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This week, President Trump dispatched ICE agents to airports across the country, an idea he claims was his own and seems proud of. The agents were sent to help a TSA strained from the partial government shutdown. After Trump’s announcement, Tom Homan, the White House “border czar,” qualified that the agents weren’t trained to screen luggage with X-ray machines at security checkpoints, which was maybe obvious but crucial information. Security checkpoints are in fact the main holdup. Travelers report waiting hours in line and missing flights. Homan did say that the agents could assist with other simple tasks, such as manning airport exits, which—as anyone who’s been to an airport knows—are generally not the source of delays. ICE’s presence is felt as mostly maskless agents, generally just standing around, perhaps sometimes handing out water bottles.
Their presence, in other words, isn’t solving the actual problem. But the image of benign, mask-free agents is made to endure. After the deaths on the streets of Minneapolis, after the theatrics of Greg Bovino, after the drama of Kristi Noem, ICE may be entering a new era. This week, Markwayne Mullin was confirmed as the new DHS head, having struck a softer tone than his predecessor during hearings. He told senators that he would stop the practice of agents entering people’s houses without judicial warrants. Mullin is new to immigration enforcement but appears to be growing close to Homan, who is a seasoned professional. But what will this new era look like? Homan, after all, has long shared Trump’s goals of mass deportations, and he was one of the architects of the child-separation policy from Trump’s first term. And the big new detention centers begun in the Noem era are still being built. On this week’s Radio Atlantic: our staff writer Nick Miroff, who covers immigration and analyzes what the next phase of ICE might look like.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
[Music]
Hanna Rosin: The Department of Homeland Security is now weeks into its funding lapse. Last Friday, with TSA lines at airports growing, a woman named Linda called into a conservative radio show to offer a thought.
Linda: Clay, I think I have a solution to the TSA problem. What we need to do is we need to supplement where we’re missing out on TSA agents who can’t afford to work for us anymore—we need to bring in ICE agents.
Rosin: The host, Clay Travis, loved the thought.
Clay Travis: Linda, I’m gonna say, it’s kind of a brilliant idea.
Rosin: He loved it enough that he brought it up on Fox News later that day.
Travis: I had a caller on the show, The Clay [Travis] and Buck [Sexton] Show, today, Charlie, who had an interesting idea: What if President Trump announced that ICE agents were now going to be supplementing TSA agents inside of all of the airports?
Rosin: By the next morning, Trump floated the idea on Truth Social, threatening that if Democrats don’t give in and fund DHS, he’d send ICE agents into airports—
TV reporter (from CBS Texas): Keeping our eye on DFW airport—
Rosin: —which he soon did.
TV reporter (from CBS Texas):—and Dallas Love Field as the White House deploys ICE agents to airports around the country today.
TV reporter (from Fox 5 Atlanta): Happening now: ICE agents have arrived at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.
President Trump: And they love it because they’re able to now arrest illegals as they come into the country. That’s very fertile territory. But that’s not why they’re there; they’re really there to help.
Rosin: Trump took credit for the ICE idea himself.
Reporter: Whose idea was it?
President Trump: Mine. That was mine.
Reporter: And can I ask you, you said that there—
President Trump: That was like the paper clip. You know the story of the paper clip? One hundred eighty-two years ago, a man discovered the paper clip. It was so simple, and everybody that looked at it would say, Why didn’t I think of that?
ICE was my idea. First person I called was Tom Homan. I said, What do you think—
[Music]
Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. If ICE is now showing up at airports helping out TSA, then what even is ICE?
Their new role comes at a time when DHS has a new head, Markwayne Mullin—
President Trump: —thrilled to swear in our new secretary of homeland security, a great American patriot, to put it mildly.
Rosin: —who took a more conciliatory position during his confirmation hearings, when the Kristi Noem–Greg Bovino era of shooting citizens on American streets has come to an end.
Kristi Noem: —an act of domestic terrorism. The ICE officer, fearing for his life and the other—
Rosin: So does this mean that we’re heading into a new era for ICE and DHS? And if so, what will it look like?
To help me think through this, I talked to staff writer Nick Miroff, who covers immigration.
Rosin: Nick, welcome to the show.
Nick Miroff: Thank you, Hanna. Good to be with you.
Rosin: Okay, let’s start with airport hell. As we know, there’s a shortage of TSA agents, and then this idea comes seemingly out of nowhere to deploy ICE at airports to help alleviate these security lines. What did you think when you first heard this idea?
Miroff: Well, first, my first thought was, This isn’t gonna help. Second was that this is consistent with the way the president views ICE as more than like a personal army, kind of like a personal errand corps, where he needs some kind of job done and he wants the optics of toughness, he just calls on ICE, which, once again, is just a gross misunderstanding of what that law-enforcement agency’s role is.
And so, over the course of last weekend, I initially wrote to some of my ICE sources, and they had no information about it; they had no idea what the operational plans were gonna be.
And then you kind of saw it take shape over the course of the weekend, with the border czar, Tom Homan, going on the Sunday shows and seemingly doing a kind of damage control, like, Oh, we’re gonna have them watching the exits and supporting TSA, which was an acknowledgment that they are not trained to do the core functions of TSA, which are the things that obviously slow the lines down.
Tom Homan: We’re simply there to help TSA do their job in areas that don’t need their specialized expertise, such as screening through the X-ray machine—not trained in that; we won’t do that. But there are roles we can play—
Miroff: All week, what we’ve seen is imagery of ICE officers mostly standing around. And ironically, it’s kind of a nice PR opportunity for an agency that has, obviously, been widely vilified over the past year for its role in places like Minneapolis.
They are in the airports without masks. They’re handing out water bottles. They’re smiling. And of course, they’re getting some of the favorable coverage from people saying, Oh wow, they’re actually really nice.
Traveler: They just walk by. Hey, they’re here to help, and I’m all for it—no problem.
Miroff: A lot of people have rightly commented that ICE officers in the airports remind them of the role that the National Guard is playing on the streets of Washington, D.C., because they just see National Guard troops kind of standing around and not really doing anything.
The kind of darker interpretation of this is that this is a test run for the president to deploy ICE officers to polling stations and intimidate voters in November. That’s yet to be seen. But it is a reminder of the way the president views DHS, but specifically ICE, as a kind of personal federal force that is at the beck and call of the president and he can just deploy whenever he needs a tough job done.
Rosin: Right. Okay, so I wanna split the darker and lighter interpretations ’cause I’m sure, even at the airport, there are some people who are freaked out by the presence of ICE, and other people who are happy and going over and shaking their hands.
So to start with the freaked out—and then this polarization shows up in social media. So in the first days was this video of a woman at the San Francisco airport being pinned down by ICE agents while her daughter looked on.
[Sounds of crying]
Woman: I’m asking for your badge number, sir.
Rosin: And then later, reports that TSA had shared information about this woman with ICE, which brings up the specter of “Oh, are airports gonna become like Minneapolis streets or something? You’re not safe anywhere. ICE could just pop up at any place where all Americans do their business.” So what do you think of that?
Miroff: Yeah, good question. Let me try to add some context here. So first thing to keep in mind is that there were already ICE officers in international airports. Just like Customs and Border Protection is in the international airports, there are ICE officers there.
In most cases, they’re there for a specific purpose. But since the start of this administration, they have fulfilled the president’s executive orders for DHS agencies to cooperate more on sharing information about potential immigrant targets that they want to arrest, right? So you already have TSA doing more to share information with ICE, flagging for ICE passengers who may have outstanding deportation orders or may be people who ICE is looking for. And that was the case of this mother and daughter traveling through the San Francisco airport.
It’s important to point out that their arrest took place the day before the president sent the ICE officers out into the airports. And the tell that I noticed immediately was that the ICE officers who carried out this arrest were not only in plainclothes; they were undercover officers. They were wearing, like, hoodies and backpacks. And the presence of undercover ICE officers in international airports is not new.
And in this case, they had been alerted to this family by TSA. The mother and her daughter reportedly had a final deportation order. So they’re on this wider list of people who ICE is looking for. And so this was what the administration and Tom Homan calls a “targeted enforcement operation,” a targeted arrest.
Rosin: Okay, so if there’s anything to fear there in the long term, it’s the increased data sharing between government agencies; it’s not this temporary story about ICE agents at airports.
Miroff: Yeah, ICE agents are not gonna be, like, sweeping through the airports looking for people to arrest.
Rosin: How do you know?
Miroff: Because those are not their operational orders. Look at the images that we’ve seen so far: They’re standing around chatting with each other, and they’re handing out water bottles, and they’re doing a soft PR campaign.
What would be the political backlash, after Minneapolis, of having ICE agents sweeping through the airports grabbing people and confronting U.S. citizens and harassing U.S. citizens? There doesn’t seem to be a lot of appetite in the White House for that right now.
Rosin: Right, okay, so everything you’re suggesting, what I’m picking up is that this is kind of a new part of a PR campaign, and I wanna get to that in a minute. But first, I wanna close this off, which is, this is just because of a temporary partial government shutdown. Congress is currently negotiating. So are they just gonna leave? Is this very temporary? Is your impression sort of once we resolve the TSA funding, ICE will just leave?
Miroff: Yeah. I think there’s some long-term damage being done to TSA, right?
This is, like, what, the third time that they’ve not gotten paid? Reportedly, hundreds of officers have quit. And what kind of message does this send as a recruitment?
One of the crazy things about this is that TSA officers, they’re not really law-enforcement officers. They’re performing this vital function, but they’re making, like, $40,000 to $50,000 a year. Meanwhile, you have ICE—in some cases, Homeland Security special investigators—who are making $150,000 to $200,000 a year and who are supposed to be investigating drug cartels and human traffickers, and they’re out there standing around in the airport, making five times as much as the TSA agents they’re supposed to be replacing.
So this is not a good solution, and it’s certainly not a long-term solution. And, yes, I would think that once they come up with a fix, ICE will get pulled back out of the airports because let’s not forget they’re supposed to be carrying out the president’s mass-deportation campaign.
Rosin: Okay, so back to your specialty: Let’s talk about ways that ICE is evolving. The new leader of DHS, Markwayne Mullin, he was confirmed by Congress this week, sworn in. Who is he? What do you know about him?
Miroff: Well, Markwayne Mullin was a senator from Oklahoma. He was a five-time congressman from Oklahoma before that. He’s got hardcore conservative credentials, and most importantly, he is someone who is personally close to President Trump and who, obviously, President Trump thinks fondly of and has served as a kind of go-to ally.
And Mullin, his profile is that of a tough-guy fighter, kind of a macho man.
Then-Senator Markwayne Mullin: You wanna do it now?
Teamsters President Sean O’Brien: I’d love to do it right now.
Mullin: Well, stand your butt up, then.
O’Brien: You stand your butt up.
Mullin: Big guy. Senator Bernie Sanders: Oh, hold on. Stop it. O’Brien: Is that your solution to every problem?
Sanders: No, no, sit down—
Miroff: He was an MMA fighter. He’s one of the only senators who didn’t go to college for four years. He inherited his father’s plumbing business and then expanded it, and he’s attracted scrutiny for some of the investments that he’s made over the years that have made him personally wealthy while he’s been in Congress.
But one thing that was notable during his confirmation hearing is that if you looked past the kind of personal animosity between Mullin and the chairman of the committee, Senator Rand Paul, fellow Republican, those two have a simmering beef.
Senator Rand Paul: You offered no apology.
Mullin: Sir.
Paul: And you offer no apology today—and no regrets.
Mullin: Uh.
Paul: Haven’t heard the word—
Miroff: If you look beyond that, he got a lot of kind of warm, supportive statements from Democrats; he obviously has friends among the Democrats.
Reporter: Are you a “yes” or a “no” on Senator Mullin’s confirmation?
Senator John Fetterman: Well, I came up with an open mind. And I’m going to maintain that. That was always my commitment, to do that.
Miroff: He got Senator Fetterman [of Pennsylvania] and Senator [Martin] Heinrich from New Mexico to support his confirmation.
And he does have this reputation as a kind of jocular, backslapping, friendly guy, and I think that that is the persona he’s trying to bring into DHS at a time when the department is looking for a kind of reset and a rebranding of its own.
And most importantly, the career workforce at the department, that has been demoralized by what they’ve seen over the past year, where a lot of people were very disgusted with Kristi Noem and, most importantly, her chief adviser, Corey Lewandowski, a lot of those people have been telling me that they’re very eager for a fresh start and that Mullin is saying all the right things to kind of win them over so far.
[Music]
Rosin: After the break, how this next phase of DHS and ICE could be just as effective in the campaign of mass deportations—without as many people noticing.
[Break]
Rosin: Let’s get into the rebrand, ’cause that could be superficial—it could be at the level of staff happiness—or it could be at the level of genuinely shifting policies. So what’s his relationship with Tom Homan?
Miroff: Well, it’s been very interesting because Markwayne Mullin has never run a federal bureaucracy. He doesn’t have a law-enforcement or military background. And so he’s coming into DHS as a newbie and clearly needs some kind of mentor.
It’s no surprise that the border czar, Tom Homan—who retains a lot of support among the kind of DHS workforce, and represents a kind of institutional continuity at DHS, and who clashed bitterly with Noem and Lewandowski—so it’s no surprise that Homan seems to be kind of taking Mullin under his wing. He’s been talking to Mullin multiple times a day. And so I think this signals that Homan is gonna retain a lot of influence at DHS this year.
And what has been Homan’s job since the president put him in charge of Minneapolis after the debacle there? Homan has been trying to turn down the temperature. He’s been trying to make these kind of conciliatory statements. He’s been trying to reassure Americans that the uglier scenes that have been politically damaging to the White House and the president’s deportation agenda are gonna go away.
And that’s why you saw Markwayne Mullin during his confirmation hearing say, Look, in six months, my goal is for DHS not to be the headlines every day.
Mullin: My goal is for people to understand we’re out there, we’re protecting them, and we’re working with them. My goal is to make every one of you guys proud. My goal for those that don’t support me, regret not supporting me.
Miroff: And so this is about delivering on the president’s mass-deportation agenda, but more quietly, without the kind of spectacle that the Noem team has been producing.
Rosin: Okay, that’s complicated. First of all, you said delivering on the agenda. Do any of these personnel changes then matter if the person setting the agenda is still Stephen Miller, who still has quota demands?
Miroff: Yes and no. What I’m talking about is a tactical change in the politics of immigration enforcement.
Rosin: In the visuals or the politics?
Miroff: In both—in the visuals and the way that it’s talked about, right? During Noem we saw the Public Affairs Office of the Department of Homeland Security issuing these, like, weird white-nationalist tweets about American history and culture and—
Rosin: Nativist.
Miroff: Nativism, delivering these sermons on what Americans should think about their history. Just this kind of stuff that is just way outside the norms.
TV reporter (from PBS NewsHour): —to the American people. For example, calling on potential ICE recruits to “defend the homeland” from outsiders, while featuring heroic images of white men, often from a bygone era.
Miroff: I don’t think we’re gonna see that anymore, at least this year. I think that we are moving into a second-year, midterm political strategy that seeks to produce high numbers of deportations so the White House can point to results and say, Look, I’m doing the thing that I said I was gonna do, that President Trump said he was gonna do, but no longer is as geared to satisfying the president’s base and the most hawkish right-wing forces that delighted in the scenes of ICE agents and Border Patrol agents going around these liberal cities and kicking ass. The politics of that have changed.
And so it isn’t like they’re gonna really back off of mass deportations—and they can’t. They have $170 billion from the One Big Beautiful Bill. That’s the law. They have to hire all these ICE officers. They have to build out the detention capacity of ICE. They have to build the border wall. The money has already been appropriated, and they are gonna fulfill this agenda. They’re just gonna manage the politics much differently.
Rosin: I guess I’m still trying to gauge if that’s a genuine policy shift, because Tom Homan, who we now talk about as the calm professional, was very involved, as this magazine reported, in family-separation policies. So I don’t know what he represents, actually, politically when he’s executing mass deportations. Does he just represent the “not Greg Bovino,” but actually, his policies are pretty similar—his tactics?
Miroff: Yes. So what does it mean when Tom Homan says they wanna do targeted enforcement? It means you’re not gonna have Greg Bovino strutting around Los Angeles and Chicago like a rooster. But Tom Homan has been an advocate of mass deportations pretty much his entire 40-year career in federal law enforcement; he knows how to pull the levers.
And what he represents is—think of it as, like, institutional ICE on steroids. You don’t have to go out and troll people visually or online with the mass-deportation agenda you’re trying to carry out. You just can go and do it because you have the money and you have the personnel and you know how to execute these deportations, and that’s what Tom Homan represents.
So when some of the border hawks who were lamenting the demise of Greg Bovino described Tom Homan as some softie, it’s almost comical because, yeah, he was one of the architects of the family-separation policy during the first term. Everyone who has seen him on Fox News for the last several years knows that he’s an unapologetic, unabashed enthusiast for mass deportations and for what President Trump wants to do.
But I think he can both be more effective, ’cause he knows how to actually make the machines run, and he’s not backing off of this. He’s just managing the politics and the optics differently because the broader public has soured on mass deportations since Minneapolis. The optics of it are bad.
Rosin: So the era we are entering is one in which ICE could have a gentler face, but is actually more effectively carrying out the president’s policies.
Miroff: Exactly, and it isn’t even a gentler face. What does targeted enforcement mean? It means they’re gonna use all their resources, all the money that they have, to develop target lists, to go and find the people that they wanna arrest, who they can arrest, and take them into custody. They’re just gonna do it in a less visible way and in the way that ICE has traditionally operated.
And that’s why the Kristi Noem, Corey Lewandowski, Greg Bovino approach of the first term was also really disorienting for most career ICE officers, ’cause it wasn’t the way they’re used to operating. They didn’t like it. They don’t wanna be performing for television cameras and social media. That’s what the masks were about, in a lot of ways.
And so if you tell ICE officers, You’re just gonna do the job that you have been doing for most of your career, but with less of the spotlight on you, they’ll be like, Great. And—
Rosin: That’s what I signed up for.
Miroff: That’s what I signed up for. And I think, ultimately, they will get bigger numbers. You will see a lot more deportations.
Rosin: Okay. All right, so some specifics, because in the negotiations to fund DHS, the Democrats have made a handful of specific demands to rein in ICE. And I don’t know that any of them have been met or will be met—they’re still being negotiated—but I’m curious about what you’re hearing about whether, in this new era, some of these things might or could change, like wearing masks. Is that a thing of the old era? What happens to that?
Miroff: Well, it’s funny; the White House, the Republicans, ICE leaders seem to have already given ground on some of the other items on the Democrats’ wish list. You saw Markwayne Mullin during the confirmation hearing say that he would return to the policy requiring ICE to have a judicial warrant to go into someone’s private home.
Mullin: I have made it very clear to the staff, and I think when you and I spoke, that a judicial warrant will be used to go into houses, into place of businesses, unless we’re pursuing someone that enters in that place.
Miroff: Firing Kristi Noem was high on that list, restoring some of the oversight authorities—Mullin said that he would do that.
So even in his confirmation hearing, outside of the scope of the negotiations, they were already agreeing to a lot of the stuff on the Democrats’ list. But what seems to be the big sticking point? It’s the masks.
Rosin: Interesting. Why would they wanna keep the masks if they’re operating in the way that you described, which is the traditional ICE way of a name on a list and you go after the name on the list?
Miroff: I think that this is something that, in the course of their recruitment effort to more than double the size of the ICE workforce and add more than 10,000 new deportation officers, that this is something that has been a promise to the new recruits, that they—
Rosin: Why? Why is this so critical?
Miroff: ’Cause they’re worried about being doxxed, and they’re worried about their families being harassed. And I’m sorry, but that’s a real thing.
Rosin: Okay, so we’re in this moment—ICE is about to do a better job at mass deportation. What do you, as a reporter, track to see whether this is happening humanely, in a way that protects rights or doesn’t protect rights? What are you watching in this new phase of ICE?
Miroff: I’m watching the plan that was set in motion several months ago to overhaul the ICE detention system.
The agency has spent the last few months acquiring large warehouses around the country. They’ve already spent a billion dollars to buy 11 properties. They’re planning to convert them into large mass-detention centers, with capacity, in some places, for up to 10,000 detainees. This is stuff we’ve just never seen in this country before.
They have $38 billion to convert these facilities and to operate them through the rest of Trump’s term. These are central to their plan to carry out mass deportations and to reach their goal of a million deportations a year, which they fell far short of in Trump’s first year.
And yet Kristi Noem, Corey Lewandowski, as they were acquiring these warehouses and implementing this plan, didn’t do any of the local political work it would need, even in Republican-dominated jurisdictions, to reassure local residents about what they were doing.
And so they have been facing this backlash to the ICE plan from people who voted for Trump, but don’t necessarily want a 5,000-person ICE detention center in their county. And ICE needs those jurisdictions to approve their permits for water and sewer and all of the renovations that they’re planning to do.
I’m tracking this plan and the possibility of mass-detention centers being built out around the United States that are really going to facilitate their broader goals.
Rosin: Right. Right, that’s the next story.
Well, Nick, thank you so much for joining us.
Miroff: Pleasure. Thank you.
[Music]
Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Kevin Townsend. Rob Smierciak engineered and provided original music. Sam Fentress and Genevieve Finn fact-checked. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
Listeners, if you enjoy the show, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.
I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.
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