Workers at detention centers and maximum-security prisons from Florida to Minnesota to California counted off the number of co-workers who’d left for ICE or were in the process of doing so. Six at one lockup in Texas, eight at another. More than a dozen at one California facility, and over four dozen at a larger one. After retirements and other attrition, by the start of November the agency had lost at least 1,400 more staff this year than it had hired, according to internal prison data shared with ProPublica.

“We’re broken and we’re being poached by ICE,” one official with the prison workers union told ProPublica. “It’s unbelievable. People are leaving in droves.”