Ezra Klein

It is hard to keep the scale of what the Trump administration is building in your mind all at once.

There is so much more happening than what is recorded on viral video clips.

So I want to talk to someone who has been tracking it.

Caitlin Dickerson is a journalist at The Atlantic.

She's been covering immigration closely since Trump's first term.

She won a Pulitzer Prize in 2023 for reporting on Trump's family separation policy.

Asked her on the show to walk me through as clearly as she could what this new infrastructure looks like, how it fits together, how it is being administered, what it is being used to do right now, and what that might mean for the future.

As always, my email, Ezra Clancho at NYTimes.com.

Kaitlin Dickerson, welcome to the show.

So I want to begin with some of the pieces of the immigration enforcement we have now.

I think the agency people have heard the most about in the last year is ICE.

What was ICE under Joe Biden and how is it different now?

I want to

pick up on something you said there, which is that many of the videos we're seeing, many of the fine clashes we're seeing are staged to be that way.

Something I've been tracking often with the Trump administration is the way it uses spectacle as policy, spectacle as message.

Oftentimes, this is less true in immigration, but oftentimes they're not changing rules so much as they are doing things, making sure the thing spreads virally, memetically, so people understand that this government is different.

Things are different now.

And I'd be curious to hear, and probably from maybe some of these past conversations you're having with former ICE officials, what's

what they make of the propaganda, what they make of the videos, what they make of the clips, what they make of the visual spectacle being constructed around it all.

Who is ICE now?