ICE Under Trump

of the day to bring you one big story.

“President Trump campaigned on a promise of nasty deportations, and since he took office”

in January, agents from immigration and customs enforcement also known as ICE have been increasing detention to try to meet that goal.

In July, Congress approved $170 billion for immigration and border enforcement, $75 billion

of which will go directly to ICE. It's the most money the U.S. government has ever invested in detention and deportation, and it makes ICE the highest funded law enforcement agency in the federal government. All this prompted our friends over at NPR's through-line podcasts to take a look back at the history of ICE, from the original intent of the agency to its evolution as a law

enforcement powerhouse. The episode features two people who've spent decades working on opposite sides of the immigration system.

“I think there's a to keep the system fair, it has to be well regulated.”

Roger Werner is currently employed by the Department of Homeland Security. He's worked there since the department was created in 2003, and he was a founding member of ICE. He's also the co-author of the book, The History and Evolution of Homeland Security in the United States.

The views he expresses are his own, he's not speaking as representative of the government. They also talk to Peter Markowitz. "I'm a professor at Cardo's at School of Law in New York City." Markowitz founded the Catherine O. Greenberg Immigration Justice Clinic, where he defends immigrants facing deportation and works on policy.

“In the through line episode, Werner and Markowitz take listeners through the fascinating”

history of ICE, starting from his origins as the immigration and naturalization service or the INS, stretching back into the 20th century. And they also explore the question of what change in 2025 since the Trump administration took office. We're going to play that final part of the episode about what changed over the past year,

but I strongly recommend that you check out the full episode on the through line podcast

because it offers critical historical context for the moment we're now in.

We'll be back with through line host, Rund Abdel Fata, who will pick up the story at the beginning of 2025. "I have three words for him, jockin' all. You're going to see if I could stretch it back." Shock and awe. That is how Tom Homan kicked off the Trump administration's second-term approach to deportations. President Trump is pushing through a mass deportation campaign.

Immigration raids are up all across the country. Thousands of national guard troops and hundreds of Marines have been called to Los Angeles by President Trump. Agents often armed wearing plain clothes and masks or showing up at places where Latino workers are known to gather. Hardware store parking lots, car washes, street vendor corners, and

rounding them up. They've grabbed people at bus stops or dragged them out of their cars. For the past few months, it felt like Americans are seeing ice everywhere. It's been hard to scroll Instagram or TikTok without hitting a video of workers and hernets at a meatpacking plant being herded into a breakroom by ice agents. A woman crying as she's put into a white truck. A black ice fan accelerating as a group of protesters pushes against its hood.

Some of the videos are posted by ice itself. The ice agents faces are blurred. The people they're detaining are not. Immigration attorney and law professor Peter Markowitz says this moment what he's seen unfolding online and in his own work is unlike anything he's experienced in ice history. The examples I might point to are like the deployment of non-immigration agents, national

guard, other military and law enforcement agencies in kind of sweeping heavy handed, very visible manner. That is something that is unfamiliar to me in what I have seen in immigration enforcement in the time that I've been doing this work and really in any time in my lifetime.

Once the start of President Trump's second term, ice is averaging more than 600 immigration

arrests every day. In some states, that's more than double the usual amount. Though government attorneys say there's no quota, Trump's deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, has set

every year. The repercussions are rippling out globally. In March, the Trump administration

“sent hundreds of immigrants to a notorious facility in Al Salvador. And in July, it deported”

eight immigrants who had been convicted of crimes in the U.S. to South Sudan. Only one of them was from there. Peter Markowitz says that as far back as its creation, some of

ice's work has always been about optics. And this is where historian and DHS employee

Roger Werner agrees. Speaking as a researcher and private citizen, he argues that detaining immigrants at such high rates and even deporting them to countries they have no attachment to could be a powerful deterrent. I recommend you all go to the Southwest border sometime. Imagine walking 50 miles. Like an old lady or a kid, 50 miles. Wow. But that doesn't transmit a level of desperation on their part to do that. Yes, but it also is that the amount

of risk you would take. You put your kid through that. A one thing and adult mail going across and say, Hey, listen, I'll send you money. We'll figure out how to get here. I can totally understand that. But, you know, and putting a four year old child, maybe in the hands of a smuggling organization, our cartel based, these people are absolutely brutal. No, I hear you. I guess in my mind then, I'm like, I have a two year old. But I think

about it. I'm like, what would compel me to ever put him in that situation? It would be things have gotten so bad in my present circumstances would be like, that's just how

“in my brain. That's how it works. I totally understand it. But you also have to say,”

is the risk worth the reward, meaning are you likely to be remain in the United States? That's the real driver. The driver isn't that, you know, where you're going to risk your children. It's, are you going to, right? If there's something worth it on the other side, yeah, if you show and say, and we're talking theoretically here, I was not involved in these operations. You're going to show and say that, hey, you're not going to be allowed

in no matter what you do. Would you sell everything and try? No, you would look for another alternative. We asked ice about this. A statement for mice and response to our questions read in part, quote, it's a baffling that anyone would even question a nation's decision to enforce laws enacted by Congress to deter crime and

“quote, Peter Markowitz says optics aside, he's noticed two other major changes in ice”

his operations. The first has to do with a judicial process when cases go to court.

You know, if you go to the immigration court at 26 federal plaza in Manhattan, where, where I often represent clients, what is happening there is, is different than what I have ever seen before. The agency is moving to terminate cases, which normally, if you're representing an immigrant, and the termination of a case is a victory. But the plan here is to bypass the immigration courts and to use extra judicial mechanisms to deport people. So they can

use a mechanism called expedited removal. And it's a mechanism where ice gets to act as the judge, jury, and executioner. They don't need any immigration judge. And there is very little federal court review available and, you know, an agent kind of determines on their own that this person is going to be deported with, with almost no due process. And so they move to terminate these cases for the purpose of using that alternative mechanism,

notwithstanding the fact that an immigration judge has, you know, has a process underway and the person is fully compliant with that process. This is happening around the country. A statement from ICE and response to our questions read in part, quote, ICE is now following

the law and placing these illegal aliens in expedited removal as they always should have

been. If they have a valid credible fear claim, they will continue in immigration proceedings. But if no valid claim is found, aliens will be subject to a swift deportation and quote. Since ICE's detention numbers began to rapidly increase, there have been reports of overcrowding, poor sanitation, and lack of food at ICE detention centers. Peter says all of this is happening at places where conditions were poor to begin with. Have you ever been to one of those

facilities? Many times. What is it like inside one of those facilities? It is indistinguishable from the Jales and prisons that I've also routinely visited. In fact, sometimes they're exactly the same facilities. You know, there are medical care of the poorest quality, people routinely die in immigration detention because of inadequate medical care. There's a couple of big private

you have to pay for things like soap or pay for things like toothpaste. And so it is really kind of the most minimal provisions that are provided to folks. We'll be right back with more of throughlines conversation about the history and evolution of ICE with run to Abdel Fatah. The second major change Peter has seen since the beginning of President Trump's second term

is money. The one big beautiful bill is directing more than $175 billion to immigration enforcement.

If you leave out the US in China, that's more than any country in the world spends on its military in a year. ICE alone is set to get $75 billion of that money. Roger says American voters are the ones who decided what our immigration enforcement system looks like when they cast their votes for

“president. Peter says the new funding complicates that. I think it is it is really difficult,”

even for me and I spend all day long thinking about this stuff to wrap my head around and what that's going to look like on American streets. And to be clear, the $75 billion can be spent over several years. We know they're going to build a ton of immigration detention. The scale of detention is going to be astronomical. They're going to have massive physical presence of like militarized agents on the streets. I anticipate that that's going to become a norm. I anticipate that we're

going to be seeing checkpoints, and so I fear that level of funding is so out of scale with what has come before that we are at real risk of kind of becoming a police state. And we've already seen that ICE doesn't hesitate to move against citizens when it perceives the need to do so.

“So I think increasingly people are going to feel that in a very, very kind of visceral way.”

What does that mean for the agency to have that kind of influx of funding? A lot of responsibility, I would say, from a historical perspective, we spend the American taxpayers wanting to wisely make sure that they're getting the best use of their money. And it's not wasted. It's a big responsibility with that amount of money coming into an HC quickly that, you know, I hope historically the right thing is done with it.

That serves both American people, the interests of the United States, and the people that are taken in the custody. You know, they deserve, they deserve the rights that are available to them under the walls that Congress has passed. But in spite of all the money heading ICE's way and the responsibility that comes with it, Roger doesn't think this moment is fundamentally different from the rest of ICE's history, or for that matter, INS is. This is nothing out of the

ordinary. None of this has been an out of the ordinary over the years, as it's been a result of funding and congressional and executive and political support and largely driven by the American people. This comes in waves of about every 30 years with our immigration policy. We become too generous and people feel that we're being taken advantage of. So then now you want a more firm hand

or, you know, a more thorough examination of things. There's always a pendulum swing. But there is,

you do have to have a deterrent because we can absorb everybody inside the United States. So it depends on where you sit on the issue is how you're going to judge that, I guess. You know, if you think we should let it everybody, then, you know, but that's not what the majority of the American public believe in. So that's not where the polls are. They want some degree of immigration enforcement. What that looks like, that's always a, you know, that's that

pendulum swinging back and forth. Peter disagrees. He says, if you look at current polls, you'll see that most Americans actually oppose the kind of immigration enforcement that's being carried out by ICE today. And he worries that we've entered in era where ICE is amassing more and more

power. And he feels like the checks on that power are disappearing. In the first Trump administration,

you know, there were, you know, institutional players in the White House and DOJ and DHS, you know, said, wait, wait, wait. We have to follow the law. Those people are all gone. Like,

“there are no internal internal checks going on anymore. Beyond that, what are the other checks?”

The immigration courts are being purged, right? Anybody who is not kind of aligned is being pushed out. What I had hoped was that the Supreme Court may actually provide some kind of check against the most extreme examples. And with one or two notable exceptions, that has really not been the case,

from or had any connection to. They're allowing the revocation of hundreds of thousands of TPS holders,

“status Venezuelans. They're stripping hundreds of thousands of people of a humanitarian protection.”

And so the Supreme Court is no backstop either. And so no internal backstop, no immigration

court backstop, no Supreme Court backstop. We are in a really, really, really precarious place as a country.

I wouldn't part of the listeners that you really have to understand that the men and women

who work for these agencies, especially immigration customs enforcement, have dedicated their life to public service. Tom Homan keeps saying, "Just wait, just wait, we're just getting started."

“And I believe him. To hear the full episode, you can find throughline wherever you get your podcasts,”

there you can also check out the rest of throughlines recent immigration series. This episode was produced by Run to Abdel Fata and Sarah Wyman with help from the rest of the throughline team. It was edited by Casey Miner. Andrew Mamba produces episode of the Sunday Story, the rest of the Sunday Story team includes Jenny Schmidt, Justin Jan, Thomas Cole-Train, and Leonne Simstrom. Our executive producer is Irene Negucci.

“I may Sharasko and up first will be back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week”

until then have a great rest of your weekend.