JJ Carrell spent 24 years on the southern border, went back into ICE when the President asked retired agents to return, and came out saying the program he re-enlisted for does not exist.
JJ Carrell is not a critic of immigration enforcement. He is a career enforcer of it — 24 years with the Border Patrol in the San Diego sector, task force command, ICE deportation officers working under his supervision. When the President called for retired agents to come back, he came back, three to four ranks below where he had finished, and spent roughly six to nine months on a fugitive operations team.
His verdict on what he found is blunt: there are no mass deportations. He calls the claim a propaganda line and says the people running the program know it.
The argument is structural, not political. In his old command, a field office of 100 officers required a full chain — one at the top, two assistants, three watch commanders, ten first-line supervisors. What he found instead was two or three supervisors total, with no second, third, or fourth line above them. That is roughly forty officers to a supervisor in a mission where every arrest carries legal and physical exposure. He is emphatic that the officers themselves are not the failure: he describes them as professional, technically sharp, and high-integrity. There are simply not enough of them, and nothing above them to drive the mission.
His second point is the one that will cost him friends. The command structure administering removals today is, in his account, the same command structure that administered the border under the previous administration. He did not expect the people who presided over the opening to execute the closing, and says he predicted the failure publicly before he ever went back in.
What he says should have happened on day one: a deportation agency created entirely outside DHS, reporting directly to the President, fifty substations, military logistics and airlift, stood up by executive order on national-security grounds. He laid the full version out in a five-part series on his own Substack.
He was named ICE’s national employee of the week. The following Monday, after his books and podcast work surfaced, he was told he was no longer needed.
He is not sparing the administration on the way out. He calls Trump a failure and compromised, and says the Republican Party is no different from the Democrats. That is an enforcement hardliner breaking with the administration on enforcement — which is a considerably harder thing to dismiss than the usual criticism.
CHAPTERS
00:00 Who JJ Carrell is
02:30 Going back into ICE
05:50 "There are no mass deportations"
08:30 Why he predicted the failure
10:15 Forty officers, one supervisor
13:20 What should have been built instead
JJ Carrell's books, documentaries and podcast: jjcarrell.com
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