Why Latinos Join ICE

Jesús Ochoa and Raymundo Gutierrez, the two federal immigration agents who killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, are Latinos from South Texas—Ochoa a Border Patrol agent, Gutierrez a Customs and Border Protection officer. Statistically speaking, this should come as no surprise. Over the past half century, Latinos went from making up a negligible fraction of Border Patrol agents to constituting half of the entire force. Latinos have been central to the work done by the Border Patrol for decades.

But when ProPublica first revealed the agents’ identities, back in February, I noticed progressives recoiling online at the thought that Latinos would participate in Donald Trump’s mass-deportation campaign, and in the most violent way possible. That impulse, I think, stems from a still-common inclination to see Latinos as one-dimensional actors motivated primarily by their sense of solidarity with other Latinos. An accompanying, usually unspoken, belief is that feelings of ethnic solidarity ought to be more important than people’s differing views of what’s right and just. The same bad thinking led many Americans to assume that Latinos could never vote for Trump.

Academics, too, have treated the phenomenon of Latino border agents as something of a puzzle. The anthropologist Josiah Heyman at the University of Texas at El Paso has argued that Latino Border Patrol officers don’t identify with the Latino community. The political scientist David Cortez at Notre Dame has written that the officers join the force mainly for the salary and benefits. Most recently, the sociologist Irene Vega at UC Irvine argued that these Latinos come to embrace the mission of the Border Patrol through the process of socialization during training.

A simpler explanation is that Latinos who join ICE believe in the enforcement of immigration laws and that they are protecting, not antagonizing, their communities. Border Patrol recruitment videos feature Latinos and target them with stories about the excitement of the job, the drugs they would intercept, the criminals they would arrest, the discipline and sense of mission they would acquire at training camp. During his first term, Trump honored one Latino Border Patrol officer at the White House for discovering almost 80 migrants attempting to enter the United States in the back of a semitruck, and he invited another as a guest to a speech he gave during a joint session of Congress in 2025. Latino Border Patrol officers have testified as the agency’s leaders before Congress, where they have highlighted its accomplishments, defended it against criticism, and expressed their firm conviction in its mission. Claudio Herrera, a Mexican immigrant who became a Border Patrol officer, said in an interview with CNN late last year that sometimes people ask him, “Aren’t you ashamed of apprehending your own?” to which he responds, “Of course not, because I’m protecting my community.”

[Rogé Karma: Why Democrats got the politics of immigration so wrong for so long]

Silvestre Reyes, who represented a border district as a Democrat in the House from 1997 to 2013, joined the Border Patrol in 1969 after serving in Vietnam. He became the force’s first Hispanic sector chief in 1984. Several Latino sector chiefs succeeded Reyes: Gustavo de la Viña, who later became the first Latino national chief; Victor Manjarrez Jr.; Raúl Ortiz, who also became national chief; and Gloria Chavez, the first woman to become a sector chief.

The path that Latinos take to a career in law enforcement frequently begins at universities in the Southwest border region. California State University at Long Beach, California State University at Los Angeles, San Diego State University, Arizona State University, the University of New Mexico, New Mexico State University, Texas State University, and other schools offer majors in criminal justice.

The criminal-justice-studies program at the University of Arizona has about 800 students, Alex Braithwaite, the director of the university’s School of Government & Public Policy, told me. More than 40 percent of criminal-justice majors at his school identify as Latino, and a majority are women. Braithwaite guessed that the percentage of criminal-justice majors who are Pell Grant–eligible and first-generation college students is higher than the percentage for the government school as a whole, in which 30 percent are Pell eligible and 35 percent are first-generation. So is the percentage of Latino students majoring in criminal justice compared with that of other tracks: About 30 percent of students in the school’s other concentrations identify as such.

At Texas A&M International University, in the border city of Laredo, the criminal-justice program has 705 undergraduate students, almost all of whom are Latino. The student body as a whole is more than 95 percent Hispanic or Latino. The program’s co-directors, Brittany Hood and Daniel Scott, told me of their students in an email: “Growing up on the border, they see up close that the work—especially at the federal level—is complex and human, involving trade, public safety, and immigration enforcement all at once. Many see these careers as a way to serve, to build stability for their families, and to bring their bilingual skills, judgment, and sense of responsibility into roles where they believe their presence truly matters.”

Customs and Border Protection declined to make any current agents available for interviews, but one window into their thinking might be a 2021 documentary called At the Ready. The draw for some Latinos to a career in law enforcement, including with the Border Patrol, begins when they’re young. If Latinos are socialized to identify with law enforcement, that process begins long before they become an agent. Many Latinos in the Border Patrol grew up in the communities where they now work.

There are almost 1,000 criminal-justice student clubs at high schools in Texas. The film tells the story of some Latino students in the club at Horizon High School, half an hour east of downtown El Paso. Horizon’s teachers are former officers of the law; the school holds career fairs where local, state, and federal agents stand by tables with promotional literature and explain the benefits of working in law enforcement. The students prepare for a competition against similar clubs at other schools. In it, they participate in a simulation of a real-life crime scenario, wearing tactical gear and armed with fake pistols and fake semiautomatic weapons.

One student’s dad emigrated from Mexico and spent years working as a chauffeur, hoping for a better life for his daughter. When he hears her talk about working for the Border Patrol, he proudly remarks that all of his hard work is beginning to pay off. Around their dinner table, she shows him and her mom job ads touting starting salaries of about $50,000.

A Border Patrol agent tells a student that it’s hard to be a Latino officer in a border city where civilians “see us as the enemy, and they don’t see the good we do for the community”—gifts for low-income families for Christmas, turkeys for Thanksgiving. “They see us as family wreckers,” he said, adding that he has been “yelled at, cursed at, spit on, and punched at, just because of what I do.” The conversation causes the student to have some misgivings about her career goals, but in the end she still aspires to work for the Border Patrol.

[Paul Rosenzweig: How to actually reform ICE]

The two teachers who lead Horizon High’s Criminal Justice Club today, Victor Perez and David Falin—both Latino, and both former law-enforcement officers themselves—have worked at the school for just a few years each. They weren’t around when the documentary was made and, they told me, have not watched it. The club attracts 15 to 20 students every year, and many pursue a career in law enforcement. Perez and Falin urge them in this direction, in part because they worry that their students could get in trouble without the structure and discipline that careers in law enforcement can provide.

Whether many young Latinos who join the Border Patrol believe that they’re saving their community, not betraying it, of course doesn’t mean that other Latinos accept their logic. After the release of ProPublica’s report that revealed the identities of the agents who shot Alex Pretti, some critics resorted to language about self-hatred and betrayal of community.

A commenter wrote on Instagram, about Ochoa and Gutierrez, that in South Texas, “vendidos abound” (vendidos means “sellouts”). Another said, “White supremacy has a long history of encouraging people of all races to sell out their own in exchange for its protections.” One commenter on the ProPublica post revealing the identities of Ochoa and Gutierrez called each agent “Uncle Tomás.” Another responded to a post by PurosLatinosTV, which has 240,000 followers on Instagram: “Lack of loyalty within our own is a huge no no.”

For a very long time, some Latinos have called other Latinos race traitors for acting in ways they disagree with. Liberal Latinos tagged conservative Latinos with such monikers when they voted for Trump. Terms like these reflect long-standing divisions within the Latino community—and show that people inside a community can be just as resistant to its complexity as people outside it.