Inside the Unofficial Forum Where ICE Officers Air Grievances Amid Immigration Surge
A private online forum boasting more than 5,000 self-identified current and former officers from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has become an unfiltered space where members openly air frustrations and concerns about their agencies, which have recently found themselves at the center of widespread public anger.
“I fully support removing unauthorized immigrants, but grabbing guys off their riding lawn mowers in California and just abandoning their trucks and equipment where they stand? That’s not working smarter—that’s just reckless,” wrote one user.
The forum hosts posts stretching back more than a decade, and frames itself as an unofficial platform for current, retired, and aspiring deportation officers to speak freely without official oversight. In posts reviewed by WIRED, members repeatedly complained of grueling work schedules, restricted overtime pay, incompetent senior leadership, and poorly prepared new recruits joining the ranks.
Prospective members do not need to provide proof of federal employment to join, and the platform does not appear to have strict content moderation. While WIRED has not independently verified the individual identities of all posters, the forum is one of several similar spaces where Department of Homeland Security (DHS) employees across branches share on-the-job experiences and discuss granular, insider details of deportation officer work that would likely only be known to people holding the role. Conversations cover everything from internal operational workflows, the hiring and training pipeline, to negotiating duty placement swaps, and membership ranges from brand-new recruits to users who have participated for more than 10 years.
Neither DHS nor ICE responded to multiple requests for comment for this story.
Widespread public scrutiny and outrage has followed DHS’s violent immigration raids in Minneapolis carried out as part of Operation Metro Surge, particularly after federal agents shot and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Even amid this national firestorm, forum users have not held back from posting unfiltered criticism.
On January 19, five days before Pretti’s killing, a forum member who joined the platform in 2015 launched a thread titled, “Ready to resign, had enough stress.”
“I’m 2.3 years away from qualifying for full special category retirement … but I don’t know if I can hold on that long. I’m so tired of this agency. Employees are being completely abused and overworked. We get mandated temporary duty (TDY) assignments with less than 24 hours notice,” the opening post reads. TDY is common shorthand for “temporary duty,” the practice of pulling officers from across the country to deploy to hotspots like Minneapolis for large-scale enforcement operations.
“No more weekends off, I’ve got more work now than I’ve had in 18 years on the job. We have no union left, no downtime at all,” the post continues. “This is not what any of us pictured for the final years of our careers when we’re in our 50s.” (In 2022, thousands of ICE personnel lost the union representation that most other federal workers enjoy, including key overtime pay protections. The president of the council that represented ICE officers within the American Federation of Government Employees claimed at the time the union had become “far left.”)
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vittoria89.82. |Other forum members jumped in to echo the original poster’s grievances and share their own concerns about the agency’s current trajectory. “Led by some of the worst leadership I’ve ever witnessed, from the local level all the way up to national leadership, this agency has managed to turn a righteous mission into a complete clown show,” added another user who joined the forum in October 2015.
Several users also complained about the public image crisis facing ICE after CBP took on a larger role in immigration enforcement inside U.S. cities. “There was absolutely zero forethought for this transition, and our management just rolled over to let Border Patrol take over. That’s a huge mistake, especially when the nuance of actual targeted enforcement is needed,” added a user who has been a forum member since May 2017.
The line between the two agencies is often blurred in public discourse, where “ICE” is frequently used as a catch-all term for all federal immigration agents. While both ICE and CBP fall under the DHS umbrella, they are separate entities with distinct core missions: CBP focuses on immigration enforcement at the U.S. border and official ports of entry, while ICE’s mandate centers on enforcement operations in the U.S. interior. Both agencies are leading the current administration’s expanded immigration operations, and also draw additional personnel from other federal agencies including the U.S. Marshals Service and the State Department’s Diplomatic Service.
In another thread titled “RHA Mandatory TDY to Minneapolis,” officers complained about their 30-day deployments to the city for the surge. “The last thing I want is to be forced to work seven days a week,” one newer member who joined in December 2025 wrote in the thread, which launched on December 16. Many posts from the final days of 2025 griped that “forced deployments are getting out of hand,” as another user, a member since February 2021, put it.
The first poster in the thread noted there had been “no pre-planning” for the influx of deployed officers. “How to use them, outfit them, get them database access, cars, equipment, clear duties—nothing. Instead they throw rehired annuitants (RAs, retired federal workers who have returned to service) to ERO to do consensual encounters that they haven’t had real training for. A two-hour TEAMS Zoom course isn’t enough.” ERO refers to ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division, which manages on-the-ground arrests and detention.
That same user also alleged that “the arrest reports are also lies in some, a lot, of cases. Lots of false statements at worst, misleading statements at best. Plaintiffs’s lawyers gonna have a field day with lawsuits after Trump leaves.”
Lawsuits are already moving forward against the agencies. Immigration agents have already mistakenly arrested U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents. Leonardo Garcia Venegas, a U.S. citizen living in Alabama, is now suing the federal government after immigration agents detained him for allegedly “interfering” with their operations. In one Minnesota case, an ICE report claimed a Mexican-born man who had lived in the state for four years shattered his skull running into a wall while in custody, and was hospitalized in Minneapolis. But a nurse at the hospital told the Associated Press, “There was no way this person ran headfirst into a wall.” According to court filings, the man, who doctors diagnosed with life-threatening injuries, was placed in four-point restraints by federal agents while receiving care.
Other forum members have also noted that the total number of deported immigrants published by DHS appears to be heavily inflated. “The stats are complete BS. I don't know if the administration is aware of this, or are just playing dumb and using the bogus numbers,” wrote one user who joined the forum in September 2025. DHS claims the agency “has removed more than 675,000 illegal aliens and [an] estimated 2.2 million illegal aliens have self-deported.” Some posters also claim that arrests are often counted multiple times by participating agencies. “When we make an arrest through a task force, that single arrest is reported separately” by every agency involved, explained a fifth poster who has been part of the forum since 2015. “In reality, the true number is likely closer to a quarter of what’s being reported.”
In other threads, users complained that DHS leadership targets “low hanging fruit” easy arrests simply to pad official arrest numbers. “This will absolutely kill any morale we had, if any,” a user wrote. “Hey you know what, maybe don't pull over the car at 7:30 in the morning in front of a school for an administrative arrest, dimwits.”
The Minneapolis thread remained dormant for the first two weeks of January, as ICE operations in the area reached a fever pitch. Then, on January 17, the poster who had alleged officers were falsifying reports reappeared, calling out agents for lying on Form I-213, the official narrative report officers write to document an encounter with a suspect. “ERO AND CBP AND BP QUIT LYING IN YOUR 213 NARRATIVES SAYING SOMEONE WHO DIDNT LOOK AT ALL LIKE YOUR TARGET AGREED TO TALK AND SELF IDENTIFIED AS ILLEGAL! You’re putting false statements down. And you don’t mention breaking glass!!?? Whistleblowers!!!!,” the poster wrote.
Other posters on the forum responded with hostility, telling the poster to quit the agency. “Are you like a lot of the BP and ERO guys racially profiling people and putting lies in your 213 narratives?” the original critical poster fired back. On January 28, the forum user who had originally started the “ready to resign” thread replied to the critical poster, writing: “You scumbag. You are likely an illegal alien on here just stirring the pot. Go back to Guatemala!”
Posts in a different thread discussed an Instagram Reel from Axios Charlotte showing federal agents ramming into a suspect’s car during a pursuit. “How about the genius who thought it was a great idea to film himself during a vehicle pursuit, while actually trying to PIT the guy—when ICE literally has a no pursuit policy? You can’t make this level of brilliance up,” wrote the user who joined the forum in October 2015. PIT refers to a precision immobilization technique, where a law enforcement vehicle hits the side of the vehicle it is pursuing, causing it to swing around and stop.
“It’s fun until you t-bone and wipe out a family doing something you were not only prohibited from doing by policy but were never formally trained to do …” a user, who joined the forum first in September 2025, replied. “If BP wants to smash up their unmarked GOVs (or rentals in some cases), that's on them.” GOV is common shorthand for government-owned vehicles.
A third user added, “Bovino told them it's their country and no one can tell them what to do, right?” they wrote, referencing Gregory Bovino, who, up until January 2026, held the title of Commander-at-Large of the Border Patrol. “I guess they’re taking him seriously.”
Across threads in the forum, users raised questions and voiced deep concerns about the training new officers are receiving, in light of ICE’s massive new hiring push and increased funding. DHS announced that it had hired 12,000 new officers in 2025, all of whom have been promised bonuses of up to $50,000. In order to get new officers into the field more quickly, DHS has also shortened the required training time for new recruits.
“What are offices doing with the new hires as far as training?” one user asked in an October 12 post. “There seems to be zero plan to train them beyond the virtual course. They all just stand around.”
Another user who claimed to be an RA responded, saying that they had finished the virtual Deportation Officer Transition Program (DOPT) and “transitioned to practicals” like firearms training. “Our ‘new agent kit’ arrived on Friday, big Pelican box with body armor, gear, new Glock and not sure what else, will find out tomorrow. Overall this process has been chaotic to say the least,” they wrote, noting that they didn’t have access to GovTa, the system the government uses to track workers’ time and leave, or Electronic Official Personnel Folder (eOPF), which allows employees to access their own employment records. “Haven't heard a peep about the sign-on bonuses either.”
In a post from this week, another user wrote, “Hiring folks with tattoos on their head and neck is a little disturbing. Also, this 3 week virtual academy is extremely embarrassing and will end up embarrassing all of us who had to put the time in at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers.”
“This is going to be a train wreck that we may not survive,” they added.
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