the younger brother by five minutes, worked for the Bureau of Prisons. Danielle, the eldest, was first a schoolteacher, then worked for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Robert was nearing the end of his career just as his kids were joining the force. They worked together for six months, an opportunity that made Robert emotional: "Seeing them in the morning when I get to the office, it's just hard to explain..." At 57, he came up on mandatory retirement in May.
He bought a sportscar, packed up his desk and was about to take his wife, Michelle, for their first real vacation in years when an email from the new Trump administration hit his personal inbox in June: Retirees could return to ICE, with a $50,000 bonus.
Michelle asked what he was thinking.
"It's a no-brainer," he told her. "It's time to go back."
A blitz and a backlash
In September, Robert and another returning officer were settling into a closet-sized office decorated with a Kansas City Chiefs banner when DHS surged federal agents to Chicago. Danielle got orders to depart for the operation named "Midway Blitz" at 10 p.m. the night before she would leave. It was a monthlong detail.
The same week, on September 25, a shooter perched on a hotel rooftop fired into the garage of an ICE facility in Dallas,fatally woundingtwo detained immigrant men. Authorities said the shooter had "specifically intended to kill ICE agents."
The anti-ICE movement was exploding.
A continuous street protest was underway at the local ICE headquarters in Broadview, Illinois, when Danielle arrived. Amid clashes with clergy and activists, a protestor held a sign with a Biblical message: "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do." Danielle walked through clouds of tear gas to get to work.
Danielle, active in her Kansas City church, confided to other churchgoers that she worked for ICE and would be deployed to the "blitz" – how else to explain her sudden, prolonged absence?
She was met by some with understanding, by others with accusations. One woman confronted her about her work.
Danielle said, "It's hard to have a conversation about it because there isn't any trust. A lot of people like the lady from church are going to just assume that I am blowing smoke and not being honest."
Immigrant families feared their loved ones being taken by ICE, or sent to far-flung detention centers. Robert and Michelle worried about their kids being deployed to Chicago.
"It's never exactly safe, but now you have people that are protesting and getting physical and burning things, and it just … it's hard to watch," Robert said.
At least six protestors were indictedin Chicago in November on charges of assaulting, resisting and impeding federal officers. Agents deployed tear gas and fired pepper balls, injuringtwo church pastors in separate incidents.
A week after Danielle came home, James was deployed to Chicago. Robert watched the furious crowds on the news, the flares of violence directed at ICE agents. At his kids.
"I saw the protests, I know how close they're getting to the facility there," he said. "Not a whole lot of room to get around without engaging. You know, people yelling 'fascist' and all sorts of things."
"It was like where you just don't want the phone to ring," he said.
What ICE does: 'We're targeted enforcement'
On a Tuesday in November, in a two-story building with minimal signage, the Kansas City ICE office was noisy with change. Builders made a racket with power tools on the second floor, outfitting the space for ICE to double its personnel in the coming months.
At 6 a.m., Danielle was already in her cubicle under the glare of fluorescent lights, country music playing softly on her cellphone.
There were echoes of her schoolteacher days: a hand-drawn sign that said "Shhh... I'm working! Thanks," with a heart for punctuation. Every available surface was stacked with brown file folders, each corresponding to someone detained, or someone ICE was planning to arrest. Sticky notes on cardboard file boxes read "removal docs" and "pending court date."
"We're targeted enforcement," she said, "so we know who we're going after."
While Danielle searched for embassy contact information to process a deportation, John readied handcuffs for that morning's arrest: a Venezuelan man living in Kansas City illegally with a rap sheet that included sexual assault and drunk driving.
James was on his way to pick up an immigrant in the federal penitentiary who had finished a criminal sentence. Robert, meanwhile, had departed at dawn for a 12-hour round trip transporting detainees.
During his tenure and the kids' short time in the agency before Trump took office, ICE prioritized going after undocumented immigrants who had serious criminal records. The agency's traditional work method has long been to surveil, surround and make an arrest as quickly and quietly as possible – no spectators.
Things have changed.
This year, pressed to deliver on Trump's promise of "mass deportation," the White House began ratcheting up pressure on ICE to raise its arrest and deportation numbers.
A quota circulated; the administration wanted 3,000 arrests per day. To achieve it, Homeland Security pushed U.S. Border Patrol – ICE's bigger, bolder sister agency – into a lead role, launching flashy operations in major American cities. ICE agents were ready to double-down on arrests after years of what they saw as leniency under past administrations.
In Kansas City, ICE officers including Robert and his kids are working long hours now – six-, sometimes seven-day weeks. Lately, Danielle stops at her parents' house for dinner after a 12-hour workday, then returns to the office to keep processing paperwork, each folder holding an immigrant's fate in the balance.
With John home for a few days from his post in Florida, the family gathered for dinner. Michelle made lasagna. The house was already decorated for Christmas.
They bowed their heads. Michelle prayed: "Dear Lord… We ask that you would help us to live a life that you find worthy, unto you, and forgive us of our sins."
'Half the country hates you'
After Chicago, after Dallas, Robert took new precautions. For the first time in his 25-year career, he started checking the rooftops of buildings near the office before getting out of his car.
"It seems like half the country loves you and half the country hates you," Robert said. "Congress has the power to change the laws if they want to change the laws. All we're doing is enforcing the laws that are on the books."
The twins often wear masks in public, when carrying out street arrests. They do it, they say, to protect their family – full stop. There is no federal law that prohibits them from doing so.
Danielle is analytical. The public deserves to know who their law enforcement officers are, she says. But there is no escaping the current reality, in which many members of the public don't trust ICE, and ICE doesn't trust them.
They hear the rage firsthand, slurs they say aren't true.
Fascists. Nazis. Cowards.
Before she became a federal worker, Danielle taught in a Kansas City high school, in a classroom where some students had undocumented parents or were undocumented themselves. She saw the trauma children suffered when a parent was deported. Still, in her view, the law is the law.
"There are collaterals," she said. "We are going after people who are in the system, who have a criminal history, who you don't want on the street, whether they are here illegally or not."
Legal or illegal? It's open to interpretation
Immigration law, housed in Title 8 of the U.S. Code, is notoriously complex and sometimes contradictory.
For example: It's illegal to cross the U.S. border between ports of entry. It's also legal to seek asylum at the border, even after crossing illegally.
The law – which hasn't been updated since before the twins were born in the late-90s – gives ICE broad authority to detain immigrants, including those in a legal process to stay. But detention is costly and jail space limited. That led prior administrations to prioritize holding immigrants with criminal records or who recently crossed.
The Trump administration and a Republican-led Congress are now pumping $45 billion into ICE to dramatically expand detention space, and the agency is increasingly flexing its detention authority. The number of immigrants held on a given day surged above 65,000 in November – a record high – from fewer than 40,000 a year earlier, according to ICE data.
Though ICE officers carry out judges' orders, they are vested with some discretion over how to handle individual cases, particularly if there are children involved.
The following day, a Wednesday, James parked a van into the secure garage of the Wyandotte County jail.
A 33-year-old Mexican man, in the country illegally since he was 2, had been arrested on drug possession charges. A judge ordered him to appear in January 2026. He posted bond. Jail officers notified ICE.
Hundreds of county jails in so-called "sanctuary" communitiesrefuse to call ICEwhen releasing a person in the country illegally, citing their mandate not to detain people after a judge has ordered their release.
James handcuffed the man, loaded him into the van and brought him to the holding area at the Kansas City ICE office. James asked him why, since he had U.S. citizen children, he hadn't applied for legal status. The man said he had no contact with his kids. He was detained, while waiting to see an immigration judge.
Not their father's agency
ICE is rapidly evolving from the force Danielle, John and James got to know on "take your kid to work" days.
Trump's mass deportation goal has led tostreamlining and shortcuts. Many new ICE hires were put through an accelerated academy. Some gun-and-badge carrying former law enforcement officers have been exempted from in-person training.
And the "operations" continue, from Los Angeles, to Chicago and Charlotte, N.C., to New Orleans and Minneapolis. The administration has indicated it will target cities across the country. The enforcement surge may come to Kansas City, too.
It was his father's example that drew John to the agency. "I always wanted to be an ICE agent because of my dad," he said. "One of the coolest things that I've seen him do is actually put really bad guys out of the United States."
John has been thinking about the strangers who thanked him in one uniform and despise him in another.
"I wonder if that person that was willing to buy me a lunch in an airport, coming home as a soldier, would look at me the same now knowing that I'm an ICE agent," he said. "Nothing's changed for me. I'm the same person."
Lauren Villagran covers immigration for USA TODAY. She can be reached at lvillagran@usatoday.com.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY:Family of ICE agents wants to create a 'safer America'
