Oops! How Danny Trejo Accidentally Made a Pro-ICE Movie

Danny Trejo has played a Mexican revolutionary, a Mexican cop, a Mexican cartel assassin and, of course, a Mexican ex-con who kills bad guys with a machete. One time, in a 2015 Super Bowl ad for Snickers, he even played a Mexican Marcia Brady. But now, after more than 400 screen appearances, the 82-year-old actor has popped up in a part nobody
saw coming, not even Trejo: He’s the Mexican star of a pro-ICE movie.

Last month, Trejo finished filming Pawn Shop, an action-thriller in which he portrays the owner of a Minneapolis store that becomes ground zero for a standoff involving ICE, anti-ICE protesters, Antifa and MS-13 gang members. While Rambling Reporter can’t definitively confirm the online rumors about how the film is chock-full of offensive anti-immigration agitprop — we haven’t read the script, only heard what’s in it, including a scene involving an unhinged, COVID mask-wearing agitator blaring NPR on her radio while mowing down ICE agents with her SUV — it’s not hard to imagine Stephen Miller in the front row, hugging a big bucket of popcorn.

Trejo declined to talk to Rambling, but a source close to the production says he had no idea the film was being produced by Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire, the conservative media company behind such MAGA-leaning pictures as the 2023 anti-trans comedy Lady Ballers. “They called [Trejo] and said, ‘Hey, we got this movie — you’d play a pawnshop owner and there’s this huge protest and a clash with ICE. And he was like, ‘OK, cool, send me my lines,’ ” says the source.

As it happens, this isn’t the first time Trejo has wandered unwittingly into Shapiro-land. In 2024, he voiced a character on the Daily Wire’s anti-woke cartoon Mr. Birchum, a gig he took simply because he knew series creator Adam Carolla. But Pawn Shop is considerably harder to mistake for just another acting job. Protesters began showing up at the set — where swarms of extras were playing protesters — and Trejo eventually began pushing back on his lines. “He couldn’t walk off the movie — he’d get sued,” says the source. “But he made them change a bunch of stuff. He was like, ‘No, I’m not going to say that.’”

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This story appeared in the Oct. 21 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.