I'm Ayesha Roscoe and this is a Sunday story from Up First, where we go beyond the news of the day to bring you one big story.
President Trump campaigned on a promise of mass deportations.
And since he took office in January, agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, also known as ICE, have been increasing detentions 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 US 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 Throughline podcast 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.
You know, 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 a representative of the government.
They also talked to Peter Markowitz.
I'm a professor at Cardozo School of Law in New York City.
Markowitz founded the Katherine O Greenberg Immigration Justice Clinic, where he defends immigrants facing deportation and works on policy.
In the ThruLine episode, Werner and Markowitz take listeners through the fascinating history of ICE, starting from its origins as the Immigration and Naturalization Service or the INS, stretching back into the 20th century.
And they also explore the question of what's changed in 2025 since the Trump administration took office.
We're going to play that final part of the episode about what's changed over the past year.
But I strongly recommend that you check out the full episode on the ThruLine podcast because it offers critical historical context for the moment we're now in.
We'll be back with Throughline host, Rund Abdel-Fattah, who will pick up the story at the beginning of 2025.
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I got three words for him.
Jack and all.
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 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, 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 van 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's 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 3000 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'd 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 I mean, but that 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 or 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 remain in the United States?
That's the real driver.
The driver isn't that, you know, where are you going to risk your children?
It's are you going to be able to... Right, if there isn't something worth it on the other side.
Yeah, I hear you.
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 in ICE's 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 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 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 begin with.
Have you ever been to one of those facilities?
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.
We'll be right back with more of Throughline's conversation about the history and evolution of ICE with Rund Abdel-Fattah.
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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 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.
Rogers 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 are 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.
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 that kind of influx of funding?
A lot of responsibility, I would say from a historical perspective, is spend the American taxpayers wisely.
Yeah.
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 American people, the interests of the United States and the people that are taken into custody.
They deserve the rights that are available to them under the laws 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'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 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.
You know, 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, 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 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.
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 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 Holman keeps saying, just wait, just wait, we're just getting started.
And I believe him.
To hear the full episode, you can find ThruLine wherever you get your podcasts.
There you can also check out the rest of ThruLine's recent immigration series.
This episode was produced by Runda Abdel-Fattah and Sarah Wyman, with help from the rest of the ThruLine team.
It was edited by Casey Miner.
Andrew Mambo produced this episode of The Sunday Story.
The rest of The Sunday Story team includes Jenny Schmidt, Justine Yan, Thomas Coltrane and Liana Semstrom.
Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi.
I'm Aisha Roscoe, 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.
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