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I could barely sleep last night after hearing the news about Renee Nicole Macklin Good. My heart goes out to her family, her loved ones, and the state of Minnesota. Furthermore, the entire country is grappling with this new reality — this new normal — where exercising our First Amendment rights places us in position to be harmed.
On Jan. 7, 2026, the 37-year-old mother of three was shot and killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent in Minneapolis. Her mother described her as “one of the kindest people I’ve ever known” and “extremely compassionate.” She was a poet, a writer, a wife, and a mom. And now she is gone; her 6-year-old son left without a mother, a family shattered by a single encounter with federal immigration enforcement.
We witnessed this devastation firsthand in the Chicagoland area when Silverio Villegas González was killed by ICE agents in Franklin Park on Sept. 12, 2025. The 38-year-old father of two had just dropped his child off at daycare. He had lived in Chicago for nearly twenty years, working to provide for his family. Body camera footage later contradicted federal claims that he had “seriously injured” an agent — the officer himself described his injuries as “nothing major.”
It’s a powerless feeling when this happens. The question that keeps coming to mind is not just who is being harmed, but who is doing the harming — and why.
The face of enforcement
Here is a statistic that demands our attention: nearly 30 percent of ICE agents and approximately 50 percent of Border Patrol agents in the United States are Latino. According to data Univision received from ICE in 2017, Latino ICE agents outnumber Black agents 2 to 1 and Asian agents by 4 to 1.
But why? Why would members of a community that experiences high rates of deportation, that is disproportionately targeted by immigration enforcement, choose to join these agencies?
A study by University of Notre Dame professor David Cortez, who interviewed over 60 ICE and Border Patrol agents, reveals an uncomfortable truth. Most agents did not join because they held anti-immigrant views or because they didn’t identify with their Latino identity. They joined because they wanted a stable job and didn’t see many other ways of getting one.
One Latino agent, Claudio “CJ” Juarez, explained his decision bluntly: he was “literally starving.” He ate a lot of beans and rice in those days. The decision wasn’t idealistic or “sexy;” it was survival. ICE was simply the first agency that called him back.
Another Latina ICE agent, Sylvia Newman, described being a single parent with a 2-year-old and a 3-year-old after a divorce. She needed a job with security. She applied to all the federal agencies she could find. ICE was the application that went through.
As Professor Cortez observed, these agents sought work in immigration enforcement for the same reasons many immigrants leave Latin America: they were looking for a better life.
The surplus force: When unemployment becomes a recruitment tool
Illinois has consistently maintained one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation. As recently as January 2025, the state ranked third highest in the country at 5.2 percent. The state has struggled with job recovery since the pandemic, ranking 46th nationally, and has spent 58 consecutive months with unemployment rates among the 10 highest in the nation.
This economic reality is not incidental to immigration enforcement; it is foundational to it. High unemployment creates what economists call a “surplus labor force”: more people seeking work than there are job openings in a specific area or sector. This surplus is a primary driver of recruitment into low-barrier federal employment.⁸
ICE employs over 20,000 law enforcement and support personnel, with recent reports indicating numbers around 21,000 to 22,000 employees. For communities facing chronic unemployment and limited economic opportunity, federal law enforcement positions offer something increasingly rare: stable income, benefits, and job security.
The economic struggles driving ICE recruitment mirror the same poverty that shapes the broader Latino experience in America. Latinos made up 18 percent of the U.S. population in 2017 but account for 27 percent of people living in poverty, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. Economic desperation does not discriminate — it pushes people toward whatever door opens first.
Breaking the chains: The broader crisis of workforce exclusion
At Equity and Transformation (EAT), our work has long centered on understanding how economic exclusion operates — and who it targets. In our report Breaking the Chains: Reclaiming Wealth, Power, and Dignity for Black Men, co-authored with Fathers, Families & Healthy Communities and supported by the Chicagoland Workforce Funder Alliance, we documented how Chicago ranks lowest among major U.S. cities in Black male labor force participation.
The findings were stark: Black men on Chicago’s South and West Sides face deeply rooted structural barriers including discriminatory hiring practices, mass incarceration, and predatory economic policies that systematically lock them out of wealth-building opportunities. These are not isolated struggles; they are part of the same economic architecture that creates the conditions for agencies like ICE to recruit from economically desperate communities.
The parallels are impossible to ignore. When we interviewed Black men about their experiences navigating the labor market, we heard stories of survival, of taking whatever work was available, of choosing between dignity and stability, of systems designed to exclude rather than include. These are the same dynamics Professor Cortez uncovered in his interviews with Latino ICE agents. The communities may differ, but the underlying economic violence is the same.
Our report challenges deficit-based narratives and instead uplifts how Black men are already building their own solutions through entrepreneurship, mutual aid, and community-based economic models. We call for targeted guaranteed income, job training with wraparound support, investment in Black-owned businesses, and pathways into high-growth sectors. These same interventions would address the economic desperation that makes federal law enforcement recruitment so attractive to communities facing chronic unemployment.
Through EAT’s Chicago Future Fund, the nation’s first guaranteed income pilot for formerly incarcerated individuals, we have seen what happens when communities receive direct economic support. People acquire jobs. People stabilize their families. People choose dignified work over survival work. Economic security creates options; economic desperation eliminates them.
The internal conflict
Professor Cortez found that many Latino agents he interviewed felt conflicted about their roles. At least one has since quit because of his concerns. But as Cortez explained, “Even among those who struggle, and who find this tension between who they are and what they do, the economic security offered by these positions puts pressure on them to stay and creates more internal conflict.”
These agents wrestle with questions their non-Latino colleagues never face: “What if this was me? Or what if this was my mother?” It is, as Cortez describes, “a unique experience that non-Latino agents in this experience aren’t having to wrestle with.”
ICE officials have acknowledged both the value and the tension of Latino representation. David Marín, former field office director for ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) in Los Angeles, told Univisión: “It’s good because they speak the language. It’s also a challenge because we’re regularly asked, ‘Why are you deporting your own people?’”
Breaking the cycle
If we want to understand the conditions that create agencies like ICE, and the people who staff them, we must understand the economic infrastructure that makes such work attractive. States like Illinois, with persistent high unemployment and limited economic mobility, become fertile ground for federal law enforcement recruitment.
The surplus labor force is not just an economic concept. It is a mechanism of control. When communities lack access to stable employment, when poverty rates remain entrenched, when economic desperation becomes generational, the federal government can step in and offer what the private sector will not. And in doing so, it transforms members of marginalized communities into enforcers against those same communities.
Renee Nicole Macklin Good should not have died. Silverio Villegas González should not have died. And the communities from which ICE draws its workforce should not be trapped in cycles of poverty that make federal enforcement work look like salvation.
Addressing immigration enforcement is not just about policy reform at the federal level. It is about economic justice at every level. It is about ensuring that communities have access to stable, dignified work that does not require them to criminalize their neighbors, detain their cousins, or become the face of policies designed to tear families apart.
Until we address the economic conditions that create the surplus labor force, we will continue to see communities turned against themselves. We will continue to mourn lives lost to enforcement violence. And we will continue to ask the same devastating question: why?
The answer, it turns out, has always been about survival.
