A television advertisement began circulating in November 2025 across markets from Charlotte to Miami, depicting a scene designed to unsettle federal immigration enforcement officers. In it, a young girl in a ponytail is doing her coloring book when her father arrives home, his ICE insignia visible on his sleeve. The voiceover cuts through: "A mask can't hide you from your neighbors, your children and God. You can walk away, before the shame follows you home."
Women's March, the non-partisan nonprofit behind the ad buy, is banking on a provocative theory: that appealing to the conscience of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, through guilt and moral pressure, might convince them to quit. The campaign is running in key markets where ICE presence is felt most acutely.
The strategy emerged partly in response to the shooting death of Renee Good, a 37-year-old US citizen killed by ICE enforcement officer Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis earlier this year. Rachel O'Leary Carmona, executive director of Women's March, noticed that women have become central to anti-ICE organizing efforts. "We mobilize women on the issues that matter to us," Carmona says, "and ICE obviously was really important to us."
For Women's March, the question became simple: what motivates people to work for ICE in the first place? The Trump administration's One Big, Beautiful Bill Act dangled substantial incentives: $50,000 signing bonuses for new recruits, 25 percent premium pay increases above base salary, and up to $60,000 in student loan repayment assistance. Carmona and her team wanted to reach not just current agents, but prospective ones who might be tempted by the financial rewards. "We started thinking about the moral imperative," Carmona says, "but also the people who are choosing to join this brutality, perhaps because of economic incentives."
Not all moral persuasion campaigns look the same. Peter Pedemonti, director of the New Sanctuary Movement of Philadelphia, takes a different approach. For over 20 weeks, his faith-based immigrant rights group has hosted candlelit vigils outside ICE's Philadelphia headquarters. The goal is to appeal to the humanity of agents, not attack them. "Shame is useful," Pedemonti says. "That commercial is showing that ICE agents are in misalignment. But there is a path to healing and turning back."
The New Sanctuary Movement prays for both the families harmed by ICE and for the agents themselves, seeking what Pedemonti calls "conversion and the softening of heart." It is a Catholic framework grounded in dignity and the possibility of redemption. Yet whether that redemption is even psychologically possible for ICE agents remains contested among experts.
Some scholars and military veterans point to a concept called "moral injury," a diagnosis that emerged from studying Vietnam veterans who returned home carrying the weight of acts they considered deeply immoral. Psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, who worked at the Department of Veterans Affairs for over 20 years, developed the framework to describe the conscience-violating damage inflicted by participating in missions that violate one's own sense of right and wrong.
Moral injury differs from post-traumatic stress disorder. Veterans can often recover from horror and fear once they return to civilian life, but if their core sense of what is right has been violated, healing becomes more elusive. The condition leaves sufferers feeling socially withdrawn, unworthy of love or esteem. Studies have linked it to elevated suicide risk. Nearly 6 percent of US military veterans experience some form of moral injury.
The question is whether ICE agents, many of whom are military veterans, already carry this burden. About 30 percent of ICE recruits come from military backgrounds, according to DHS. Dan Clare, a Marine Corps and Air Force veteran who now works with Disabled American Veterans, suffered profound moral injury during his service in Iraq. He remains concerned about veterans entering ICE work. "It's not necessarily going to be a victory lap for those folks who end their careers with ICE," he says. "We're worried about those guys."
But not everyone believes moral injury applies to ICE agents. The agency has pursued aggressive recent hiring, slashing college degree requirements and eliminating age caps to rapidly expand its workforce. Jake Clark, a former LA police officer, FBI agent and now director of Save a Warrior, a rehabilitation program focused on moral injury, has observed the psychological profiles that law enforcement tends to attract. He argues that many enforcement personnel gravitate toward these roles to recreate patterns of abandonment from their childhoods, becoming addicted to the adrenaline and drama the work provides.
"They're addicted to their own adrenaline, endorphins, melatonin and cortisol," Clark says. "They live for drama." He worries that as ICE faces mounting public criticism, impossible quotas and collapsing morale, moral injury among agents will only deepen.
The composition of ICE's workforce complicates the moral calculus. About 30 percent of ICE officers are Latino, and many joined for reasons entirely unrelated to ideology: steady work, health insurance, a steady paycheck. Others enlisted because they genuinely believe in immigration enforcement. Some signed up for the signing bonus. A small number, perhaps, thrill at the prospect of confrontation and violence.
At New Sanctuary's Philadelphia vigils, organizers have tried to acknowledge this complexity. A local pastor's prayer for ICE agents recognized that not every agent operates from the same motivation or moral starting point. Yet other researchers remain unconvinced that moral persuasion will work at all. Joseph Wiinikka-Lydon, a moral injury scholar at the Southern Poverty Law Center, worries that ICE as an institution is designed to evade shame and accountability. The masks and face-coverings agents wear during operations, he suggests, reveal their own understanding that what they are doing is wrong.
"They're basically admitting that what they're doing is harmful," Wiinikka-Lydon says. The question remains whether that admission, even if subconscious, can be weaponized by activists to push agents toward conscience and exit.
Author James Rodriguez: "The bet that shame can move ICE agents is audacious, but the real problem may be deeper: if an agent believes in the mission, no commercial or vigil will touch them."
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