An Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent appeared to sympathize with a protester on Sunday while in Charlotte, North Carolina, but declined to engage with them out of fear of “video cameras.”

According to Ukrainian-American journalist Oliya Scootercaster, ICE agents were conducting an operation Sunday in Charlotte, writing that agents were “searching through [a] wooded area for a man who was selling flowers on the corner.”

A video of the event shared by Scootercaster shows a group of protesters engaging with an ICE agent – specifically an agent with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) – about the agency’s aggressive operations and its frequent use of warrantless searches and seizures that experts have called unconstitutional.

One protestor asked the agent how they determine a suspected undocumented immigrant’s immigration status before putting them “in handcuffs.”

“That’s a very fair question,” the agent answered. “I think that more of us would like to have a conversation about these things but we can’t because this isn’t a press conference, I can’t go and give official statements in front of video cameras… this is not a conversation, this is a ‘gotcha.’”

Morale at ICE has reportedly been “

in the crapper

” as agents have expressed frustrations with aggressive quotas, excessive overtime, and the moral dilemma of routinely targeting migrants with no criminal histories. The Trump administration issued ICE a quota to make at least 3,000 arrests a day, with a

majority

of migrants arrested having no criminal history outside of their immigration status.