This is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts.
With every norm-busting move, with every boundary-busting decision, you get this debate around President Trump: Is it authoritarianism now? Has the nature of the American state finally changed into something else?
It’s not going to be that clean. There’s no one moment when we phase from one thing to another. But I think what we can say — what can’t even really be argued — is that the authoritarianism is here. It’s just unevenly distributed.
But you can see it. You can see it in the video of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shooting and killing Renee Good in Minneapolis. You can see it when you watch a disabled woman dragged out of her car on her way to a doctor’s appointment. You can see it when a family of eight, on their way home from a basketball game, is tear-gassed and their 6-month-old child needs to be given CPR. You can see it when Border Patrol agents tackle and detain a U.S. citizen who is filming their activities and then they accuse him of assaulting them. You can see it when masked men walk up to people with brown skin and just ask them to prove that they are American.
You can see it spreading every day, distributing itself more widely to more kinds of people.
In Minnesota, local law enforcement officials held a news conference to announce that their officers were being racially profiled by federal immigration agents.
Archival clip of Mark Ruley: We started hearing from our police officers the same complaints as they fell victim to this while off-duty. Every one of these individuals is a person of color who has had this happen to them.
But we are at the beginning of this — one year into this administration. And now, thanks to the unprecedented $170 billion from immigration enforcement in Trump’s “big, beautiful” act, the administration has essentially a blank check to build the police state of its dreams.
It is hard to keep the scale of what the Trump administration is building in your mind all at once. There is so much more happening than what is on video clips online. So I want to talk to someone who has been tracking it.
Caitlin Dickerson is a journalist at The Atlantic. She’s been covering immigration closely since Trump’s first term. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 2023 for reporting on Trump’s family separation policy. I asked her on the show to walk me through what this new infrastructure looks like, how it fits together, how it is being administered, what it is being used to do now and what that might mean for the future.
Ezra Klein: Caitlin Dickerson, welcome to the show.
Caitlin Dickerson: Thanks for having me.
I want to begin with some of the pieces of the immigration enforcement we have now. The agency that people have heard the most about in the last year is ICE. What was ICE under Joe Biden, and how is it different now?
ICE is responsible for immigration enforcement in the interior of the country, going after people who have made it across the border, are living in American cities and are subject to deportation. That’s who they were under the Biden administration, and that’s who they are now. The difference is how they go about that work.
Since the Ford era, we’ve had some level of priorities that immigration enforcement officials are supposed to follow for who they should go after, versus who they shouldn’t. Because throughout United States history, we’ve had lots of unauthorized immigrants. Some are thought of societally and in the eyes of government as a problem, and others really are not — they’re minding their own business, they’re doing jobs.
The Biden administration imposed the strictest form of priorities that we’d seen historically, where ICE was directed only to go after people who had very serious criminal records. The rest of the undocumented population was left alone, so ICE officials had to get permission if they wanted to go after somebody and arrest them and deport them, and the bar was considered very high.
Now, of course, there are no restrictions whatsoever. ICE has carte blanche to go after any immigrant in the United States without legal status.
ICE has always done lots of arrests — hundreds of thousands, some years — and consistently gone after these people with serious criminal records. But central to their approach was to make arrests happen in a way that was meant to be as safe as possible and as seamless as possible.
Not that this is going to sound great to people, but to describe it for you: What ICE agents did historically is that they would identify someone they wanted to arrest, do lots of work at a desk on a computer before they ever pursued this person, to confirm their identity, to confirm they had no claim to legal status in the United States. Once that work was done, they would often go to the person’s house at 5 or 6 in the morning, knock on the door and try to take them into custody, often while other relatives are still sleeping and before they leave for work for the day.
I point out that — this isn’t going to sound great because, of course, what I’m talking about is a situation where you’d have kids wake up in the morning and find out that their mom or dad was gone — but that approach was to minimize the kinds of chaos that we’re seeing ICE really invite now.
I’ve talked to so many current and former ICE officials who are watching this happen, and they’re really bewildered because it’s as if ICE is now going against all of its former training to make arrests as dramatic as possible, to do them in the streets in front of the general public, inviting conflicts that then lead to protesting and to escalations. They’re also filming a lot of these violent clashes, making them as dramatic as possible and prioritizing that over safety. It’s really such a significant change. It’s hard to understate.
Part of it, I think, is because they’re trying to really spread a certain level of fear that’s intended to encourage people to leave the country on their own so that they don’t have to make as many arrests. They want to encourage self-deportation.
So it’s absolutely the case that the look and feel of ICE is really different right now. I think people are right to feel that way. It’s the massive increase in boots on the ground. It’s the tactics being used. It’s the locations where arrests are taking place.
Historically, ICE had a policy that made courthouses, schools and hospitals off limits for immigration enforcement for the same reason: to prioritize safety.
That policy is now gone. And I think, for purposes of efficiency and getting as many deportations done as possible but also playing into the drama, now you see ICE very frequently in those places.
I want to pick up on something you said there, which is that many of the videos and violent clashes we’re seeing are staged to be that way.
Something I’ve been tracking often with the Trump administration is the way it uses spectacle as policy, as message. This is less true in immigration, but oftentimes they’re not changing rules so much as they are doing things, making sure the thing spreads virally, mimetically, so people understand that this government is different, that things are different now.
I’d be curious to hear, particularly from some of these conversations you had with former ICE officials, what they make of the visual spectacle — the propaganda, the videos, the clips — being constructed around it all.
When it comes to the former law enforcement officials, what they make of the propaganda is grave concern because they feel it’s taking away from the legitimacy of this agency.
ICE, people will tell you, has always kind of been the redheaded stepchild of federal law enforcement. It’s a less prestigious job, it’s easier to get into than other federal law enforcement agencies, and it’s always politicized. So there was this real emphasis to learn the law and to apply the law with a certain degree of professionalism, to kind of give ICE more legitimacy as a serious federal law enforcement agency.
My best impression of the situation is that whereas before, it was very thorough training to explain: What are people’s civil rights? What is immigration law? What are your authorities and what are not your authorities as a deportation officer? Now training is dramatically truncated, and basically the message has come down to: Do what you have to do to bring people into custody.
What I’m hearing from these former officials is that the propaganda and the videos are taking away from that impression, really making the public quite skeptical of them. And they feel the same way about the fact that officers now are routinely wearing masks and refusing to identify themselves. All of it sort of takes away from how seriously they’re viewed as a law enforcement agency.
Who is ICE now? One of the things that surprised me when doing research for this episode was recognizing that now most of its enforcement agents are new recruits.
That’s right. We had about 7,000 ICE agents toward the end of the Biden administration, and the Trump administration says that they’ve hired 12,000 people since then.
Some percentage are people who’d retired from immigration enforcement, so they have some experience. But we’re talking about a lot of new faces. They’re trying to hire as many former law enforcement agents as they can just to bring people in with some familiarity with how to do this type of work.
But there are lots of people, it seems, in this new work force who have absolutely no experience and who are learning how to enforce the law, how to carry a weapon and how to interact with the public, just starting from Square 1 right now.
When you look at the way they’re recruiting, when you look at the images and videos they’re using to recruit, who do they seem to be targeting?
It varies. Some of the messaging says that the Department of Homeland Security is looking to hire patriots, looking to hire people who want to defend and protect the country.
But we’re also seeing a lot of explicit references to white nationalist ideas and the kind of dog whistles that we’ve all become used to when Trump is president. They’ve used slogans. They’ve referenced songs. They’ve used images that speak to Manifest Destiny and this idea that the United States was the land intended for white people.
It’s language that I think, to people who are unfamiliar with these phrases, just seems kind of weird — old-fashioned and strange and odd. But the fact is that if you’re a member of the Proud Boys or you’re a follower of QAnon, you recognize these exact phrases that are being used as a kind of call to action to apply for a job as an ICE agent.
Stephen Miller went on TV to deliver a message to ICE agents under fire for brutality and aggression.
Archival clip of Stephen Miller: To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties, and anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop you or tries to obstruct you is committing a felony. You have immunity to perform your duties. And no one — no city official, no state official, no illegal alien, no leftist agitator or domestic insurrectionist — can prevent you from fulfilling your legal obligations and duties. And the Department of Justice has made clear that if officials cross that line into obstruction, into criminal conspiracy against the United States or against ICE officers, then they will face justice.
What do you make of that?
I make of that that Miller’s trying to communicate to ICE and to these new members of ICE, in particular, that they will not face consequences for use of force, specifically. I think he’s speaking to the ICE officer who shot Renee Good in Minnesota and killed her but also to officers who’ve used tear gas, who’ve pushed and shoved and arrested protesters, who’ve claimed that people who are filming them are impeding arrests and using that as a pretense to either take those people into custody or have some sort of violent altercation with them. It’s very striking.
I was talking to one former ICE official who told me that you would always fear discharging your weapon in an interaction, even a potentially violent and dangerous one. Usually the concern was that officers would be too unwilling to use their gun because they worried about potential repercussions. And there were all these layers of investigation that would take place after a shooting. His fear when he was in ICE for 30 years was that he wouldn’t use his gun in a moment when he needed to.
And now it’s almost as if the opposite fear is true. We’ve seen in ICE people losing their jobs, high-level officials losing their jobs because they’re not delivering enough deportations, they’re not being aggressive enough. I think Miller is just underscoring that argument that you’re not going to get in trouble for being too aggressive and, in fact, the only thing you will get in trouble for is not being aggressive enough.
Tell me about that high-level purge or turnover of leadership.
It’s happened a couple of different times. The very head of ICE was replaced, a deputy was replaced.
ICE has the country divided into individual field offices, and those directors are the people who are overseeing the officers carrying out these deportations — talking to them on a daily basis, communicating quotas and guidelines. We’ve seen a significant number of those field office directors taken off their duties and replaced with officials from the Border Patrol.
I think that’s really significant because the Border Patrol, in general, reputationally, is viewed, even within the Department of Homeland Security, as a tougher and Wild West almost type of environment that they tend to work in.
Also, there are legal differences. What people’s rights are at the border are different from their rights in the interior of the country.
I’m glad you brought up the Border Patrol, because I said at the beginning that I think people have heard the most about ICE, but a lot of the very aggressive raids we’re seeing now are led by or certainly include Border Patrol officers.
Tell me a bit about how that agency’s mission and focus have changed over the past 18 months.
The border has been — compared with the past — relatively empty since Trump took office. So you have a lot of border officials who are available and have been detailed to American cities to support ICE. I think that you’re seeing the difference in the way that they’re used to working in these interactions that we’re watching in American cities.
Border Patrol officials operate in a different constitutional zone. They have a lot more freedom when it comes to how they stop and question people, what source of information they can access — very different from the Fourth Amendment protections that we’re used to in the interior of the country.
I think some of the differences that we’re seeing in how interior arrests look now versus how they did in the past may simply come down to training.
Let me pick up on what you said at the beginning, which is that the border has been very quiet since Trump took over. Trump did run for office promising to secure the southern border.
I remember talking to Biden administration officials often during his term, and there was a huge surge in people crossing the border and people being stopped at the border. And you would get all these explanations that made it seem like it was quite out of their control, that there were all these things happening in Latin America and problems in Venezuela and people fleeing. And they often treated it as outside the realm of policy. In the last year of Biden’s administration, they began to change policy, and border crossings seemed to go down.
What has Trump done to basically — I don’t want to say “end” people coming in through the southern border, but you look at the numbers, and it is very low. What is the lesson of that?
I don’t think the lesson is that the changes in numbers of people crossing the border are solely due to policy. I hear what you’re saying. I’m very familiar with this debate, and I think that circumstances outside the United States and outside American policy are very relevant.
A lot of times what is missing from that conversation is acknowledgment of the fact that there was a pandemic and an incredible pent-up demand for crossing borders, given the way that international economies struggled so much. The U.S. recovered better than any other country in the world economically, so it makes sense that coming out of the pandemic, with travel restrictions lifting abroad and with so many other countries suffering more than they were previously, that there was a huge pent-up demand that contributed to the increase in people who crossed the border under the Biden administration.
You had millions of people leave Venezuela because of falling apart within that country and the regime there and the economy and public safety, and political dissidents were being jailed and killed, etc. So at a certain point, everybody who was able to leave Venezuela has left Venezuela.
I think there can be a real problem with just taking a slice of a moment in time and saying, “The Biden administration had record-breaking immigration,” and leaving it at that to suggest that only factors that had to do with the Biden administration and their policies were at fault for these really high numbers.
I don’t think I would say “only factors,” but I think I would be surprised that the sense of American cruelty and the signal sent by the Trump administration and by these videos and by networks of immigrants coming here and what it is like to be here — I’m not saying it is good. I don’t think you should close the border through sheer cruelty. But the numbers are very low.
It is definitely having an impact. Getting to the other side of the conversation now, I completely agree with you, and I think there are a couple of things going on here.
Policywise, Trump is sort of riding the wave of legal restrictions to asylum that the Biden administration put into place. Those numbers dropped precipitously even before the election, and I think it’s undeniable that the Trump administration is benefiting, in terms of these low numbers, from the public messaging campaign that they have going on right now.
There’s this longstanding debate about whether deterrence works, whether imposing consequences — legal consequences, putting people into jail or deporting them — can in a significant way decrease the number of people crossing the border.
I think that what the Trump administration is doing is going far beyond deterrence. They’re spreading this message of fear internationally and, frankly, conveying an image of the United States that doesn’t make it look like the type of place where people want to seek refuge.
The rule of law is a huge part of what makes the United States the most attractive country in the world for migration. And when you turn on the news and you look at what’s happening in the United States right now, it doesn’t look like a place where the rule of law is still in effect or where the country is necessarily free to participate in basic democratic freedoms, like voting and protesting. There’s a lot of violence in the streets right now.
I think that is having a significant impact on the number of people who are crossing the border. You’re not going to seek safety in a place that doesn’t look very safe.
You often have immigrants coming here because they have a credible fear of persecution where they’re from, and it often seems to me the Trump administration’s policy is meant to create a credible fear of persecution here. Why would you go somewhere where these things could happen to you?
Exactly. That’s a good way of putting it, just to look at the standard for what asylum requires. That’s why we’re seeing people leave.
We don’t know the exact numbers of how many people have left the United States. We don’t really have reason to believe that the 1.9 million number that the Trump administration is touting is accurate. But I am hearing on a regular basis about people, especially people in so-called mixed-status families — where you have a mom or a dad who’s undocumented and the rest of the family members are United States citizens — deciding that it’s no longer worth it to stay in the United States.
I think it’s going to be years before we have a good sense of how many of those people there are, but it does feel like the calculation is changing.
As you say, the border, through whatever mix of mechanisms, has gone quiet. That has created the space to focus the Border Patrol on the interior of the country.
What does it mean to have the Border Patrol focused on the interior of the country, in terms of operations and also in terms of the deeper question about the way the Trump administration is looking at the country itself and what its problems are?
Operationally it means a lot more boots on the ground. It means a lot more arrests and a lot more deportations.
I think that because ICE and ICE field office directors are primarily dealing with people who have longstanding ties to the country and direct relationships with American citizens and are often represented by lawyers, they’re used to being held to a higher level of scrutiny.
People who work along the border are mostly dealing with folks who are trying to enter the United States for the very first time, may not speak English and are not represented by lawyers and people who just don’t have an expectation of basic rights and protections in the way that American citizens do. So when you put officials from that agency into American cities, you have this incredible clash of the expectations versus how these border officials are used to working.
To your question about the deeper meaning: The Border Patrol is a law enforcement agency that is supposed to fortify the exterior of the United States and keep people who are unwanted out, from entering the country, in accordance with the laws and the policies that we have, etc.
Now you have that force of people moving into the center, moving throughout our cities and communities and really creating this impression that there are outsiders, that there are others, that there are unwanteds everywhere among us. We see them taking into custody American citizens. We see them taking into custody people who have legal status, stopping people and openly acknowledging that they’re stopping people because of their physical appearance, their race or their accent.
It really is sending this message of a sort of enemy within and helping to foster fear and division.
A lot of the immigrants swept up in these raids and in some of these policies, they have or, at least until very recently, had some legal status. And we’ve been talking about, in theory, people here without legal status. But how have things changed for many of the people who came in with some legal status, even temporary legal status?
A million and a half people lost their temporary legal status from the Biden administration into the Trump administration. It was interesting to see how Trump campaigned really fudging data —
You’re kidding me. Him?
[Chuckles.] I know, it’s a shock — and referring to everybody who came into the United States under the Biden administration as illegal, as unauthorized.
It was just such a blatant misrepresentation of the reality when, for better or worse, whether or not you like this program, someone who’s filled out an application, who’s been invited to an interview, who’s undergone an interview and then, after being vetted, allowed into the country — to all of sudden call them illegal is just such a bait and switch.
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But we’re also seeing now the Trump administration reopening refugees’ cases and trying to relitigate vetting that, in that case, can take years.
It’s not even just people without legal status. It’s sort of anyone that they can figure out a way to claw legal status back from as well.
You’ve done a lot of reporting on what it is like to be caught up in these raids. What are some stories that stand out to you? What happens if you’re an immigrant or you’re near an unauthorized immigrant or you’re in the building that they’ve decided to target? What is it like?
What I’m hearing now is just that people are living with a really high level of panic, and that’s exactly what the Trump administration wants.
People without legal status, in moments like this, keep in really close touch with one another. There are networks of communication. People use WhatsApp or Facebook to try to let one another know in advance if someone has seen ICE or if a raid is going on.
I’ve talked to kids who’ve told me that they look outside in the morning before their undocumented parent goes to work, and they watch them walk out the front door, walk to their car and that they monitor their parents obsessively all day on Find My on their iPhones to just try to track their parents’ location. So it’s just this 24/7 paranoia that people are dealing with.
I’ve talked to law enforcement officials about this, too, specifically about Renee Good’s death. I spoke to a bunch of officials who reviewed the video. From the very beginning, the first officer runs up to her car, uses expletives, tells her to get out, starts trying to force open the door. And these officers said to me: There’s no reason to not approach her and say, “Ma’am, can you shut off your car and please open the door?”
That’s, in fact, how you want to approach a civilian. Someone who has never been arrested before isn’t used to being screamed at in the face by police. But they’re coming at people in these arrests with such aggression that it’s making people panic. And I think that is leading to some of the more violent incidents that we’re seeing, of people getting hurt and thrown to the ground or worse.
I can’t tell, although I have a suspicion, to what degree that is the actual policy. From the beginning, as these raids and these occupations have escalated in their size, in their aggression, in their framing and their propaganda, it has always looked to me like they are creating the conditions for these tragedies to occur.
And that is a fairly common thing in authoritarian regimes — we’ve seen this in other countries and in history — where you attack your own population, and you then look for pretext to escalate. Where the question is not how to prevent the killing of a Renee Good from happening again but actually how to escalate around the killing of Renee Good in order to catch more of the Trump administration’s enemies in their net — call the protesters domestic terrorists, etc.
It’s not exactly knowable, but it is a very important distinction whether this is seen by the Trump administration as a tragedy — “We need to think about how we are training our troops” — versus part of the policy, actually.
One thing that can be helpful is that the Trump administration usually signals what they want to do before they do it. For example, with Title 42, the Covid-era border ban, Stephen Miller tried for years to figure out a way to completely cut off access to the southern border and shut down asylum. And then finally, the Covid-19 pandemic came around and gave him the pretense that made White House lawyers say: OK, now is the time we can shut down the border.
I think something similar is happening with the Insurrection Act. Trump has been threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act since his first presidency, and it’s coming up again now.
So I can see why you’re saying that there’s a perception that there’s a desire to create the conditions that would justify something like that as an even further escalation. I mean, we’ve seen so many.
I don’t have the sense that individual ICE officers are being told: Escalate things as much as possible. Make sure things get violent.
That would be pretty reckless and actionable legally. But what I think we are seeing very clearly and in Stephen Miller’s message that you played a few minutes ago is that the idea is: Do what you have to do. Don’t focus so much on the laws and the rules and civil rights. Focus on getting people into custody at any cost.
We’ve been talking about physical raids, but one thing you’ve written about is how the “big, beautiful” act, which included a huge amount of money for ICE, for Border Patrol, for the Department of Homeland Security, included a lot of that money for advanced technology and surveillance systems and that the effort to build a very different form of surveillance network, particularly given advances in A.I. and digital tools, is ongoing and might create something that is around for a long time. What can you tell me about what’s being done or envisioned there?
A lot of this is really being kept under wraps by the security contractors that are involved. From what we can see in the public requests for proposals, ICE is really increasing its use of facial recognition technology both at the border and in the interior of the country and then hiring companies like Palantir to collect as much data, really to create almost dossiers on people, drawing from their education records, their financial records, their social media accounts, utilities, etc. to try to create files on immigrants. There’s also data on people’s cars and their license plates — just to kind of be able to constantly monitor and locate people.
There are lots of concerns about what happens with all that data and who is being swept into these collection efforts. I think it’s pretty impossible to keep American citizens out when you’re collecting video for the purposes of facial recognition, whether it’s at the border when people are coming home from their vacation or in the interior of the country.
I think what it comes down to is just collecting a massive amount of information on people that can be used to track them down more easily but also to monitor their behaviors and their activities.
And I think that’s important because of what you mentioned earlier. This expanded use of labels like “domestic terrorist” that the Department of Homeland Security is sprinkling into its messaging, that we’ve seen in a presidential action memo from Trump himself.
This memo, which hasn’t gotten as much attention as it deserves, is very broad in its definition. It says: Domestic terrorists tend to espouse views such as — and lists anticapitalism, anti-Christianity, views opposing the traditional American family and even extremism on migration, which, of course, is how this administration would describe anybody who is out in the streets protesting or trying to protect immigrants without legal status in their communities. You can’t imagine language that’s more broad.
I think that’s one of the things that makes this technology so concerning.
You wrote something that I think has really stuck in my head all year: that after the “big, beautiful” act, the amount of money going to domestic immigration enforcement is larger than the budgets of any military in the world, save for the U.S.’s and China’s.
In addition to worrying about that on behalf of immigrants, when you think about these questions like surveillance, when you think about how Trump talks about domestic opposition, how Stephen Miller talks about domestic opposition, I think something that I fear — that I see the shadows of, but I think it’s actually much more visible than that — is an infrastructure that could be turned against all kinds of internal targets: political opposition, media, protesters, anybody they don’t like. You’ve seen very strange picking up of random academics and students, and it seems that it has something to do with social media posts.
When people build infrastructures like this, they tend to get used. It’s very, very hard to resist using what you have and when you’re as radical an administration as this one is.
I guess I’m asking how the infrastructure itself looks to you. There’s what it’s being used for now, but when you think about how many new agents this is, how much more they’re spending on new weapons for the new agents, when you think about the surveillance, when you think about the drastic increase in detention centers, what does that look like?
The money is so staggering and unprecedented that we don’t have an image in the past that we can look to try to guess where all of this is going. As you pointed out, it’s a military-size budget, and it’s leading to physical changes to the country: large detention centers that are already starting to spring up and that the administration wants to dramatically increase, boots on the ground in American cities and armed officers who are questioning people, asking for proof of citizenship, accosting them, who are hostile to protesters and anybody willing to question their work.
Although I think it’s important to acknowledge that it’s not typical, the level of pushback that law enforcement is facing in the streets, either. I think they are facing an unprecedented level of challenge to their work, and all of that is contributing to the conflicts and the chaos that we’re seeing.
I think it just looks like a very different country than we’re used to. We’re starting to see what that image is. We can see it on social media and on the videos that have gone viral.
So far, though, most of those incidents are relatively isolated. Most of the country can look at those videos and say: Wow, that looks really scary — but then walk outside their front door and go to work and mostly have the same experience that they were used to prior. I think those videos are going to become the reality more and more in American communities because the money is there, as you said. The mission is there. The mandate is there. The money is there.
One of the only checks that remain is the federal courts, and we are seeing significant challenges in federal court to some of what the Trump administration is trying to do. But the courts are sort of hanging on their own right now as a check. Congress has been quiet, other than to fund this massive expansion.
I really think that we’re looking at a reality, with this more than $170 billion for immigration enforcement, that involves armed law enforcement in the streets as a regular fixture of our lives. Chaotic conflicts in the streets are something that we’re going to become accustomed to and massive detention centers that are going to come up and are going to be built for the purposes of holding people and then getting them out of the country.
Tell me about those detention centers, because that was a huge space of new funding in the “big, beautiful” act. How are they using detention differently, and what do they seem to be envisioning for detention in a year or two?
The number of immigration detention facilities in use has dramatically increased since Trump took office. And they’re really just getting started with spending the $45 billion that was specifically dedicated to detention in the “big, beautiful” act.
This means that private prison companies and counties that want to rent bed space to ICE are going to be able to profit really significantly on increasing the detained populations. When Biden left office, the detained population of immigrants was around 39,000 people. Now it’s 70,000 people.
You need to be able to detain people to effectuate deportations, and at times, a lack of detention space has held them back. There was a time last year when I was reporting in Atlanta, and people who were going to the downtown ICE field office for their ICE check-ins were being arrested and put into immigration custody. Many of them were folks who had temporary legal status under the Biden administration and then had that eliminated when Trump took office.
Then a few weeks after I started reporting on this issue, I started to hear that people were going into their ICE check-ins once again and having this normal interaction, where they would tell the officer what they’d been up to, where they were living and be told to come back in six months or a year. I asked what the difference was, and it was just that the detention facilities in Georgia had filled up in the intervening time.
Really, who was being arrested and who wasn’t had nothing to do with the circumstances of their case or whether they were a legitimate threat to the public or not. It was: Is there a bed to put them in? I think the Trump administration really wants to eliminate the possibility that limited bed space could hold them back.
Immigration detention is legally not actually meant to be punitive, which is a little bit ironic, given what we know about the health and safety conditions in detention centers. Lots of people are dying in detention, more than in years past, which is a huge concern for people. But there’s also problems with access to legal representation, with adequate food and sanitation and medical care.
The Trump administration is very much seeing this dramatic expansion of the detention system as an important part of immigration enforcement.
We’ve been talking about places where the Trump administration is trying to significantly expand the capacity of immigration enforcement — more ICE agents, more Border Patrol agents, more detention centers.
One very odd thing about the “big, beautiful” act is it capped the number of immigration judges at 800. What was that, and what does it reflect about how they’re using the immigration courts?
That was a head scratcher. It was one of the only caps that existed in the entire bill. Everything else seems to be about sort of limitless spending.
There’s been a lot of churn on the immigration court since Trump took office. They’ve fired dozens of judges, mostly ones, it seems, who were granting too many requests for relief or requests to remain in the United States and replacing them with people who they think will be more harsh.
You’re seeing that reflected in the denial rates. Overall asylum denial rates were around 50 percent when Biden left office, and now they’re up to 84 percent.
Immigration courts are a kind of choke point for deportations because you’ve got someone in custody, but if they have access to a legal remedy, then they’re going to fight their case. And sometimes those cases take years.
I think one thing that the cap on judges could reflect is that the Trump administration is trying to find ways that go around the immigration courts to remove people. They’re trying to expand the use of something called expedited removal, which allows for people to be deported without going before a judge and trying to fight their case.
They want to be able to effectuate removals more quickly and just go around the courts entirely if they can.
You spent some time reporting on an immigration court in Virginia. Tell me what you saw there.
My reporting was actually done on Zoom because immigration court was being done virtually so that it could go more quickly. It’s something that started during the pandemic, and it’s continued into this administration, as all messaging and goals and systems are being modified to effectuate deportations as quickly and efficiently as possible.
What I saw was a judge sitting in an empty courtroom and looking into boxes on her screen, calling people up and moving incredibly quickly through their cases. Most people in court that day were unrepresented by lawyers. As people may or may not know, in immigration court, you don’t have the right to an attorney if you can’t afford one or to a jury of your peers.
And people were panicked. They were in shambles. I definitely saw the change in this administration, wherein most people who are being arrested by ICE on a given day have been in the United States for a long time and have no criminal record.
I was hearing parents break down in tears, crying and saying, “I’m worried about my child.” There was one father, in particular, in my story who said he was arrested in front of his two youngest children, who were both under 5 years old. He said he was desperately worried about how they were going to survive without him. People like this father but others, too, were asking about their children and how they were going to be dealt with, because they’d been taken away from their children when they were arrested. And the judge really seemed uninterested in answering their questions and was just moving very quickly through their cases.
There’s all this focus on numbers. Each one of them, I was reminded in court, is not a number — is a person and has family and has employers and a community that is impacted each time that this happens. I was really struck by the speed with which this judge was moving through cases.
You could tell that a lot of people were confused. You have a lot of people for whom English is a second language or maybe don’t speak English at all who are in immigration court. And the Zoom hearings make it that much more difficult. You might have inconsistent video; the translation might not be as good quality as it could be.
It seemed to me that some people whose cases were being heard didn’t even fully understand what the judge had decided. She would issue a ruling — these were preliminary hearings, so for the most part, people were going to be coming back for a subsequent hearing — but some people after, that first hearing, stipulate to their removal, and I was concerned that it seemed some people didn’t really know what they were agreeing to, because the proceedings were moving so fast.
Something I think people have heard about is this move toward third-country removal, where somebody is making an asylum claim or they’ve come here and we are deporting them to Uganda or somewhere and saying: Deal with it there. What is that policy? How is it being used? Is it legal?
The Trump administration is also using its diplomatic might to get other countries on board with its mass deportation effort. I mean, it’s sort of amazing. Anybody — from a mayor to a business owner to a leader of a foreign country — if they come to President Trump right now, the message seems to be: Bring me something on immigration if you want to work together.
Through diplomatic efforts and through pressure campaigns, the Trump administration has persuaded several dozen countries to accept deportees who are from other parts of the world. In theory, this is to address the problem that some countries don’t accept deportees from the United States. That’s their way of pushing back against the United States and American foreign policy, to say: We’re not going to accept people who you want to deport to us.
In reality, that was always a small number of people. This third-country removal program is really a scare tactic more than anything else. Even though we have relationships with, I think, more than 40 countries that have been established — and I think the administration is in negotiations with more than 60 currently, and there are more coming online regularly — you only have a few hundred people who actually have been removed to a third country.
But we’ve been talking about this fear campaign that’s designed to persuade immigrants living in the United States to leave and to discourage anybody thinking about coming here from doing so. What is scarier than knowing that you may not only be deported but also that you may be deported to a poor country where you don’t speak the language and you don’t have any relationships or anyone to protect you and keep you safe?
I really think that the third-country removals, which are legally dubious — they’ve been challenged, but they have been carried out, so far — are more about the fear campaign. They’re not really logistically feasible on a large scale. They don’t really make sense as a foreign policy initiative, but they’re very intimidating.
I’ve been thinking about something I heard Chris Rufo, the right-wing activist who’s inspired many of the Trump administration’s activities, say, and I want to play it for you.
Archival clip of interview with Christopher Rufo:
Rufo: You are never going to have enough muscle, enough kind of logistical force to deport 15 million people in handcuffs. Also, it’s just not possible. It’s not practical. It’s not feasible. It’s probably not wise, because then the narrative is going to turn because you’re going to start making mistakes, because you’re expanding at such an extraordinary logistical rate.
So what do you do? The solution, as you suggested, is you have to shift the incentives so that there’s remigration, sometimes called self-deportation.
Interviewer: Yeah.
Rufo: So, voluntary exit. And this is where I think the rubber meets the road and where it’s going to be difficult for the Trump administration.
I think that gets to what at least some of the underlying strategy is. As much as they are expanding, they are not expanding at the rate or to the numbers and do not have the political support to go door to door and deport the numbers of people they seem to want to deport.
It does seem their strategy is to make it so miserable and frightening to be here that very large numbers of people leave. Do you believe that?
That’s a longstanding strategy on the right that the most prominent anti-immigrant restrictionists — even elected officials but also activist groups — have pushed for a really long time. And I think it’s just the degree to which the administration is willing to pursue this that is the change.
But yes, this idea of pushing for self-deportations has been popular for a really long time among people like Stephen Miller. And it was once just a fringe idea, and now it isn’t. In the past, the ways that states and municipalities would go about this was by doing things like not letting people without legal status get driver’s licenses, not letting their kids get in-state tuition in colleges.
Now it’s very different. It’s those things, plus you might be violently arrested. You, your relatives, even those who are legal immigrants or citizens might be stopped and accosted based on how they look or what their accent is. I mean, it’s just so much more aggressive.
But absolutely, the administration has been open about the fact that they’re trying to encourage people to self-deport. They post memes and videos making fun of undocumented immigrants and basically telling them to get out of here, or else.
So, yes, absolutely. But I think that they’ve also shown a willingness to inflate the numbers and kind of claim victory and success before there’s evidence to support it. It really is all about messaging more than it is substance.
I mentioned they’re claiming that 1.9 million people have self-deported. Experts have looked into that number. It seems to be based on a census report that was done with a very small sample size, not taking into account that it’s not very likely immigrants are going to be fully forthright or even participate in any kind of a census count right now, given the environment of fear that we’re in. They extrapolated from this very small census and declared that 1.9 million people had left the country, which does not seem true.
I want to, with all this in mind, get at what has been happening in Minneapolis. What was the administration’s justification for this operation?
The administration said this operation in Minneapolis had to take place because of rampant fraud there, and there is a longstanding federal investigation going on about Covid-19 relief funds and fraud in Minnesota.
But really, Trump seems to have latched onto this video that was posted online by Nick Shirley. He’s this young right-wing social media video influencer who went around Minneapolis to day care sites, claiming that they were fraudulent, that they had no children inside, when, of course, if a strange man is showing up outside a day care, videoing what’s going on, it is probably not going to let that person inside to see children, if there are children there.
I’m someone with young children, and would I want my day care, if somebody knocked on the door and was like, “Show me the kids in here,” to let them in? [Chuckles.]
You probably don’t want to let that guy in.
Yeah.
And we don’t know. There is an active investigation going on in Minnesota about legitimate fraud that happened.
Yeah. It does not mean that there’s not fraud, but it does mean that I’m not sure I would take that video as strong evidence.
Exactly. But the administration took it and ran with it and launched what they’re calling the largest immigration enforcement operation in the country as a result of it.
There are so many things to talk about with what’s going wrong in Minnesota. One thing to point out, though, is that fraud — again, even if it’s happening — is a white-collar crime. The idea that it deserves a response that involves weapons and officers in the street and stopping people at random really doesn’t make sense.
I mean, the way that you research fraud is on the computer. You’re looking at records. You’re maybe eventually going out and doing some investigative work to shore up what people have claimed to be true about their businesses. You do not catch fraud by stopping people at random in the street.
I’ll note they’ve also gutted — Republicans, over time — the I.R.S.’s fraud division. There’s a lot of tax fraud. It is a lot bigger than day care fraud in Minnesota. And the concern with taxpayer money not showing up where it should seems a little bit selective, to me, here.
That’s right. I was talking to one political analyst the other day about what’s happening in Minnesota with this fraud scheme. I thought he put it really well: Labeling Somali immigrants as fraudsters almost seems like Trump’s version of Ronald Reagan’s welfare queen, which is really convenient at a time when the country is realizing that this promise of only focusing immigration enforcement on hardened criminals isn’t being kept, that far more people are being swept up by ICE than the public initially expected.
People are turning away from and are questioning this campaign, and so if you can instead send this message that suggests that most or all immigrants — maybe all Somali immigrants, maybe all African immigrants, maybe all immigrants in Minnesota, who knows? — if you can suggest vaguely that they may, most or all, be involved in some rampant fraud scheme that involves taking public dollars that are supposed to be going toward kids for their own personal use, it makes people a little bit more sympathetic toward the fact that this campaign doesn’t look the way that they wanted it to or that they think they want it to.
Well, it also reflects the move toward these fraud arguments. And there is fraud out there. There’s fraud from immigrants. There is much fraud from native-born Americans.
It reflects the appeal of conflict expansion, I think, for the Trump administration. Which is to say they are pointing this at blue states where they can also use it as an attack on political enemies. Obviously, Tim Walz — his political career seems to more or less be in shambles now. They’ve talked about moving into California to try to do this against Gavin Newsom and justify crackdowns in California.
But I think, for them, the fraud thing is very amorphous and they’re using it to justify widespread crackdowns — and that is, as you note correctly, not how you run a fraud investigation — but it also creates an interface with the political system and the political leaders of blue states, so you can use it to go after your political enemies as well. It creates a bit of a twofer for them.
You’re right. And there are other examples of the administration focusing on fraud — accusing elected officials that they don’t like of mortgage fraud, for example.
I think you’re making a good point that fraud is rampant. And who is pursued in a fraud investigation almost says more about who the investigator wants to target than the existence of the fraud itself, especially when you think about immigration.
The Trump administration is looking at denaturalizing people, taking their citizenship away, or preventing them from requesting asylum status based on a discrepancy between documents.
Just to walk people through the process: When you’re applying for any form of legal status in the United States, you are filling out dozens and dozens of forms. Some people do it with a lawyer; a lot of people don’t do it with a lawyer. But any layman would be confused by some of these questions in these applications that are being filled out. Sometimes the questions seem to conflict with one another. One document seems to be putting a request one way, another a different way.
And even people who are trying their best will end up with two documents that say two different things. And it could be very simple — the omission of a middle name or an explanation of why you left the country on the day that you did or why you came. Did you put on one document that you came for work and another that you came to visit family, when both were true?
That is a really powerful pretense or could be a really powerful pretense for, again, clawing legal status back from a lot of people by claiming fraud. When you’re doing an audit on someone’s entire life, you can find something, and even the most upstanding immigrants will tell you there’s something on a document that could be used against them.
It really is just an entree to focus on the people — whether it’s Democratic politicians or immigrants — that the administration wants to go after.
I want to talk here about the ideology behind all of this. We are discussing, I think, the most significant change in policy under Donald Trump. This is a place where they’ve put the most energy, where they’ve gambled the most, where they’re putting the most new money. It is very, very important to them.
Why? When you listen to the Trump administration, its top officials, the people who seem to influence them and they listen to, what is their broad theory of immigration? Why is it such a problem? What are they trying to do? What would be accomplished if they did succeed? What is the macro narrative they seem to believe here?
Two-prong answer: There are some people within the Trump administration — and I would say Stephen Miller is their leader — who want a return to not just a majority-white country, which, of course, we’ve always been, but also one where white American culture is dominant. That we’re not so much viewed as a diverse nation of immigrants, where different languages and different foods are celebrated, but one that is more purely a white-supremacist country.
Then you have people within the administration — and Trump, I would consider to be the highest ranking, of course, among them — who’ve latched onto the subject of immigration because it gives him power. When Stephen Miller started working for Donald Trump in his first presidential candidacy, he was a speechwriter that people really weren’t sure about, until rallies started and until the president started to see the incredibly powerful reaction he was getting every time he talked about immigration.
This led to Miller being empowered throughout that campaign, all the way up until Trump’s first election — which, remember, stunned Trump and his inner circle. People did not expect him to win. This narrative solidified within that first Trump White House that Miller was responsible for Trump’s success.
I think everything that I’ve reported suggests that, since then, Trump has held on to that commitment to immigration and that commitment to Miller not because he is personally passionate about the issue. I would say the same is probably true for people like Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi. These are people who want to support the president and his consolidation of power and are latching onto immigration because it seems to be working. They believe that that’s why Trump has been so successful as a politician.
Really, we’re going to have to look at the midterms and the next presidential election to see how much that holds. I do think that populist message, as misleading as it was, was very powerful and impactful to the electorate. But you are seeing the polling change.
At a certain point, when you create the image of these boogeymen and you promise this unprecedented deportation campaign, you’re going to have to do it. And then the untruths that you’ve been spreading are going to become obvious.
I agree that power and ideology are braided for them. And I think that’s why I worry particularly about the way in which the scaling up of immigration funding of domestic law enforcement creates a kind of apparatus that can be used in different ways.
I mean, I look at Customs and Border Protection and ICE, and I think about what their recruitment videos and social media presence look like. I think about the people in the masks. I think about who would join it now, given how controversial it is. And it’s very hard, as somebody who’s read some history of other places, not to see at least the possibility of a domestic paramilitary force. How real or overstated do you find that concern?
I mean, you don’t want to be alarmist, of course. I know you don’t, either, but I don’t think that it’s overstated in the fact that the president himself has said that he’d like to unleash American troops in the interior of the country. But I think we do have to believe Trump when he says what he wants to do. And he has not gone so far as to say he plans to unleash a domestic paramilitary force, but I think he’s also said lots of things that come very close to that, and we have to take those seriously.
I’ve seen a lot more discussion among, particularly, liberals of what was once just a social media hashtag, which is “Abolish ICE,” and the view that after this, given its leadership, given who it’s recruiting, that there’s not going to be a way to reform this organization, that it’s a younger agency that you’re just going to need to get rid of it, much as Trump got rid of U.S.A.I.D. What have you thought about that discussion?
Usually when I hear “Abolish ICE,” I think it’s coming from the realization people are having about what our immigration laws actually are and what they allow, which is that anyone who does not have legal status in the country is subject to deportation. It doesn’t matter if you’re best friends with a bunch of families at church. It doesn’t matter if you’re beloved in your community, you’ve lived here for 20 or 30 years, you’ve never committed a crime, you have a bunch of American children, they’re in the military: You are subject to deportation if you don’t have legal status.
And for a vast majority of the undocumented population, there is no pathway to legal status. This is another thing that people don’t realize. I got an email from a reader after a recent story, saying to me: Caitlin, you’re writing about all these people you say have been in the United States for 15 or 16 years. Why don’t they just become citizens, instead of trying to leech off the system and refusing to pay taxes?
And I had to write this person back and say: Undocumented immigrants contribute billions of dollars to the American tax base every year. And trust me, if these folks in my story could have become citizens, they would have eagerly done so to avoid being detained and potentially deported after so much time in the country.
Those options do not exist, and Congress controls all of that. ICE does not control that. ICE can only do what the law tells it to do. The law on its face says: Everybody who doesn’t have status is deportable.
Even more so now, I could see people saying they would want ICE to be abolished at some point in the future because you’re going to have this massive work force that is misaligned with what I think a lot of people think immigration enforcement should look like in the United States.
So my sense is that the country would not support a world in which there was no immigration enforcement. I don’t see that as a realistic possibility. But I think that a lot of the anger behind this “Abolish ICE” message really comes out of people’s frustration — and they may not realize this — with what Congress has told ICE to do.
Then, always our final question: What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?
I’m going to recommend “Impossible Subjects” by Mae Ngai. This is kind of a holy grail book for immigration nerds, but it’s eminently readable, and it tells the story of Americans’ relationship to immigrants. It really helps people understand how we reached this moment and how immigration enforcement has really always been subjective. It’s never been as simple as figuring out who’s legal and who isn’t. It’s really been more about who’s desirable and who isn’t. So I really recommend that book by Mae Ngai.
I also want to recommend “Solito” by Javier Zamora. Going in a completely different direction: If you want to learn more about immigration in this moment but you don’t want to read about policy, you don’t want to read anything wonky and you just want to read an incredibly beautiful story that helps you understand what it’s like to come to the United States and to cross borders in general and what it means to be an immigrant, it’s a gorgeous book.
The last book that I’m going to recommend is “Meditations for Mortals” by Oliver Burkeman. I don’t know about you, but to get through the last few years, meditation has been really critical for me. And I’ve read a million books about it, but this one is just incredibly accessible. I think whether you’ve been reading about mindfulness for years and you need a refresher or you’re trying to jump into it for the first time, this is a really great book to kind of get you started and help get you fortified to learn about what’s happening in the world right now and kind of understand your place in it and understand what to do about it. That’s where I’d start.
Caitlin Dickerson, thank you very much.
Thank you.
You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sarah Stillman and Aaron Reichlin-Melnick. Transcript editing by Andrea Gutierrez and Jose Fidelino.
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