What A Day - ICE’s Deadly Traffic Stops

Episode Date: July 14, 2026

Last week, ICE agents killed a Mexican man in Houston, Texas, who was driving to work and was not the target of an ICE operation – despite what the Department of Homeland Security said initially. And yesterday, ICE agents in Maine killed a Colombian man who was legally permitted to work in the United States. He was also not the target of an operation. This marks two deaths at the hands of ICE officers in the last week alone. For more on what’s behind the recent surge of ICE activity – and violence — we spoke to David Bier. He’s the Director of Immigration Studies at the Cato Institute.And in headlines, Trump reverses course on charging ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz, Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh makes his first appearance before Congress, and Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett testifies about the sharp increase in threats she’s experienced since joining the nation’s highest court.Show Notes: Check out David's work – cato.org/people/david-bier Call Congress – 202-224-3121 Subscribe to the What A Day Newsletter – https://tinyurl.com/y4y2e9jy What A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcast Follow us on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/crookedmedia/ For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail]

They had over $100 billion at their disposal to roll out body cameras to new officers if they wanted. And they didn't do it. And I think the reason is quite clear. They don't want accountability. It's the same reason why they wear masks. They don't want people to know what they're doing. I'm Jane Koston, and this is Wadaday. The show congratulating E. Jean Carroll on finally getting paid by President Donald Trump today after he repeated.

neededly defamed her. Yes, according to court documents, $5,625,05.48, that's interest, hate Carol's bank account. I hope she got a fun notification on her phone letting her now. On today's show, we talk about a week of federal immigration enforcement violence with the Cato Institute's David Beer. Before we get into all the changing narratives of ICE, here's what we're following today, Tuesday, July 14th. I was wondering if you could explain your changing thinking on the straight of form moves, applying a 20% fee. How did you get to the decision you just... Yeah, so when I put that out yesterday, we've been doing that for many, many years.

It was never fair to me that we would be guarding the strait when we basically don't take anything. We don't need the oil at all. And it wasn't important for us, but it was important for allies. It was important for people that we get along with very well, including the major Gulf State countries. So I put it out yesterday. I thought it was good. I was called

by different people, different countries, kings and emirs and all of the people that we all know and we all love and they've been frankly, they've been very strong partners. I do not know or love the emirs of the Gulf states.

That seems like a you thing. After announcing a plan to charge ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz yesterday, Trump today did what he does best. He tacoed. In a post on True Social, Trump said that actually he wouldn't be charging ships passing through the Strait of Ormuse. Instead, Gulf countries will make, quote, trade and investment deals in the United States. During an Oval Office press event with the Prime Minister of Iraq, Trump added that, quote, I don't think anybody should be able to charge a fee for the straight, which is again the opposite of what he proposed yesterday. Oh, and by the way, over the weekend, Trump sent a formal notice to Congress that the United States is again at, at war with Iran, giving the Trump administration another 60 days before they need to ask lawmakers for approval. Think of it like an action movie. Iran War, part two, still stupid. If we get policy right, and I can assure you we will, the inflation surge of the last five years will be a thing of the

past. Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh made his first appearance before Congress since replacing Jerome Powell as head of the Fed. Warsh spoke to the House Financial Services Committee, today after the government reported that U.S. inflation cooled last month. The cost of gas, clothes, and used cars fell, providing some relief for consumers. According to the Labor Department, prices dropped 0.4% from May to June, the largest monthly drop in four years. Still, oil prices rose for a second day as the U.S. renewed a tax on Iran, and Trump announced a new blockade in the Strait of Hormuz. He's young and he's handsome, which I don't like. I'm not happy about it.

On this episode of Who is Trump talking about this time, I give you a new player, Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi. Trump welcomed Al-Zairobi to the White House today after strongly backing his bid for office. Al-Zairobi is a wealthy businessman with no political background, so it doesn't come as a surprise that Trump has taken to him. Also, he's so handsome. During their meeting in the Oval Office, Trump said Iraq has, quote, tremendous potential because of its oil, and deals were on the horizon. Al Zaiety said the focus of his visit would be to announce a, quote, economic partnership between the two countries. Though it wasn't on the original schedule, Trump decided he and Al Zaydi would have lunch together because of their, quote, tremendous chemistry. Because again, he's so handsome.

Maybe I lack imagination, but I didn't expect that performing this service was going to put me in the position of explaining to my children what a bulletproof vest was and why I had to wear one. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett told lawmakers today about the sharp increase in threats she's experienced since joining the nation's highest court. Barrett and Justice Elena Kagan testified before a House Appropriations Panel in support of a request to increase security funding for Supreme Court justices. It's the first time justices have testified before Congress since 2019. It comes and judges around the country have seen a rise in threats of violence and intimidation. The Supreme Court requested a total of $228 million for the next fiscal year. a roughly 10% increase over the year before. Much of the requested increase would go to expanding personal protection for members of the court,

with six more agents for each. And that's the news. Let's talk about immigration and customs enforcement. Last week, ICE agents killed a Mexican man in Houston, Texas, who was striving to work and was not the target of an ICE operation, despite what the Department of Homeland Security said initially. And yesterday, ICE agents in Maine killed a Colombian man who was legally permitted to work.

in the United States. He was also not the target of an operation. This marks two deaths at the hands of ICE officers in the last week alone. The response to the shootings this past week was immediate. Here's Rhode Island Democratic Representative Seth Magazine are on the House floor today. When will this madness stop? When he took his position, Secretary Mullen said that his goal was to get the department off the front page of the news. Well, you're back on the goddamn front page now with two innocent people gunned down in broad daylight. These deaths are part of a recent surge of ICE activity and violence.

The New York Times reported that ICE arrested more than 10,000 people in the last five days of June alone. That surge means that more people are coming into contact with ICE agents, with horrifying consequences. For more, I spoke to David Beer. He's director of immigration. Studies at the Cato Institute. David, welcome to Waddey. Thanks for having me on. So it's been somehow about six months since the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Preti, which I think

rocked many of us, the entire city of Minneapolis, the country. And here we are, again, with two more people shot to death by federal immigration agents in two different states. Both victims were in cars when they were shot. And today it's been reported that ICE agents have in order to suspend most vehicle stops. What was the ICE procedure dealing with vehicles before this? Because it seems like this keeps happening. I mean, they do have pretty good policies, actually, when it comes to how ice agents and DHS officials are supposed to interact with vehicles.

They're not supposed to put their bodies in the way of the vehicle to try to stop them or force the vehicle to stop in that way. way because that puts the officer in danger and then creates an environment where the officer may feel it's justified to shoot the driver, even though the policy also recommends against shooting operators of moving vehicles because shooting and a driver does not stop a vehicle. But the upshot here really is that the agents are actually going out of their way to stop people in their vehicles. Making vehicle stops was a big part of what they're doing because for a number of reasons. One, it's easy to take someone's license plate and try to look up, well, who's the driver or who's

the vehicle registered to? And then you can try to figure out, okay, do they have status in the country or not? And then try to make a stop from there. And that's what's resulted in a lot of these cases where ICE agents have been just trying to randomly roving around, looking for people to round up, and then they end up in a car chase and ultimately a shooting, which is what we saw in Houston. We'll get back to my conversation with David Beer in a moment to talk about how DHS has and hasn't changed under Mark Wayne Mullen. But if you like the show, make sure to subscribe. Leave a five-star review on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, watch us on YouTube and share with your friends. More to come after some ads. What a Day is brought to you by Quince.

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night after night for the best sleep ever. Remember, the day always ends well with Casper. Right now, save up to 20% on mattresses and up to 25% on everything else when you go to casper.com. One last time, that's C-A-S-P-E-R.com and save up to 20% on the mattress you deserve. Let's get back to my conversation with David Beer. Something that I am noting is that the officer, in both the main shooting and the Houston shooting were reportedly not wearing body cameras.

Now, back in 1892 or earlier this year, former Homeland Security Secretary Christine Nome said that body cameras would be deployed to officers across the country. Congress gave DHS $20 million for body cameras. DHS is flush with money. Why weren't the officers wearing them? No one really knows. I mean, look, even if they didn't have money specifically allocated to them, they absolutely could equip the officers with body camers if they really wanted to. They're blaming the government shutdown, which never really affected the ICE at all. According to the director of ICE, Todd Lyons, testified that they were not being affected because they had been pre-funded by the one big beautiful bill in July of last year.

So they had over $100 billion at their disposal to roll out, body cameras to new officers if they wanted, and they didn't do it. And I think the reason is quite clear. They don't want accountability. It's the same reason why they wear masks. They don't want people to know what they're doing. They don't want people to be able to look up who they are and file lawsuits against them or otherwise hold them accountable. And that's why in so many of these cases. You know, how long are we have to wait to find out who the agent was, who shot, whoever the latest person is to be shot? I want to jump in on something else with regard to the shooting of Renee Good and a couple of these other instances, which is that DHS says something

about an incident. And then, you know, I remember talking to our producers about this last week, that I am going to be very clear that this is what DHS said, because I'm pretty sure. sure that we're going to learn in about 24 hours that none of this is true. This keeps happening. DHS will say, like, this person attacked our car and then video will come out. No, they didn't. What's going on here? Yeah, I mean, I think it's a cultural thing. You know, it really got going going under Secretary Nome's leadership that they were going to have quick, rapid responses to any controversy, any criticism online would be responded to, and they were going to have a very aggressive social media strategy. And that leads to problems when officers are not honest after incidents

happen. And I do think that, you know, it's not Secretary known necessarily or the head of the DHS social media team that is making up lies about what happens in these scenarios. They are actually getting this information from somewhere. And most of the time, some of the framing language, I think, is something generated by the higher-ups. You know, in the Alex Pready case, for example, you know, saying that he had the intent to massacre. I mean, that's something that, you know, wasn't necessarily coming from the officers. But the idea that, you know, we're getting information that he had a gun and was threatening people, that is coming from the officers. So, I do think the officers are filtering up false information to protect themselves.

You know, they're afraid of what might happen to them. And I think, you know, they want to justify what they did. And so they say that the individual was uncooperative and attacked them. And maybe it feels like that subjectively to them, you know, that they're being attacked by someone not listening to them in the way that they want. But as a actual reality, no, you were not being attacked. You were the one initiating the interaction. You know, in the Houston case, you know, the video shows pretty clearly that the man who was killed there did not slam his vehicle into the ICE vehicles.

It was the other way around. Something that's been strange is that DHS secretary at Mark Wayne Mullen took over for Kristy Nome in March. And it felt like ice activity was comparatively quiet. It's not that ICE wasn't doing things. They've been still arresting people en masse. But it has felt far less flashy. Is that purposeful? How has the department been working under Mullen?

Yeah. So I think Mullen was getting some credit for this shift when really it was more coincidence than anything else. I mean, he didn't take over until after this shift. was well underway, and it was a response, effectively what happened was border patrol got neutered from doing interior enforcement in cities. That was the model that Stephen Miller and the White House had imposed on DHS and said, you know, we're going to go out and go city to city, and we're going to send Border Patrol teams in, and we're just going to, you know,

blitz the area and get as many arrests as we can, and then we'll go to another city and we'll do the same thing. And so that strategy was then, you know, discredited by Minnesota and in the eyes of the public. And in particular, President Trump said, I don't, you know, I don't want this anymore, you know, figure out a new strategy. And it just so happened that, you know, Mullen was coming in as this strategy with new strategy was being figured out. And then they decided, we're just going to ramp up everywhere. we have enough money to pay the officers for weekends and overtime as much as we want. And so now what's happening is we had a doubling of arrests in just the last two months. And it's a result of this intense pressure to hit these quotas and targets for arrest that the White House has sent.

We now decided on a new model. It's just as intense, but it's more diffuse across the country. There's no one single area. This is why you have it happening in Maine at the same time as it's happening in Houston. And so that's what's led to now over 2,000 arrests per day. And you have to look back, you know, at the end of the Biden administration, it was about 300 arrests in the interior per day. So it's just an enormous, enormous increase. So at the end of June, the Supreme Court cleared the way for the Trump administration to end.

to temporary protected status, which gives immigrants from certain countries, legal permission to stay in the U.S. if they can't safely return home, people from Haiti, for example. Is that playing a role in that surge of deportations we've been seeing? Yeah. So it actually hasn't been fully implemented yet because there's still some lower court action, bureaucratic actions that need to happen to remove the lower court injunction. So it actually hasn't played a part. And I think we're really only getting the initial taste of what this is going to look like. I mean, when you think about ice moving into a place like Springfield where there's a huge bifurcation of the population between the black Asians and the white U.S. citizen population, I mean, the racial profiling

opportunities there are going to be, you know, very intense. And I think that is a situation that so many people are worried about when those protections are fully eliminated. and they can proceed with, you know, a mass deportation strategy targeting them. David, thank you so much for taking the time to join me. Sure, anytime. That was my conversation with David Beer, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute. Before we go, on last week's episode of Keep It,

pop culture connoisseurs, Louis Vettel and Nina Parker, asked the hard-hitting questions. Should we tax the tasteless rich? And are you familiar with up-and-coming Gen Z artist Madonna? Check out Keep It for the highbrow and lowbrow pop culture stories you love. New episodes of Keep It drop every Wednesday. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. That's all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review. Let Wisconsin Republican Senator Ron Johnson show you a fun new way to get away with saying nonsense and tell your friends to listen.

And if you're into reading, and not just about how after claiming a recent photo of Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell may have been fake, Johnson hit Control Z during an interview on News Nation today. You know, on Monday, you said that you're not sure that the photo that Senator Mitch McConnell shared of himself and his wife over the weekend in the hospital is even a new picture. What made you say that? I'm curious if you've gotten any more clarity on that, Congressman. Well, the TV host was saying it was AI. And I just said, well, you know, I'd heard that maybe wasn't the most recent photo. You know, I have no idea.

I mean, just discount all that. Like me, what a day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at Kirkland. dot com slash subscribe. I'm Jane Koston, and when it comes to things Ron Johnson says, I generally do just discount all that. What a day is a production of crooked media. Our show is produced by Caitlin Plummer, Emily Ford, Erica Morrison, and Adrian Hill. Our team includes Haley Jones, Greg Walters, Matt Berg, Joseph Dutra, Johanna Kay's, and Desmond Taylor. Our music is by Kyle Murdoch and Jordan Canter. We had helped today from the Associated Press. Our production staff is probably unionized with the Writers Guild

of America East.