Why are Latinos serving as immigration agents? Are they victims or oppressors?

The surge of massive detentions and deportations that began in mid-2025 not only highlighted racial profiling and vulnerable communities, but it also underscored the demographics of agents who performed these record-breaking activities. 

On Wednesday, a panel of experts brought to light how Latinos are significantly important to the U.S. workforce, but within their own families, there are also immigration agents seeking to deport their own. 

UC Irvine (UCI) Professor of Sociology, Irene I. Vega, authored the book “Bordering on Indifference,” where she elaborates on how immigration agents negotiate race and morality.

She interviewed 60 Border Patrol agents and 30 ICE officers. The majority of them were Latinos, children or grandchildren of Mexican immigrants and many of them grew along the U.S.-Mexico border.

“People are surprised to hear that 50% of the Border Patrol on a national level are Latinos and one-third of ICE are Latinos,” Vega said. “Where I grew up [in Arizona] these figures can be upwards of 75%, 80% Latinos who grew up there and have come back to do this work.”

Vega said she became very interested in learning how these federal agents reconcile the politics and ethical dubiousness of their work.

While many people think these agents are “self-hating race traders” or people who want to assimilate and gain acceptance from the dominant population, there is a more specific reason why, particularly, men of color participate in the social control of their communities. 

She said some of the reasons why they join include educational inequality, uneven economic opportunity and the uneven recruitment of men of color into the military.

Once they are part of the organization, their actions become a culture, just as in the military or policing, where the belief is that they are all in it together without regard to who the target is. However, the actions are becoming more dangerous as the pressure for higher detention quotas increases, said Dr. Lisa Magaña, professor at Arizona State University (ASU). 

“So it's not surprising that we're seeing these atrocious activities on the part of ICE,” she said. “The other thing that we see consistently is that there's much more emphasis on enforcement immigration policy, not service.” 

She said the funding for detention and deportation should go towards more judges facilitating the cases, instead of ICE enforcement. 

Latino Trump supporters and opponents

In 2024, Trump had the highest percentage ever of the Latino male electorate of any previous Republican presidential candidate; 47%, according to the Pew Research Center. However, his actions made him lose many of the same votes he had just won. 

Gustavo Arellano, Los Angeles Times columnist and strong critic of la migra (immigration officers), said right after the June 6, 2025 deportations started he attended a protest in Santa Ana, Calif. where he met people who said they didn’t have a problem with Trump deporting criminals, but with the fact that a lot of blue collar, hard-working people were getting profiled and targeted. 

Arellano said if Trump hadn’t started his “deportation delusion” and instead quietly focused on the people whom he wanted to deport like criminals and recent migrants from Central and South America, he could’ve kept the male Latino vote. 

“But no, [Trump] really wanted to just crush us [Latinos]. And it started here in L.A., and [in] L.A. we’re like, we're not going to do this. You're not going to do this at all. And so that's where the resistance started,” Arellano said.

Dr. Magaña said that many of these voters have shifted, not so much from the Republican Party but from Trump. She said this truly shows how immigration remains as an important issue for Latinos, not because of border crossings, but because of the treatment ICE is giving to the detainees. 

Proposed solutions 

Dr. Vega said accountability is paramount in the way the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agencies are being instructed to act. 

However, it is also important to hold the tension between the reactions of people to Latinos in immigration enforcement and the structural explanations for how they get into the job. 

“Because I think what we do about it is we advocate for more educational opportunity, more economic opportunity, and I think that's a big part of the way that we change what these institutions look like,” Vega said. 

Magaña agreed it is important to challenge people and to see the positive change they can create. Through encouragement, they can become leaders of their communities and create more positive change. 

She said in Arizona, for example, voter registration has gone up and there have been more grassroots organizers, including immigrant activists. Others have opted to become involved in politics, both traditional and non-traditional. 

“So in some ways, sort of targeting and all of this, this rhetoric and draconian notice, it's actually serving to galvanize,” she said. 

The panel was hosted on Wednesday by the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute and the Arizona State University School of Transborder Studies.