As immigration became one of the defining focuses of Donald Trump’s second administration, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has taken center stage. Under the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act, DHS, which oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), and several other agencies, received more than $80 billion in additional funding, and in January the agency announced that it had hired more than 12,000 new agents.

Even as cities like Los Angeles and Minneapolis have seen a surge of immigration officers descend upon them, DHS has maintained a high level of opacity around its operations. Officers carrying out raids and arrests are often masked and driving in unmarked cars. As enforcement has pulled in federal law enforcement personnel from across the government, it has become difficult to tell what agency a given officer works for, let alone who they actually are. Though DHS has been combative with the media, ICE agents themselves have been mostly quiet, even if some have mixed feelings about their work and where the agency is headed.

Karl Loftus, an independent journalist who runs the Instagram account @deadcrab_films, started a new project following the immigration surge in Minneapolis called Confessions of an ICE Agent. There, he publishes interviews with people who work in immigration enforcement across DHS. This includes agents and officers with the two main divisions of ICE—Homeland Security Investigations and Enforcement and Removal Operations—as well as CBP officers. He offers them anonymity and a place to speak their minds outside the structures of traditional media, and in return gets a glimpse of what the people inside the agency are experiencing, creating an archive of this moment in its history.

In one post, a biracial agent speaking shortly after Trump announced that he would be replacing DHS Secretary Kristi Noem told Loftus he believed Noem was a “DEI” hire. In another, an HSI agent called the people leading the US government “imbeciles,” saying they were “disgusted by nearly all of them.” Another HSI agent expressed concerns about DHS colleagues violating the law, and complained of having to pause investigation into child sexual abuse cases to focus on immigration work. “If they gave child exploitation cases a fraction of the attention, funding, resources, personnel, analytical support, etc. that they’re now giving immigration enforcement, we could do so much good,” they said.

WIRED spoke to Loftus about the public response to a polarizing topic, how he vets his sources, and the pressure to pick a side. A DHS spokesperson responded to WIRED’s request for comment saying that they cannot verify anonymous interviews but that DHS and its Homeland Security Investigations unit “is not slowing down and remains committed to all aspects of its mission, leveraging a whole-of-government approach to address threats to public safety and national security.”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

WIRED: Before this project, your account mostly focused on things like disaster recovery after Hurricane Helene and similar topics. How did you start working on ICE?

Karl Loftus: In 2018 I was a volunteer in North Carolina during Hurricane Florence. I was there during the hurricane for four days doing search and rescue. That kind of started my passion for disaster response. I had been in Jamaica for seven weeks responding to Hurricane Melissa, working with a handful of different NGOs. I worked with Global Empowerment Mission repairing roofs of hospitals and medical centers to try to get the medical infrastructure back on track. I worked with World Central Kitchen. I was there documenting. I had planned to go to Wisconsin for the holidays, which is where I’m from, to visit some family, but I ended up staying in Jamaica. In early January, I finally made it up to the Midwest to see some family, and that’s when the Renee Good shooting happened. I was like, “Man, I know shit’s about to go insane the following day, and there’s going to be protests and riots and all this stuff.” So I decided to make the trip to Minneapolis.

The chair starts at $8,995, but that doesn’t include the side table or ottoman. Add those and it costs $10,995. The model pictured above uses Alpaca wool fabric and brings the cost up to $14,995. (There are more than 300 fabrics and colors to choose from, and the swiveling table comes in various woodgrains.) The Herman Miller Eames, of which the Diffrient Lounge also takes inspiration, costs roughly $8,500 today, depending on which leather you choose.

“The Eames is obviously an iconic design—it’s timeless, it’s beautiful—but it’s not something you can work comfortably in for a long time,” Silva says.

Don’t let the Lounge in the name fool you. Silva assures me that every chair the company designs is built with ergonomic comfort in mind, with the adjustable work surface and headrest allowing for different postures. While traditional lounge chairs focus on style, Silva says the Lounge prioritizes comfort. In my brief time on the chair, it indeed felt enveloping and cushy yet supportive. And the mechanical levers made it easy to shift the chair into a more active sitting position or a more relaxing posture, without disrupting the ergonomics with a laptop on the table.

Diffrient had been tinkering with the idea of a lounge chair that could double as a workstation for a long time, Silva says, and believed that technology allowed people to work in different ways.

“The chair acknowledges the fact that creativity and productivity don’t necessarily happen when you’re tied to your desk,” he says. “They happen in different postures; more relaxed or moving around the office, and this chair supports those transitions.”

King recites a famous quote from Diffrient: “The best chair is a bed.” When you sit upright, your weight compresses your spine, but when you lean back, a large portion of that weight goes into the backrest, so when you’re lying down, there’s significantly less pressure on your spine. “Reclining is really healthy,” King says. “He always thought it would be a good way to work.”

Luxe Seat

How does a chair come to cost $15,000? Silva highlights Humanscale’s long-standing approach to simplicity. After all, it’s a hallmark of the original Freedom chair. While the Diffrient Lounge may not look very complex, that’s by design, cleverly masking the engineered mechanical system with clean lines and curves. There’s even some automation in the headrest. If you’re fully reclined and the headrest is in a forward position to support your head, as you come back up, the headrest will automatically go into a neutral position.

There are two USB-C ports on the chair to power your devices, which means the Diffrient Lounge needs to be connected to an outlet.

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

UK communications regulator Ofcom has set out the regulatory structure which it believes will drive full-fibre gigabit broadband to reach almost all UK homes and businesses over the next two years.

In setting out its Telecoms Access Review (TAR) 2026-31, finalising plans for how it will enable further competition and investment in the sector, Ofcom has gained general acceptance of its plans from the UK’s disparate and sometimes fractious broadband ecosystem.

Essentially, the regulator says the availability of full-fibre broadband almost everywhere in the UK will lay the foundations for productivity gains across the UK, and according to projections in its Connected nations: Planned network deployments 2025 report, given what is described as “the right support”, full-fibre is set to reach almost 29 million properties by the end of 2027, equivalent to well over nine in 10.

With the broadband industry investing billions each year in bringing better broadband to communities up and down the country, Ofcom says UK gigabit roll-out is now reaching its end phase. Yet it emphasised that the job is not yet done, and to realise the productivity potential of full-fibre for the UK economy, as much of the country as possible must have access to it.

Ofcom says the next frontier for fibre is customers taking it up, with more than half of those eligible for an upgrade yet to make the change. It observed that people and businesses have more choice between broadband providers than ever before – around three-quarters have access to at least two networks, and nearly a third of the country can choose between three. This, it says, has meant “ever-better services at attractive prices”.

At the heart of the announcement is guidance on how Ofcom regulates UK broadband leader Openreach, building on its 2021 regulations regarding the BT-owned company.

Ofcom claims that since it introduced a new regulatory framework, it has driven competition between different broadband networks, meaning that fibre roll-out has been an infrastructure success story.