In November 2025, a TV ad began running in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Palm Beach, Florida.

In it, a little girl with blond hair in a ponytail lies on her belly, working on a coloring book. A nearby TV blares with images of immigrants being brutalized by ICE agents. The front door opens and the girl bounces up, rushing over to hug her father and asks: “Daddy, how was your day?” while the camera reveals ICE insignia on his shirtsleeve. The voiceover begins: “A mask can’t hide you from your neighbors, your children and God. You can walk away, before the shame follows you home.”

The ad was paid for by Women’s March, a non-partisan non-profit, which, according to its mission statement, “transforms women into feminists”.

“We mobilize women on the issues that matter to us,” says Rachel O’Leary Carmona, executive director of Women’s March. “And ICE, obviously, was really important to us.”

Women have been “the tip of the spear” in anti-ICE organizing, Carmona says. When 37-year-old US citizen Renee Good was shot and killed by the ICE enforcement officer Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis, Minnesota, earlier this year, a new acronym emerged in rightwing circles to describe such protesters: Awful, for “affluent white female urban liberal”. (The term seems to have originated from the conservative Christian commentator Erick Erickson, who called Good an Awful in a post on X shortly after the attack.)

“After the officer shot Renee Good, he walked away and called her a ‘fucking bitch’,” Carmona says. In the weeks that followed, Carmona felt “a lot of the discourse was actually, ‘Well, was she a fucking bitch or not?’” It was clearly a women’s issue.

With their ad campaign, Carmona and Women’s March wanted to dive deeper into what motivates ICE agents. “We started thinking about the moral imperative,” she says, “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” increase above base salary 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 – anywhere the presence of ICE is being felt.

Women’s March is one of a number of groups and organizations that believe one of the best ways to challenge ICE is to appeal to the morality of its agents and potential recruits. But there are soft and hard approaches to this tactic. Some activists compassionately appeal to a sense of basic humanity in the genuine hope that ICE agents might be healed so as not to harm others. Others apply feelings of shame and guilt in a fire-and-brimstone way – precisely to make agents feel bad.

Many critics would argue that ICE’s execution of their anti-immigration mandate is so unprincipled that its agents are not capable of feelings of contrition or remorse. But Peter Pedemonti, director of the New Sanctuary Movement of Philadelphia, an immigrant rights group that has been organizing against ICE in recent months, believes there’s still hope. “Shame is useful,” he says. “That [Women’s March] commercial is showing that ICE agents are in misalignment. But there is a path to healing and turning back.”

A faith-based organization (Pedemonti himself is a Catholic), New Sanctuary 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 that are based on love and justice and seeing everyone’s humanity and dignity, then we need to model that and act that way.”

Recovering from ‘moral injury’

The modern history of American military and policing offers warnings about just how devastating shame can be. This feeling of profound guilt carried back from conflict zones has its own diagnosis. Some experts call it “moral injury”, a term coined by Jonathan Shay, who served as a staff psychiatrist at the US Department of Veterans Affairs for more than 20 years. It offers a framework for understanding the conscience-violating, sometimes completely soul-breaking ramifications of certain violent and controversial missions.

In the years since American troops withdrew from Vietnam and declared the whole campaign in south-east Asia an abject failure, doctors and psychiatrists began noticing a pattern among returned veterans. There were, of course, the telltale signs of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): disturbed thoughts, nightmares, irritability, suicidal thoughts and behaviors, and an acutely heightened fight-or-flight response. But there was something else, too. It was a feeling among soldiers of not just being subjected to extreme, psychologically shattering circumstances, but of doing something that violated their own sense of right and wrong.

As outlined in Shay’s 1994 book Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, “moral injury is an essential part of combat trauma that leads to lifelong psychological injury. 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.”

Given the Vietnam war’s level of violence, and the conflict’s discredited justification by American political elites, many who served struggled to come to terms with acts they committed, which they saw as deeply immoral. These feelings were amplified by the war’s unpopularity in the US, and the sense among troops that they were not being supported by civilians back home. Subsequent military boondoggles – in Afghanistan, Iraq and Mogadishu – only compounded these incidences of acute moral injury.

The term may seem a little euphemistic: a way of absolving perpetrators (or bystanders) of violent acts undertaken in uniform. It’s a grace rarely afforded offenders in civilian life. You don’t really hear about “murderer’s trauma” or “arsonist’s remorse”. How we should treat the suffering of perpetrators is debatable but the effects of moral injury are diagnosable and verifiable. Those that experience it are avoidant in social relationships, believing themselves unworthy of love or esteem.

Some 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 social, psychological or spiritual trauma from morally injurious events. Moral injury has also been diagnosed among police officers and other first responders. Recent studies have analyzed the prevalence of PMIEs, or “potentially morally injurious events”, among US law enforcement.

Dan Clare, a Marine Corps and air force veteran who now works with Disabled American Veterans, counts himself as someone who suffered profound moral injury while serving in the Iraq war. It all snapped into focus when his aunt, a nun, asked him if he felt he had seen Jesus overseas. “I knew what she wanted me to say,” Clare says. “But absolutely I did not see Jesus in Iraq. I did not see the will of God in Iraq. I saw a lot of suffering when I was over there. It changes your view of yourself. It makes you feel extremely guilty.”

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While Clare hesitates to comment on DHS actions specifically, he 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.”

‘They’re addicted to their own adrenaline’

The recent ICE hiring spree was aggressive, with relatively lax suitability requirements, courting would-be agents with no law enforcement or military experience whatsoever. College degree requirements were cut. Age caps were eliminated. This led to worries that the influx of street-level enforcement officers were undertrained, unvetted and ill-prepared for the physical and psychological toll of their mission.

“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 served in the Los Angeles police department, FBI, Secret Service and California national guard) who now runs the intervention organization Save a Warrior, focused on the rehabilitation of moral injury. “If you can fog a fuckin’ mirror, they got a job for you.”

Clark maintains that agencies like ICE tend to attract certain personality types and psychological profiles. “There’s a high degree of neglect, abuse, dysfunction, physical, emotional, sexual abuse, religious abuse,” he says. “We go into these jobs to recreate the abandonment of our childhood. And we don’t know that we don’t know that, because we’re addicted to the pain. And that’s the secret.”

Clark defines many of his patient-clients as “process addicts”: that is, addicted not to drugs or alcohol or other exogenous adulterants, but to their own learned body chemistry. “They live for drama,” he says. “They’re addicted to their own adrenaline, endorphins, melatonin and cortisol.”

Clark has worked with ICE and DHS agents at Save a Warrior, offering a therapeutic program that includes identifying the sources of those traumas, resolving psychic pain and even, according to its website, “mindfulness-inspired labyrinth walks for integrating our survival traits”. He worries that incidences of moral injury are bound to increase, especially as the agency endures increased criticism and plummeting morale over impossible quotas, long hours and generalized public hatred. Earlier this year, one anonymous ICE agent described the job to a reporter as “mission impossible”.

At a recent New Sanctuary Movement vigil in Philadelphia, there was a similar compassion for agents’ troubled past, with a local pastor offering a prayer for ICE agents. His petition acknowledged that not every ICE agent is the same.

Some enlist because they believe in purging the nation of undocumented immigrants. Others are enticed by the hefty signing bonus. Some just need work. Many are non-white. Latino Americans, for example, are overrepresented among ICE’s ranks, accounting for nearly 30% of the work force.

And yes, surely, there are a few who just thrill at the promise of confrontation and violence. “There were some strong words there,” New Amnesty’s Pedemonti recalls. “But it sort of recognized that ICE agents are at different places.”

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Other researchers, aren’t so sure it will be possible for ICE agents to reckon with what they have done. Their morals, such as they are, are not at all “misaligned”. There is nothing to be compromised, betrayed or “injured”.

“I think it’s a big concern,” says Joseph Wiinikka-Lydon, a moral injury scholar and senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). “If you have people come on board who really like violence, I think it’s very, very dangerous and irresponsible.”

Wiinikka-Lydon worries that ICE is designed to shirk feelings of shame and culpability. This evasiveness, he believes, is symbolized by agents wearing masks and face-smothering neck gaiters. “They’re basically admitting that what they’re doing is harmful,” he says. “They make this person not a person, but an agent of the state. It’s a sign of a desire to dominate and brutalize and to overpower.”

SPLC has also noticed troubling signs in the agency’s recruitment patterns and demographics. Last August, they published a report criticizing ICE for using graphics and messaging in their recruitment campaign “ranging from overt nationalist and antisemitic imagery”. Earlier this year, the US House representative Jamie Raskin expressed concern that the agency was using “white nationalist “dog whistles” in its recruitment campaign … seemingly targeting members of extremist militias”. This included, Raskin said, members of the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, Three Percenters and other far-right groups involved in the attempted resurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, who were subsequently granted blanket clemency from Donald Trump. Far-right political affiliation, a history of political violence and diagnosable sociopathy may not be disqualifying. Indeed, ICE can seem like a jobs program for January 6 pardonees.

The billionaire hedge fund manager, Democratic mega-donor and California gubernatorial hopeful Tom Steyer has called for ICE agents to be treated like a criminal racket. “You can’t reform a criminal organization,” Steyer says. “Every American should be concerned that ICE is recruiting people with authoritarian views that are contrary to the constitution.”

Steyer brushes off any meaningful comparison between ICE agents and military veterans who are suffering from the symptoms of so-called moral injury. “An active service member who was deployed to a combat zone in a foreign country, under authority authorized by Congress, is not the same as a masked thug shooting Americans in the street for exercising their rights.”

ICE recruits have been compared to the Gestapo, Adolf Hitler’s secret state police. The Trump administration complains that such comparisons are purely pejorative, but most observers maintain that this language accurately describes ICE and their mission. In other words, the jackboot fits.

“Our people have a collective memory of what happened in the Holocaust,” says Shayna Solomon, an organizer with Never Again Action. Described as a Jewish-led mobilization against the persecution, detention and deportation of immigrants in the United States, Never Again Action isn’t afraid of drawing direct comparisons between ICE anti-immigrant raids and the most harrowing historical traumas of the 20th century. As Solomon says: “It’s important that we use our history and memory to fight against fascism today.”

Getting agents to reconsider their role

Given these extremely severe indictments – comparing ICE officers to Nazis and the Gestapo, or drawing a direct line between the horrors of the Holocaust, internment camps in El Salvador and the streets of Minneapolis – it can be difficult to rouse certain sectors of the public to care much about ICE’s feelings. Many would argue that the trauma we should be trying to heal is that of the people ICE has brutalized, many of them children.

Save a Warrior’s Jake Clark admits that the nature of the ICE mission, and its widespread unpopularity – in February, a poll found that nearly two-thirds of Americans disapprove of ICE’s actions – makes them a tough demographic for the public to support. Given the way the mission disrupts communities, their identity-concealing clothing and the very public incidences of violence perpetrated by ICE, it can prove difficult to get many people to care about its agents’ psychological states or their feelings. “There’s a certain antipathy when you talk about DHS and ICE,” he says, putting it lightly.

Asked if he thinks it is sometimes difficult to humanize and sympathize with ICE, New Sanctuary’s Peter Pedemonti pauses. “I think we can also harden our hearts as well,” 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 or address media concerns. The DHS has been accused have maintaining a combative relationship with journalists, from accusing reporters of “demonizing DHS law enforcement” to intimidating and arresting members of the media for documenting ICE activity. Reached for comment, an ICE spokesperson maintained that “to safeguard employees’ mental, emotional and physical health US Immigration and Customs Enforcement provides confidential services for all ICE employees and their family members”. These programs include non-clinical peer support, clinical support for veterans serving within the agency, and a chaplain program to “assist employees in crisis or after traumatic events, offering guidance for those who desire spiritual help”.

For Women’s March’s Rachel O’Leary Carmona, making genuine appeals to morality is more a means to an end. Her commercial campaign, she says, is not about drumming up sympathy for the hardworking enforcement agents, returning home with their heads hung low, but about trying to get those same agents to pause and reflect.

“Their redemption is not our concern,” Carmona 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.”