Waylon Wong

Earlier this week, a former ICE lawyer spoke at a forum held by congressional Democrats.

He said the agency's training program was, quote, deficient, defective and broken.

Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal's office also released documents it said came from ICE whistleblowers.

The documents appear to show that new ICE recruits are getting 250 fewer hours of training than previous cohorts.

In a statement this week, DHS said again that ICE officers are getting the same amount of training as before.

After the break, we look at how ICE is planning to spend over $38 billion on detention centers.

One rural town in Georgia is trying to balance the economic benefits with detention associated with an ICE facility in its own backyard.

So at this point, you might be asking yourself, where are these increasing numbers of people being held?

To help me explain all of this, I'm joined by NPR's Sergio Martinez Beltran.

He covers immigration.

Welcome to The Indicator, Sergio.

The Trump administration has dramatically changed how we as a country approach immigration enforcement.

Remember, there were millions of removals under President Obama, but the majority of those removals were at the border.

The Trump administration is going hard on enforcement in the interior, picking people up in cities like Minneapolis and Chicago.

And DHS has a lot of money right now to follow through on these big ambitions.

Despite the shutdown over the agency's funding, it got a big chunk of change from the so-called Big Beautiful Bill.

And you reported on one of them in Georgia.

Can you tell us about what you found?

Now, this sounds like a story we've heard before.

A small town that has no industries gets a lifeline in the form of a prison or an immigration detention center.