Danny Trejo’s Son Explains His Dad’s Pro-ICE Movie Controversy: ‘People Are Not Turning Down Work’

Danny Trejo was excited to play the good guy.

His son, filmmaker Gilbert Trejo, remembers being with the 82-year-old actor when his agent pitched “Pawn Shop” a few weeks before filming began. The movie would follow a Mexican American store owner trying to keep the peace amid protests and escalating violence. After a career spent playing convicts and criminals, the opportunity was appealing.

“Oh, cool. I’m playing a good guy,” Gilbert recalled his father saying.

The people behind the indie project proved more controversial. Produced by Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire and Bonfire Legend, the pro-ICE action movie has since drawn protests and questions about why a beloved performer known for supporting immigrants would participate.

Danny’s agent, Gloria Hinojosa, told IndieWire that Trejo didn’t personally know that Shapiro or The Daily Wire was involved when he accepted the role. Gilbert said his father thought he was playing a sympathetic character, and further described his own fears that walking away or criticizing the project could expose his dad to litigation the actor can’t afford.

Asked whether Danny felt empowered to turn down work, Gilbert pointed to his prolific output. With a sprawling filmography including “Heat,” “Desperado,” “From Dusk Till Dawn,” “Spy Kids,” and “Machete,” Trejo has amassed nearly 500 credits across film, television, video games, and music.

“I think his IMDb attests to the fact that no, he hasn’t been saying no,” Gilbert said. “He’s like most of us in this country. People are not turning down work.”

Gilbert said he sees his father almost every day but that he was not involved in negotiating “Pawn Shop.” He hasn’t reviewed his dad’s contract for the film, either. Nevertheless, Trejo’s predicament echos a question raised by IndieWire’s earlier reporting: What did the people hired to make this film know before taking the job, and what choices did they have after it started?

“Danny didn’t hear about Ben Shapiro’s or The Daily Wire’s involvement until a couple weeks ago,” Hinojosa confirmed to IndieWire in an October 13 email. “He was not familiar with nor had he ever heard of either before.” Trejo’s agent also directed IndieWire to her client’s recent social media statement.

“I am a proud Mexican who has always been and always will be a supporter of my community,” Danny wrote. “I am also obviously, pro immigrant. I am not pro ice.”

“I know where I come from and I know our struggles,” Trejo continued. “I am an actor. My job is to tell a story.” Neither The Daily Wire nor Bonfire Legend responded to IndieWire’s request for comment on the actor’s involvement, and Hinojosa’s email response did not address the claim that her client could not criticize the film publicly. “Pawn Shop” reportedly follows a federal immigration agent who takes shelter in a Minneapolis pawn shop amid civil unrest. Trejo plays the owner, a Mexican American military veteran.

Harvey Keitel, Henry Thomas, and others also star. The film, shot in Livingston, Montana, prompted protests and public safety complaints earlier this month. City officials temporarily suspended the production’s shooting permit before reinstating it with additional restrictions, and The Daily Wire announced on October 9 that filming had wrapped.

A screenplay draft, previously verified by a crew member and reviewed by IndieWire, includes a sequence resembling the fatal shooting of Renée Good by an ICE officer in Minneapolis earlier this year. In those pages, a protester strikes an ICE officer with her car before being shot by his partner, and the officer subsequently dies. No agents died in the real-life incident, and whether Good’s car ever posed a threat to her killer, Jonathan Ross, remains widely disputed.

“No one reached out to my dad and said, ‘Hey, we want to make some pro-ICE propaganda,’” Gilbert said, when pressed on the content of the “Pawn Shop” script as he understood it.

Not recognizing the producers and not understanding the movie are different things, to be sure. And neither Hinojosa nor Gilbert specified for IndieWire what was in the script Danny received or when he learned more about its overall portrayal of ICE. “Pawn Shop” was also not his first Daily Wire job.

Trejo previously voiced a character on Adam Carolla’s DailyWire+ animated comedy “Mr. Birchum,” whose December 2023 announcement also named Bonfire Legend’s Dallas Sonnier as a producer and Shapiro as an executive producer. Gilbert described that assignment as a casual acquaintance asking his father to voice a cartoon, without Danny meaningfully appreciating the companies involved.

Gilbert doubted his father would have recognized Shapiro walking around on set. He also believes he alerted Hinojosa, Danny’s agent of decades, to the political implications of the partnership amid the “Pawn Shop” controversy. He said her reaction suggested the team hadn’t fully understood them.

“It’s really hard to believe when you know everything that’s going on online that other people don’t,” Gilbert said, describing his father’s attention as living closer to home. For Danny, Hollywood is part of the local economy: a place to earn a living through assignments that often follow a familiar daily routine and steady yearly cycle.

“He looks at Hollywood like it’s a factory. It’s a factory that makes movies,” Gilbert said. “My dad thinks about Hollywood like it’s Detroit.”

Trejo’s challenge for much of his career has been getting more roles, and now there are fewer for everyone. A formerly incarcerated Mexican American actor, Danny built his legacy from parts that often reduced men with his background to a threat. “And he’s one of the very few Mexican men, especially of his generation, who have been able to turn getting cast as a convict, getting cast as a gangster, inmate number three, inmate number four, into goodwill and good faith,” Gilbert said.

Acting gave Danny a wider audience for the community work he had been doing for years, his son said. At prisons, schools, and recovery meetings, people recognize a Trejo character first and then listen to the man’s own story. On the day of our interview, Gilbert said, Danny recorded a voiceover and distributed socks to homeless people. He keeps them in his car just for that purpose.

“He feels like this career was given to him in order for him to help people, so he wants to keep working,” Gilbert said. “He just wants to work. That’s what he wants to do.”

Trejo’s financial troubles are public record. After he filed for personal Chapter 11 bankruptcy in February 2023, a judge approved a five-year plan to repay roughly $3 million in tax debts, including through the sale of one of his two Los Angeles homes, Bloomberg Law reported. His restaurant businesses were outside the bankruptcy, but Trejo said in a court declaration that approximately 90 percent of his income for the tax years at issue came from acting. The Hollywood strikes further interrupted that cash flow.

An April 2025 interim case closure does not establish his remaining debt or available funds today. IndieWire contacted his bankruptcy attorney, Jeffrey S. Shinbrot, for clarification. Still, Gilbert fears his father could not afford a legal fight. “It’s like, yeah, if I’m Tom Cruise, sure, whatever,” he said. “You know what I mean? But if I’m a hardworking 82-year-old Mexican American man, that’s not the case.”

IndieWire has not reviewed Trejo’s contract and cannot establish what consequences he might have faced for walking away from “Pawn Shop.” SAG-AFTRA previously told IndieWire that productions are expected to give performers enough information to make informed decisions.

“Misleading a performer about the role may undermine the meeting of the minds required to form a binding contract,” a spokesperson said. (The union did not respond before publication to additional questions about Trejo’s circumstances or the production’s current signatory status.)

An anonymous “Pawn Shop” crew member interviewed for our earlier investigation said they accepted what was only described as a “fun action movie” without knowing its connection to The Daily Wire or Shapiro, either. The worker ultimately left the shoot over political and safety concerns.

Reached again after the claims about Trejo became public, the worker remained skeptical that the principal cast could have been so uninformed. They emphasized that, in the version of the script they saw, Trejo’s character was “ultimately helping the ICE agent,” but they also had no firsthand knowledge of the actor’s negotiations and did not stay for most of the filming.

“I don’t want to discredit what he’s saying, and I would like to believe that that is the truth,” they said.

Speaking out has brought its own complications for Gilbert, who wanted to explain his father’s position without making it harder for him to navigate. His initial explanation was intended for a smaller audience. On October 10, he posted an Instagram Close Friends story describing his father as “handcuffed to this stupid project.” It circulated in the press, and Gilbert said he would have phrased it differently had he expected his comments to be shared widely.

“I hate the idea that any of what I would have said would be used against him in any sort of litigious way,” he said. “I’m not saying that anger is the problem. I’m saying the problem is there’s so much to be angry about. It’s very difficult to say, ‘I’m mad, I’m angry over here,’ and to stop and go, ‘Wait, who does my anger benefit?’”

Explaining the fallout to his father has also meant explaining internet outrage. To show that disconnect, Gilbert recalled asking Danny not to post photos of him because social media commenters mocked him for not looking tough enough to be Trejo’s son. His dad’s response, Gilbert said: “When you put something on there, they can say things back to you?”

“Fortunately, people believe in him, and he tells his story, and they know that he’s been through what he’s been through,” he continued. “Unfortunately, they expect him to think with their brain as well.”

There’s irony, Gilbert said, in realizing that his father has played rapists, drug dealers, and cartel members without audiences mistaking their beliefs for his own. But it was taking a turn as the so-called “good guy” that left Danny having to explain himself.

“He’s playing a game he always thought was checkers, and now it’s chess,” Gilbert said.

A likable and even heroic character can still serve a political argument. But the younger Trejo’s account at least offers an explanation for why his father took the job with Shapiro’s Daily Wire. And whatever Danny understood when he accepted “Pawn Shop,” the filmmakers are using his face to tell their story.