LOS ANGELES — See if you can ride along with some agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement rounding up Latino immigrants, the photo editor tells the photographer. Go capture a group of brown-skinned innocents being led away in cuffs. And if one of the ICE agents is also Latino, the editor adds, so much the better.

In the Trump era, such conversations are unfolding again and again in newsrooms across the United States. Our best “shooters” are sent out on a hunt for images of undocumented immigrants at perhaps the most vulnerable and degrading moment in their lives.

These images have been a staple of American journalism for as long as I’ve been in the business. Very often, they seem a kind of immigration porn.

When I was young and angry and saw such pictures for the first time, I confronted one of its purveyors. A photojournalist and artist had filled a San Francisco art gallery with his black-and-white images of Mexicans and others being tied up and hustled away by the Border Patrol near Tijuana. This was in the mid-1980s, long before any fence or wall was built there. The detained immigrants had the startled expressions of children caught misbehaving, or confused peasants caught up in a modern system they couldn’t hope to understand.