Two Latino ICE agents killed a Latino immigrant named Alex Pretti in January, and a lot of people acted shocked. They probably shouldn't have been. Latinos now make up a majority of Border Patrol officers and somewhere between 20 and 30 percent of ICE agents, and according to a new analysis in The Guardian, that is less a modern anomaly than the continuation of a very long, very uncomfortable American story.
The Numbers Nobody Wants to Talk About
More than 60 people have died at the hands of or in the custody of ICE since Trump returned to power, according to The Guardian. That includes Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston and Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine, two Latino immigrants killed in the same week. Brown people are being hunted in this country right now. That part is not in dispute.
What gets less attention is who is doing some of the hunting. The assumption that Latino agents enforcing brutal immigration policy represents some kind of betrayal only holds if you believe Latinos are naturally, uniformly opposed to restrictionist immigration enforcement. The Guardian's analysis, written by historian Eladio Bobadilla, is here to tell you that assumption has never been historically accurate.
This is not comfortable reading. It is not meant to be.
This Goes Back Further Than Trump
The Guardian traces the pattern to at least the 1950s, when prominent Latino leaders and organizations actively supported Operation Wetback, the federal deportation campaign that removed hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants and, in the process, plenty of their American citizen family members too. The support wasn't random cruelty. It was rooted in labor economics. US employers had spent years using migrant workers to undercut unions, suppress wages, and break strikes. Latino workers, many of them union members themselves, saw undocumented labor as a direct threat.
The logic carried into the 1960s and 1970s. The United Farm Workers, César Chávez's union, the iconic symbol of Latino labor solidarity, had activists who harassed undocumented migrants, reported them to immigration authorities, and in some cases organized their own border patrols. Some of those patrols turned violent. This is documented history, not right-wing talking points.
None of this makes the violence excusable. It does make it comprehensible, which is a different thing entirely.
Proposition 187 and the Swing That Wasn't
California's Proposition 187, the 1994 ballot initiative designed to cut undocumented immigrants off from public services including schools and healthcare, is remembered as a racist overreach that unified Latino voters in opposition. The Guardian's analysis complicates that tidy memory considerably.
Only about a quarter of Latino voters ultimately supported the measure. But polling in the weeks before the vote showed nearly half were considering it. That is not a community united against nativism. That is a community genuinely torn, weighing fears about belonging and resources and status against solidarity with people who shared their heritage but not their legal status. The gap between where they started and where they landed matters. So does the fact that nearly half got all the way to the edge.
Trump Didn't Create This. He Exploited It.
"Latinos for Trump" did not appear from nowhere in 2016. And when Trump ran again in 2024, according to The Guardian, he didn't just hold his Latino support, he expanded it. The gains were sharpest among Latino men and in heavily Latino border communities along the US-Mexico border, including counties with majority-Latino populations that shifted toward him in significant numbers.
Bobadilla's analysis points to a broader rightward evolution happening simultaneously: the American right reorienting itself around opposition to multiculturalism, feminism, LGBTQ rights, and immigration rather than explicit white identity. That made room for people of color who shared the political commitments without the biological framing. Enrique Tarrio, the Proud Boys leader who is Afro-Cuban, got a Trump pardon after January 6. Nick Fuentes, whose father is Mexican American, became one of the most visible white nationalist influencers in the country. These are not footnotes. They are the point.
The right is not simply including people of color despite its politics. It is actively recruiting them into a coalition organized around those politics, offering what The Guardian describes as inclusion on specific terms: not as outsiders or victims, but as enforcers and defenders.
What the ICE Agent Actually Gets Out of This
The Guardian identifies several explanations scholars have offered for why Latinos join immigration enforcement in such large numbers: economic stability, a sense of community service, proximity to whiteness. Bobadilla argues these are all partially true and collectively insufficient.
The deeper pull, his analysis suggests, is about the particular anxiety of people who occupy an uneasy middle ground in American society. Subject to discrimination, never fully included, but also never fully excluded. Enforcement agencies offer something concrete: status, belonging, the chance to be the one holding the authority rather than the one subject to it. That is a powerful thing to offer someone who has spent their life in the uncertain in-between.
This does not make what those agents do acceptable. People make choices. But understanding why people make certain choices is a precondition for understanding anything about how power actually works.
The Dingo Take
You are supposed to look at a Latino ICE agent and feel simple, clean outrage. Traitor. Sellout. The shock is supposed to be the whole story. But the shock only works if you've been telling yourself a version of Latino political identity that has always been more wishful than accurate, and The Guardian's analysis is doing the uncomfortable work of correcting that.
Every community contains the full range of human possibility, including the possibility of enforcing systems that harm your own people, including the possibility of finding security and status in institutions built on cruelty. That is not a uniquely Latino failure. That is a human one, repeated across every group that has ever been offered conditional inclusion by a hostile society. The Irish enforcing anti-Black policies in 19th century cities. Working-class whites voting against their own economic interests for the comfort of racial hierarchy. The mechanism is not new. The players rotate.
What is new, and what makes this moment genuinely dangerous, is the scale and the explicit recruitment. The Trump movement did not accidentally attract Latino support. It built for it, offering a political home to anyone willing to sign onto the program regardless of what the program does to people who look like them. More than 60 people are dead in ICE custody since January 2025. Some of the agents responsible have Hispanic surnames. History did not have to go this way. It just did.
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