Caitlin Dickerson

I was talking to one former ICE official who told me that, you know, you would always fear discharging your weapon in an interaction, even a

potentially violent and a dangerous one, usually the concern was that officers would be too unwilling to use their gun because they worried about potential repercussions.

And there were all these layers of investigation that would take place after a shooting.

And so...

his fear when he was in ICE for 30 years was that he wouldn't use his gun in a moment when he needed to.

And now it's almost as if the opposite fear is true.

And we've seen within ICE people losing their jobs

high-level officials losing their jobs because they're not delivering enough deportations, they're not being aggressive enough.

And so I think Miller is just underscoring that argument that you're not going to get in trouble for being too aggressive.

And in fact, the only thing you will get in trouble for is not being aggressive enough.

So it's happened a couple of different times.

The very head of ICE was replaced.

A deputy was replaced.

And then we've also seen several field office directors.

So ICE has the country divided into individual field offices.

And those directors are the people who are overseeing the officers carrying out these deportations, talking to them on a daily basis, communicating quotas and guidelines.

And we've seen a significant number of those field office directors taken off of their duties and replaced with officials from the Border Patrol.

I think that's really significant because the Border Patrol in general, reputationally, is viewed even within the Department of Homeland Security as a tougher and wild, wild west almost type of environment that they tend to work in.

But also there are legal differences.

What people's rights are at the border are different from their rights within the interior of the country.