Caitlin Dickerson

What has changed over this period of time is not so much the mission, but certainly the size and the budget of ICE.

ICE is now the highest funded federal law enforcement agency in the country, thanks to the one big beautiful bill act that President Trump signed.

ushered in and convinced Republicans in Congress to support last year.

Another big change I want to point out in ICE, which is really a more recent change, is the way that its policies are described and marketed to the public.

So even in the first Trump administration, you think about its most controversial policy, family separations, that policy was described in innocuous bureaucratic terms as merely enforcing the law.

We hear nothing like that today.

We're hearing language that is mocking undocumented immigrants, that's taunting them, teasing them, really playing up the violence of the way that immigration enforcement has looked under the second Trump administration.

There's sort of no mention of...

accountability for officers who are carrying out these policies, really a prioritization of the rule of law.

I mean, Greg Bovino, before he was reassigned, would talk about all immigrants almost as if they were guilty from the very beginning.

We've also seen really overt white supremacist language being published right out of the ICE press shop.

Mm-hmm.

They're distinct agencies.

The Border Patrol is much older.

It predates the Department of Homeland Security, but it essentially handles immigration enforcement at the border.

So while ICE focuses on the interior of the country, people who are already here and who are eligible for deportation, the Border Patrol is...

It does what the name suggests.

It works at the border and is intended to determine who can enter and who can't.

An important part of that distinction is that people who haven't officially entered the United States have fewer rights and protections under the Constitution.

The Supreme Court has held this historically.