On a forum with over 5,000 members claiming to be current and former Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers, users vent their frustrations and concerns about the agency as it has become the center of public ire.

“I’m all for removing illegals, but snatching dudes off lawn mowers in Cali and leaving the truck and equipment just sitting there? Definitely not working smarter,” wrote one user.

The forum contains posts dating back over a decade and describes itself as an “unofficial forum for current Deportation Officers, prospective applicants and retired Deportation Officers to have a platform for discussion.” In posts viewed by WIRED, users complain of long working hours, limited overtime pay, incompetent leadership, and poorly trained new recruits.

Forum users do not need to show proof of their employment to join, and the platform does not appear to be heavily moderated. WIRED has not confirmed the individual identities of these posters, though the forum is one of several related forums where people working in different parts of DHS share experiences and discuss specific details of deportation officer work that would likely only be known to those in the job, including discussions about the inner workings of the job, the hiring and training process, and swapping duty placements. Some forum members are newcomers, and others have been members for over a decade.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and ICE did not respond to requests for comment.

As scrutiny and public outrage have followed the violent immigration raids in Minneapolis for DHS’s Operation Metro Surge, particularly in the wake of federal agents shooting and killing Renee Good and Alex Pretti, users in the forum haven’t shied away from posting.

On January 19, five days before Pretti was killed, a user started a thread titled, “Ready to resign, had enough stress.”

“I have 2.3 years left for full special category retirement … but don’t know if I’ll make it. Tired of this Agency. Employees being abused badly. Mandated TDY’s with less than 24 hours notice,” the first post reads from a user who has been a member of the forum since September 2015. TDY is the shorthand for “temporary duty,” which involves pulling officers from across the country to cities like Minneapolis for large-scale operations.

“No more weekends off, more work than ever before in 18 years. No more union. No more down time,” the post continues. “This is not what any of us envisioned for our last years of career when we are in our 50’s.” (In 2022, thousands of ICE personnel lost union representation that many other government workers possess, including protections around overtime pay. The president of the council that represented ICE officers within the American Federation of Government Employees alleged that the union had become “far left.”)

Other forum users joined in to echo the original poster’s complaints and voice their concerns about the direction of the agency. “Led by some of the worst leadership I’ve ever witnessed, from the local level all the way up to the national stage, 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 have also complained about the image problem created for ICE as CBP has taken a greater role in immigration enforcement in US cities. “There was absolutely zero forethought and our Management just rolled over to let BP take over. HUGE mistake, when the nuance of actual targeted enforcement is needed,” a different user who has been a forum member since May 2017 added.

That distinction sometimes gets elided as “ICE” has become a generic descriptor for federal immigration agents. Both ICE and CBP are part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), but they are separate entities with distinct missions. CBP focuses on immigration enforcement at the border and ports of entry. ICE’s mandate allows it to target its operations in the US interior. Both agencies are active in the administration’s current immigration operations, in addition to pulling in personnel from other agencies, like the US Marshals and the State Department’s Diplomatic Service.

In another thread titled “RHA Mandatory TDY to Minneapolis,” officers complained about their 30-day assignments to the city for the surge. “Last thing I want is to be forced to work 7 days,” one user, a newer member who joined in December 2025, wrote in the thread, which began on December 16. Many posts from the final days of 2025 griped at how the “forced deployments are getting out of hand,” as another user, a member since February 2021, put it.

The first user noted that there had been “no pre-planning” for the influx of officers. “How to use them, outfit them, databases access, cars, equipment, duties, nada. Instead they throw the RAs to ERO to do consensual encounters that they haven’t had training on really. A two hour TEAMS Zoom course ain’t enough.” ERO refers to the Enforcement and Removal Operations division of ICE, where staffers manage detention and make arrests on the ground; RA refers to “rehired annuitant,” or federal employees who were retired but have since returned to federal work.

That same user also alleged that “the arrest reports are also lies in some, a lot, 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 on the way. Immigration agents have already mistakenly arrested US citizens and legal residents. Leonardo Garcia Venegas, a US citizen living in Alabama, is now suing the government after immigration agents detained him, claiming he was “interfering” with their operations. In one case, an ICE report said that a man, who was originally from Mexico but had lived in Minnesota for four years, was taken to a hospital in Minneapolis after being detained by federal agents. He had broken bones in his face and ICE agents claimed he had shattered his skull by allegedly running into a wall. One of the nurses at the hospital told the Associated Press, “There was no way this person ran headfirst into a wall.” This individual, who was diagnosed by doctors at the hospital as having “life threatening injuries,” according to a court filing, has been placed in “four point restraints” by federal agents.

Others in the forum have noted that the number of deported immigrants shared by DHS appears to be 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 a fourth 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 on the forum also claim that arrests are often counted multiple times. “When we make an arrest through a task force, that single arrest is reported separately” by every agency involved in the taskforce, according to 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 of DHS leadership going after “low hanging fruit” to pump up the numbers of arrests. “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 thread on Minneapolis 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 that officers had been falsifying reports reappeared, claiming that immigration officers were lying on their 213s, the narrative report that an officer writes up 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 respond 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 initial user responded.

On January 28, the forum user who had originally started the thread about wanting to quit replied to the poster alleging ICE’s improper reports posted, “You scumbag. You are likely an illegal alien on here just stirring the pot. Go back to Guatemala!”

Posts in a different thread discussed a reel from Axios Charlotte showing federal agents ramming into someone’s car. “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’s 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 refers to 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, held the title of Commander-at-Large of the Border Patrol. “I guess they’re [sic] taking him seriously”

Across threads in the forum, users asked questions—and voiced concerns—about the training new officers are receiving, in light of all ICE’s new hiring and 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 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 the 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 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 [Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers].”

“This is going to be a train wreck that we may not survive,” they added.

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