The Staggering Scale of Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Crackdown
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With every norm-busting move, with every boundary-busting decision, you get this debate around Donald Trump. Is it authoritarianism now? Has the nature of the American state finally changed into something else? It's not going to be that clean. There's no one moment where we phase from one thing to another. But I think what we can say, what can't even really be argued, is that the authoritarianism is here. It's just unevenly distributed. But you can see it. You can see it in the video of an ICE officer shooting and killing Renee Goode in Minneapolis. You can see it when you watch a disabled woman dragged out of her car. on her way to a doctor's appointment. You can see it when a family of eight on its way home from a basketball game is tear gassed and needs to give CPR to their six-month-old child.
I was giving them out to mouth and I remember stopping and I said, I will give you all my breath till you get yours back because nobody wants to see their kids like this.
You can see when Border Patrol agents tackle and detain a U.S. citizen who is filming their activities, and then they accuse him of assaulting them. You can see it when masked men walk up to people with brown skin and just ask them to prove that they are American. And you can see it spreading every day, distributing itself more widely to more kinds of people.
— Good morning, everyone. I'm Mark Rooley, police chief of the city of Brooklyn Park.
— In Minnesota, local law enforcement officials held a press conference to announce that their own officers were being racially profiled by federal immigration agents.
— We started hearing from our police officers the same complaints as they fell victim to this while off duty. Every one of these individuals is a person of color who has had this happen to them.
But we are at the beginning of this. We are one year into this administration. And now, thanks to the unprecedented $170 billion windfall from immigration enforcement and Trump's one big, beautiful bill, the administration has essentially a blank check to build the police state of its dreams. 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.
Thanks for having me.
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?
So ICE is responsible for immigration enforcement within the interior of the country, going after people who've made it across the border, are living in American cities, and who are subject to deportation. That's who they were under the Biden administration, and that's who they are now. The difference is how they go about that work. So really, since the Ford era, we've had some level of priorities that immigration enforcement officials are supposed to follow for who they should go after versus who they shouldn't.
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