There were moments while I was watching the 2021 documentary At The Ready last week where the afterschool program at the center of the film felt really familiar. There’s the frustrated-but-attentive coach, and the fresh-faced kids worried about some upcoming regional competition against other schools. But then, BOOM: the filmmakers cut to those same kids wearing light tactical gear, holding fake plastic orange guns, walking briskly through the hallways of their empty school – they were carrying out mock immigration and drug raids in their classrooms. Then their coaches, all professional law enforcement types, give them pointers on how to hold their guns when they enter a room or the proper technique to zip-tie and detain a suspect.
At The Ready zooms in on the lives of several kids who are in the Border Patrol Explorer program at Horizon High School in El Paso, Tex. — a kind of ROTC for young people who think they might want to work for an immigration or law enforcement agency. (The documentary says there are around 900 clubs like this in Texas alone.) The student body at Horizon High School is almost entirely Latino, and clubs like the BP Explorers at Horizon have gained real traction in Latino communities along the southern border.
Geraldo Cadava, who teaches Latino history and politics at Northwestern University, swung by the podcast this week and said that programs like these help explain part of why Latinos make up about half of the people in Border Patrol nationally – that’s according to the Department of Homeland Security, who provided that statistic when we asked for the data. And Cadava told me the film should help complicate the ways people — and especially liberals — think about the many Latinos in immigration enforcement.
Contrary to some online discourse, Cadava says Latinos who sign up to do immigration enforcement are not all cynical sellouts who want to be white, nor are they just people looking for steady work who get indoctrinated into ICE’s mission once they’re on the job. (There’s also maybe some misplaced liberal assumptions about racial solidarity among Latinos in the premise: why are folks so sure a third-generation Mexican American ICE agent would see herself as sharing a peoplehood with the Venezuelan migrant that she’s arresting?) “If Latinos are socialized to identify with law enforcement, that process begins long before they become an agent,” Cadava wrote in the Atlantic. And the job has a lot to recommend it, materially and politically: you get a well-paying stable gig in an office full of other Latinos that’s close to home and you get to think of your work as protecting the community you live in, to boot.
Of course, the documentary shows that not everyone in town digs ICE. One agent talks about the friction they encounter on the job since so many members of the public see them as the bad guys who come to break up families and ruin lives; a student in the BP Explorers program who hears his talk expresses real misgivings about what she might be getting herself into. In 2026, there’s no way this would not have occurred to her, since abolishing ICE has now become a mainstream position according to a recent YouGov poll.
Even still, she did end up deciding she wanted to join immigration enforcement after high school. So what became of her and her teammates? Did they actually go on to join ICE? Did they wash out with the agency’s notorious churn and turnover? Did they have changes of heart or become even more committed believers in the mission? At The Ready, which was filmed in 2019, captures this pivotal moment in the lives of a group of young people who don’t yet know that their then-dream job is about to become one of the most polarizing professions in American life.
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ON THE POD
It’s Memorial Day Weekend, which means pools and beaches are opening up again! That also makes it a great time to revisit one of our favorite convos from last summer, in which our former colleague Jasmine Romero confronts the profound fear of the water she inherited from her mom. Then we zoom out to take a wider look at just why so many people of color in the United States never learn to swim. That'll be out again tomorrow, wherever you get your podcasts.
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