Caitlin Dickerson

Thanks for having me.

So ICE is responsible for immigration enforcement within the interior of the country, going after people who've made it across the border, are living in American cities, and who are subject to deportation.

That's who they were under the Biden administration, and that's who they are now.

The difference is how they go about that work.

So really, since the Ford era, we've had some level of priorities that immigration enforcement officials are supposed to follow for who they should go after versus who they shouldn't.

Because throughout the United States history, we've had lots of unauthorized immigrants.

Some are thought of sort of societally and in the eyes of government as a problem and others really not.

They're minding their own business.

They're doing jobs.

And the Biden administration imposed the strictest form of priorities that we'd seen historically, where ICE was directed only to go after people who had very serious criminal records.

The rest of the undocumented population was left alone.

So ICE officials had to get permission if they wanted to go after somebody and arrest them and deport them.

And the bar was considered very high.

Now, of course, there are no restrictions whatsoever.

ICE has carte blanche permission to go after any immigrant in the United States without legal status.

And ICE has always done lots of arrests, hundreds of thousands some years, and consistently gone after these people with serious criminal records.

But central to their approach was to make arrests happen in a way that was meant to be as safe as possible and as seamless as possible.

Not that this is going to sound great to people, but to describe it for you, what ICE agents did historically is that they would identify someone they wanted to arrest, do lots of work at a desk on a computer before they ever pursued this person to confirm their identity, to confirm they had no claim to legal status in the United States.

Once that work was done, they would often go to the person's house at 5 or 6 in the morning, knock on the door, and try to take them into custody, often while other relatives are still sleeping and before they leave for work for the day.

So, you know, I point out that this isn't going to sound great because, of course, what I'm talking about is a situation where you'd have kids wake up in the morning and find out that their mom or dad was gone.