General Discussion

Jesús Ochoa and Raymundo Gutierrez, the two federal immigration agents who killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, are Latinos from South Texas—Ochoa a Border Patrol agent, Gutierrez a Customs and Border Protection officer. Statistically speaking, this should come as no surprise. Over the past half century, Latinos went from making up a negligible fraction of Border Patrol agents to constituting half of the entire force. Latinos have been central to the work done by the Border Patrol for decades.

But when ProPublica first revealed the agents’ identities, back in February, I noticed progressives recoiling online at the thought that Latinos would participate in Donald Trump’s mass-deportation campaign, and in the most violent way possible. That impulse, I think, stems from a still-common inclination to see Latinos as one-dimensional actors motivated primarily by their sense of solidarity with other Latinos. An accompanying, usually unspoken, belief is that feelings of ethnic solidarity ought to be more important than people’s differing views of what’s right and just. The same bad thinking led many Americans to assume that Latinos could never vote for Trump.

Academics, too, have treated the phenomenon of Latino border agents as something of a puzzle. The anthropologist Josiah Heyman at the University of Texas at El Paso has argued that Latino Border Patrol officers don’t identify with the Latino community. The political scientist David Cortez at Notre Dame has written that the officers join the force mainly for the salary and benefits. Most recently, the sociologist Irene Vega at UC Irvine argued that these Latinos come to embrace the mission of the Border Patrol through the process of socialization during training.

A simpler explanation is that Latinos who join ICE believe in the enforcement of immigration laws and that they are protecting, not antagonizing, their communities. Border Patrol recruitment videos feature Latinos and target them with stories about the excitement of the job, the drugs they would intercept, the criminals they would arrest, the discipline and sense of mission they would acquire at training camp. During his first term, Trump honored one Latino Border Patrol officer at the White House for discovering almost 80 migrants attempting to enter the United States in the back of a semitruck, and he invited another as a guest to a speech he gave during a joint session of Congress in 2025. Latino Border Patrol officers have testified as the agency’s leaders before Congress, where they have highlighted its accomplishments, defended it against criticism, and expressed their firm conviction in its mission. Claudio Herrera, a Mexican immigrant who became a Border Patrol officer, said in an interview with CNN late last year that sometimes people ask him, “Aren’t you ashamed of apprehending your own?” to which he responds, “Of course not, because I’m protecting my community.”