Caitlin Dickerson

It means a lot more arrests and a lot more deportations.

I think that because ICE and ICE field office directors are primarily dealing with people who have longstanding ties to the country and direct relationships with American citizens are often represented by lawyers, they're used to being held to a higher level of scrutiny.

People who work along the border are mostly dealing with folks who are trying to enter the United States for the very first time

may not speak English, are not represented by lawyers, and people who just don't have an expectation of basic rights and protections in the way that American citizens do.

And so when you put officials from that agency into American cities, you have this incredible clash of expectations versus how these border officials are used to working.

To your question about the deeper meaning, the Border Patrol is a law enforcement agency that is supposed to fortify the exterior of the United States and keep people who are unwanted out from entering the country in accordance with the laws and the policies that we have, etc.

Now you have that force of people moving into the center, moving throughout our cities and communities and really creating this impression that

there are outsiders, that there are others, that there are unwanted everywhere among us.

And we see them, in fact, taking into custody American citizens.

We see them taking into custody people who have legal status, stopping people and openly acknowledging that they're stopping people because of their physical appearance, because of their race, because of their accent.

And so it really is sending this message of a sort of enemy within, and I think helping to foster fear and division.

Yeah, a million and a half people lost their temporary legal status from the Biden administration into the Trump administration.

It was interesting to see how Trump campaigned really fudging data and referring to everybody who came into the United States.

You're kidding me, him?

I know, it's a shock.

under the Biden administration as illegal, as unauthorized.

And, you know, it was just such a blatant misrepresentation of the reality when someone has, you know, for better or worse, whether you like this program, someone who's filled out an application, who's been invited to an interview, who's undergone an interview, and then after being vetted, allowed into the country to all of a sudden call them illegal is just such a bait and switch.

But we're also seeing now the Trump administration reopening refugees cases and trying to relitigate vetting that in that case can take years.

So it's not even just people without legal status.

It's sort of anyone that they can figure out a way to claw legal status back from as well.