A federal agent stands in a hallway to prevent members of the media from going past a certain point in the Jacob K Javits Federal Building in New York, on 17 July 2025. A mask can’t hide you from your neighbors, your children and God. You can walk away, before the shame follows you home. This is the message of a TV ad that began running in November 2025 in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Palm Beach, Florida. The ad, paid for by Women’s March, shows a little girl hugging her father, an ICE agent, while a voiceover urges him to quit.
A Moral Appeal to ICE Agents
Rachel O’Leary Carmona, executive director of Women’s March, explains the motivation behind the campaign. We wanted to dive deeper into what motivates ICE agents, she says. We started thinking about the moral imperative, but also the people who are choosing to join this brutality, perhaps because of economic incentives. The Trump administration’s One Big, Beautiful Bill Act offered a $50,000 signing bonus for new ICE recruits, along with 25% premium pay and up to $60,000 in student loan repayments. The anti-ICE ad is now being shown in more markets, appearing in key time slots from El Paso to Miami, Atlanta, and New Jersey.
Women’s March is one of several groups that believe challenging ICE requires appealing to the morality of its agents and potential recruits. Some activists compassionately appeal to a sense of basic humanity, hoping ICE agents might be healed so as not to harm others. Others apply shame and guilt in a fire-and-brimstone way to make agents feel bad. Many critics argue that ICE’s execution of its anti-immigration mandate is so unprincipled that its agents are not capable of contrition or remorse. But Peter Pedemonti, director of the New Sanctuary Movement of Philadelphia, believes there is still hope. Shame is useful, he says. That commercial is showing that ICE agents are in misalignment. But there is a path to healing and turning back.
Faith-Based Efforts and Moral Injury
New Sanctuary Movement, a faith-based organization, uses organizing tactics that account for the basic humanity of ICE agents. For more than 20 weeks, the group has been hosting weekly candlelit vigils outside the agency’s Philadelphia headquarters. The community is coming together to pray for the families impacted by ICE, Pedemonti says. And also to pray for ICE agents. To pray for conversion, and the softening of heart. If we want our government to pass policies based on love and justice, then we need to model that.
The concept of moral injury, coined by psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, offers a framework for understanding the conscience-violating ramifications of certain violent missions. Moral injury is an essential part of combat trauma that leads to lifelong psychological injury, Shay wrote in his 1994 book Achilles in Vietnam. Veterans can usually recover from horror, fear, and grief once they return to civilian life, so long as what’s right has not been violated. This term has been applied to military veterans, police officers, and first responders. Studies have linked moral injury to higher incidences of suicidal ideation and suicide attempts. It’s estimated that nearly 6% of US military veterans suffer from morally injurious events.
Dan Clare, a Marine Corps and air force veteran who now works with Disabled American Veterans, says he suffered profound moral injury while serving in the Iraq war. It changes your view of yourself, he says. It makes you feel extremely guilty. Clare notes that a considerable number of new ICE recruits are military veterans—about 30% by DHS’s own accounting—who may already be suffering from moral injury. It’s not necessarily going to be a victory lap for those folks who end their careers with ICE, he says. We’re worried about those guys.
Recruitment and Psychological Profiles
The recent ICE hiring spree was aggressive, with relatively lax suitability requirements. College degree requirements were cut, and age caps were eliminated. This led to worries that street-level enforcement officers were undertrained and ill-prepared. They’re hiring the bottom of the barrel at Customs and Border Protection, says Jake Clark, a US army veteran and former first responder who runs the intervention organization Save a Warrior. If you can fog a mirror, they got a job for you. Clark maintains that agencies like ICE tend to attract certain personality types. There’s a high degree of neglect, abuse, dysfunction, he says. We go into these jobs to recreate the abandonment of our childhood. Clark defines many of his patient-clients as process addicts, addicted to their own adrenaline, endorphins, and cortisol.
Clark has worked with ICE and DHS agents, offering a therapeutic program that includes identifying sources of trauma and resolving psychic pain. He worries that incidences of moral injury are bound to increase as the agency endures criticism and plummeting morale. Earlier this year, an anonymous ICE agent described the job as mission impossible.
Compassion Amid Criticism
At a recent New Sanctuary Movement vigil in Philadelphia, a local pastor offered a prayer for ICE agents, acknowledging that not every agent is the same. Some enlist because they believe in purging the nation of undocumented immigrants. Others are enticed by the signing bonus. Many are non-white; Latino Americans account for nearly 30% of the workforce. And there are a few who thrill at the promise of violence, Pedemonti recalls. But it recognized that ICE agents are at different places.
Other researchers are not so sure that ICE agents can reckon with what they have done. Joseph Wiinikka-Lydon, a moral injury scholar at the Southern Poverty Law Center, says it’s a big concern if people who really like violence come on board. He worries that ICE is designed to shirk feelings of shame, symbolized by agents wearing masks. They’re basically admitting that what they’re doing is harmful, he says. The SPLC has criticized ICE for using nationalist and antisemitic imagery in recruitment. US Representative Jamie Raskin expressed concern that the agency used white nationalist dog whistles, seemingly targeting members of extremist militias, including those involved in the January 6 Capitol attack.
Billionaire hedge fund manager Tom Steyer has called for ICE agents to be treated like a criminal racket. You can’t reform a criminal organization, he says. Steyer brushes off comparisons to military veterans suffering from moral injury. An active service member deployed to a combat zone is not the same as a masked thug shooting Americans in the street. ICE recruits have been compared to the Gestapo. The Trump administration complains that such comparisons are pejorative, but most observers maintain that this language accurately describes ICE.
Shayna Solomon, an organizer with Never Again Action, a Jewish-led mobilization against immigrant persecution, isn’t afraid of drawing direct comparisons between ICE raids and the Holocaust. It’s important that we use our history and memory to fight against fascism today, she says.
Public Antipathy and Redemption
Given these severe indictments, it can be difficult to rouse public sympathy for ICE agents. Many argue that the trauma to heal is that of the people ICE has brutalized. Jake Clark admits that the nature of the ICE mission and its widespread unpopularity—a February poll found nearly two-thirds of Americans disapprove of ICE—makes them a tough demographic to support. There’s a certain antipathy when you talk about DHS and ICE, he says.
Asked if it is difficult to humanize and sympathize with ICE, Peter Pedemonti pauses. I think we can also harden our hearts, he cautions. We can say, these are terrible people and they’re not worth saving. But we keep the olive branch out. That strategy is not for everybody. ICE agents don’t generally speak to reporters. The DHS has been accused of maintaining a combative relationship with journalists. Reached for comment, an ICE spokesperson maintained that the agency provides confidential services for all employees, including peer support, clinical support for veterans, and a chaplain program.
For Women’s March’s Rachel O’Leary Carmona, making genuine appeals to morality is a means to an end. Their redemption is not our concern, she says. Their non-cooperation, their desire to leave their roles, or their unwillingness to do things that might get them in trouble—that feels important. We’re trying to get people to refuse to be part of this machine.
