Today, Explained - Trump’s ICE shakeup

Episode Date: November 4, 2025

The president wants more arrests and faster deportations of unauthorized immigrants. Which means the shock-and-awe enforcement campaigns might get even more chaotic. This episode was produced by Denise Guerra with help from Miles Bryan, edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd and hosted by Astead Herndon. Federal agents in Chicago. Photo by KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI/AFP via Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

President Trump's immigration crackdown has already sown anger and confusion. This guy in the glasses took his gun out and pointed in innocent buystanders, right there. Ice go, ho! Get the f*** in Chicago, you cowards! You cowards! Some in the communities say the tactics are too aggressive. Video taken last weekend shows agents using tear gas at a Halloween parade. But here's the thing.

The White House thinks this doesn't go nearly far enough. You're okay with those tactics. Yeah, because you have to get the people out, you know. President Trump is shaking things up at ice, and he's doing so with an explicit goal. More arrest, more deportations, more chaos. While the next phase of Trump's immigration agenda could be even more dramatic than the previous ones. That's coming up on Today Explained from Box. Now streaming on Paramount Plus, it's the epic return of Mayor of Kingstown.

Warden? You know who I am. Starring Academy Award nominee Jeremy Renner. I swear in these walls. Emmy Award winner Edie Falco. You're an ex-con who ran this place for years. And now, now you can't do that. And BAFTA award winner Lenny James. You're about to have a plague of outsiders descend on your town.

Let me tell you this. It's got to be consequences. Mayor of Kingstown, new season now streaming on Paramount Plus. Megan Rapino here. The WMBA season is over. But on a touch more, we're still playing games. We're checking out the tug of war between the players and the league, as the CBA is about to expire,

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I'm pumped for us to be chatting. I feel like this is going to be the first of many in our future. Yes, I think I have the medal as the most frequent. today explained, guest. You know, I'm pumped to talk to you also because I think your story was so helpful. I particularly love the first line where you pointed out how ICE is a symbol to many Americans of Trump's callous treatment to immigrants. But, of course, there's a big cohort, particularly on the right and in the White House, who think that ICE has not gone far enough when it comes to things like deportations. And then last week, we had news of a big shakeup that the White House was doing when it comes to immigration enforcement.

Can you take me through what that shakeup was and why is it happening? So what happened was essentially that several leaders of ice field offices across the country got removed from their posts, and it became known. It leaked out that border patrol officials were going to be moved into ice to take over their jobs. And apparently these ICE officials were at first going to be fired, but then due to intervention from some ICE leadership, they're just being reassigned to headquarters or something. but basically pushed out because the White House slash DHS powers that be think that they haven't been aggressive enough, they haven't been tough enough, and there's another agency, the Border Patrol, that has. And that agency is now being empowered more and more, and they're essentially trying to import its way of thinking and tactics into ICE, which has traditionally operated quite differently. So it seems as if in the power rankings of immigration enforcement, ICE is down and the Border Patrol is up, at least in the White House's view. Yes. So there is this core difference between how these two agencies have long operated, which is that ICE, they prefer as a matter of typical practice, to know who they are targeting in advance, at least somewhat, to have,

a name, a list of names, a workplace, to have information in advance about who those people are, what's happening at that workplace, oh, there's unauthorized immigrants being employed there, so we should go in and do something about it. Border Patrol, you know, the term cowboy gets used a lot. Like, they're at the border. They view themselves as patrolling a kind of chaotic, lawless aerial, just going out and looking for people who look suspicious because they, you know, by necessity, they don't have information on who the exact person is that they're seeing if they've just recently

crossed the border. And so they have these more aggressive tactics that are just along the lines of just going out and trying to question people, to grab people, to detain people. Video shows federal agents striking a man in the head as they try the rest of it. You know, they're not the only ones using these tactics now, but these are the tactics that Border Patrol has used at the border that are now being imported into American cities and being used by a variety of agencies. Hey, wait, that's not how you're ready to get on the ground.

It seems as if this is somewhat coming from the top down. What do we know about the debate happening within the White House and the kind of factions among different camps when it comes to immigration enforcement. Yeah, so it's basically a debate between the hardliners and the harder hardliners. You know, there's no, there's no squishy moderates around the Trump White House on this issue, exactly. But so Stephen Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff. It is fundamental and essential to the idea of sovereignty and national survival to have control over who enters and doesn't enter the country. He is just infamous for in the first term, and in this term, just constantly having meetings, calling up officials at agencies and chewing them out, saying, why aren't you arresting enough people?

What are you doing to deport more people and just, like, berating them until they do it, like, sort of at risk of their jobs? Then at the Department of Homeland Security, you have, at the top of it, Secretary Christie Nome. Just because you think you're here as a citizen or because you're a member of a certain group or you're not a citizen, it doesn't mean that. that you're going to be protected. And Corey Lewandowski. We will find you. We will apprehend you. We will put you in a detention facility.

He's basically acting as Chrissy Noem's chief of staff, even though he doesn't have that title officially. But he is working with Noem trying to, you know, implement their own version of the hardline DHS crackdown. And their main rival has been Tom Homan, the White House border sorry. The governor and the mayor should be calling President Trump in thanking him for taking public safety threats off that street. And he was initially like the face of mass deportation. But Holman has been compromised a bit by the report that he accepted $50,000 in cash in a Kava bag last year. It was from FBI agents posing as business executives in an undercover sting. Officials within the Trump administration saying the probe was politically motivated.

But even before that, Christy Noem had soured on him, reportedly, because she was annoyed he went on TV more than she did and was getting out in front of her at various TV announcements. So all sorts of high-minded policy concerns at work here in the Trump administration. But it all comes back to how Miller wants the mass deportations. Dome and Lewandowski also want to look tough. And they have really fixated upon, oh, maybe Border Patrol can do what we think ICE can't or won't do. Because there was a big turning point earlier this year in about May. Stephen Miller summoned various ICE officials to Washington and chewed them out and saying, you're taking too long.

You're too slow. You're not arresting enough people. You're not doing enough. And then he asked the question, specifically, why aren't you going to Home Depot? He said, why aren't you going to 7-Eleven? That's when we saw this real new phase of immigration enforcement start in Los Angeles, and we're seeing it now in Chicago, especially. Those are the two most high-profile cases, but they are in some form like rolling it out in other cities or preparing to roll it out in other cities. This is the more aggressive street patrols, highly militarized.

Lots of, like, you know, they're making all these videos about how tough they look going around the city. And a lot of that is from Border Patrol. ICE has become the shorthand for Trump's immigration crackdown, but most of the viral videos that show these really aggressive or outrageous tactics, probably most of them are Border Patrol. You've mentioned the Chicago and L.A. incidents is I think the immigration enforcement raids that have garnered the most detention. And your story points out one CBP officer, Gregory Bovino, who's pretty emblematic of their tactics overall, and that was at the center of those operations. Can you tell me about him? Yes, Bovino was a longtime Border Patrol agent who was higher up in the El Centro, California area, and he kind of led this Los Angeles crackdown, which was the first big post, why aren't we going to Home Depot operation. When someone steps in the way, then that may not, again, that may not work out well for them. and if we need to affect an arrest of a U.S. citizen or anyone else, then we'll do that.

The administration evidently really liked what it saw there. They've seen him, you know, deploy really tough tactics with protesters, especially. Bovino's actually seen throwing a tear gas canister personally at protesters. Possibly violating a judge's order. Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino now must meet with a federal judge every day over tactics used by federal agents. a lot of the stuff that looks like racial profiling, that is basically what he's unleashed. And he has become the face of this.

He is just heavily featured, like, always in his, you know, his Border Patrol garb, looking tough, looking, like, walking around with his tough guy entourage. Yeah, Trump, a lot of tough guy performance. This guy's matching the bill. And they've been using. this as, you know, all sorts of, you know, short-form video from him, set to, like, peppy music that, like, the MAGA bass loves. This is how and why we secure the homeland.

For Ma and Pa, America, we've got your backs. Whether it's here in Sacramento or nationwide, we're here, and we're not going anywhere. They love the optics of this. So, in a sense, Border Patrol is being empowered first because, uh, ICE wasn't hitting the numbers Miller wanted. But second, because they love the optics of Bovino being tough and they think that the politics of that are good for them, that is a questionable assumption because these are also, you know, some of the most controversial things that Trump's crackdown has unleashed, but, you know, Miller and people in the White House, they have this gut sense that if it's between law enforcement and unauthorized immigrants, if it's between law enforcement and, and, and, you know, left-wing protesters, the public is ultimately going to side with

law enforcement. And so that is kind of the bet they're making and the MAGA base loves it too. Box is Andrew ProCop. Coming up, we know what Trump thinks about immigration. What is the public think? Now is that changed since Trump has come back into

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slash explain and use code explain for 20% off. Your first purchase, that's B-O-M-B-A-S.com slash explain. Code Explain to check out. Recently, I've been curious about how the public is reacting to Trump's immigration rates. Because on the one hand, he promised all of this, and you could argue voters knew what they were signing up for. But now that they're seeing it in real life, is America having buyers remorse? Molly O'Toole has covered immigration for years, most recently at the L.A. Times. And she says Trump's got a leg up here because he's figured out something important.

What Trump has done very effectively, and in particular the people around Trump, but Trump as a messenger very effectively, is shifted the entirety of the immigration conversation, the sort of political conversation, the American public's perception on immigration, shifted the entire thing to the right. Whereas if you look at the polling, you know, there actually is much more sort of bipartisan support for immigration and sort of broadly positive views on immigration. writ large, then he would think based on sort of the rhetoric that we've heard and also the electoral successes, right? That the sort of MAGA Trump movement coming down the escalator and, you know, talking about crime and fear. Right. They're sending people that have lots of problems and they're bringing those problems with us.

They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people. Then again, on the other hand, obviously. instead of this sort of conversation about, okay, illegal immigration bad, you know, refugees, asylum seekers, quote unquote, legal immigration good, which is sort of broadly speaking with a broad brush how the debate kind of broke down before. But in the pre-Trump era, now you just have all immigration bad. And there sort of is no immigration good sort of side of the ledger. And in that way, I think, think the Trump administration has been remarkably effective at sort of shifting the nature of the conversation. That speaks to something the Democrats have done over the last several years,

which I think kind of agree with Trump's premise that this is an issue that needs to be kind of dealt with rather than kind of stepping out on their own affirmative vision. Is that how you have seen it? Is that what you're kind of saying in terms of the success of Donald Trump shifting the narrative broadly over the last eight years? There doesn't seem to be that counterbalance force. Yeah, exactly. So, like, not only has it been like a fairly smart, concerted effort, you know, really over the last dozen years longer from people who, for whom this issue is, like, is ideological and not just sort of politically strategic. Like, you know, the fear of the other, I mean, this has been one of the most, like, common tropes within American politics, you know,

from the history of the country. Yeah. But I do think it's also, So there is a strategy there, and it has been effective. But it's easier to shift the whole conversation to one side of the spectrum if there is no counterbalance. There were two polls that recently came out. First was a New York Times-Siena poll that showed registered voters really disapprove of Trump's recent actions on immigration. And while they want mostly immigrants who come to this country illegally to be deported, they don't necessarily like what he's doing now. What is your reaction to this?

Like, because it's kind of weird, right? Like, voters wanted deportations, but not like this. So I think when, you know, you sort of get into the complexities of this, which people, you know, in political messaging, right, is not exactly known for its nuance. When you get into the complexities of what the legal barriers are, how much that would cost, how many American citizens are going to get swept up in the meantime, what civil rights, broadly speaking, might be a real. in order to achieve this goal, the billions upon billions of dollars that would be required

in order to achieve some of these goals. When you start to get in the details of that, and then also just see how this plays out in your community, I don't think that it might be one thing for, you know, a significant part of the American public to say, well, that sounds pretty good. Like, let's remove, yeah, let's remove the criminals. Let's remove, you know, violent offenders. But because they shifted this conversation to all immigration bad, you know, the American voter was not making the distinction between, well, wait, actually, a lot of these actions are targeting people who have permission to be here. Yeah.

They're asylum seekers. They're not these scary sort of criminals that, you know, boogeymen that the Trump campaign was talking about. That's not who they're going after. And, well, I do appreciate all the hard work that the I saw. officers have been doing, taking the worst of the worst. It seems to become more aggressive recently. They said, we're going to get rid of the criminals and the gang members first, right? And now we're seeing, like, Home Depot's get raided.

That's crazy. There was a Gallupol this summer that really drove this hole for me. In 2024, 55% of people wanted to reduce all immigration, which I think is helpful to understand what was fueling Donald Trump's comeback. But this year, the same poll found that that number had dropped by almost half. Just 30% of people wanted to reduce all immigration. It seems as if now that Donald Trump is there, maybe the sentiment or the public effort has at least swung back to the other side. I mean, I think that poll is absolutely fascinating.

But it's really hard to know what to attribute that to. Is it because people are like, great, you know, problem solved? Like, you know, numbers are way down at the border. New data obtained by CBS News shows unlawful crossings at the southern border are at the lowest level in 50 years. An Eagle Pass, Texas, during the Biden administration, more than 2,000 migrants crossed into the U.S. in a single day. But now, under President Trump's policies, officers encounter just 20 migrants a day here. Which is honestly, that sort of, it kind of, it's a very limited statistic when it actually comes to understanding what's going on in terms of broader migration. trends. And it's actually a pretty limited statistic when it comes to even like measuring the

effectiveness of U.S. policy because that's at the tail end of people's journeys, right? So that's actually not telling you a lot. But it is the number that we do sort of tend to focus on. So it's hard to know to what extent that that shift and really quite dramatic shift sort of back towards a pre-2021 feeling on immigration. Is that because people feel like, okay, well, we looked at Trump and he fixed it? Or does that have to do with this sort of people seeing what those promises

look like in practice and being like, wait a second, I didn't vote for that. Yeah. I signed up for deporting criminals. I didn't sign up for deporting. Exactly. So it's sort of hard to know to what to attribute that to. But I think there's a few other things that are really interesting about that.

I mean, I think the sort of politics of fear of the other, while it is a very potent force in American politics, villainizing the immigrant and sort of blaming them, you know, for economic concerns, despite the fact that there's, you know, very limited data actually showing, and broadly speaking, immigration being a sort of net benefit economically. So I think part of it is this, if you're going to come back to fear over and over and over and over and over again, I think some of the potency of that gets diluted, gets diminished.

It seems as if the White House is pushing forward. We know that these kind of immigration ramp-ups or even the images of these sweeps are important to people like Stephen Miller and Donald Trump. And we also know that there seems to be growing evidence that the public is lacking it less and less and that Trump's kind of actually actions on immigration are unpopular. Your normal politics brain would say, you know, isn't that a bad thing to do? There's midterm elections coming up. There's all these other things. Why do we think the Trump administration seems completely. kind of removed from that sort of calculus.

I do think that the Trump administration, the sort of Trump movement, very effectively sort of used the media to really, you know, suck up all the oxygen in the room, get all of the attention as a way to really magnify their sort of messaging. These memes that are being sent out

by, you know, the Department of Homeland Security, a sort of taxpayer-funded Twitter account, right? We're seeing these memes that are pretty explicit in terms of this sort of nativist era of American politics that they're hearkening back to. You know, here's the historical roots of that. Here's why it's troubling. Here's the fact check.

Even when the media is doing that, the Trump administration doesn't really care, right? Like, what they want is for that message to get out. But it's a great question. Your politics brain would be like, don't they want to sort of be safe? speaking to or being seen to represent the majority of people in this country. Like, that's how you win elections, right? But I think that what we saw in 2016, and I think what we saw in 2024, is that that isn't necessarily how you win elections, right?

You can have a very impassioned, vocal minority that can win an election, even if what they support is not necessarily what a majority of the American public supports. And so I think the messaging, even though it seems counterintuitive, right? Like, that's who it's geared toward. Like, it's geared toward their diehard supporters on the top level, I think. Yeah. And then I think there's another level in which it's operating in that they want people to self-deport. They want people to be afraid.

The point is the intimidation. Exactly. So not just of immigrant communities, though. They want people to be afraid to protest. test. You know, they want people to be afraid to come out. But I think time will tell also whether it turns enough people off, you know, that it becomes a less effective political strategy. Molly O'Toole, Immigration Reporter. She's writing a book right now about all of this. Keep an eye out for.

Today's show was produced by Denise Gatta, edited by Joe Lee Myers, fact-checked by Laura Buller, and engineered by Patrick Boyd. I'm a Stead Herndon. This is Today Explain. Thank you.