During one of my many career crises, my mom surprised me by telling me that if I did not like what I was doing, I didn’t have to do it.

This stunned me. I considered my parents and their peers as being from a generation that sucked it up, did what they had to do, ground it out and lived out other clichés that add up to engaging in drudgery (and sometimes morally compromising drudgery) to better the circumstances of yourself and your family.

I felt certain that I had misheard her, that I should tough it out the way she and my father had. “Your father wouldn’t stay in a job he hated,” she responded.

I told her that it was easy for him. He loved being a cop.

“Not always,” she responded.

That’s when she opened up with the story I did not know, and I thought I knew all the stories of my father’s highly decorated career in the new New York City Police Department.

Early in my father’s tenure, he was assigned to the vice squad. He was big and athletic and had a booming baritone, and when he said “Freeze!”, you froze—good assets to have in raids.

The vice squad is often considered a division of the police force that goes after victimless crimes, but my father didn’t see it that way. They broke up gambling rings, and he knew how illegal gambling ruined people’s lives, wrecked families and led to brutality when enforcers were sent out to collect debts. They broke up prostitution rings, and he didn’t see those as victimless at all. The sex workers were not there as consenting adults, he thought, but coerced—often as minors—into dead-end lives of exploitation and violence.

But there was a third target of the vice squad. They were also sent to raid gay bars and shut them down.

My father was a young, mid-century Catholic man who did not question the church teaching that homosexuality was wrong. At the same time, he didn’t see any victims when men chose to socialize where and with whom they chose. But he was young and trained in the military, and he obediently did his duty.

During one such raid, as he was making an arrest, he looked up at the man on the next stool and saw the desolate face of a famous singer. A very famous singer at the time. It was probably this man’s records he put on when he was wooing my mother. He looked to his fellow officer, moving to arrest the mortified crooner, and waved him away. Such an arrest would end up on front pages across the country and lead to his great humiliation, destroying his career and leading to who knows what kind of repercussions.

Simply because of where the guy chose to drink.

My father went home that night and described the incident to my mother. What stuck with him was not the sad face of the singer they had spared but the faces of the men they had arrested. They would generally not be prosecuted aggressively, but these arrests could end up costing them their families, their jobs and their reputations. But these men had no hit songs to save them—and the double standard he had applied did not sit well with my father. The compassion and relatability he felt for the singer could not let him unsee the humanity of these other men, and the wrongness of what he was doing.

Suddenly, he could see that there were victims, and he was not the one protecting them.

My mom surprised him, as she surprised me decades later, telling him he didn’t have to keep doing it if he didn’t want to. Despite the two of them planning to start a family, and despite the big career opportunities that could come from such a plum assignment early in an officer’s career, he didn’t have to keep doing a job that felt wrong to him. They would find another way forward.

Ironically, the same church that taught them that the acts of homosexuals were wrong also helped form in him a conscience that led him to turn away from being their persecutor.

He asked for his transfer the next day. He was sent to report for duty at One Police Plaza, N.Y.P.D. headquarters. As police assignments go, this was Baltic Avenue. He worked the mailroom with veteran cops who were described as “broken toys”—men with behavioral problems and drinking issues, bragging about the big arrests they had made while seemingly oblivious to the reality that they had been removed from the street because they were a danger to themselves and others.

Dad considered leaving the department entirely, but this posting proved to be a brief interlude before another high-profile assignment—the Tactical Patrol Force. The T.P.F. was a spit-and-polish unit of the sturdiest young officers, sent in to quell riots and make the big, sweeping organized-crime arrests that put the mayor and commissioner on the front pages.

He was leading this unit in arrests, and his career was off to the races again, when his path took another turn after another principled stand. He asked for the night off on the evening his first child was born, and when this reasonable request, well within his rights, was denied, he took the night off anyway. Saying no to the big time twice is twice too many times, and the next day, he was shipped out to Brooklyn to report for precinct duty.

But being exiled to the outer boroughs, doing anonymous, “flatfoot” work over the next two decades—first as a patrolman, then as a detective—turned out to be the work he loved. It was what he had signed up for: protecting and serving people trying to make something of their lives and their neighborhoods.

He never told us that he led the borough in arrests for several years running. He never told us about the decorations he received. But he told us of the family he made among his fellow patrolmen and detectives, and the good people they watched over.

There was a great irony along the way. His former colleagues on the vice squad were disgraced in the aftermath of the Stonewall riots in 1969, as many of them were discovered to be shaking down gay bars for bribes. The Tactical Patrol Force, once the department’s shining elite, was left to operate with impunity for too long and got their comeuppance when the Knapp Commission in the early 1970s revealed the unit to be rife with corruption. While my father’s career ended in applause at a community banquet, many of his former colleagues saw theirs end in humiliation and ignominy.

I think about my father as I think about Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and other immigration enforcement officers across this country. I can imagine that ICE agents are, for the most part, trying to do a job as honorably as they know how when they know their mission has been compromised. But finding themselves forced to operate in situations beyond the scope of their training, their orders call on them to undertake operations that destroy families, violate American principles, violate principles of human decency and perhaps turn them into people they do not recognize, as they take the heat for the administration’s cravenly political agenda. When they remove their masks and look at themselves in the mirror, I imagine them asking questions of themselves that my father once asked.

I think of him and of them, and I want to say: You do not have to continue. There is another way forward for you. It may be inside or outside law enforcement, but please know there is another way. And if my father’s story is any indicator, it is almost certainly a better way.

Edward Hoyt is a freelance writer living in Baltimore. He has written for Catholic Relief Services, The Baltimore Sun, The Catholic Review and The BARk magazine, among other outlets.