Caitlin Dickerson

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.

But that approach was to minimize the kinds of chaos that we're seeing ICE really invite now.

So I've talked to so many current and former ICE officials who are watching this happen, and they're really bewildered because it's as if ICE is now going against all of its former training.

to make arrests as dramatic as possible, to do them in the streets, in front of the general public, kind of inviting conflicts that then lead to protesting and to escalations.

And they're also filming a lot of these violent clashes, making them as dramatic as possible and

prioritizing that over safety.

So it's really just such a significant change.

It's hard to understate.

And part of it, I think, is because they're trying to, and I'm sure we'll get into this, really spread a certain level of fear that's intended to encourage people to leave the country on their own so that they don't have to make as many arrests.