Investigators say one immigration enforcement officer managed to physically assault his girlfriend for years. Another admitted to repeatedly sexually abusing a woman in his custody. A third is accused of taking bribes to lift detention orders on people targeted for deportation.
At least two dozen U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement employees and contractors have been charged with crimes since 2020, and their documented misconduct includes patterns of physical and sexual abuse, corruption and other abuses of authority, a review by The Associated Press found.
While many of the cases occurred before Congress voted last year to give ICE $75 billion to hire more agents and detain more people, experts say these types of crimes could accelerate because of the sheer volume of new recruits and their power to use aggressive tactics to arrest and deport people.
The Trump administration has emboldened the agents by arguing they have “absolute immunity” for their actions on the job and by weakening surveillance. One judge recently suggested that ICE was developing a disturbing culture of lawlessness, while experts questioned whether job applicants are getting enough vetting and training.
“Once a person is hired, brought in, goes through training and is not the right person, it’s hard to get rid of them and there’s a price that has to be paid later by everyone,” said Gil Kerlikowske, who served as US Customs and Border Protection Commissioner from 2014 to 2017.
Almost every law enforcement agency encounters bad employees and crimes related to domestic violence and substance abuse are long-standing problems in the field. But ICE’s rapid growth and mission to deport millions is unprecedented, and the AP review found that the immense power that officers wield over vulnerable populations can lead to abuses.
Homeland Security Department Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said the misconduct was not widespread at the agency, and that ICE “takes allegations of misconduct by its employees very seriously.” She said most of the new hires had already worked for other law enforcement agencies, and that their backgrounds were thoroughly checked.
“America can be proud of the professionalism that our officers bring to work from day to day,” she said.
ICE misconduct could become a ‘nationwide phenomenon’
ICE announced last month that it had more than doubled in size to 22,000 employees in less than a year.
Kerlikowske said ICE agents are particularly “vulnerable to issues of unnecessary use of force,” as they often conduct enforcement operations in public while facing protests. With the number of ICE detainees nearly doubling since last year to 70,000, the employees and contractors responsible for overseeing them are also facing challenging conditions that could provide more opportunities for misconduct.
The Border Patrol doubled in size to more than 20,000 agents from 2004 to 2011 — six years longer than ICE took. He was embarrassed by a wave of corruption, abuse and other misconduct by some of the new employees. Kerlikowske recalled cases of agents who accepted bribes to allow cars carrying drugs into the United States or who became involved in human trafficking.
He and others say ICE is ready to look at similar problems that will likely be broader in scope, with less oversight and accountability.
“Corruption and abuse and misconduct were largely limited in the previous instance to along the border and interactions with immigrants and residents of the border state. With ICE, this will be a phenomenon throughout the country since they attract so many people who are attracted to this mission”, said David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian think tank cato.
Bier, who has helped publicize some of the recent arrests and other alleged misconduct by ICE agents, said he was struck by the “remarkable range of different crimes and charges that we’ve seen.”
The AP review examined public records involving cases of ICE employees and contractors who have been arrested since 2020, including at least 17 who have been convicted and six others who are awaiting trial. Nine have been charged in the past year, including an agent cited last month for assaulting a protester near Chicago while off-duty.
Some of the most serious crimes were committed by veteran ICE employees and supervisors rather than rookies.
While federal officials have justified ICE’s aggression, the agents’ behavior is drawing scrutiny from watchdogs and prosecutors who operate cellphones in Democratic-led jurisdictions. Local agencies are looking into last month’s fatal shootings in Minneapolis of protesters Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents, as well as the killing of Keith Porter by an off-duty ICE agent in Los Angeles on New Year’s Eve.
The arrests made local news
Across the country, the cases have drawn unwanted headlines for ICE, which has spent millions of dollars publicizing the criminal rap sheets of those it arrests as “the worst of the worst.”
Among them:
__ ICE Cincinnati office assistant supervisor Samuel Saxon, a 20-year ICE veteran, has been in jail since his December arrest on charges he tried to strangle his girlfriend.
Saxon had abused the woman for years, breaking her hip and nose and causing internal bleeding, a judge found in a sentence that ordered him to be detained pending a trial. “The defendant is a volatile and violent individual,” the judge wrote of Saxon, whose attorneys did not return a message seeking comment. ICE said he is considered absent without leave.
__ “I’m ICE, boys,” an ICE employment eligibility auditor told police in Minnesota in November when he was arrested in a sting as he went to meet a person he thought was a 17-year-old prostitute. Alexander Back, 41, pleaded not guilty to attempting to entice a minor. ICE said Back is on administrative leave while the agency investigates.
—When officers in suburban Chicago found a man passed out in a crashed car, they were surprised to discover that the driver was an ICE officer who had recently finished his shift at a detention center and had his government firearm in the vehicle. They arrested Guillermo Diaz-Torres for driving under the influence. He pleaded not guilty and was placed on administrative duty pending an investigation.
__ After an ICE officer in Florida was stopped in August for driving drunk with his two children in the car, he tried to get out of the charges by pointing to law enforcement and his military service. When that failed, he demanded to know if one of the deputies who arrested him was Haitian and threatened to check the man’s immigration status, body camera video shows.
“I’ll run him once I get out of here and if he’s not legit, ooh, he’s getting a ride back to Haiti,” Scott Deiseroth warned during the arrest.
Deiseroth, who was sentenced to probation and community service, is on administrative leave pending the outcome of an internal investigation. “He did something stupid. It’s his property,” said his lawyer, Michael Catalano. “He’s very sorry about the whole thing.”
Several cases involve force and abuse
The AP review found a pattern of allegations involving ICE employees and contractors who mistreated vulnerable people in their care.
A former top official at an ICE contract facility in Texas was sentenced to probation on Feb. 4 after he admitted grabbing a handcuffed detainee by the neck and slamming him into a wall last year. Prosecutors had reduced the charge from a misdemeanor to a misdemeanor.
In December, an ICE contractor pleaded guilty to sexually abusing a detainee at a Louisiana detention facility. Prosecutors said the man had sexual encounters with a Nicaraguan national over a five-month period in 2025 as he instructed other detainees to act as guards.
Outside Chicago, an off-duty ICE agent has been charged with felony battery for throwing a 68-year-old protester he was filming at a gas station to the ground in December. McLaughlin said the agent acted in self-defense.
Other charges mentioned corruption
Another pattern that emerged in the AP review involved charged ICE officers who abused their power for financial gain.
An ICE deportation officer in Houston was indicted last summer on charges that he repeatedly accepted bribes from bail bondsmen in exchange for the removal of detainers that ICE had placed on their clients who were targeting them for deportation.
ICE said the officer was “indefinitely suspended” in May 2024, before his arrest a year later. He pleaded not guilty to seven counts of accepting bribes and was released pending trial.
Prosecutors say a former supervisor at the New York City ICE office provided confidential information about people’s immigration status to acquaintances and made arrests in exchange for gifts and other benefits. He was arrested in November 2024, pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial.
Two Utah-based ICE investigators were sentenced to prison last year for a scheme in which they made hundreds of thousands of dollars stealing synthetic drugs known as “bath salts” from government custody and selling them through government informants.
ICE officers used badges to try to avoid consequences
The misconduct often included using ICE resources and credentials to try to avoid arrest or receive favorable treatment.
In 2022, ICE supervisor Koby Williams was arrested in a police sting in Othello, Washington, on his way to a hotel room to meet what he thought was a 13-year-old girl he had arranged to pay for sex.
Williams had driven his government vehicle, which was full of cash, alcohol, pills and Viagra, and he was carrying his ICE badge and had a loaded government firearm. The 22-year ICE veteran offered a rationale that turned out to be a lie: that he was there to “rescue” the girl as part of a human trafficking investigation. Williams is serving time in prison for what prosecutors called a “reprehensible” abuse of power.
“With a duty to protect and serve,” they wrote, “the accused sought to exploit and victimize.”