Bullet holes scarred the walls and blood stained the floors of the Dallas Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office when Todd Johnson arrived.A sniper had killed two detainees in a transport van last September. His agents were shaken. After three decades in federal law enforcement, Johnson said the attack forced him to rethink the job.Johnson, 57, worked complex criminal cases, rising to oversee investigative teams in Dallas for ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division. A month after the shooting, he retired, saying the toll of the work, and that moment, made clear it was time to step away.“I realized that even if I could stay longer,” Johnson said recently, “that I needed to go.”Now, with immigration enforcement a continuing focus under President Donald Trump, Johnson is speaking more openly about an investigations division that he says was pushed beyond its core mission.“I do believe we got off track,” Johnson said, “by going after so many non-criminal illegal aliens.”In an interview with The Dallas Morning News, he described a sharp change in immigration policy, from what he saw as loosened priorities under Joe Biden’s presidency to Trump’s push for mass deportations.His account offers a rare glimpse inside an agency being redirected in real time by Washington, with the results playing out in neighborhoods and detention centers.Johnson arrived in Dallas in 2009 at the division of ICE that handles complex criminal investigations of drug trafficking, child exploitation, money laundering, human trafficking and weapons smuggling. In 2020, he became an executive-level supervisor.He said the division’s resource allocation often changes with each presidential administration.In Trump’s first term, arrests of undocumented migrants increased, and in the second, Johnson said, his agents were expected to ramp up those numbers, sometimes at the expense of longer-term investigations.“Everything else came secondary to that,” Johnson said. “The primary focus of Trump 2 is anybody and everybody that’s illegal should be deported.”Johnson’s agents were assigned to assist ICE’s enforcement and removal operations division, which handles arrests and deportations, not criminal investigations.Usually, there isn’t much overlap between the two. This time, they were assigned as a force multiplier for ICE.“I don’t think that HSI’s resources should have been used to the extent they were for purely civil immigration enforcement,” he said. “That was not an efficient use of valuable investigative resources that impact many different areas of public safety and national security.”DHS, in a statement, defended the administration’s approach and said anyone who entered the country illegally has committed a crime, rejecting the label “non-criminal” as misleading.Shifting prioritiesJohnson said Trump’s first administration was primarily “focused on criminal investigations,” including worksite enforcement and human smuggling.Agents were sent to the Southwest border to clamp down on those operations. Agents also targeted companies hiring undocumented workers.Under Biden, he said, HSI agents increasingly were pulled away from long-term criminal investigations, often to assist the overwhelmed Border Patrol as unlawful crossings surged.Johnson supports strong border enforcement, saying “unimpeded migration is unsustainable.”But he described a system that has relied on a “delicate balance,” with undocumented workers embedded in agriculture, food service and other industries. During Biden’s presidency, he said, that gave way.“It got totally out of balance,” he said of the spike in migrant entries. “There were no real consequences for people coming here illegally.”Biden officials have said migration is driven by global conditions and that they were working to bring order to a strained system they inherited.Arrest expectationsJohnson said he was optimistic when Trump was reelected, expecting his division would return to work on broader public safety threats.Instead, pressure mounted across ICE and other federal agencies to meet deportation goals, including 1 million removals, he said.“Whether you want to call it quotas or not, there were definitely expectations that there would be a certain amount of arrests over a period of time,” he said.Trump administration officials have denied imposing quotas, saying ICE operates under enforcement goals rather than fixed arrest requirements.Johnson didn’t mention a specific number, although a top Trump aide said last year that the administration was seeking 3,000 daily arrests.Those came with tradeoffs.“If there are expectations that a certain number of arrests need to be made in a day, a week, a month, then, at times, you’re going to go after easy targets so that you can accommodate the expectations,” Johnson said.Many of those arrested or deported had no prior convictions, which Johnson found frustrating.Johnson said he would rather see HSI agents pursuing wider criminal investigations.In Dallas, he oversaw cases that he said reflected HSI’s traditional role, including those unrelated to immigration. Among them, former Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Sam Hurd, who pleaded guilty to drug trafficking after HSI agents uncovered his involvement in a cocaine distribution scheme.Last year, Johnson was selected deputy director of the Homeland Security Task Force for the North Texas-Oklahoma region, which he described as a “whole of government” effort to tackle public safety threats.He supervised investigations that led to convictions of leaders of the Los Zetas cartel in the 2011 killing of an HSI agent, Jaime Zapata, and helped dismantle much of that Mexican cartel.Those types of cases, he said, require time, coordination and long-term investigative work, the kind that becomes harder to sustain when agents are reassigned or pressed to meet low-level arrest expectations.‘Difficult to watch’Over the past year, agents from multiple federal agencies fanned out in cities, making immigration arrests at check-ins, courts and even Home Depot parking lots.Border Patrol agents, typically limited to operations within 100 miles of the border, were leading many of the efforts. U.S. citizens were detained, and migrants, protesters and agents were injured in clashes.“It’s been difficult to watch both sides at times,” Johnson said.He said some actions crossed the line. He questioned why demonstrators blocked vans carrying detainees into ICE facilities, saying individuals with serious criminal charges or convictions could be inside.“I don’t think those are the kind of people they would want in their community,” Johnson said.At the same time, he criticized authorities for using inflammatory language after high-profile incidents, even before investigations were completed.“The hubris of some of the messaging and responding to questions from the public was disappointing,” he said.The operations in Minneapolis, where federal agents fatally shot two Americans, became a turning point, he said, prompting leadership changes and a pullback from public raids.But Johnson dismissed calls to disband ICE, warning that would carry real risks.“National security relies on ICE to a large extent,” he said. “I don’t know what that looks like when people talk about dismantling or reform.”