Throughline - ICE

Episode Date: September 4, 2025

What is ICE? What was it created to do? And what’s changed in 2025? Today on the show, the history of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and how it tracks the story of immigration, and politics, in the U.S.Guests:Peter Markowitz, professor at Cardozo School of Law in New York City and founder of the Kathryn O. Greenberg Immigration Justice Clinic.Rodger Werner is co-author of “The History and Evolution of Homeland Security in the United States” and currently employed by the Department of Homeland Security. The views he expresses in this episode are his own and do not represent the views of DHS or the U.S. government.To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR and the following message comes from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. RWJF is a national philanthropy, working toward a future where health is no longer a privilege but a right. Learn more at RWJF.org. This just in, you were looking at obviously a very disturbing live shot there. We don't fully know the detail. Did you see what happened, sir? Unconfirmed reports. Did you see what happened? What happened?

On September 11th, 2001, as the ashes of the Twin Towers smoldered, a team of FBI agents met in a basement in Washington, D.C. The energy in the room was intense. It was their job to find out who did this, why, and if more attacks were coming. They started making calls to the CIA, to police precincts around the country, and to an agency known back then as INS, the Immigration and Naturalization Service. We are doing numerous interviews,

running down hundreds, if not thousands of leads around the country. Within three days, they had a list of 19 names. First name, Walid Al-Sheri. The second, whale al-Sheri, also known as Walid. And as investigators dug into each of those names, pressure mounted on the INS because all 19 hijackers had come from abroad, and all 19 were on temporary visas. Some of their passports had fraudulent stamps in them, and consulate officials didn't catch them. Two of the hijackers had lied on their visa applications, and a handful of them had overstayed or violated the terms of those visas before the 9-11 attacks.

The 9-11 commission was set up to determine how so many federal agencies missed this and how to keep it from happening again. Here's audio from one hearing. These 19 people got documents and got in the United States of America. They defeated the INS. They defeated the customs. They defeated the FBI. They defeated the CIA.

They hijacked four American airplanes. It was a blur of activity. A lot of panic, a lot of like being kicked in the, the gut. That's about the best I could describe it. Roger Werner worked for the INS at the time. On the morning of 9-11, he walked nearly 60 blocks in New York City to get to the INS office on Housson Street.

And when he got there, he says there was a lot of work to be done. There was still a lot of unknowns. There would be leads developed by other agencies, and a person was discovered that, hey, this person has overstayed their visa. you know, we're putting before an immigration judge to see if they, you know, are removable. So there was a lot of work doing that time. For years, politicians on both sides of the aisle had fought for major immigration reform in the U.S. And now it seemed like a massive terrorist attack had happened in part because law enforcement agencies weren't sharing information with each other.

And in part because of an immigration enforcement failure. So the political landscape changed radically. 9-11 was the turning point that before and after for how immigration enforcement works in this country today. We knew that the United States government was serious.

Within two years, the U.S. government had undertaken its biggest reorganization since FDR's New Deal, and Congress approved the creation of a new entity, the Department of Homeland Security. And within it,

immigration and customs enforcement, also known as ICE. Now, more than 20 years later, ICE is everywhere. Back up, back up, back up all the world. Showing up masked in parking lots, conducting arrests at immigration hearings, even in some cases targeting citizens and green card holders. When you have plane crows, officers not identifying themselves, it makes you think of a totalitarian regime.

It makes you think of a country where. People are kidnapped. The work that we do is to protect people and make sure that we remove these weapons and drugs off of our streets and hold those criminals accountable who would go forward and continue to use that to harm individuals. Since the beginning of President Trump's second administration, ICE arrests have searched, and the goal is mass deportation. The vast majority of people ICE is detaining have not committed violent crimes. In fact, many of them don't have criminal records at all.

And in July, Congress approved $170 billion for immigration and border enforcement, including $75 billion in additional funding for ICE. It's the most money the U.S. government has ever invested in detention and deportation. And ICE is about to become the highest funded law enforcement agency in the federal government. ICE says that it is looking for more recruits. Offering signing bonuses of up to $50,000. I want to show you the front page of ICE's recruiting website. ICE is using recruiting posters, similar to those from World War II.

You can see Uncle Sam, and right underneath him is the message America needs you. Today on the show, what is ICE? What was it created to do? And what has changed in 2025? We'll talk with two people who've spent decades working in very different parts of the immigration system, and we'll trace the story. of ICE. Hi.

This is O'Mari from New York City. For a complete historical context and perspective, continue to listen to through life from NPR. Part 1. Before Ice. Remember in the 1980s, there was a large-scale crime epidemic that everybody was afraid of. 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. But for this story, he didn't speak to us as a representative of DHS, ICE, or the U.S. government. The views you'll hear him express in this episode are his own. And many of them are drawn from his experience co-writing a book about the history of the agency, the history and evolution of homeland security in the United States. Having a long history in the United States government, these are very complex organizations.

And a lot of stories are out there that have never been told. From where he sits, the story of ICE starts in the 1980s. Good evening. We're coming off the bloodiest year in the history of New York. Crime rates in the U.S. were spiking. Some of that had to do with the crack epidemic. And because cocaine was being smuggled into the U.S. by cartels south of the border, some police departments started treating crime like an immigration issue. Hispanic gang violence erupts in East Los Angeles.

Street violence due to crackbys gone bad here has gotten much worse. As all of you know, crime today is an American epidemic. Recent studies suggest that immigrants to the U.S. have historically been less likely to commit crimes than people born here. But still, during the 1980s, immigration laws became more and more intertwined with criminal laws. We are attempting to carry forward this comprehensive plan across the country to face down what has become a true menace. At the time, immigration was increasing

and was mostly overseen by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, or INS. In the 1980s, a series of new laws gave the INS more resources, One of those laws meant that even non-citizens who were legally in the country could be deported if convicted of, quote, aggravated felonies. And the list of what constituted an aggravated felony grew. It started out with the big three, murder, drug trafficking, and illegal trafficking of firearms and destructive devices. But with every new piece of legislation, the list expanded. until eventually deportable offenses also included things like check fraud and drug possession. And with all these changes, the idea of a so-called illegal immigrant and the role of INS in deporting them

really started to take hold in American culture. From movies... I'm Tony Montana, a political prisoner, Vancouver. And I won my fucking human rank. That's when I'm walking around in the middle of the fact and all of a sudden there's a goddamn immigration raid. And the doors fly open and all these guys come busting in. and then they think that I'm illegal and they grab me and throw me in the bus.

To music. Where were you born, man? Huh? I was born in East LA, man. But by the late 80s and early 90s, the federal government had started to worry about a new threat. The rise of terrorism and the threat global terrorism. Roger Werner says the rise of personal travel

and the Internet changed the nature of this threat. That, combined with the first Gulf War in 1990 and 91, put the U.S. government on high alert. They knew it was only a matter of time before we would be attacked. Then in 1993, a group of men bombed the World Trade Center. Two of them had entered the U.S. using fake passports and without visas. So when you combine those type of things, you start seeing, you know, a lot of fear among especially voters and congressmen and lawmakers. saying, when are we going to be attacked? These attacks are getting larger scale. What are we doing about this to make sure somebody who comes in the United States leaves when they're supposed to

and are here doing what they're supposed to be doing? By the time 1995 rolled around, the federal government was supporting a record number of immigrants. More than half of those people had criminal records. And by that point, INS funding was three times what it had been in 1980. And then the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. That was played over and over again on CNN. The bomb ripped a hole in the building, causing portions of all nine floors to collapse. We are seeing injured people everywhere. Rescuers continue to search for survivors in the rubble.

168 people died. Hundreds more were injured. Law enforcement officials raced to find who was responsible. And at first, journalists and police speculated that the attackers were from the Middle East. They're looking for two, perhaps three, most likely two Middle Eastern men. She says that they were dressed in Arabic clothes with the Bernouce, which is a long veil on their head with the band around the forehead. There was initial speculation about foreign terrorism. That speculation was quickly, you know, people were quickly disabuse of that notion because it didn't take long for them to identify Timothy McBean.

Bay as the bomber. This is Peter Markowitz. I'm a professor at Cardoza School of Law in New York City. He also founded the Catherine O. Greenberg Immigration Justice Clinic, where he defends immigrants facing deportation and works on policy. Peter and Roger Werner agree. This moment in the mid-90s was crucial. It became a turning point for immigration enforcement in the United States.

But Peter says the irony is, the attacker in this case, was a U.S. citizen. So a domestic terror, the worst domestic terror incident in American history by a white man, you know, born and raised in the U.S., how does that connect to the story about immigration? It doesn't connect well in any kind of logical way, but what it does is it provides the catalyst for this new big piece of anti-terrorism legislation, the kind of, the kind of mood of the moment allows people with anti-immigrant agendas to kind of pack these bills with all sorts of immigration provisions under the specter of the kind of the foreign terrorist

threat, though the terrorism that actually was intended to address had nothing to do with that threat. Within a year and a half of the Oklahoma City bombing, Congress passed new immigration reform legislation. And it brought a few big changes to the immigration enforcement landscape. First, the new laws expanded the categories of who could be deported even further.

Now, any undocumented immigrant who was convicted of a crime was fair game. People are arrested for things like unlicensed driving, for selling, you know, counterfeit goods, turnstile jumping, shoplifting, marijuana

possession. A person like that if they had contact with INS or ICE to follow, that person could suddenly be subject to, you know, what the Supreme Court has called the loss of all that makes life worth living, deportation. Even people here were talking about who have been here lawfully, who might have a green card, who might have been here decades, who might have U.S. citizen children or family or even served in the U.S. Army of businesses. At the time, the prevailing view was that local police didn't have the power to influence. enforce federal immigration laws. But, and this is the second major change introduced by the 96 laws, suddenly that was an option.

The federal government was offering to train and deputize local police to act as immigration officers, basically saying, hey, just so you know, you can help us out here if you want to. And what's remarkable is in the years that followed, states and localities said, thanks, but no thanks. We don't want to do that. And they did it because law enforcement leaders across the country said, A, we have a job to do and it's crime fighting and we don't want to divert our resources to immigration. And B, if we did engage in this, it's going to undermine our crime fighting mission because we need to have good relationships with our immigrant communities so they can come forward as witnesses and victims of crime and we don't want to be seen as immigration agents. So that invitation that Congress extended, the law enforcement leaders across the country rejected.

Call it Chekhov's invitation. It'll be back. Another variable here was money. The INS budget had already gone up since the 80s and showed no signs of slowing. In three years, the budget increased by around 50%. And then came 9-11. Coming up, Ice is born. Hi, this is Mike from Key West, Florida, and you're listening to Threline from NPR.

Support for NPR, and the following message comes from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. RWJF is a national philanthropy, working toward a future where health is no longer a privilege but a right. Learn more at our WJF.org. Part 2. No pre-9-11 thinking. November 2002. It's been a little over a year since 9-11.

President George W. Bush walks briskly down a red carpet at the White House, flanked by eight people in suits. A wall of newscast. cameras follows him with their lenses as he sits down behind a small desk. There's a big sign hanging from the front edge of the desk, with protecting the homeland spelled out in all caps. And as the applause continues around him, President Bush signs a piece of legislation to massively reshape the structure of the U.S. government. It's now my privilege to sign the Homeland Security Act of 2002. The Homeland Security Act created a brand new department.

Department in the Federal Government, the Department of Homeland Security. And to do that, President Bush consolidated nearly two dozen federal departments and agencies under one roof. The idea was to increase and improve communication. With this reorganization, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, or INS, ceased to exist. Many of its agents were moved over to the Department of Homeland Security, and alongside U.S. Customs agents became part of ICE. And all of this happened very quickly, especially by government standards. Remember, between that Homeland Security Act in November of 2002

in the formation of DHS was only like five months. You know, it was a very short window. Roger Werner had been working for I.N. Now he was part of ICE. And he says, as far as the actual work was concerned... I transitioned smoothly. My job fundamentally did not change. The changes were promoted as the government's response to 9-11, organized and intentional.

But on the inside, Roger says some DHS employees just experienced it as a bureaucratic mess. Some of them called it mayhem, you know, that first day because nobody knew what to do. But Roger says as far as he was told, the mission stayed the same. Immigration enforcement officers were supposed to go after the worst of the worst, gangs, sex offenders, and also anyone who might be plotting an act of terrorism. So if there was somebody who overstayed their visa or should not be here, they should be prioritized and looked at, or even somebody who maintained a green card. If this put them in the realm that they violated the status of their green card, do everything you can. to make sure that they were identified. That and the counterterrorism mission. So it was just a continuation of what I was used to in the INS of pro-ordidized criminal individuals and individuals

that, you know, are high risk. Yeah. And high risk translates, just so I understand, to, like, convicted of a crime of some kind? Convicted of a crime or had significant interactions with, say, law enforcement that warrants this person might be damned. dangerous. Do you want to take the risk that person is going to not hurt somebody? If they're not here on solid legal immigration grounds, how many bites of that app are you going to let them have until they murder somebody or seriously injure somebody? So you have to always make those risk-based assessments. I think, you know, some folks listening might hear that and say, well, that seems like a stretch to go from someone, let's say, having an altercation with a police officer

to they're going to go out and murder like a family of four. So how would you respond to that? I would respond to that saying any police officer or law enforcement officer has a wide degree of discretion. They have their own experiences. They have their own understanding of factors. And they have to make risk-based assessments of each individual they encounter. Because remember, we don't have all the time in the world to spend with every person in the country that may be out of their immigration status or here illegally. So you have to look at who are the threats? Who wants to risk that? I'm never going to live with myself if somebody got hurt because I didn't decide to pick up a phone or make a call or look into somebody. So there were

different, there's always been different priorities. Other people have different perspectives. I mean, I will say this, that, you know, one retiree reminded me of a saying that we had that I think is very important. It's against policy to engage in pre-9-11. Thank you. Meaning, we'll never, we'll never take somebody's word for it at the border that they're just here visiting somebody when we have information or a good instinct because the risk is too great. It may be unfortunate, but at the same time, too, is I would never take that risk. It's important to remember that at the time DHS and ICE were created, 9-11 was still extremely raw. In 2004, the Congressional Commission created to investigate the attacks finally released

its report. Here is former National Counterterrorism Coordinator Richard Claudeau. Mr. Clark, testifying to the 9-11 Commission about that day. To those who are watching on television, your government failed you. Those entrusted with protecting you failed you. And I failed you. We tried hard, but that doesn't matter because we failed. In the decade after 9-11, the United States, deported more people than ever.

A research group called Track collected and analyzed data about this. And it says the vast majority of people the U.S. government deported after 9-11 were not flagged as terrorism threats or violent criminals. Immigration attorney Peter Markowitz says ICE's mission has never been restricted to just immigrants with criminal records. Because if you look at the reality, at its inception, the goal was 100%. enforcement to deport each and every non-citizen that could potentially be deported. So the data is consistent with that original strategic plan and very inconsistent with the rhetoric which says we're going after the worst of the worst. We asked Roger Werner about why immigrants without criminal records often make up such

a large proportion of the people ICE detains and deports. Quite honestly, they violated the law. Because if I go into a consulate and I say, I'd like to go to the United States, knowing full well, I'm going to go there to work and never return. Well, I've committed fraud and misuse of visa. I might have lied to a consular official. I might have shown that visa to an airline if I get it. I might have showed it to the inspector. I might have lied to the inspector.

Just because a person wasn't arrested or convicted for him doesn't mean they didn't commit them. Just to be clear here, overseeing a visa in the United States is a civil offense, which means the government can find those people, and it can even deport them. But it cannot charge them with a criminal offense. Entering the U.S. illegally is a crime. The first time, it's a misdemeanor. After that, it's a felony. What I'm hearing you say is, like, well, there was an original crime that was committed by even entering illegally.

Yes, and I don't think generally in the American public, based on our research, like that. They don't like people gaming the system because nobody else games the system in any interaction with the federal government. When you apply for a visa overseas and you say, I'm going to come to the United States, I'm going to visit New York and Disneyland. That's what we expect from you, not have a plan to immediately get to the United States to start working. That wasn't what you got the visa for. So, you know, I think there's a, to keep the system fair, it has to be well regulated. After 9-11, a Gallup poll found that more than half of Americans thought immigration levels should decrease. And now, the return of Chekhov's invitation.

In the 90s, the federal government had given local police the option of collaborating with immigration enforcement. At that time, departments around the country said no. After the events of 9-11, more of them said yes. Here's Peter Markowitz. Under the Bush administration, when ICE was created, they had a few thousand ICE agents. They had hundreds of thousands of local and state police across the country, and they wanted to figure out how to get their hands on those folks. First, they started kind of dumping some immigration kind of information into what's called the National Crime Information Center database. And that's the database when you get pulled over by a cop for speeding and they take your license back to the,

car, it's one of the databases they're running you through to see if you're wanted for kidnapping in Idaho. And they started dumping certain categories of immigration into that, trying to bypass the kind of leadership and the policymakers on the state and local level and go straight to the local cops. So in practice, if someone got pulled over for, say, speeding or a broken taillight, the police officer might run their name through that database and see an immigration warrant. And the big innovation, and this is the second thing that kind of has precipitated our era of mass deportation, was something called secure communities. And what secure communities is, is whenever somebody is arrested anywhere in the United States and they are fingerprinted,

those fingerprints are eventually sent to the FBI to make sure that, you know, they're not wanted somewhere else in the country. Secure communities diverted those criminal fingerprint checks, and they're now sent from the FBI over to the Department of Homeland. Security. And the Department of Homeland Security can say, oh, wait, that person might not have a serious criminal problem, but we want them for deportation. And so that was the innovation that really allowed them to bypass the policymakers on the local level who have said we didn't want this entanglement because they have no choice. When they run their fingerprints, it is automatically immediately checked by ICE. By the end of his time in office, President Bush had

deported more than twice as many immigrants as any president before him. That trend continued during the Obama administration. In every year of his first term, he set a new deportation record. I think there's been a pretty consistent through line in ICE's behavior. Not entirely. There are exceptions that we can point to, but a pretty consistent through line regarding immigration enforcement from Clinton to Bush to Obama. But things did change under President Obama. His The administration expanded secure communities, the program that shared fingerprint records collected by law enforcement with ICE. Under President George W. Bush, just 14 jurisdictions had participated in the program. By 2013, under President Obama, that number was up to more than

3,000 in all 50 states, and it wasn't optional. The other thing that set the Obama administration apart was a man named Tom Homan. If that's ringing a bell, it's because he's currently President Trump's borders are. When you enter the country illegally and you know you're here illegally and you choose have your assistant child, that's not you. That's not on this administration. If you choose to put your family in that position, that's on them. So Tom Homan, he was a border patrol agent back in the day. And he rose kind of precipitously through the ranks of the Department of Homeland Security and had a leadership role under Obama. He was the head of what's called

enforcement removal operations, which is the biggest piece of ice. They're the guys who go out and arrest people. Tom Homan advocated for tough and punitive border policies. He went so far as to propose separating parents from their kids at the border if they were caught trying to enter the country illegally. At the time, his colleagues in the Obama administration thought it was too extreme. Put a pin in that. But meanwhile, deportations soared.

Immigrant rights activists referred to Obama. as the deporter-in-chief. And then in 2016, Donald Trump was elected president for the first time. How different was ICE under his administration compared to the Obama administration and the Bush administration before him? Yeah, I think in Trump 1.0, there was more the same than there was different, right? But the big differences in Trump 1.0 between what had come before were first in rhetoric. When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. It started even before the election, during the campaign.

They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And it continued into President Trump's first term. The president often highlighted violent crimes committed by undocumented immigrants, though several studies found that, as had been true in the president. the past, immigrants were less likely to commit crimes overall. There was, you know, a phenomenon of horrific rhetoric coming out of the White House and coming out of the Department of Homeland Security. And there were some real horrors that were being visited upon immigrant communities.

But those horrors were not different in kind than what I had seen over the previous couple of decades that I've been doing this work. And Tom Homan was back. In 2017, the Trump administration of approached him to lead ICE. And this time, the idea of prosecuting adults and separating parents from their kids at the border, the one Obama administration officials thought was too extreme, it got the thumbs up. Soon, audio leaked of what it sounded like.

We just don't have a lot of details about the conditions inside or how the children are faring after being separated from their parents. That policy, officially enacted in 2018, led to more than 5,500 children of immigrants being separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. And that is why the audio that was released earlier this week from ProPublica was so jarring. The voices of children crying, calling out for their mothers and fathers. People were outraged. Homan was grilled in Congress. Mr. Homan, I'm a father. Do you have children? And how can you possibly allow this to happen under your watch?

First of all, your comments are disgusting. I've served my country. And on TV. You're separating mothers and their children over a misdemeanor. We're separating mothers and the children because they've chose to violate this. But you just said it was a misdemeanor. We're enforcing the law. There was so much backlash that President Trump ultimately ended the family separation policy

with an executive order a little more. more than a month after his administration had officially rolled it out. But the protests continued, and over the course of the spring and summer of 2018, they coalesced around the theme, Abolish Ice. Thinking about that sort of abolish ICE movement that emerged, you know, in 2018, what would a world without ice look like? And does that even solve the problem? So this is something I've spent some time thinking and writing about, and I think it would look a whole lot like what we see in other administrative realms, right? ICE is an administrative agency in the federal government. There are lots of administrative agencies in the federal government.

The IRS monitors tax, you pick your agency, the OSHA, monitors workplace safety. All of them have a scheme, a statutory scheme that sets legal limits that they need to enforce. All of them enforce those civil legal limits without huge militarized agencies that put people in cages, right? When the SEC finds a business that is out of compliance with securities law, its first instinct is not to prosecute that agency to the fullest and hammer it with the harshest penalty possible. Its first instinct is to use something called cooperative enforcement, which says, is there a way to bring this company into compliance? compliance with the law. That should be our first approach with immigration, right? And when ICE identifies somebody who is out of compliance, they don't have to arrest them and lock them up and start removal proceedings. They could say, hey, I'm giving you a 30-day, a 60-day window to initiate an affirmative

application to regularize your status. If you don't do that, we might come for you. Roger Werner says any country you go to will have some kind of immigration enforcement or border control. And the version of that we have in this country is the one Americans voted for. I mean, they voted the polls and they decide. People get elected on different things. And it's usually based on that the American people get tired of something. We let too many people, you know. So, I mean, like, maybe we let too many people in. Maybe we let too many people that in and out of jail with criminal records without any type of deterrent factor that doesn't work. When Joe Biden was elected in 2020, he relaxed many of President Trump's policies.

Many more people came into the country, though deportations also continued. And then in January 2025, Donald Trump took office for the second time. We spoke to Peter in July. And already, he said, things are very different. Things have shifted in a way, unlike anything I've seen in the 20 years. that I've been doing this work. That's coming up. You're going to see us take this country 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 rates 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 are 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's felt like Americans are seeing ice everywhere. It's been hard to scroll Instagram or TikTok without hitting a video. Of workers in hairnets at a meatpacking plant, being herded into. a break room 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 agent's 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 ISIS history. The examples I might point to

are like the deployment of non-immigration agents, National Guard, other military and law enforcement agencies in a 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. Since 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 a goal of 3,000 detentions per day. That would mean a total of more than 1 million arrests every year. The repercussions are rippling out globally. In March, the Trump administration sent hundreds of immigrants to a notorious facility in El 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 doesn't that transmit a level of like desperation on their part?

To do that? Yes, but it also is the amount of risk you would take, you put your kid through that. One thing, an adult male 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, a 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 right i totally understand it but you'll 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 isn't something worth it on the other side yeah if if you show and say and we're talking theoretically here i was not involved in these operations If you 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 from ICE in response to our questions read in part, quote,

it's baffling that anyone would even question a nation's decision to enforce laws enacted by Congress to deter crime, end quote. Peter Markowitz says, optics aside, he's noticed two other major changes. changes in ISIS operations. The first has to do with the judicial process when cases go to court. You know, if you go to the immigration court at 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan, where I often represent clients, what is happening there is different than what I have ever seen before. The agency is moving to terminate cases, which normally, if you're representing an immigrant,

the termination of a case is a victory. But the plan here is to bypass the immigration courts and to use extrajudicial 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 in-agent kind of determines on their own

that this person is going to be deported 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 kind of, 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 in 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. End 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 be with. Have you ever been to one of those facilities? Oh, many times. What is it like, you know, inside one of those facilities? It is indistinguishable from the jails 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 prison companies that manage the majority of these.

And through a profit motive, sometimes 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. The second major change Peter is 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 U.S. and 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 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 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, you know. 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, you know, 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? have that kind of influx of funding?

A lot of responsibility, I would say from a historical perspective, spend the American taxpayers money 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 agency quickly that, you know, I hope historically the right thing is done with it. You know, that serves both the American people, the interests of the United States

and the people that are taken in the custody. You know, 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 ISIS history, or for that matter, INS's. This is nothing out of the ordinary, none of this has been 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 they want a more firm hand or you know 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. If you think we should let in 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 an 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 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, right? Over and over again, they're letting them remove people to countries they have never come 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 humanitarian protections. And so the Supreme Court is no backstop either. And so no internal backstop, no immigration court backstop, no. No Supreme Court backstop. We are in a really, really, really precarious place as a country. I would impart to 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. This is the first episode in our series on how immigration enforcement became political and profitable. Next week, how the U.S. southern border went from a line in the sand to a fence to a wall. And that's it for this week's show. I'm Randab del Fattah. I'm Ramtin Arablui, and you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me. And me and...

Sarah Wyman. Amber Tsi... Casey Minor. Julie Kane. Lawrence Wu. Anya Steinberg. Christina Kim. Devin Katiyama. Irene Noguchi.

Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vocal. This episode was mixed and mastered by Gilly Moon. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his... band Drop Electric, which includes Navid Marvey. Show Fujiwara. Anya Mizani. Thank you to Felicia Ariaga,

Jasmine Garst, Stephen M. McMartin, Ida T. Silva, and Isabel Patricia Vasquez. Thanks also to Tony Kavan, Nadia Lansy, Johannes Durge, Edith Chapin,

and Colin Campbell. And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on this show, please write us at Thurline at NPR.org. And make sure you follow us on Apple, Spotify, or the NPR app.

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