Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is In Conversation from Apple News. I'm Shamita Basu. Today, inside ICE's rapid expansion and where it could go from here. Since President Trump took office just over a year ago, federal immigration enforcement has substantially expanded, with a significantly larger budget and thousands of agents deployed in aggressive operations in cities across the U.S.
Nowhere has that escalation been more visible than in Minneapolis, where federal officers killed two American citizens in January, Renee Good and Alex Preddy, in separate incidents, amplifying already intense public outcry.
Although the Trump administration has been quick to defend the actions of federal agents in previous violent incidents, ruling out excessive use of force even before investigations are conducted, this week, Trump struck a somewhat different tone when asked by Fox News host Will Kane about Preti's death.
I think the whole thing is terrible. I don't like the fact that he was carrying a gun that was fully loaded and he had two magazines with him, and it's pretty unusual. But nobody knows when they saw the gun, how they saw the gun, everything else. Bottom line, it was terrible.
That slight shift in rhetoric was accompanied by a change in leadership. The administration removed U.S. Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino from overseeing the Minneapolis operation and brought in Border Czar Tom Homan to take his place. And on Wednesday, the Department of Homeland Security said the federal agents who shot Pretty and Good had been placed on administrative leave.
President Trump is changing course, shifting his tone. That's Caitlin Dickerson, a staff writer at The Atlantic.
I think part of that is him taking a look at the video of these two most violent incidents and also just hearing from lots of people who are calling into question these narratives and him in real time trying to figure out the best way to proceed to try to hold on to his power and the support that he has.
Kaitlyn won a Pulitzer Prize for her coverage of family separations under the first Trump administration, and she's been closely following ICE's activity through the years and especially the changes over the last 12 months.
I wanted to sit down with Kaitlyn to get her perspective on how we got here, what's happening inside ICE and Border Patrol today, and what these latest developments could mean going forward. When we spoke earlier this week, I started by asking her how to understand these recent shifts from Trump.
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Chapter 2: How has ICE's budget and operations changed since the Trump administration?
He was not somebody who was personally passionate about immigration enforcement to the extent that he was going to hang his career on it. You know, Trump began to embrace immigration enforcement when he saw that speeches Stephen Miller had written for him in 2016 moving forward were were very popular at his rallies.
He was getting a huge response from people who'd come to watch him talk about his policy agenda. And so he moved closer and closer to this issue of immigration as he saw that it was helping him win support and win power. And I think that's the same reason why we're seeing the modulation of the message that's happening now.
because we have video and photo evidence of the harshest versions of this enforcement campaign, and they're incontrovertible. And he can see the public questioning these efforts and is responding in kind.
Well, let's take a step back and talk about ICE as an agency. What was ICE created to do originally, and how different does it look today?
So to talk about the history of ICE, quickly go back to 9-11 and a terrorist attack that shook the nation. And the Bush administration decided they had to do whatever they could to prevent another such attack. A 9-11 commission that was formed came up with this idea of a Department of Homeland Security. So DHS was created for the first time.
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Chapter 3: What incidents in Minneapolis have raised public outcry against ICE?
And within it, this new federal agency, ICE, was established at the same time. Since then, the mission has been the same, but there's this disconnect that has existed throughout this period, where, again, DHS and, by proxy, ICE were created to prevent a future terrorist attack, and yet ICE's work has always involved...
not focusing on terrorism and counterterrorism, but focusing on arresting and deporting immigrants in the United States without legal status. 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.
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Chapter 4: How has President Trump's rhetoric about ICE shifted recently?
And you mentioned Greg Bovino there, who up until recently was commander at large for Border Patrol. How does Border Patrol click into this story, fit in with ICE? They're distinct agencies.
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.
And so border patrol officers are used to operating with more freedom when it comes to search and seizure, when it comes to detaining people. And we've also seen that it's an agency that has more of a history of violence, frankly, of bad conditions inside detention centers. I've reported on some really, really troubling conditions in border facilities specifically.
Because this is an agency that's used to dealing with people who don't tend to be English speakers, don't tend to have legal representation, don't really have the ability to defend themselves in addition to having fewer rights and protections legally.
So to have those officers move into American cities, dealing with a much different population, I think is also a big part of why this immigration enforcement push has been so intense and looked so different from what the public is used to.
And to go back to ICE for a moment, Who are these agents? What do we know about recruitment efforts, the types of people who are now carrying out this work on the ground in these operations?
We don't know a lot about these new recruits, nor I think does the Trump administration. So what we know is that. Going into the Trump administration, ICE had about 7,000 deportation officers on the ground. They claim to now have hired 12,000 more people, doing so by offering big pay bumps, signing bonuses up to $50,000. And through these campaigns that I mentioned that make overtures to ICE.
Everything from patriotism to outright white supremacy and trying to recruit people as quickly as possible because the administration has described hiring as critical to be able to carry out its deportation goals. As part of that, though, the vetting for new officers has been limited significantly. So training for new ICE officers is now less than half the time that it once was.
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Chapter 5: What is the historical context of ICE's creation and its evolving mission?
And the Supreme Court obviously has a conservative majority that has thus far mostly favored what the administration is trying to do, whether that's related to immigration or not. But until then, yes, federal courts... and I think will continue to push back against some of these more blatant and really obvious violations of constitutional rights and of legal precedent.
You know, as someone who is paying attention to what's been happening in this sphere and this agency's actions almost around the clock, I'm sure it feels like for you, what should people be paying attention to that isn't making it to the top headlines? Right.
So I wrote a story called Hundreds of Thousands of Anonymous Deportees because I realized that it was as if individual cases were becoming household names, individual people who'd been picked up by ICE and who were viewed as especially sympathetic, but who also had access to national media, had a spokesperson who was willing to come forward.
But I noticed that people seem to be thinking of them as unique when, in fact, if you spend a day in immigration court, as I did, you will see that they're everywhere, that people who've been in the United States for decades, who have no criminal record, who are beloved members of their community, either because they're active in their church or they're business owners or they've been their boss's greatest employee for 20 years.
These folks are going through immigration court every day. Most of them are going through court without a lawyer, which makes them far less likely to win their cases.
I saw people who are being removed after all these decades in the United States and all these local community ties that they'd established because they simply didn't have the ability to be represented by a lawyer to try to fight back against their case. And they weren't getting the attention that these other individual cases were. So I think
The administration is adding to this kind of myopic view of the enforcement campaign in that they're talking about one particular city at a time. You know, first it was Chicago, then it was Los Angeles, then it was New Orleans, now it's Minneapolis. ICE is working like gangbusters across the country.
And so it's really important to not forget that what's happening in Minneapolis is likely happening elsewhere too, and that we're just not seeing it. I would say that's something I think people should keep in mind.
I want to return to the idea about public outrage and public opinion. Can you speak more to that? And I think it might even help people who are listening right now who have felt like they are sitting and watching and feeling a bit far away from all of this or a little disconnected from all of this.
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