Caitlin Dickerson

And those directors are the people who are overseeing the officers carrying out these deportations, talking to them on a daily basis, communicating quotas and guidelines.

And we've seen a significant number of those field office directors taken off of their duties and replaced with officials from the Border Patrol.

I think that's really significant because the Border Patrol in general, reputationally, is viewed even within the Department of Homeland Security as a tougher and wild, wild west almost type of environment that they tend to work in.

But also there are legal differences.

What people's rights are at the border are different from their rights within the interior of the country.

So the border has been relatively, compared to the past, empty since Trump took office.

And so you have a lot of border officials who are available and have been detailed to American cities to support ICE.

And I think that you're seeing the difference in the way that they're used to working in these interactions that we're watching in American cities.

Border Patrol officials operate in a different constitutional zone than

Border Patrol officials have a lot more freedom when it comes to how they stop and question people, what source of information they can access.

Very different from the Fourth Amendment protections that we're used to in the interior of the country.

And I think some of the differences that we're seeing in how interior arrests look now versus how they did in the past may simply come down to training.

So I don't think the lesson is that the changes in numbers of people crossing the border is solely due to policy.

I hear what you're saying.

I'm very familiar with this debate.

And I think that circumstances outside the United States and outside American policy are very relevant.

I think

A lot of times missing from that conversation is acknowledgement of the fact that there was a global pandemic and an incredible pent-up demand for crossing borders given the way that international economies struggled so much.

You know, the U.S.

recovered better than any country in the world economically.