Trump Administration Fills Two Very Different Advisory Roles: An Angel Dad at ICE, an Ex-JPMorgan Exec at Social Security

The Trump administration made two personnel moves this week that say a lot about where its priorities sit right now: one aimed at immigration enforcement, the other at fixing a federal agency millions of Americans depend on every month.

An Angel Dad Runs ICE's Victims Office

DHS announced Friday that Joe Abraham will become executive director of ICE's Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement office, known as VOICE. Abraham's daughter Katie, 20, was killed in January 2025 in a hit-and-run crash in Illinois. The driver, Guatemalan national Julio Cucul-Bol, was drunk. He later pleaded guilty to aggravated DUI causing death and leaving the scene of a crash involving death, and was sentenced to 30 years in prison, according to the Daily Wire.

Abraham's daughter's death also helped inspire the administration's "Operation Midway Blitz," a large-scale immigration enforcement sweep in Illinois. Abraham has been outspoken since the crash, criticizing Illinois' sanctuary state policies and becoming a visible advocate for Trump's deportation agenda.

"Since his daughter, Katie, was murdered by an illegal alien drunk driver in a hit-and-run in sanctuary Illinois, he has been a staunch advocate for victims of illegal alien crime," DHS said in a statement. "In his new role, he will continue to help families who have lost a loved one to a preventable tragedy caused by open-border policies."

Abraham said on X that the job is "not simply a government position" for him. "It is deeply personal and rooted in a mission I have come to understand through unimaginable loss," he wrote. He said he wants victims and their families "heard, treated with dignity, and never become an afterthought in our immigration system."

The VOICE office has a political history worth knowing. The first Trump administration created it in 2017. The Biden administration shut it down in 2021 and replaced it with the Victims Engagement and Services Line, which handled complaints from illegal immigrant detainees about detention conditions. Trump reopened VOICE in April 2025.

Since reopening, the office has logged 897 calls from victims, family members, and advocates, and has assisted 588 victims and 185 victims' families, according to DHS. The most common complaints involve assault (35%), rape or sexual assault (17%), and homicide or manslaughter (10%).

A legitimate question about whether a dedicated office for crime victims of illegal immigrants represents sound policy, or whether it risks overstating the scale of the problem relative to crime committed by U.S. citizens, deserves examination. DHS has not published comparative crime-rate data alongside the VOICE numbers, and the office's caseload reflects calls received, not a statistically representative sample of immigration-related crime nationwide. What's undisputed: Katie Abraham is dead, her killer is a convicted felon who entered the country illegally, and her father now holds a federal role built around victims like her.

A Wall Street Veteran Goes to Social Security

Separately, the Social Security Administration is bringing on Matt Zames, a former JPMorgan Chase chief operating officer, as an unpaid adviser starting Monday, according to CNBC, which first reported the move citing people familiar with it who were not authorized to speak publicly.

Zames will work under SSA Commissioner Frank Bisignano, his former co-COO at JPMorgan. Bisignano took over the agency last year and has made modernizing its aging technology infrastructure a stated priority.

Zames' resume is heavy on crisis management and tech overhauls. He helped clean up JPMorgan's $6 billion "London Whale" trading loss, ran the bank's technology and cost-cutting efforts for roughly five years, and was once considered a potential successor to CEO Jamie Dimon before leaving in 2017. He later served as president of private equity firm Cerberus and has sat on Federal Reserve and Treasury advisory panels tied to debt markets, according to CNBC and Morningstar. He now runs his own advisory firm, Zames Group.

As a special government employee, Zames can serve up to 130 days, though that time can be spread out since he won't work full-time, per CNBC's sourcing.

The SSA's retirement trust fund is projected to run dry in less than a decade, a shortfall that could trigger automatic benefit cuts for tens of millions of retirees if Congress doesn't act first. The agency has also been shedding staff, with a stated goal announced in February 2025 of cutting 7,000 jobs. The SSA told MarketWatch its fiscal-year 2027 budget will push a "digital-first agenda" to streamline operations.

The Social Security Administration did not respond to a request for comment from MarketWatch on the Zames appointment. No formal announcement from SSA itself has been published alongside the CNBC report.

Two different appointments, two different tests ahead. Abraham's success will be measured in whether VOICE actually gets more victims' families connected to resources they need. Zames' will be measured in whether Social Security's 60-year-old computer systems get fixed before the trust fund runs out, currently projected within the next decade.