What ICE Agents Talk About When They Think Nobody Is Listening

Around 8 a.m. on a recent Friday, two federal agents walked into the coffee shop where I was sitting and drinking an $8 cup of drip coffee as I examined the decor—posters reading "Creative Fucker" and three flatscreen televisions, each playing different content produced by the coffee shop company, including interviews with the CEO and drone footage from a "Creative Conference" that the brand had hosted with baristas.

The agents wore plainclothes: cargo pants, Under Armour T-shirts, baseball caps, the standard attire of the often-masked agents from various federal departments who have been assigned to perform courtroom arrests of immigrants. I recognized both of them, their eyes and foreheads, after spending most of the previous two weeks in two of New York City's immigration courts. These two were usually quietly standing and following orders; I'd seen them standing in a ring around an immigrant being arrested, but I'd never seen them performing the arrests themselves.

One of the agents was just beginning his shift and the other was finishing. The first was wearing a metal and leather bracelet with a cross and some writing that looked like a Bible verse engraved on it. "Judicial day for me," he said, which I took to mean that he was going to be stationed in the courtroom that day. He went on to describe some training he had received over the past week. "I wasn't quite getting a particular take-down. So I asked them to show me again. You know, what does this really look like?" he said earnestly, sounding like he wanted to be a good student. "Now I learned the move, I won't forget it."

They began complaining about recent changes to their directives. A few weeks earlier, Stephen Miller had demanded arrest rates of 3,000 per day, which had generated a spike in detention numbers. "Did you ever see that show 'The Good Place'?" the one wearing the bracelet with the Bible verse said. "This reminds me of something that the demon tried to torture people with. Give them something terrible, let them figure it out, and then change it."

"The Good Place" is a comedy series in which a multiracial cast wakes up and is told by Ted Danson that they are in a kind of Heaven after living lives as good people. Eventually, the cast learns that they are actually in hell, and that they have been tricked by Danson, who is a devil. In this analogy, the agents had just been disabused of their sainthood, presumably by their bosses who were, by turns, either God or the devil.