Air Date: 8-8-2026

Today we examine the mass deportation machine that's been intentionally designed to inflict suffering, from the conditions inside immigration jails to the reckless actions of ICE agents, and the systematic dismantling of accountability. All of this in service of a blatant demographic engineering program to forcibly Whiten the country.

Full Show Notes

 

Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast.

Today we examine the mass deportation machine that's been intentionally designed to inflict suffering, from the conditions inside immigration jails to the reckless actions of ICE agents, and the systematic dismantling of accountability. All of this in service of a blatant demographic engineering program to forcibly Whiten the country.

For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our Top Takes in about 55 minutes today include

CounterSpin

The Intercept Briefing

Fresh Air

Reveal

and The Majority Report

Then, in the additional, Deeper Dives half of the show, there'll be more in 3 sections;

Section A, Inevitable Brutality

Section B, Designed to Be Unbearable

And Section C, The World Watches & The People Fight Back

And now, on to the show.

in the wake of Johan Sebastian Duran Guerrero's killing by ICE in Maine, itself in the wake of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo's killing by ICE in Texas, you put out a statement that did not call vaguely for reforms to ICE, as I saw some headlines referring to public outrage.

What was the statement you put out actually saying? 

Yeah. 

The statement that we put out was saying that we need ICE out of our streets, that ICE should not be engaging in any removal efforts that they're currently engaged in. And, that entails traffic stops, which were temporarily paused, but that also entails, these deportation removal orders, all these warrants that are being served on foot in these different communities and are also leading to violence and death.

The statement says it's clear that the only way to prevent ICE from killing us in the streets is to remove ICE from the streets. that's a long way stronger than we need to know what they're up to, they need to sometimes testify about things. this is not that. 

Yes, I would agree that we are, we're taking it a step further than we need body-worn cameras and, we need more oversight.

Those things are important too, and they may be more easily attained potentially, although I think we're seeing that even those kind of minimum restrictions on ICE's conduct are being rejected. so we should ask for, what we think is actually gonna be the biggest deterrent to ICE violence, and we do think that is removing them from street operations.

let me ask you about this particular thing that you also mentioned that I think is being lifted up for people, this shooting into cars business. this seems to be a primary way if you're making these street stops. This is becoming a primary way that ICE ends up harming or killing people.

It's a weird thing, isn't it, to be shooting into vehicles? 

Absolutely. And I would say that's, not something that's been accepted e- even by kind of the most pro-force, ardent members of the law enforcement community for over a decade now. There's been a consensus in the law enforcement community that shooting into vehicles, fleeing vehicles, charging vehicles, whatever it may be, is just so highly dangerous that there are few, if any, situations that justify it.

Not only dangerous to the person who's driving the vehicle, but bystanders, passengers, and law enforcement themselves. And so the universally accepted or national standard practices around shooting into vehicles is that there are very few situations where it is justified and where policy should permit it.

most stories that I have seen note or any way suggest that the killing of Guerrero, of Araujo, while they're horrific, are not outliers, that they fit in a broader pattern of violence, recklessness, and racism, from ICE. In your recent conversation with Sonali Kolhatkar on Rising Up, I understood you to suggest that we hold an even bigger picture about policing in this country and specifically that we'd not set up a framing that says ICE bad, regular police good, I, I know you're not saying ICE violence isn't worth the attention it gets, but what are you getting at there? 

Yeah. I think that there's been a real, I think, shift, I'm thinking particularly amongst lawmakers who are, identified Democrats who are on the left, who have really spoke up about the importance of curtailing ICE violence right now, and I think that's o- obviously incredibly important.

but it's a bit myopic in terms of, they're not making those same demands for local law enforcement that are, carrying out similar types of uses of force, similar types of violence and harm against other communities, against their constituents who are, Black Americans, for instance.

And so I think, it's, it needs to be a both/and. This can't be, just a focus on ICE because ICE, they're cops. They are doing what cops do, usually against people who are only suspected of breaking civil laws. but there's a lot of victims, as of local law enforcement violence who, have not committed any crimes or are not even suspected of committing crimes.

And so I think this is very important that we don't reframe some of the violence that ICE has undertaken as being exclusive or specific to federal law enforcement agents because we know three people die as a result of police violence every single day, and those are, largely local police officers that are committing those uses of force.

And it's just useful, just as we can't connect everything to Trump, when particular policies predated Trump, And if we think if there's no more Trump, all of this is gonna disappear, then we've got something fundamentally wrong. It's important to pull out the tactics, the actual behaviors that are problematic, and to disconnect them from a particular agency even, or a particular politician certainly, yeah.

Absolutely. 

the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement, and I can't remember where I saw this, but they said in a statement, quote, "We are always evaluating our procedures to keep our officers safe and criminals off our streets. We will not disclose or discuss law enforcement tactics," close quote.

And I have to ask, what if we had a press corps that would say, "You won't disclose or discuss law enforcement tactics?" wait, wait. Everything comes to a halt. I often balk at transparency as itself a goal. we wanna stop actions, not just, have a peek at them.

But when an agency straight up says, "Oh, we're gonna, not even gonna talk about how we make any of these decisions," that is a, a clanging warning bell to me. 

Yes, I would agree. And, I think, generally we're of the same mind at the National Police Accountability Project that we shouldn't be advocating for transparency's sake.

But transparency is a essential prerequisite for accountability, for reform, for even things like abolition. If we don't understand systems, we really can't improve them. We can't know if they were at issue and causing harm. it really is step one for change, whatever you want that change to look like.

Sure. 

And so at the very least, this is information we should have, and I just did a long spiel about how ICE are just cops, and this is something that we're seeing everywhere. But I would say the way that the DHS and, the agency is functioning right now is really different from what, local law enforcement agencies would even try to get away with.

That lack of transparency around policies themselves, around practices, what is an acceptable practice and what is an acceptable tactic under what circumstances is something that y-y-you wouldn't expect a chief of police or a sheriff to not disclose if asked about it. 

Absolutely. y- the sunshine is necessary, as you say, as a first step.

And, this kind of follows along, but I do wonder, and I wonder this sincerely, how police at every level can lie and lie. and and then bystander video, as more and more is often the case, says no, what their account was absolutely false, and yet they're still treated as reliable sources, not just by news media, but by other institutions.

It just seems to me it's hard to think of other entities that can be caught in lies again and again, and yet each time they come up There's an assumption that they're telling the truth. 

Yeah. I think that is something that's very frustrating in our work at the National Police Accountability Project because you're right, there's data, there's anecdotal examples, about the fact that, law enforcement officers and the agencies that are often protecting them or supporting them, have a history of dishonesty or that they're not more honest than any other witness or not more credible than any other public institution.

And I do think one of the things that is becoming more and more common, post-2020 is that the public, I think, is less willing to accept a police narrative at its face. and that's, doubly for DHS and, what's coming out of the Trump administration about what's happening in these use of force incidents and other things.

And so I would say that I think that even though there are some media sources printing the police press release in full detail and, some institutions saying, this is what the police said," the public, has less and less confidence in police. And I don't know the current rates, but I think in 2021, the last time there was a poll, less than 50% of all Americans said that they trusted the police or felt the police were trustworthy.

And so it'll be interesting to see what current data is and how that data stacks up against, a specific look at confidence in federal law enforcement agencies. 

Within the span of six days, federal immigration agents shot and killed two people, fifty-two-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Texas, and twenty-five-year-old Johan Sebastian Duran Guerrero in Maine.

That brings the total number of people fatally shot by immigration agents in Trump's second term to at least 11. Two more people died in connection with ICE within the last month. A third man, identified this week as a Mexican man on vacation in the US, was struck by a truck after fleeing an encounter in Florida.

A fourth man died in custody in Georgia after his family says he was denied medicine, reported by our former colleague Jose Olivares at The Guardian. Their deaths are not isolated incidents. A new analysis from the ACLU that documented 1,200 ICE incidents last year across eight states finds a pattern of federal immigration enforcement that consistently flouts civil liberties.

Noreen, one of the report's findings that struck me the most was the emphasis on these most recent killings and deaths not being an aberration, but part of a broader systematic pattern, and that the way the US government is conducting immigration enforcement is moving us further away from a liberal democracy and toward authoritarianism.

Can you tell us more about that finding and others from the ACLU report? 

Again and again, ICE and immigration agents that work for ICE are resorting to violence. They are using the threat of violence and actual physical violence in their interactions with people, not because they are facing a specific threat, but just as a default tool, as a way to compel, immediate obedience, as though that is the main tactic they have in understanding how they engage with the public.

And what we saw was that they weren't doing so in a professional way. It wasn't calibrated. It wasn't specific as though they were following a carefully designed protocol. let me give you an example. There was a situation not far from where I live in Maryland, in Hyattsville, Maryland, where a man is pulled from his car.

He is in the traffic intersection being held down. He's being pinned down by the neck by an ICE agent, and that agent fumbles his gun. His gun falls while he's doing this. He grabs the gun, picks it back up, and points it at the crowd that has gathered to watch this. A second agent then moves in on the crown- crowd with his weapon raised as well.

And so you're seeing them act as careless as they are reckless And that is really dangerous because the other thing we found in the report was that 

ICE is now on our streets, at our grocery stores, at our parking lots, even at school playgrounds. 

And that presence there in, masks, in street clothes, with that kind of aggression is changing the nature of daily life in this country when you have to be afraid that when your 15-year, 15-year-old is waiting for the bus, they are brown, that they may be accosted by a masked agent, that they may be questioned about their citizenship.

I've heard about people wearing their identification around their necks because they're so afraid. That is a change in our country, and it's a change for the worse. 

I wanna back up a little here and just remind people of the arc Of this mass deportation project from the beginning of Trump's second term, al- although, it was a feature of his previous administration.

This attack has reached an unprecedented scale since 2025 when Trump entered office for the second time. We saw, as you mentioned, Noreen, masked and uni- identified ICE agents descend on our cities, attacking pro-Palestine students. We saw, as the report notes, the president send the military to cities run by his political opponents, first deploying the National Guard to California to suppress anti-ICE protests, where we also saw a surge of mass federal agents targeting Latinos and grabbing people off the streets at gas stations, grocery stores, churches, and so on.

We started the year with immigration agents flooding Minneapolis and killing two protesters and shooting another who survived. Although the killings of those protesters, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, really drew national attention to this issue in a new way, you all documented just how widespread this kind of action from immigration agents has been over the past year.

And while we've covered a lot of that at The Intercept, namely the targeting of pro-Palestine students by ICE, ICE has been doing this kind of thing in ordinary neighborhoods across the country. 52 people have also died in ICE custody since Trump reentered the White House, putting the mortality rate of deaths in ICE custody at its highest level in over a decade, more than doubling that rate since he started his second term.

That's according to a new report from Physicians for Human Rights and Human Rights Watch. Naina, can you talk a little bit about why you think January was a turning point in terms of people paying attention to this? 

Sure. I'll just start by saying, the Trump administration right now may have moved away from the more theatrical displays of force that characterized those earlier operations in places like Minneapolis and Chicago.

But just as you say, the basic objective has not changed, and that is a fixation on increasing detention and deportation simply for the sake of numbers. This is an administration that has made clear that sheer volume is their goal. What we saw in January was, a lot of Americans waking up to the fact that this is the first time in US history that we are seeing the immigration system taken to its extreme, and sometimes beyond its legal limits, within American communities, against long-standing immigrant neighbors and those that stand up for those neighbors.

In other words, while in the past we have had harsh or punitive Or restrictive immigration policies at our border, this is the immigration enforcement system used to the extreme within the interior of the United States in our communities. And- ... folks seeing that in their streets, this kind of indiscriminate enforcement driven by sheer quotas and numbers, is a wake-up call.

And that, that includes for folks who voted in support of this president and mass deportation. We've heard stories reported early on of communities in places like Missouri that voted in large numbers for the president, who are suddenly out on the streets calling for the return of their favorite local business owner and soccer mom who was swept away by arrest and detention.

In other words, a lot of the protests and pushback we've seen is both because of the extreme nature of these agenda, but also who it's targeting, and those are longstanding members of our communities who pose absolutely no public safety threat. And I think we're seeing a lot more Americans than ever before say, "Wait a minute.

Why do the laws subject these people to this kind of extreme response? That doesn't make sense." 

This is for both of you. I wanna talk about the people who have been dying in ICE custody, which often does not get as much attention as the shootings. What is happening to people when they enter these facilities?

Look, the immigration detention facility had a record of endemic abuse long before the Trump administration, and now what we're seeing is the administration sweeping in, again, people who largely pose no public safety threat, who have no prior criminal convictions, who are being put into a system that no longer records where they are in the system so that family members and lawyers are unable to locate or find their loved ones.

we're talking about a system where now under the Trump administration, the vast majority of people locked up in these inhumane facilities don't even have a right to a court hearing in the immigration system to make a case for their release. The administration is rapidly expanding the use of mandatory detention so that people who would have a good case for release don't get to make that, and that means that then folks are stuck inside.

And sometimes when US citizens or folks with lawful status get swept into these detention facilities, it can take weeks before they're able to show that they shouldn't even be there because they don't have access to that basic kind of due process. And then finally, again, the, the endemic abusive conditions of this system predate the Trump administration, but this administration has taken that to an all-new extreme.

And at this point, we're seeing an average of one death every eight days out of the immigration detention facilities, across the country, and the kinds of conditions we're hearing about include starvation, not just medical neglect, but intentional medical abuse, people not being able to receive life-saving medical treatments, pregnant women, not being given the support they need.

this is extreme inhumanity, and that is what folks are facing when they go inside. And it's a lot harder to shine a light on those abuses, because we don't have viral video footage like we do when we see some of these shootings and killings in our streets. 

If you've ever been to one of these detention facilities, you get a sense just of the geography that's at play.

The geography of a detention facility is that sometimes you're driving hours from the nearest city. These are in the woods. They are in areas that no one is supposed to be able to reach. The Trump administration has a design. They have a plan. They want to put people in detention sites that are remote, where lawyers have a harder time getting access, where journalists are not gonna visit, and they don't want people to be knocking on the doors and finding out what's going on inside.

They don't want congressional staff and members of Congress to be there either because what's happening inside is truly frightening. It is straight out of the most dystopian novel, which is that you go inside these detention facilities, and you have no ability to reach back out into the world and get that lawyer to help you navigate the system or even talk to an ICE officer and say, "I have no idea what's gonna happen to me."

And the most tragic cases are the ones where people need something as basic as their heart medication, and without it, they will die, and they can't get answers. They can't get seen by a doctor. There is just no way to reach out to people to say, "This is happening to me." That is why we're seeing the record number of deaths in ICE detention because once you go in, you are stuck there in the most nightmarish kind of way.

We hear from people, not as much as we would if people actually had working phones in all these detention facilities. The ACLU just published a report with Human Rights Watch about Camp Montana, the largest detention facility that's on a military base. The conditions there are appalling. It really just strikes at your conscience to think that people are living this kind of nightmarish condition where they don't think they're ever gonna make it back out of these facilities, and that, again, is what the Trump administration wants to do.

There was an ICE official who last year said, "We're gonna create the Amazon Prime of deportations." They want to treat people like they are not human beings, and that is partly why they put them as, in these detention sites. It's to be able to get them out of public view quickly and deported quickly. That is just anathema to our Constitution, our entire system.

under our laws, detention is not supposed to be used as widely as it is being used. It's meant to effectuate a final order of removal. That doesn't mean that it's meant to be used as punishment or to deter people from coming here or to terrorize people into self-deporting, but we know that's the Trump administration's aim.

At this point, there are more than sixty thousand people being held in ICE detention centers across the country.

a few months ago, it was as high as seventy thousand. to give listeners a sense just of an, an immediate context for that, when Trump first took office in January of twenty twenty-five, that detention population was around thirty-nine thousand. So it's exploded, in the last year and a half. and it's, coincided with, unsurprisingly, a whole host of horrors that have been reported from inside these detention centers and all kinds of statistics that, that demonstrate just how dangerous the conditions inside have become, the most obvious of which is that deaths in ICE detention are way up.

There have been fifty-two since Trump took office a second time. the comparable numbers that we've seen are things that haven't ha- you know, haven't emerged in decades. and then when you look even more specifically at those deaths, a significant number of them are suicides, to give you a sense, of course, of just how utterly desperate and horrified people are inside detention.

You were able to get, a lens into this, detention center in El Paso, the largest so far, through, some of those who have spent time in there. And your piece opens with a man named Ray, who is originally from Cuba. Tell us about him. Who is he, and why had he been checking in with ICE for years as a condition of staying in this country?

Yeah. Ray came to the United States in 1994, along with 30,000 other Cubans who fled the country that year alone and came on makeshift rafts. It was known as the, the rafters crisis. and he spent, when he was first interdicted by the US Coast Guard, in 1994, he spent about 11 months, on the US Naval base, Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, before he was eventually released to live with his father, who had emigrated to the United States in 1980.

His father lived in El Paso, and the conditions there with his father grew tense. He had arrived with his half-brother, who wasn't his father's biological son. There was tension between the two of them, and eventually Ray and his brother leave his father's house, live in a church in El Paso for a very brief period, then relocate to Austin.

And before long, Ray finds himself back in Miami, where a, a number of people he knew from Havana had begun to start an American life for themselves. and for those years, you're talking about someone who, in, in Ray's case, is in his early 20s, has been overwhelmed by everything that's happened to him.

He got into trouble, and eventually got arrested, for his involvement in a robbery, served a five-year prison term in Florida, and then was released. And after his release, because the Cuban government didn't have any sort of relationship with the United States, it, it didn't accept, Cuban immigrants whom the United States would've wanted maybe to deport.

And as a result, he was authorized to continue to live in the United States on the condition that eventually he start to check in with a local ICE office as part of a, a program that ICE had, which essentially recognized that it was impossible for ICE, to detain and deport everyone who might be in some sort of complicated standing with immigration law.

And so for years, i- including after he relocated to El Paso in 2014, he would every several months check in with his local ICE officer, and, more or less live an ordinary life. And I should say that, for years, e- even before the second Trump administration comes into office, Ray's friends would always give him a hard time and say, "You are the most naive person on the planet- to think that, you just keep checking in and nothing's gonna happen, they're never gonna try to arrest you. And he was always really principled in his response to them. He said, "Look, we made mistakes in our past, and the only way to outrun those mistakes is to try to do things the right way."

And so that was what was happening in his life when, in 2016, he gets married to someone who he meets in El Paso. that woman had then a one-year-old son who Ray adopts as his own. he and the son become very close. and they have a life together as a family until October of 2025, when at one of these routine check-ins that he'd been doing for decades at this point, he gets detained and from there gets sent to Camp East Montana.

and that's really where the nightmare begins for him. 

So okay, so Ray is detained. he's in, this, this, tent city almost, at Fort Bliss, and he is immediately alarmed at what he saw. this is a man, as you said, had been at Guantanamo after, after fleeing Cuba, so he has seen, the inside of one of these places.

What did he see in those first hours that really worried him? 

Yeah, he's a really-- he has a really interesting perspective on all of this because, both because of the experience he had at Guantanamo and because of the experience he had in federal prison. and so he's used to a, a general sense of order.

this is a guy who's a survivor. This is a guy who's tough, who's been through a lot. he's not expecting to be treated in a, an overly sensitive way, but he's expecting there to be s- a certain baseline sense of order and regulation to the experience in detention, and that from the very start is clearly not the case at Camp Peace Montana.

And so it immediately sets off kind of an alarm in his head that there's something off here. So f- so for instance, he arrives there, he spends his first night with twenty other guys sleeping essentially on the floor of what is a kind of de facto holding cell before they're then transferred to these individual tents.

Each tent has maybe a dozen or so units in it. and, the first thing he says to the guards when he's taken into custody is, "Listen, I've got, I've got a medical condition. I've got diabetes, I've got high blood pressure. I was recently hospitalized, a couple of months before in New Mexico.

I had sepsis. doctors had to insert a catheter. my health s- situation is very delicate, and all I ask is that you check in with my wife, who has access to my medication at home." And the first thing they said to him in response to that v- very straightforward expression of concern about his own medical situation was, "Y- yeah, we're not gonna do that."

and so he's already beginning to become uneasy. And then, over the next couple of weeks, not only is he systematically denied his medication, even as he starts to feel increasingly sick, but he also sees other people in his tent being mistreated. Someone, for example, who comes in a wheelchair who can't sit in a top-- who can't r- make it to a top bunk, but at the time that this man comes wheeling in, doesn't, the, the, the, the beds are all occu-- all the bottom bunks are occupied, and someone just throws him a mattress, and the guy sleeps on the floor because the guards don't bother to try to, improve the situation.

Ray is seeing all of this stuff and is, is most alarmed by the level of chaos. and that I think, above all for him, given his experience, was I think the, the indicator that something here was awry. 

Abnormal, but would he go so far to say that the conditions were inhumane? 

we haven't even spoken about the conditions themselves, which, yes, I think objectively speaking are inhumane.

By the time Ray gets there, it's October of twenty twenty-five. It should be said about the facility before Ray gets there that a, a large number of detainees who were held at Camp East Montana were being held there w-while construction was going on at the facility itself. And in August, September, there are people-- and we have, thanks to the American Civil Liberties Union, which took a bunch of declarations early on, we have testimony from detainees who describe essentially there being dust coming into the tents, people coughing, people not being able to breathe, people getting sick, the water working sporadically, toilet and sewage water leaking into the living area.

the, the toilets and the eating and sleeping area are all in a small confined space inside these tents. And leaks from the bathroom are seeping into where detainees are eating and sleeping. in the early days, the outside recreation area isn't set up yet, so people aren't allowed outside at all.

For 

weeks. there's-- For, for weeks on end. the, the phone booths or visitation booths where people are supposed to be able to meet with lawyers and family members aren't set up, and so people are completely cut off from the outside world. The tablets that, that detainees are meant to use to communicate with lawyers and family members don't work.

So people are essentially being held incommunicado in conditions that are, increasingly alarming. medical care, as a general matter, doesn't exist. one after another person described to me essentially that anytime you had any sort of physical problem, if you complained loudly about it, they'd give you Advil, but that was the extent of it.

No one got seen by a doctor. People with medical conditions who needed medication, with chronic conditions were essentially ignored. there weren't, there w- there was infrequent cleaning of the tents themselves, and so a lot of the detainees had to do it themselves, sometimes with their own clothes.

So there's testimony from detainees who are wiping up, sort of fetid bathroom water with their own underwear. every manner of horror. and, we can get into this, but essentially These, these problems evolve or devolve, depending on how you look at it, over the course of several months.

By the time Ray gets there in October, four of the five tents at Camp East Montana have been built. and so there's still construction going on, but it's not as notable for him, say, as it was for someone who arrived there in August when it essentially was an open construction site. 

Right. Okay.

yeah, we're going to get into that, but I'm just thinking everything that you described, this, this isolation, this medical neglect, it really lands on really your argument in, of this entire piece that these conditions aren't incidental because a former senior ICE official told you that the government's goal is to make detention look and feel so bad that people leave.

It sounds like suffering is the strategy. 

I think that's exactly right, and I think that's been the case all acro- a- all across the country and it's actually had a demonstrable effect on the rate at which people abandon cases. a- and this is well beyond, say, Camp East Montana, although it's obviously especially true in Camp East Montana.

there was a, a woman who, whom we'll, I'm sure we'll talk about who, named Lydia, who was also detained at Camp East Montana, who basically described that half of the women in her unit eventually agreed to their own deportation because they just couldn't stand the conditions anymore.

and that, of course, is true all across the country and, different groups who-- Human Rights Watch has a, a, an excellent report documenting the rates at which people in the New York tri-state area, for instance, have abandoned their legal cases, because the conditions where they're being held are so inhumane.

but that's very much the idea. and one of the interesting kind of trends that you hear in talking to people who've been held in ICE detention during the current administration is for all of the neglect, for all of the general mistreatment, and for the general absence of, ICE officers on the scene...

for example, at Camp East Montana, one of the strangest realities of being there is you're actually interacting most commonly with independent contractors who have different jobs because there are all these subcontractors providing different services at the facility. So actually speaking to someone who is an ICE official who can give you information about your case is difficult.

But the trend is that when those officials appear, they appear to do one thing. It's to say to people, "Okay, who's ready to leave? Who's ready to end this?" and it's, it's very much part of the- 

The larger- ... 

the design. 

Yeah, of what, of what the administration is doing. 

It's a hot summer day in Lake Worth Beach. Around Lake Avenue, bakery windows fill with fresh pan dulce. Outside the mercado, conversations move easily between English, Spanish, and the indigenous Mayan languages of Guatemala. Pickup trucks loaded with lawn equipment head out for another day of work, all of this just six miles from the president's home, Mar-a-Lago.

Families have been building lives here for decades. Many first arrived fleeing Guatemala's civil war. Then brothers, sisters, cousins, parents followed. Little by little, this stretch of South Florida became one of the country's largest Guatemalan communities. It's home. That's how Elisa Perez sees 

it. This might seem rude, but it's like pura Chapines in, Spanish 'cause I only see, a lot of Guatemalans.

The Perez kids have only ever known Lake Worth. They are mischievous and loving. First, there's Elisa, the laid back responsible one. Then 18-year-old Jessica, who wears her heart on her sleeve. Romeo, who is quiet but quick-witted. And 13-year-old Cynthia, the baby of the family who's always helping whenever she can.

Since their mom has been in detention in Eloy, Arizona, thousands of miles away, phone calls are their lifeline. 

Mami, ...</ Bye, Mommy, love you. 

Bye, 

Mommy, love 

you. Bye, Mom. Bye, Mom. 

Bye, Mommy. Anybody who knows the Perez kids knows that they adore their mother. We ask Elisa what Olga is like. 

Dang. I never really think about, 

'cause that's my mom. if you know her. I don't know. Very loving. everyone loves her, my whole family members. She's very open-minded, too. She's very 21st century. She's up-to-date. She's al- she's always saying, "I'm lit," and throwing up peace signs. 

Olga worked in an organization called the Guatemalan Maya Center.

She was always there. She'd bring homemade meals, and she was a translator. Olga speaks English and Spanish, and she also speaks Mam, an indigenous Mayan language. She interpreted for families at hospitals, schools, and has even helped detectives solve crimes against victims who only spoke Mam. 

It was the fall of 2025 when Elisa's parents were taken into immigration custody.

Her father, Romel Sr., was detained first and sent to Alligator Alcatraz. Olga stepped in to keep the landscaping business going. For a while, the family managed. They worked during the day, called Romel Sr. every chance they got, and tried to hold everything together. Then one morning, two days before Thanksgiving, everything changed again.

We were heading to work, and I was like, "Oh, I'm gonna take I95 'cause it's faster." So we're, like, getting to the next location, and then they stopped us. 

Florida's highways had become a danger zone for undocumented families. The Perez family had talked about the risk. If they were ever stopped, Elisa would hand over only her own ID.

Romeo Jr. would record everything on his phone. They'd gone over the plan again and again. 

I just remember after he had started banging on the window, telling me that I have to put the windows down so my mom and my uncle can give their IDs. And then from there, I blacked out 'cause it was traumatic.

Elisa means that in that moment she couldn't remember what she was supposed to do. Her mother and uncle were being questioned. The officer was talking. 

I remember him joking about Romeo, ha, he doesn't have a proper ID. Maybe I should take him, too." So I was like, "Bro, don't. You're joking about all of this while you're taking my parents.

you already took my dad." I had told him, too. I was like, "You took my dad, and now you're taking my mom." 

For Elisa, the hardest part wasn't watching her mother being taken away. It was going home afterward. The truck was still full of landscaping equipment, and her siblings still needed dinner. The next morning, customers still expected their lawns to be cut.

There was no one else to take over, so Elisa did. For months, Elisa has been the one taking care of everyone else, but there's someone looking after her, Mari Blanco. She's known Elisa since she was a little kid. 

She was five years old, and she was in her after-school program. We still tease her about this because she was just the cutest and smartest little girl.

Today, Mari runs the Guatemalan Maya Center, where Olga worked. As Guatemalan immigrants became targets for deportation, Mari says the center's work changed. Every week, more parents began showing up carrying folders, birth certificates, emergency contacts, power of attorney forms, preparing for the possibility that one day they wouldn't make it home.

Because at this point, it's become almost inevitable in, in our community. We know it's not a matter of if they get separated. It's a matter of when. 

Just before Olga was detained, Mari pushed her to update her power of attorney paperwork. 

We kept delaying it and delaying it, and one day I said, "Olga, we just need to get this done.

we need to get this done." So we only changed that power of attorney a few days before she was taken. 

Elisa had to run the household and the business, and Mari became the person schools called, doctors called, the kids called, their godmother. The kids spent hours at the center after school, hanging around the offices, teasing each other, and pulling the staff into whatever drama came up next.

One afternoon, as a joke, the kids decide to put Elisa on trial. 

I'm HR right now, okay? Now, I'm gonna give you guys a 15-minute window to give me all the complaints, and then I will decide. 

I can vouch for them 'cause they're useless. 

Thinks other siblings are useless. 

You guys always say how we should listen to Elisa.

She works so hard. I do the same thing. I'm expected to clean. 

What's your complaint? 

That why should she get special treatment when I do more than her? 

Okay, no special treatment. 

I win? 

No, I'm noting, I'm noting- I win. Why is that the first thing you say, "I win"? 'Cause I'm, 

really 

tired today. 

Okay. 

No, I'm not saying nothing because I'll get in.

Elisa hasn't paid me. Ch- oh, child labor. 

Child labor. 

Can I get that one? 

Child labor. 

Where's the child labor? I can't find it. For 15 minutes, the room fills with jokes the kind only siblings can make. For a little while, they're exactly what they should be, kids.

In January, the kids prepared for a real trial, Olga's. She had filed a petition to stay in the country and to have her removal to Guatemala canceled. The kids were ready to testify. 

We are staying here in this same room. Yeah. You're all staying here, and yeah, I brought you guys tissues. I 

need- This first hearing is remote, so the kids have gathered at the center.

They're in a room usually used for conference calls. Olga appears by video from detention in Eloy. Friends and coworkers, even a Lake Worth local official, are there to show their support and testify on Olga's behalf. The kids crowd around a single laptop, hoping that by the end of the day, the judge will let their mom stay in the country.

Mari gives them one last pep talk. 

Basically, you're just gonna be honest, okay? it's nothing that you guys don't actually feel. Wait. Okay, babies, good luck. I love you guys. 

Love you. As the kids wait for the hearing to start, I ask Mari how they've been doing. 

Yeah, the kids came over last night, and I gave them all hugs.

And Elisa said, "Oh, I'm dirty." But she was holding back tears the entire time I was talking to her. And I said, "Okay, baby, I just thought you needed a hug." And she's, "No, I'm good." And then later she texted me, and she says, "I w- I'm coming over. I think I could use that hug right now." 

In the courtroom, one case after another gets heard, and then right when it's time for Olga to come forward, the judge says time has run out and calls for a postponement.

The kids fall apart. Elisa storms out the front door of the center. Jessica starts hyperventilating. Cynthia, Romeo, and the staff rush to her side. 

Three, and release. deep. Come on, mama, you got this. You got this. you're doing great. You're doing great. Now try to relax your body. It 

takes 10 minutes for Jessica to calm down.

By then, Cynthia has become quiet, and Romeo distracts himself by playing video games on his phone. Loosen up. I'm here. And eventually, Jessica's able to talk to her father, who calls to check in on the kids from detention.

Why did it have to be you and Mom?

And Mari leaves to find Elisa. 

Elisa's crashing out. Where is she? You saw her leave? she crossed the street? Oh, there she is.

Sorry, baby. I'm sorry

I'm so sorry

It was the first of many times that either the government or the judge would postpone Olga's hearing, and each time, the disappointment cuts deep. The uncertainty weighs on Alisa. Sometimes after work, with whatever energy that the sun hasn't sapped from her, she takes the short drive from her home to Lake Osborne Park One evening, the sun is still out and reflecting off the water.

People are walking their dogs, bikes zip past. It's peaceful. Elisa's been coming here for years. She tells me that she used to come here for exercise. Now she comes for something else. 

Can you show me your crying tree? 

it's just this one, like right here I sit in between the trees or back there. so whenever my siblings stress me out, instead of crashing out at home, I just crash out here, crying.

Or, like, when my mom first got caught and my uncle, I blamed myself a lot, so I would come here, and then I would, pray to God. I was like, "Why? Why you took my mom?" 

Elisa tells me that this is her refuge away from her house and away from the people who need her to be okay. She also tells me that this spot holds so many childhood memories.

I would skateboard. My dad would play soccer at John Prince. my mom used to sell Gatorades at the park where my dad would play soccer, so we were always outside. 

In the last seven months, Elisa has gone from being a daughter to being something more like a single mother. She knows she has to be there for her younger siblings, be witness to the milestones in their lives, because their lives keep moving on.

This is from St. Louis Public Radio, and this just hit me last night, in the heart. I couldn't... Another horrifying story of what ICE What deportations actually mean in practice and how so many people are coming to this country not because of our robust social safety net, 'cause I've got news for you, compared to European countries, it's pathetic.

They can't get access to Social Security, they can't get access to Medicare, if they're not citizens. They can't get access to Medicaid. In fact, immigrants who pay taxes but aren't full citizens with those benefits pay more into our social programs for us. They subsidize our social programs while being in the sub-citizen status, while oftentimes having their wages garnished and stolen from them.

Wage theft is the number one form of theft in this country, and it's by bosses who exploit workers like this oftentimes who have fewer protections. And so yeah, many people don't have economic opportunity in their home countries, in large part due to US intervention to overthrow socialist governments in Latin and South America, et cetera.

But a, a lot of time people are fleeing literal political violence, and gang violence too as a result of those same systemic problems. And this story was just horrifying. "Overland couple shot dead in Guatemala after local ICE stop led to deportations," and this is what happened. "An overland couple who had recently returned to Guatemala was found bound and shot to death in a sugarcane field.

Nixon Giovanni Perez Paz and Glendi Marisol Gonzalez de la Cruz were killed weeks after Gonzalez de la Cruz self-deported to be with her husband, who was deported by the US, Cus- Immigration and Customs Enforcement last year. Their 14-month-old daughter, Giovanni, was found crying beside her mother's body in southern Guatemala.

The child shown s- signs of dehydration and was taken to a medical center where she is recovering according to Guatemalan news outlet ABC Stereo. Guatemala's National Civil Police told local news outlets that Perez Paz, 43, and Gonzalez de la Cruz, 25, had been gagged and had their hands and feet bound.

Authorities said both showed signs of physical trauma. Prosecutors are investigating the killings." quotes from their family here. This is about what happened, right below this image, this paragraph. "In the early hours one morning last April, Perez-Paz was driving his 51-year-old brother, Ronaldo Perez-Paz, to their roofing jobs when they were stopped near their home by ICE.

A group of agents exited an un- exited an unmarked vehicle and swarmed them, taking them out of their white work van and later putting them in handcuffs and shackles, before taking them, to the Phelps County Jail, Ronaldo Perez-Paz told St. Louis Public Radio on Monday from his home in Guatemala."

And I just wanna point out the white van, the stoppage on the way to a construction job is exactly what killed Lorenzo down in Houston, that example that I just mentioned, almost to the T, these details, including working with his brother The agents didn't explain much other than telling him there wasn't a warrant out for his arrest, but they were being arrested for entering the country illegally and that they would be deported.

The two men were in the country without legal status, fleeing violence and poverty from the Central American country, said Ronaldo Perez-Paz. An ICE spokesperson confirmed the stop and arrest in Overland when they located and arrested Perez-Paz for being unlawfully pleasant in the- present in the United States.

The spokesperson alleged he was convicted twice for drunk driving in Overland and put on four years probation, but no records appear in the Missouri court database backing the claim. They also pointed to a 2010 open container charge Perez-Paz received in Palm Blee- Beach, Florida, an ordinance violation that prosecutors dropped.

So this is what they're saying is- Was ... the reason to break up this family. So the mother, his wife, by the way, had to self-deport to be reunited with her husband. They're using a false claim about his crimes, about his drunk driving. No records are available. but I guess he drank a beer on vacation in Florida openly.

God forbid. when I was 19, I was arrested for underage d- driving. I should be... I guess I should be thrown in a gulag. 

I got an open container here in New York first week I was ever here. 

d- off you go, back to, Poland, Matt- But we're- ... where you originally came from, 

your family. This is because, there is a disconnect, and, our media, the, and the supporters of, the common sense, harder boardened, have contributed to this misunderstanding, which is that, ICE is going after bad guys.

So they're actually not. They're going after whoever the fuck, comes up on their, Peter Thiel database. And they're... Regardless of if they don't have anything, and when they are arrested, and people have a problem with it, they're like, they make up some horseshit about a DUI. Because they, the people actually don't support this, this just send them back type of thing to the extent that, the...

Y- even some people in the Democratic Party, but most people on the right, suggest that is just common sense. Because actually when you look at it a little bit closer, beyond just, the dumb, we gotta do something about all these crossings," is the brutality. And people are actually, would actually just be okay if the Democrats, when they have the power, pass the fucking amnesty instead of waiting for the Rep- Republicans to, come to terms on this.

There will be probably terror attacks, because guess what? Yeah, we have a bunch of white supremacists in this country that are gonna be upset about demographics. We have an FBI for that. 

A few weeks later, it's time for Olga's final hearing. It's June 4th, and for the 10th time, the kids squeeze in front of a laptop at the center, waiting for the judge to decide whether Olga will be able to stay in the US.

As the minutes tick by, Elisa's anxiety grows. She even tries to come up with more ways to sway the judge's opinion. 

We have an hour, and those, rosary takes 30 minutes. If he sees us as devoted Catholics praying on camera- 

Elisa, you can't just assume that. 

Romeo is skeptical. They decide not to pray. And instead, they just sit there for an outcome they can't control

Four hours pass before the judge begins reading his decision. He starts by working through the legal requirements one by one. First, he finds that Olga testified credibly, and that she's lived in the United States long enough to qualify for relief. He also finds that she's a person of good moral character.

Mari looks over at the kids. They look back at her. No one says anything. With those requirements satisfied, only one question remains: whether forcing Olga to leave would create what's known in immigration law as exceptional and extremely unusual hardship for her children. The judge acknowledges everything they've been through, the panic attacks, the stress and anxiety.

But then, he says the law requires more. The judge says he sympathizes with what the family has endured, but under immigration law, sympathy isn't enough. Olga will be sent back to Guatemala. The kids are devastated. 

They kicked us out. It ended.

The judge didn't order Olga deported. Instead, he granted her voluntary departure, giving her about 30 days to leave the country on her own rather than be forcibly removed. But he didn't specify when Olga would be released to pack up years of friendships, work, and community. Eventually, the kids calmed down enough to drive home

A few weeks pass. Elisa's still heading up the family landscaping business, keeping everything together the best she can. The stress of the court postponements, worrying about their mom's health in detention are over. Only one last uncertainty remains. When will their mother be released from the Eloy Detention Center?

Then on the evening of June 15th, we receive a frantic phone call from Mari. Olga is about to be released onto the streets of Arizona. 

Okay, I'm gonna go pick up stuff from the Perez's kid's house, her phone and, 

I'm gonna stop to get her passport. In half an hour, logistics and plans are all figured out.

They book Olga an Airbnb in the town of Eloy, look into flights, and then decide on who should pick her up. 

So in the morning, who's gonna go get her? I think it should be Chris. Yeah. I think you're 

right. Chris McVoy. They chose him because he's a Lake Worth city commissioner and a friend of Olga's, and because he's white, they believe that he has the best chance of getting Olga through airport security.

The planning hits a snag when the Perez kids tear apart their house and can't find Olga's current Guatemalan passport, so they have to send Chris with her expired one instead. At 3:00 A.M., Chris and I make our way to the Miami International Airport for our flight to Phoenix. 

How does it feel going to pick somebody up all the way in Arizona on short notice at 3:00 in the morning?

It'll be wonderful to be able to help out with getting her back here to her kids, at least for a few weeks. 

Our flight touches down a little past 9:00 A.M. But even with a handful of hours of sleep, Chris jumps behind the wheel of our rental minivan and we start our journey down to Eloy, Arizona. It's a small city.

The vast desert landscape around it makes it feel like it's cut off from the rest of the world. We're getting close to Olga's Airbnb. 4. The destination is on your left. Olga 

Esperanza Perez. Arrived. 

Yep. 

Chris pulls into the gravel driveway of a small house. When he gets to the door, he gently knocks.

Olga?

So see you. I'm free. I'm free. I'm free. I'm free

Olga hugs him tight. She's petite, and she's wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants. Her eyes are tired, but the visit has energized her. She spares no time telling Chris about how the news of her release was as much of a surprise to her as it was to everyone else. One. And 

he say, "You release today." 

In the US?

Yeah. Yeah. And say, "Yeah, I don't know what time, but they need release you very soon." I don't know what happen in the future, but just I want to hold my kids. I'm ready. Just I wanna enjoy this moment. 

A few hours later, Chris and Olga are on their way to the Phoenix Airport. They're both nervous and wondering if Chris will be able to get her past airport security for their flight back to Florida.

We get to the gate. 

In terms of identification- Yeah, unfortunately, I'm not allowed to take this one. I have to have a, either a passport from Guatemala or, one of the green cards from the US. All right. 

this is where we may get a little complicated, 'cause I do have a passport, but we do not have her most current.

After a few nervy moments of explanation, another TSA agent comes along and gives Olga permission to fly. Just like that, Olga is through, and a few hours later, they board a late-night flight, heading back home to Florida. 

If you have a carry-on, please place it all the way under the seat. 

As Olga disembarks at the Miami Airport, she has no idea there's a welcoming party waiting for her at baggage claim.

Her children shift around anxiously. 

I'm nervous. Me too. I'm nervous. Scared. 

They're there with the staff from the Guatemalan Maya Center, holding homemade signs that say, "Love you, Mama," and "Welcome back, Olgita." For seven months, the Perez kids imagined this moment, seeing their mom and getting to hold her again.

Just then, they spot Olga coming down the escalator. 

Oh my God, that's them, you guys. That's 

them. No, don't tell me that. Don't tell me that. I'm nervous. Yeah, that's them. That's them. Oh my God. Whoa.

I'll wait. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Miami. Olga rushes over to her four children, bear hugging them the way only a 

mom can do. Elisa then lets loose all the guilt that she's been carrying for the last seven months, apologizing for being the one that was driving that day in November.

Sorry. Sorry, Mommy. We are now preparing for arrival. No. Sorry. No, my loves, no. I'm sorry. No, mi amor, 

no.

I'm sorry. no, no.

I'm sorry. No,

mi amor. no, no. Okay? Okay, mi amor? Okay, Mommy. It's not your fault. It wasn't your fault, mi vida. It wasn't 

your fault, mi amor. Por favor. "It's not your fault, my love. It wasn't your fault." For a brief moment, the baggage claim of the Miami International Airport disappears. The only thing the Perez kids see, hear, and feel is their mom.

But everyone knows something they don't have to say out loud. Olga has only a short time left in the United States before she has to leave again. The countdown has simply changed, no longer to another hearing, now just until she has to say goodbye.

Olga left the US for Guatemala on July 6th. Elisa has decided to stay and run the family business. Her siblings are still trying to decide what to do.

We've just heard clips starting with

CounterSpin arguing that the only way to stop ICE killings is to remove ICE from the streets entirely, while warning against framing local police as the safe alternative.

The Intercept Briefing examined an ACLU report finding ICE targets grocery stores, parking lots, and school playgrounds, using violence to compel obedience, pushing the country toward authoritarianism.

Fresh Air exposed how a former ICE official admitted the government wants detention to feel so bad that detainees abandon their cases, with half the women in one unit accepting deportation.

Reveal profiled a Guatemalan family six miles from Mar-a-Lago, where ICE detained both parents and left the eldest daughter running the household, the landscaping business, and her three younger siblings.

The Majority Report told the story of Nixon Perez-Paz, who was seized by ICE and deported to Guatemala where he and his wife were found murdered.

And Reveal in part two of their discussion described how a judge deemed Olga Perez credible and of good moral character, yet immigration law still required her deportation, leaving her four kids behind.

And those were just the top takes, there's lots more in the deeper dives sections,

If you get value out of the show - and want to make sure we can keep going while getting it delivered ad-free to the new, members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at bestoftheleft.com/support - there's a link in the show notes - through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple Podcasts app.*

If you've been listening at all recently, you'll have heard me talk about my desire to relaunch the voice message segment on the show. In the early days of the podcast, it was a well-loved segment but dwindled over time, probably for multiple overlapping reasons.

After I announced the relaunch recently, we got a few messages, and I continued the push by asking thought-provoking questions on the show and posting them to social media with a link to our new voice message system.

But, over the last few weeks, I'd been pretty disappointed to have not gotten a single new message, if you can believe it. I didn't know what else to think other than that people must just not really be very interested in calling in and leaving their thoughts on a voice recorder, until today.

I logged into the new voice message system for the first time in a while only to find that those few messages we had received had actually filled the inbox and prevented any more from being recorded. So it wasn't necessarily that people hadn't tried to leave a message, they just couldn't.

Then, I noticed the system has analytics to track clicks to our recording widget. Turns out that during the time I'd been asking thought provoking questions on social media and pointing people to the voice message system, about 1000 people had clicked through.

Not nearly all of them would have left a message, of course, but even 1% would have sparked interesting discussions for the show, I'm sure.

this feels a bit like the opening credits of Bob's Burgers as I announce the grand re-re-opening of the voice message segment for the show. Now with the ability to actually leave a message!

that's a tiny bit of excitement but we are still in the middle of an episode about an ongoing atrocity being carried out in our country so to bring the mood right back down, here's today's question:

If you have stories related to ICE raids, detentions and deportations, we want to hear them. Maybe you're participating in ICE Watch, maybe your place of work or community space has been preparing for the possibility of raids, or maybe you or someone you know has been directly impacted already. Whatever your story, if you feel safe sharing it, share it. And if you have a story about something that worked out well or helped someone, those are great for keeping spirits up.

If you would like your comments included in the show you can record a voice message - re-recording until you're happy with it - by tapping the link in the show notes,

As for today's topic,

the reason to defend immigrants is because they're human beings with inherent value. That's the core of the progressive argument. The overt White supremacists attempting a demographic engineering project to remake the nation don't see people that way. They see demographics and bloodlines, cohorts who are worthy and unworthy, those who belong and those who don't. They use dehumanizing terms or even just numbers to describe the millions of individual people with lives and families they're targeting to hide the humanity of those they make to suffer.

And for all their cold, calculating focus on hard numbers over humanity, they are still destined to fail in their goals by their own standards because, in reality, they are unserious, magical thinkers who are driven by racism over logic at every turn.

Case in point, the anti-immigrant fanatics in the Trump administration are proud of their goal to deport a hundred million people, nearly a third of the country, and there's no legal, let alone moral, pathway to get to that number. Their plans are blatantly racist, which should surprise no one. But their vision for the country, and the magical thinking it takes to get there, comes into focus when you scratch just a little beneath the surface and connect some very logical dots.

There's been a lot of attention paid to the attempt to overturn birthright citizenship, which the Supreme Court blocked in recent weeks. But that was only about turning off the tap of new native-born citizens. It doesn't touch the mechanism that lets them target existing citizens, denaturalization, literally taking a person's citizenship away. The Justice Department made that one of the Civil Division's top five priorities last year, and the guidance they were given on case discretion may as well have just said, "go get 'em."

the Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship, but that does nothing to protect the 25 million naturalized citizens in this country from being denaturalized and deported. And, to be clear, there is no legal pathway to denaturalize a native-born citizen.

Even counting every naturalized citizen, there are only 50 million foreign-born people in the country. Half of their stated goal of a hundred million deportations. Which gives us our first glimpse of their magical thinking.

Do you think they have a secret plan for how to deport an additional 50 million people after all the foreign-born people are gone? Some dusty old law or loophole nobody has paid attention to? Because they don't. They're making it up as they go. They said a hundred million deportations as marketing and as a value statement, not as a policy proposal.

The next bit of magical thinking is the fallacy their entire premise rests on. DHS posted a picture of a vintage American car parked on an empty beach with the text, "America after a hundred million deportations."

To decode that for you, I'll give the non-bullshit version first. It's referring to the middle of the last century, the golden fantasy era they all dream about. The reality is that the fifties came right after World War II, when the rest of the world was still rebuilding from the wreckage and the US, which had sustained negligible damage by comparison, had just ridden the booming war economy into the booming consumer economy. We peaked at producing roughly thirty percent of the entire world economy, and got a head start on the rest of the world that lasted most of the rest of the century.

In short, the US was running a race after the war in which everyone else was wearing cement shoes, and the White supremacists looking back can only marvel at how naturally fast we were. Then, as the gap began to close when the world recovered, they concluded that it must have been the immigrants slowing us down. In Stephen Miller's own words, describing his racism-addled fantasy,

"Someone should write an alternate historical novel where Americans are the first to master the automobile, the first in flight, the first to harness the atom, the first to land on the moon – but just keep going and never open our borders to the entire third world for sixty years."

So their vision of the future, in which the US metaphorically chills on the beach in its vintage car after having deported a third of the population, requires magical thinking. Because the rest of the world isn't currently on fire, and continued economic output requires the presence of people. And we know they know this, because at the same time as they're trying to remove a hundred million people from the country, they're also very worried about the low birth rate in the US.

Again, the non-bullshit reason first. If your country is experiencing low birth rates, that means you've already won at the game of civilization. It goes like this.

One. The first step is medical advancements and child labor laws that dramatically reduce the number of children dying in your society, which causes families to stop having extra kids as an insurance policy.

Two. You level up from an agrarian economy and stop needing children as farm labor. This flips the cost-benefit ratio, and kids go from being an asset who can work the farm to a liability that costs the parents a couple decades of investment.

Three. Meanwhile, opportunities for women to get more educated and increase their own earning potential grow, which means the trade-off of raising children gets even more expensive from the opportunity cost.

And four. Wealthy countries recognize the benefit of providing social safety nets for the welfare of all their people, which largely takes the place of what children used to be expected to provide to their parents in their old age.

This is the pattern that every wealthy country has gone through, causing birth rates to decline through pure, logical self-interest. This is one of the deepest ironies at the heart of any backward-looking search for greatness that frets over low birth rates. The low birth rate itself is a sign of greatness, your country already made it!

The only downside, in the macroeconomic sense, is that your population begins to shrink, shrinking your tax base and economic output, unless you allow immigration that tends to come from countries with higher birth rates. The whole idea of immigrants being a drain on their adopted countries is basically pure fantasy and almost exactly backwards.

But magical thinking has the White supremacists convinced that, all evidence to the contrary, we'll be much better off as a high-birth-rate society if we can just crack the problem of getting people who don't want or can't afford more kids to have them anyway.

Again, the non-bullshit version first. Pro-family policies, such as paid leave and universal child care, are just good progressive policy. A lot of people want to have kids create needs, and good policy is Government serving the needs of people.

The problem only starts when the government starts to have an opinion about how many children are being born in aggregate and how many you're giving birth to personally. No decision is more private than whether, when, and with whom to have a child.

A government that values individual freedom supports whatever decision you make. When a government begins encouraging or even coercing a higher birth rate, that means the relationship has flipped. The people are now being seen as a resource, working and living to supply their labor and the future labor of their children for the benefit of the state. I can't think of a single political demographic in the US; left, or center, who would sign on to that framing.

The governments who follow through with that sort of policy are, without exception, authoritarian. Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and much more recently Putin's Russia have all offered to award medals to women based on how many children they bear. Medals are what countries give to honor sacrifices and services rendered to the nation. Children should never be thought of that way, which is why democratic nations never feel the urge to offer such awards.

Right on cue, Simone and Malcolm Collins, the country's most famous and creepiest pro-natalist couple, proposed a draft executive order to the Trump administration to bestow a "National Medal of Motherhood" on mothers with six or more children, and said the White House was receptive. Public reaction was swift to condemn the Hitler-and-Stalin-esque proposal. Around two thirds of Americans polled disapproved, and there hasn't been any more said about it since.

The mass deportation operation is the visible half of their demographic engineering project, but the other half is moving just as quickly, if less noticeably. To lay the groundwork, the government has already redefined an embryo as a child already in existence, and the funding notice for the federal contraception program under Title X was rewritten around fertility instead of birth control. Plus, this important detail was added among the priorities of that program. They want to enforce a commitment that the money would not benefit any people here illegally. That's the pro-native birth and anti-immigrant demographic engineering in one document.

When the magical thinkers look for inspiration for their project, they turn to Viktor Orban's Hungary as the model to copy. Orban's party already ran this experiment and spent five percent of Hungary's economy encouraging higher birth rates with generous family policies. Hungary's birth rate was quite low, and the vigorous pro-family push ticked those numbers up substantially, though still well below the replacement rate, and only very briefly, before they ticked right back down again.

In fact, in 2017, Orban set a national goal of hitting the replacement rate by 2030, and Hungary is further from it now than when he set that goal. Given that there seemed to be brief upward movement in the birth rate, that begs some questions, and the reason the policy is failing can be explained by the old truism about lies, damn lies, and statistics.

When demographers looked at what caused the bump, it turned out the government benefits only helped people start their families a little earlier but did nothing to make them want more children than already planned. That explains the brief bump in the birth rate but actually shows that it was more of an illusion than anything else, which is why the rate soon went back down.

Also interesting, Putin's Russia ran the same play and got the same result. That's the track record of success the Trump people are chasing.

The hard truth of it is that anyone determined to get birth rates to rise in a fully developed country will have to turn to state coercion or be destined to fail. Orban's people and American pro-natalists might say that they would never want to do that, and they may be telling the truth, but that's the magical thinking at play again. They can get the results they want, or they can continue to allow people to enjoy the basic freedoms and dignity we take for granted. They can't have both.

And even that framing is probably overstating it because the coercive strategy experiment was already run by the communist dictatorship in Romania in the middle of the last century so we know how that worked out. The government decided to boost the population from 20 million to 30 million. Abortion was outlawed, contraception was prohibited, and it was declared a patriotic duty of women of childbearing age to have large families.

Maternal mortality rose dramatically, parents abandoned infants to orphanages by the tens of thousands where many suffered neglect and starvation, and the secret police weaponized abortion and intruded into the intimate lives of Romanians of reproductive age.

basically, a variation of A Handmaid's Tale. These policies worked to increase birth rates for a brief period, but only when the enforcement was intense. If enforcement relaxed, birth rates dropped and this played out for decades. The takeaway is that the government tried persuasion and coercion simultaneously, and the only thing that was effective for keeping birth rates high was coercion. And, as is invariably the case, women and children suffered greatly in the process.

For the record, I've been getting these details from Gail Kligman, author of "The Politics of Duplicity, Controlling Reproduction in Ceaușescu's Romania." She wrote it back in the 90s but has been using Romania as a warning for what happens when abortion is restricted, and drawing a direct comparison with the US today, saying that after the Dobbs ruling overturned Roe v. Wade, some states have been implementing similar and, in some cases, harsher measures than the communist dictator in Romania did.

The Romanian government knew the details of their failing policy, of course. But as authoritarians so often do, they only ever doubled down on ideology rather than relenting in the face of evidence. The country only changed their policies after the dictator was overthrown and executed.

I'm not saying that JD Vance, Stephen Miller, or any of the Republicans filling the state legislatures passing extreme abortion bans want to inflict the same kind of suffering the Romanian dictator did. But the thread that ties them together is the magical thinking that leads them to believe their demonstrably failing policies will work if they just believe hard enough. Because magical thinking is structurally identical to conspiracy theories, self-sealing logic that's impervious to new information, so they can't be argued out of it.

It's not an accident that ideas this bad tend to only get pushed through under authoritarian governments unaccountable to those suffering from the effects of their policies.

There's no mechanism inside their logic that would allow them to course-correct in the face of failure, they'll continue to escalate until they're stopped. The Supreme Court stopped them on birthright citizenship, but elections are the only thing that can purge the broader, insidious demographic engineering mentality that's poisoned our country.

The vast majority of us don't want the state to have a single opinion about how many kids we choose to have, or not. And we believe that the whole point of the existence of government is to serve the needs of the people, as opposed to the other way around. Government serving people is merely the way that we've organized ourselves to serve each other. And our duty is always to serve one another, not the state or those in power.

And now, we'll continue to dive deeper on 3 topics today. First up;

Section A, Inevitable Brutality

Followed by Section B, Designed to Be Unbearable

And Section C, The World Watches & The People Fight Back

So after Renee Good and Alex Pretti were shot and killed in Minnesota, there was a lot of pushback against the way immigration enforcement was being done, including by Republicans, including by some MAGA people.

So how did we get back here again with two killings by immigration officers in such a short period? 

Yeah. there was a, kind of a broader pullback, right? the administration sent Tom Homan into Minneapolis to clean things up. The president ousted Kristi Noem. Markwayne Mullin came in as the new DH Sec- DHS secretary, signaling that he wanted things to be quieter, to keep DHS out of the headlines.

And yet the calls on the right started, ac- throughout the spring were growing for them to intensify their ICE operations. People were seeing the ICE arrest and deportation numbers lower than they had been, prior to Minneapolis. And, Markwayne Mullin, as well as Border czar, Tom Homan, were getting accused on the right of backing off of Trump's promises to carry out the largest, deportation campaign in US history.

And so- What we've seen in the last few weeks was a rapid intensification of ICE activity. They have been arresting about twice as many people as they were doing a few months ago, and they were trying to do it more quietly. It didn't look like Minneapolis, 'cause it wasn't all concentrated in one city.

It wasn't border patrol agents, sweeping through neighborhoods. It was the kind of targeted enforcement that Tom Homan signaled that he wanted to double down on, the kind of tactics that ICE has always done. But this time, it's been more focused on vehicle stops, not on homes. It's on vehicle stops, and these vehicle stops, are inherently dangerous for many of the reasons that we have just seen.

What do we know about the details of these shootings so far? Because we haven't had the kind of videos emerge like we did in Minnesota, where we could see clearly what happened at the moment of shooting. 

I'd say one thing else about that, which is, if you think about Minneapolis, because every- everyone was so stirred up and the protesters were out in the streets, it was almost impossible for ICE to, to carry out some kind of arrest like this without somebody filming it on a cellphone.

Says a lot about how much more quietly they've been able to operate since Minneapolis. And, the, the focus on the body cams, is once again become a, a contentious matter. ICE got, tens of billions of dollars obviously last year through the, one big beautiful bill, and, got another, several, tens of billions through the reconciliation bill that passed prior to the, the shutdown.

So the White House is saying it's the Democrats' faults that, that the body cameras haven't been, distributed across the country, but Democrats are pointing out, that they had tens of billions of dollars at their disposal, last summer that, that they could have used on body cameras.

And Kristi Noem, after Minneapolis, said that they were gonna get body cameras out to ICE officers around the country, and here we are six months later with no body camera footage of either fatal shooting. 

What do we know about each of these incidents? 'Cause it sounds like the traffic stop element is important.

so what do we know? 

what's... I think, one of the first things that's significant about both incidents is that the officers killed someone who wasn't the target of their arrest operation that day. So in Houston, the, the team that went out, and decided to pull over, the work van driven by Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, the, the 52-year-old, construction contractor and father of, three US citizens.

In that case, they were looking for somebody who they have not named, and, they were doing the kind of targeted enforcement that they've been doing across the country. Typically, they go, early in the morning to try to catch people as they're coming out of their homes and getting into their cars or heading off to work the, the tactics that ICE has relied on historically to get people, at their homes, that doesn't work anymore.

People no longer open their doors for ICE. They know that, that officers need a judicial warrant in order to force their way into the, into a home. And so ICE has given up on that tactic and they're trying to catch people, as they're leaving for work, and that's what they were doing, with this work van, even though Mr.

Salgado was not the target of their operation. And so what we know is that, they tried to pull him over. There's, surveillance camera footage showing that he, he didn't obey their commands, that he continued to drive. his sons have said that they thought he probably panicked. He was worried that he was getting robbed, for his work tools that were his livelihood.

So he didn't stop, and they tried to, box him in. the Department of Homeland Security said that he tried to weaponize his vehicle and drive at them. reporters who went to the scene did not see any, major impacts on any of the vehicles suggesting that there was a big crash. and there are eyewitness accounts claiming that, the ICE officer who shot Salgado was reaching through the passenger, open passenger window.

shot him in the stomach, and then the officers, pulled him out of the vehicle and tried to handcuff him. There's a bystander video recorded, that shows two officers over him and he's moaning in pain. we know he was taken to the hospital after that, where he died. 

You mentioned that Salgado's sons said he might have panicked when the police tried to stop him because he thought they were trying to rob him.

That's not what a lot of people would picture as a traffic stop. Like you would see the police lights flashing. You would know that it was a police car. so what is a traffic stop like by an immigration enforce- ment agency? 

Yeah, it's a great question. These ICE vehicle stops are not like traffic stops conducted by normal police officers with marked cars and flashing lights.

These are ICE officers typically in, in plainclothes and driving in unmarked cars, and they're really relying on the element of surprise. it's, it isn't like driving past a, a police car in a s- on a highway, and then it turns on its lights and you understand why you're being pulled over.

These, these ICE officers are swooping in out of nowhere, in some cases trying to pin the vehicle of the person that they want to arrest. And, if they do this hundreds of times a day across the country in multiple cities- It stands to reason that in some cases, the people they're after are going to panic, and if they panic and try to drive away, does that, justify, killing them, 

and, the, the answer is no, of course, but it's an... it points to the inherent risks of these kinds of tactics by ICE officers. 

So that's Texas. What about the incident in Maine? 

We saw another targeted enforcement operation gone wrong in the town of, Biddeford, Maine. And in that incident, what we know is that a team of officers went to a residence looking for someone, who had a, you know, a, what's called a final order of removal.

A- an immigration judge had ordered them to leave the country. but it was not the person that ICE ended up shooting. And a Colombian, father named, Johan Sebastian Duran Guerrero was on his, way to work coming out of his home. again, the officers claim that he, used his vehicle in a way that they described as a threat to public safety.

we've seen ser- security footage showing the aftermath of the shooting in which the vehicle is doing loops in an intersection after they have shot him. The officer, involved fired through the, through at least four shots through the windshield. He was struck in the head. there's also footage showing them taking him out of the vehicle and attempting to handcuff him as he's dying.

And, we know that the officer who fired was a new hire. in this case, an officer who had federal law enforcement experience working for the Veterans Affairs Department police force but had been, hired by ICE just this year. And, I think, more details are coming out about this officer's training and his background.

Yeah, and those details are pretty alarming. Members of his family told the media that he had a history of mental health issues dating back to when he was a preteen and also a history of violent behavior. so that's that one officer in Maine. Now, more broadly, another thing that's come up a lot is traffic stops.

Both of these killings involved traffic stops. So what's the significance of that? Is that something that these immigration officers are not particularly trained to handle? 

Yeah. What I'm, what I've been told is that, ICE officers not only went through this kind of fast-track training program last fall and r- into the, this winter, because of the White House's urgency in getting, thousands of more trainees out onto the streets, that generally ICE officers don't get as much training in safe vehicle stops as say, large police departments.

And- That at the same time, they are increasingly relying on this tactic in order to make their arrest numbers and to, to m- meet the, the, the pressure from the White House to, to have more and more arrests and deportations. And so they're relying on this tactic. They don't have what, police departments call a vehicle pursuit policy that really establishes, clear guidelines as to when you can use force during a vehicle stop, because what the Supreme Court has established is that you cannot shoot somebody just because they're disobeying your commands or they're fleeing police officers.

They have to... The officer has to be able to articulate, a reasonable fear, of imminent harm to themself, to the other officers, or to the public.

we've learned a lot over the last week as to what exactly happened Tuesday morning, and there's still a lot of outstanding questions. But I can take you back to Tuesday afternoon when the first time we heard about the shooting.

We had a very small statement from ICE just detailing their very short account of what happened, and according to an ICE spokesperson, they were attempting to do a targeted enforcement operation, arrest Salgado Araujo, and they say during that traffic stop, during that moment, during that encounter, they claim that Salgado Araujo was weaponizing his vehicle, attempting to evade arrest, attempting to ram a, an ICE officer with his car when the officer fired his gun.

He was shot in the abdomen and then taken to Ben Taub Hospital, a hospital here in Houston, where he later died of his wounds. But it wasn't until the early afternoon when we, the public, and reporters began to hear about what had happened, and at that moment we had very little to go off of. 

Did people initially take that account as the, unimpeachable truth, or was there immediately suspicions that there may have been another side to the story?

It was almost immediate that immigrant rights organizations like LULAC and the family were disputing the account. 

We do not believe them. They're playing by a playbook. They're using a template in shootings and murders that have happened across the country time and time again, and it is time to stop. We don't expect the truth from the Department of Justice or from the FBI.

We expect a whitewash. 

Mostly we just didn't have a lot to go off of. We had the very short statement from ICE and we had almost no details from the family. The family themselves were looking for more answers. It took them a while to figure out what had happened to their father, when he had passed.

Around 7:00 AM, I was notified by my mom that something bad had happened to my dad. We didn't know what. All we knew is that it was ICE related. I saw a video posted on Facebook that he had been shot. I recognized him immediately, not from his appearance, but from his voice, crying for help as he lay on the street bleeding out 

So a lot of outstanding questions tuesday night, and the calls for accountability, transparency began immediately.

So how long does it take until we get a differing account of what happened on Tuesday morning? 

The next morning we started to hear from the family. Two of Salgado Araujo's sons, Ronaldo and Lorenzo Jr., spoke to the public and started to offer just details about who their father was and that they believed their father would have complied, that he was trying to just go to work and they didn't believe that their father would be acting aggressively, ramming his car, or, attempting to evade arrest.

They said it didn't sound like his father. But it would take a few more days before we got any more credible accounts about people who were in the car with Salgado 

Araujo. And when did that happen and what did they say? 

On Thursday we started to see reports online that the detainees, the men who were in Salgado Araujo's car who were also detained by ICE, started to kinda come out through their lawyers, speak out about their experience.

On Friday, the lawyer for two of the men who were detained, Hugo Balderas, said that- 

I can tell you with conviction that it, that, My clients' versions of the events are extremely different from what ICE agents are saying or what the agency 

is saying. Essentially, they were saying that there, at no time was there an ICE agent in front of the car, that he came, the approach to the side of the car, that the shots fired from the side of the car, basically discrediting the idea that Salgado Araujo was ramming his car with an officer or was ever trying to run an officer over.

They allege that the account happened completely from the side and that the officer fired immediately upon exiting his vehicle. 

How does the city respond to this differing account? 

Yeah. There's been a lot of calls for Houston Police Department to do an independent investigation for anybody, on the Houston official level to launch an investigation, and it's unfolded over the week in a, a bit of a confusing manner I think for the public.

District Attorney Sean Teare did say on our radio that- 

My office is running an investigation, but we do not have the same level of access that we do in almost any other officer-involved shooting 

We ourselves have seen people from the district attorney's office going to different gas stations in the area and other businesses to ask for surveillance footage.

but the problem that Teare is outlining is that they haven't been invited by the federal authorities to collaborate or work alongside them. So Teare is clear that he may not be privy to all of the evidence that, federal authorities do collect during their own investigation. Right now, the Federal Bureau of Investigations is the one leading the inquiry, but their investigation is clearly into the potential assault on a law enforcement.

It doesn't say that it's into the shooting as a whole to find exactly what happened. 

And how is ICE responding to this account that disputes theirs? 

We've asked repeatedly about allegations that their account is not, fully accurate or that it's missing details or that it, implies that Salgado Araujo was behaving in a way that he might not have been, and we've gotten no answers.

We haven't got any kinda comment about the allegations that the account is not credible or if they wanna add any more to their initial statement. 

So how are we gonna find out the truth, if we are at all? 

It's gonna be a difficult process, and part of the thing that complicates that is that, ICE and DHS has said that the officers on the scene were not wearing any body cameras, and they had no dash cam video of the incident.

So they're saying that the ICE agents on the ground have no video to share with the public. We are starting to see clips on social media from those surveillance videos, from the footage at gas stations or from witnesses who were filming as well start to cir- circulate online that show different parts of the shooting and different parts of the encounter, but we're still not getting the most full clear picture yet.

Could you tell us about this individual, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo? Who was he? 

Yeah. From what we've learned from his sons, he got to Houston in the early '90s and has been here since working as, in construction helping build homes in the Houston area. They said, he would go to work all day, come home and be with his family.

My father was a simple man, a family man, a man of routine.

He dedicated his life in the United States to giving his family the American dream. My father was a private man, a man who dedicated his life to work. You could find him every evening after work resting on his porch, listening to music, petting his dog. 

he's the father of three sons, all of whom have gone on to college and are now working in teaching professions or as engineers, and they describe him as a shy man, a man who loved his family, a man who cared for his sons, a man who loved the Chivas soccer team from Mexico.

someone that they deeply miss.

Now, what happened after these killings is confusing, and I think clearing it up will help us understand where immigration policy is headed. The way it was first reported is that Markwayne Mullin talked to Susan Collins, the senator of Maine, issued a policy to at least temporarily halt these traffic stops that you're talking about.

And then Trump comes out on Truth Social and seems incensed by this. What did Trump write, and how do you explain what happened? 

Yeah. the order of events is that, Secretary Mullin talked to Susan Collins three times on Monday after the fatal shooting in Maine, and he also talked to Senator Angus King, the other senator from Maine.

He had been hearing from senior ICE officials, that the vehicle stops were becoming a problem and are exposing the insufficient training of these officers. so he was already hearing about these worries. And so late Monday night, an order went out from an ICE official to all the ICE supervisors around the country to halt the vehicle stops.

And the president, people woke up to this Tuesday, and by, Wednesday morning, the president sent out his statement on Truth Social, effectively saying that they needed to continue with the traffic stops, that, countermanding the order from the ICE officials and saying that the traffic stops are a, a much needed tool and that they can't back down.

And we know that he did that because throughout the day on Tuesday, as, hard line- immigration hard-liners and members of the, more extreme members of the MAGA coalition were telling him that it would make him look weak. and it's saying similar things to what they said after Minneapolis was that, they're giving in to protesters, to the radical left, that they can't back down from the mass deportation campaign that Trump has promised.

And, clearly they broke through to him and, and he has reversed course. Now, what we're still seeing is that some kind of new guidance is coming to ICE officers that is going to, try to introduce some, some additional safeguards into these vehicle stops. But it also shows that the president is very sensitive to criticism from his base about, any perceived, backtracking on this deportation campaign.

Yeah, 'cause you said it calmly, but it was a lot of capitals and exclamation points. it, it seemed like a very aggressive statement the president was making, which doesn't necessarily clarify the con-confusion, 'cause I'm assuming that Mullin wouldn't have issued that statement without checking with someone at the White House.

So you think just afterwards there was a lot of MAGA pressure, to reverse course, and it's as simple as that? 

I was telling, that on Wednesday, senior administration officials were really throwing Mullin under the bus, on this one and saying that he hadn't cleared, these, this, vehicle stop order with the White House.

But, these are... I, I also spoke to people in the department who said it was im- that was impossible, that it's, there's no way this kind of order would've gone f- forward without people including, Tom Homan and Stephen Miller from being aware that they were, that it was coming.

Mullin is still in charge for the moment. Has he made any significant changes? How is he different than the previous leadership? 

Mullin came in to replace Kristi Noem, who along with her top advisor, Corey Lewandowski, ran the department in a very different way, and, made a lot of enemies there, generated a lot of controversy, and ultimately were removed because of the perception that she was trying to promote her own career, her own interests, and, and had just become too much of a liability for the White House in a way that was undermining the president's broader immigration enforcement goals.

Mullin was brought in, I think, to stabilize the department, to bring, a kind of a, a sunnier presence, while still being somebody who was, close to the president and intensely loyal to Trump and who would carry out, the campaign, with a better face, so to speak.

their goal has been to carry out the president's mass deportation campaign, but more quietly and with less controversy. And I think that they'd been relatively effective in doing that up until these shootings. but it really shows the inherent, tension in what they're trying to do.

They're trying to carry out this incredibly disruptive, intrusive, controversial, deportation campaign in American cities and communities, and there's just no way it's gonna be quiet and that people aren't gonna push back. 

So do you have a sense that the two latest shootings could change policy at all?

Could shift the course of how they're doing immigration enforcement? 

I think that after the president's response to that order and his fear of looking weak, I think no. I, they're gonna continue pressing forward. They have the money. They have the personnel. Trump has made this commitment. This is, the signature domestic policy initiative of his second term.

So they're gonna, they're gonna go forward, and they're gonna try to, keep a lid on this stuff politically as best they can, and the question is gonna be, can they pull it off? how many more of these shootings can Americans stomach?

It was an early morning shock outside Sabrina Medina's front door.

Video captured by Medina and neighbors shows a large number of ICE agents accompanied by the Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem. 

You're seeing grandmas, you're seeing children, you're seeing families, you're seeing business owners. You're seeing people who are just standing in line waiting to go to work being snatched out of those lines, hauled off by men in masks, never to be heard from again, presumably.

Arrest as many people that touch you as you want. Gas on film. Gas 

on film. 

We're filming it. Instead, we've seen an emphasis of the arrests when people are already in local or state custody. That's governed by something called a 287agreement, which allows ICE to cooperate with those jurisdictions and pick people up who are on unrelated crimes and may have a final order of removal.

We're just not seeing as many of those, incidents where we'd see some, a band of ICE agents go surrounding a car and pulling people out, and we're not seeing surges of immigration officers into major US cities that are, in the eyes of the Trump administration, not doing enough to collaborate with federal law enforcement and with federal immigration officers.

So that change has meant that even though the numbers are still high, they're still deporting and detaining thousands of people, throughout the courses of weeks, right? we're not seeing that register in the same visceral way that it did on, under Kristi Noem, in such a way that it actually really tainted the Trump administration's standing with voters on immigration.

Why were we ever seeing that? did Kristi Noem have some sort of mandate from the president to make this look as horrendous as it looked? 

There's a couple things that were going on there. There was a school of thinking that is especially championed by immigration hardliners, the really, the toughest hawks on immigration enforcement, that the only way you deter people from coming to the United States, and not just to shut down the border, but to make it difficult to live in the United States and to create a culture of fear.

that you could be rounded up and deported and separated from your family. These shock and awe tactics, in at least some vein, were intended as a deterrent. 

We will hunt you down. If you come to this country, you will not get the chance to return. 

And Noem's decisions, elevating Gregory Bovino, who was a pretty, random off Border Patrol commander, to be essentially the point person for how deportation operations were taking place, was a sign that she believed that message was important.

We're gonna turn and burn to that next target and the next, and we're not gonna stop. 

There's also the factor that we can't separate with Kristi Noem is that she had higher political ambitions, and clearly her messaging strategy was not about the department, but s- a lot of it was about her.

The advertising campaign that had her at Mount Rushmore. 

You cross the border illegally, we'll find you. 

Her standing with the big cowboy hat at the border. 

What is she hiding her face like her ICE agents now? By the way, is this what the $800 billion went to? Every day we see her after there's some new tragedy in homeland, she's wearing a different outfit with a different hat.

Those photo optics also fit into this idea. She was the face and the implementer of this immigration crackdown. And so that public strategy also played into the secretary's personal ambitions at the time. Markwayne Mullin just isn't that kind of guy. He doesn't need that kind of optical performance to have a good relationship with Trump.

The relationship goes back to, and Mullin talked about this in his confirmation hearing, to when his son had a traumatic brain injury when Trump was president the first time and Mullin at the time was a House member. 

The president found out about it and he gave me a call immediately. And the president didn't understand the severity of it, but he heard it in my voice and immediately he went to work.

I told him we had to get to Bakersfield, California to the Center for Neuroskills. And the president offered us in his plane, his personal plane. 

So they have a longstanding relationship. Mullin's also a man, which as we've seen with the cabinet firings recently, like if you're a woman, your position is potentially more precarious in the cabinet.

And that certainly plays a role in those discussions. And so it's also just a question too of who was leading the department and the tone they were trying to set.

So we're not seeing the Operation Metro Surge style tactics that were toxic for this administration earlier this year and got a reaction all over the country, if not the world. What are you seeing? You're paying much closer attention to this than maybe the average American is, and this isn't headline news every day anymore.

There are still operations in the field, right? it's not like ICE isn't carrying out some arrests at homes or workplaces. that does still happen, but it's just not in the same scale that it was before. It's usually very targeted. It's for specific types of people that they may have missed, an immigration court hearing, and they were wanted on a final order of removal.

They'll arrest that person, bring them to the county jail, and they call ICE and they say, "Hey, this person who you have an order of removal against is in our custody. Come pick him up." And so the ICE officer will come to the jail. They only need one person to do it. He's already in handcuffs. They put him in the back of the car, and they send him to an ICE detention facility.

And that has actually really helped to, run up the numbers still because it's low-hanging fruit that wasn't being prioritized in a lot of cases. And the administration has also given local jurisdictions considerable carrots to actually sign these agreements to h- foster this cooperation, and now they're really maximizing the fruits of that, those agreements.

So tell us what the numbers look like. Are the numbers up? Are they down? Are they about the same? 

They still haven't met the million a year target that the White House has set, but based on the numbers that we've gotten, it's well over in the hundreds of thousands that they've deported thus far. And the scale that we've seen, that we've heard from our sources and that other outlets have reported is that the number of arrests are in the thousands per day.

Certainly in the thousands per week, depending on the scale of operations and where specifically there are targets to be found. But we are getting to a pretty voluminous flow of immigration enforcement that we weren't even seeing at, some of the high points of when Noem was secretary. 

Two Americans were killed in Minneapolis when Kristi Noem was secretary.

I believe many more died in ICE custody, but President Trump had to take the temperature down. Now, we've got new leadership, but someone was shot and killed in Texas last week, and reportedly again this morning in Maine. Does that suggest that it's impossible for ICE to fulfill its mission without killing people?

Is this type of law enforcement, like invariably lethal? 

It's a real challenge to the thesis that we have just spent the last 10 minutes talking about, right? because certainly it's a question of the messaging, right? And how do they keep the situation from devolving into protests or in general from like engendering mistrust.

And we certainly have to think about, what's the profile of the victim. We're still learning in real time about what happened in Maine. We don't know what the demographic background of the person is, what were the details of the situation that then led to the use of lethal force. That's gonna trickle in probably in the next couple days.

But there's certainly disparities, right? That we have to acknowledge. there may be a situation, right? Like, where this doesn't register in the same way with voters if there's not video or we're not talking about two white Americans who are American citizens and who have, it's easy to construct a narrative around that they were perfect victims or they were, they were not necessarily the type of people that we voters expect ICE to be going after.

But when we still talk about the systematic use of force by ICE, right? Irrespective of how this changes the political conversation, it does make it harder for, the Mullin team to argue that there isn't, a structural problem or a systemic problem with the way that ICE has been trained.

And this may reignite a conversation on Capitol Hill about whether there need to be additional guardrails put in. Congress is negotiating an appropriations bill right now that would f- you know, even though they've given ICE money through the reconciliation bill, there's still debate about whether they can put provisions in there to constrain ICE behaviors or to require more training or to, if there is gonna be any, funding that is just pegged to the next federal fiscal year, what restrictions are on that money?

we may find ourselves having the same conversation that we were having in Washington around the use of force and ICE's training that followed after the two shootings in Minneapolis, and then all the legislative debate is gonna get subsumed again by this question of, is ICE acting within appropriate constraints?

The New York Times is reporting the FBI will no longer investigate shootings of protesters or immigrants by ICE agents. According to The Times, it is now FBI policy for the Department of Homeland Security to determine whether an ICE or Border Patrol agent was justified in discharging their weapons and whether that agent was telling the truth when that agent claimed they acted in self-defense.

So far this month, ICE agents claiming self-defense shot and killed two immigrants. Neither one of them had a warrant out for their arrest. They weren't targets of any immigration investigation. According to The New York Times, since Trump's return to the Oval Office, nearly 24 people have been shot by immigration agents, six of whom ended up dead.

Nearly all of those shot were inside their vehicles, and nearly all of the immigration agents who discharged their weapons claimed they acted in self-defense. Alex Pretti was killed by Border Patrol agents, not ICE officers, and he was shot on the street. Now, the official policy for the Department of Homeland Security, which after each shooting automatically insists the victim's car had first been weaponized, the Department of Security, Homeland Security, will make the official determination as to whether or not the ICE or Border Patrol agent was truthful when they claim to have acted in self-defense.

Border czar Tom Homan appearing on the Sunday talk shows to announce that moving forward, when a team of ICE agents perform a traffic stop, at least one of the agents will now be required to wear a body camera. So Homan is a liar, and he told two very large lies on Sunday. The first lie was, "Oh, I welcome body cams because they always end up exonerating the ICE or Border Patrol agent."

that's a lie. Practically every time we gain access to either body cam footage or surveillance video of a shooting involving immigration agents, ICE and Border Patrol, it always reveals the Department of Homeland Security and the agent who fired the shot is lying when they claim that the shots were fired in self-defense.

Always a lie. Always a lie. And, if you have pro- I always welcome corrections. You know where to reach me. So if you have proof that's, this isn't true, we triple check here. If you watched last week's show I did three shows last week, and dur- all three of them, I told you, that, an ICE agent has never, ever been shot and killed by an immigrant they were trying to arrest.

It has never happened, and I invited you to correct me. Nobody could correct me. 

ICE was established in 2003. In its 23-year history, not a single ICE agent has ever been shot and killed by an immigrant they were trying to arrest. Not a single ICE agent has ever been killed after getting run over by an immigrant who weaponized their car or simply tried to drive away and accidentally ran over that ICE agent.

And despite the lies from Border czar Tom

Homan, there is not a single body cam video of an ICE agent shooting someone, and that video turning out to be exculpatory evidence. In other words, it's presented as evidence to clear the ICE agent for shooting. Any time ICE agents are captured on video discharging their weapon, the video every time clearly indicates that those ICE agents are lying and Homeland Security is lying when they claim the agent discharged the weapon acting in self-defense.

There doesn't exist one single video of an ICE agent shooting shoving or injuring a US citizen or immigrant with that, without that video showing the ICE agent exerting unnecessary lethal, dangerous, or deadly force. In November of 2025, then border commando, I'm sorry, commander, then border commander, little tiny Greg Bovino, who at the time was running immigration operations in Chicago, Greg Bovino admitted under oath that he lied under oath.

He admitted this to Federal Judge Sarah Ellis. I invite you to Google this. Greg Bovino admitted to Federal Judge, Sarah Ellis in Illinois in November of 2025, he admitted, "Yes, I lied under oath when I testified under oath that it was necessary for me to fire tear gas at protesters marching in Chicago's Little Village neighborhood on October 23, 2025."

So Bovino Very tiny half-man. he originally testified and lied that he was forced to fire the tear gas after the crowd became unruly, but later vi- video clearly indicated that it was a peaceful crowd, and Greg Bovino- Greg Bovino decided to be a little prick. he was born a little prick and with a little prick, and he decided to fire tear gas.

And when the video showed that, yeah, he had to go before Judge Sarah Ellis again and admit, "Yeah, I lied." So yeah, Judge Sarah Ellis, she had... You can read her ruling, and it was b- it, she was gonna make a criminal referral, a perjury referral against Gregory Bovino, but it would've gone to Pam Bondi, so it would've died there.

So that's the first lie that Tom Homan told on Sunday, that video always clears the ICE or border agent. The complete opposite is true. When ICE agents are caught on video, they always demonstrate a lack of training, intelligence, character. They always reveal themselves to be frightened little men with unresolved childhood trauma, and that trauma emerges through their inability to control their rage The other lie Tom Homan on Sunday told is he would have fitted ICE agents with body cams, but the Democrats held up the funding when they shut down the Department of Homeland Security earlier this year.

That is an effing lie. I don't curse on the show because if I did, I wouldn't stop. Tom Homan is an effing liar. Okay? Democrats shut down funding for ICE because ICE agents weren't being ordered to wear body cams. Tom Homan is a liar. Now, the 2026 budget, we're living in the 2026 budget, it ends on October 1st of this year, and it came out in piecemeal in 2026 'cause of all the continuing resolutions and th- the, they shut the government down, then they shut the Department of Homeland Security down, then it was a partial shutdown of Homeland Security.

The Homeland Security shutdown was over administrative warrants, taking off the masks, right? Having your badge, ICE showing their badge, and body cams, mandatory body cams, and the Republicans and Trump and Homan didn't want mandatory body cams. So the 2026 budget, Trump wanted to spend only $6 million on body cams for ICE agents, and they would never be mandatory.

The final number came in at 20 million- for 2026. Tom Homan is lying. ICE got all $20 million earmarked for body cams, but he slowed down the rollout because he didn't want ICE agents to have to wear body cams. Greg Bovino, the Border Patrol commander who admitted to lying under oath, he apologized under oath to Illinois federal judge, Judge Ellis, and then she ordered him to begin training to wear a body cam at all times.

He didn't want to, but he agreed to it, but then he appealed her order, and so he never had to go- undergo the training to wear a body cam. So he wasn't wearing a body cam. They don't want to wear body cams. $20 million for 2026 to hand out body cams, and they didn't get delivered. Not because the Democrats held up the money Greg Bovino, Tom Homan, Stephen Miller, the Department of Homeland Security, they do not want ICE agents wearing body cams because body cams tell the truth

Yeah, I mean- ... one of the justifications was, I don't remember which case it was, but that one of the men was fleeing, and DHS said, the ICE officer, fearing for public safety, shot the man just bec- Oh, he... Oh, maybe he's gonna go rough up an old lady or vandalize a train car or something. oh, generally, we're worried about public safety, so we have to shoot a man in the back, or I don't know where he was shot.

But, It's fine ... like the justification is so thin at this point they couldn't even say the officer feared for his safety. Dave Weigel, what are... W- what response are we seeing from this politically, if anything? 

W- a, a kind of split fearful response. This has been mishandled by the Trump administration, but wh- why did it start?

I'm not gonna spend the whole segment talking about why it started, but go back to the first Trump administration. They had a policy of, deporting as many people as they, as possible. They actually deported fewer people day by day than the Obama administration. and they didn't want to be super visible.

they, they did deportations, but they didn't advertise them that much as they did in this, in this administration. Remember, they, in this instituted the Remain in Mexico policy. They wanted asylum seekers to be out of sight of the media. It was interest- and their interest in the first term, this is, besides Stephen Miller, a different Trump team.

they, they had this understanding in that Trump team that if people were seeing footage of people who looked pretty innocent and then were pretty innocent of everything except not having paperwork to be in the country, being harmed, being tort- tortured, basically by the conditions, that would be bad and there'd be a backlash, and there was a backlash.

There was a backlash in 2018. This administration, very hubristically, very, cruelly on purpose, wanted to make a sport out of this, and you saw that in how they advertise for new ICE hires. David was talking about this. But th- there's this really, this campaign of kind of brio and backslapping, that you need 47 days of training because Trump's the 47th president.

That's not the most serious basis for how to train people. the number of, of people who- Yeah ... have taken the oath of office, equals the number of days you train. And they were mocking and advertising this. They wanted shows of force on the street, to pe- to make people afraid. Now, Miller's always been interested, Steve Miller's always been interested in making immigrants, migrants afraid to come to the country, afraid to go out in public.

That was family separation, but it wasn't this public, and that's the context for all this. I say that politically they've been a, a, a little shaken because this, in Maine, Susan Collins is running for as, as we discussed, running for re-election. Yeah. and she's tried to finesse this, that she is a Republican in a blue state.

most of the state did not vote for Trump ever in three elections. And when I... After the Good killing in Minne- in Minneapolis, when ICE was in Maine- She took credit saying, "I talked to Kristi Noem," who was then DHS secretary, "and I've got them to roll back the, what they're doing." This time in, in, in Maine, the sh- the shooting over the last week, she again tried to get in front of it and say, I as the influential senator who's not always on board with Trump or on all these policies, I'm trying to get body cameras to these agents.

and actually we would've had them months ago if Democrats hadn't been protesting so much." it's a very muddled response. Yeah. you have this contrast of, "Look at our tough, brave agents in body armor taking out these terri- terrifying immigrants." What they always do is there'll be a roundup, but the advertisement, the people they'll tweet, the people that'll, they'll get their, go to Kinko's and get a blow-up of somebody's mugshot, will be the m- most, unsympathetic cases.

"Look at this drunk driver we got rid of. don't, why do Democrats not want to get rid of a drunk driver?" the administration has been wobbly when there's been one of these, these shootings 'cause they can't really defend the policy to the hilt. Yeah. and they have in Susan Collins somebody who would really rather this, the salience of this go down and also the, the quality of the, of the ICE deportation program go up.

Yeah. but they're hoisted by this petard - ... that, that started on day one of the Trump administration of let's be as rough and tough and Charles Bronson movie as possible about doing this. Yeah. Maybe there won't be any negative consequences. and- There are terrible negative consequences for how people view mass deportation right 

now.

a- and you're seeing that in, in real time. I mean- shortly after the second one of these killings, the one in Maine- 

Yeah ... 

Markwayne Mullin, announced that there was, not going to be, stops by ICE, vehicle stops, for an indeterminate period. And Trump apparently didn't find out about that by being briefed by Mullin.

He found about, out about it on social media He found out about it on Fox News, and he was furious. and he- ... immediately reversed that policy within 24 hours. 

It's sort of a bizarre push-pull within the administration, right? I read a month or two ago that, when DHS was pulling the ICE enforcement out of Minneapolis, that, Stephen Miller wanted them to stay in longer and go harder.

He was advocating internally for doubling down and seemingly maybe lost that internal battle to, to some degree. it seems that the same thing is happening now, where, Susan Collins... Obviously, any amount of generalized anger towards the administration is bad for Susan Collins. if, Mainers are angry in the streets about unjustified killings, that's gonna be bad for her, whether or not she had anything to do with it, simply because she's a Republican.

And she has plenty to do with it, let- ... let's be clear, for confirming all of these, secretaries and being a part of the, helping the administration, being a part of the party. so she would rather it be quiet, but Trump, is making headlines. it's... I got the paper New York Times right here because I'm, uh, trying to get my luda- Luddite bona fides up.

On the front page- ... Trump de- demands ICE restart use of traffic stops. that's- ... that is the administration's- ... response to the killing. Do it more. don't- ... slow down. Do it more. a- y- you really imagine Stephen Miller sitting there just w- fingers steepled going, "Yes, yes, more dead immigrants.

I'm happy." that's what, it's what he wants, right? He wants immigrants to die so that the other immigrants are afraid. So i- it's, it's a- Mm-hmm ... political contradiction for, for his side, is it not? 

No, definitely. It, it, it, it is, y- you heard it from, uh, from David D- Dayen just now. Uh, it's incoherent, that there are people in the administration who think...

If, if the, if the goal is getting the biggest number of non-citizens out of the country, there are ways to do that that don't make good TV, and, and they don't beli- And there are some people in the administration who want to do it that way. Uh, you can... Uh, there, there are things they've done. Uh, we're gonna, uh, deny licenses to truckers who are not citizens.

Well, you kinda know who those people are. You can, you can send law enforcement to round, round them up. The way they have transformed ICE is more in the Miller, as you were saying, in the, in the Miller mold. They like the idea of these visuals. They like the, the idea of really angering the left. So much of this comes down to what makes our opponents the, the most angry, and you've seen from Tom Homan and other people in administration who are, who are not even cross-purposes, they just say different things on different, different days.

They, they tried to make this argument after the Minneapolis shootings that the problem here is that liberals are protesting, and Democrats should tell their voters, "Stop protesting this. Get out of the streets. Don't defend migrants." Uh, that is also much further than they went the first time. Taking a do not protest the government position.

Uh, look, there's, there's a constituency for that. I'm sure there is. Uh, but that is further than any administration in a very long time has, has gone to say, "If you disagree with us, uh, don't say so in public. Don't encourage people to disagree with us. You are part of the problem. We might investigate you for terrorism."

That's how far they're going. Yeah. The, the administration's taken other steps, uh, to, to criminalize different kinds of left-wing protests. The we're gonna tr- try to bu- build cases against An- Ant- Antifa. 

Yeah. 

All of that is so much more than they need to do if the goal is just reducing the number of migrants in the country.

Yeah. I had Fox News on today, and all of it was about of, you know, Marco Rubio fighting Antifa and stuff like that. Right. that is, their response. David Dayen, if you'd just tell us a little bit more. We spent a lot of time on the politics of it. Mm-hmm. But, just how successful has the Trump administration's deportation campaign been?

And, what are the... W- w- what are the effects that are happening to real people that are not making such big press as, you know, these, these three- Yeah ... unjustified killings? And I'm sure there's plenty. 

I, it's, it's been quite successful certainly from the standpoint of, I think, this year we will probably hit a net, negative, immigration in terms of, the, the, the population statistics in the country.

the only people coming in from overseas are white South Africans, right? that, that's, that's become the entire refugee program. And then these other various, ways that they're keeping people out of the country, both direct, actual deportations, and indirect, like some of the things that, that Dave Weigel was talking about.

one example is that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau put out a guidance to banks just, a few weeks ago that said, "Hey, banks, you might not wanna give immigrants any loans because they're, they're unreliable. They might not be able to pay you back, so, exercise some caution in, uh

i- if you wanna con- maintain the safety and soundness of your bank." So they're doing- Mm-hmm ... there are things like that, little things like that happening all over in ways that try to discourage, uh, immigrants from coming to this country or staying in the country. And, uh, these are having massive... I think the thing that gets lost is, these are having massive economic in- impacts.

Mm-hmm. I'm aware of a study that's gonna be coming out next week that looks at the ICE surge in Los Angeles, at the, the middle of last year- Yeah ... and what the economic impacts of that were. you're talking about millions of people that just stopped going to work because they were afraid that at their job they would be abducted by ICE.

Yeah. And that had a, a huge ripple effect across the economy, and not just going to work, but just being out in public, going to restaurants, going to, concerts or wherever, that, that you would normally congregate. this kept people locked in their homes in fear, and, that had significant economic impacts, and not just in Los Angeles, but all of the surge cities that we've seen, whether Minneapolis or Chicago or wherever.

Next, Section B, Designed to Be Unbearable

This, ICE officer who shot, Johan Sebastian Guerrero in Maine apparently, according to his wife who spoke to the Associated Press, had serious mental health issues since childhood, had been abusive she alleges, and had been violent in the past, and threatening relatives including s- there's a voicemail that she shared with the Associated Press that he said he want- he thought someone should slit her throat.

Yeah, he, he said, "I'm not saying I'm going to do it, but I'm saying it should happen to you." 

So this is- Jesus ... this is the guy who, who killed the, that man in Maine, and here is the interview with his ex-wife about, this ICE officer. 

David back in November brought up that he had accepted a job with ICE.

I thought at that it was just a delusional thing 'cause I'm used to him talking crazy, so to speak. So I said, "Yeah, sure you are, buddy." You know? I didn't realize that he was actually working for ICE until, yesterday, and I was completely shocked 'cause I'm like, how do you keep getting into these jobs where you're around guns all the time?

I asked him what was going on. He told me that, that I don't need to be answering questions for anybody, that all I needed to know was that it was a justified shooting and that he did do it, and he claimed that this man had tried to run him over. And I said, "I don't see that in anything, and I've watched it from all angles.

All I seen is how the car was going in circle after the fact." and then he's like, "Well, I need you to lie about my character because this is how, this is what it comes down to is the, my character. I don't want you talking about any of the abuse in our relationship. this is literally about me, Ashley."

I told him that I was not gonna lie for him, that I've waited years to speak my truth. I've been silenced long enough. Mm. And now I need to come out with everything because a man lost his life. It was abuse not only to me, but to our daughter. and even being divorced from him, I've dealt with harassing phone calls, threats of him wanting to kill me.

I believe that this man was murdered. I believe that David's mental health played a part in what happened. I think what happened was he was standing there during that operation, had a PTSD moment, and hit fight or flight mode, and unfortunately a man lost his life due to it. 

So, this is the kind of person that is, has signed up for ICE under the Trump administration.

There's, they're not doing any screening. They're pretending that they are. They're getting a badge and a gun. They're not forcing them to wear body cameras. Someone spoke to The Intercept, I think it was ICE officials, that said that they saw that there were body cameras on the, officers in Maine, but they clearly just weren't turned on, and it just, it shows- 

What I've heard is that they aren't paying for the...

And, who knows to, what to believe, but, they aren't paying for the subscription to that, so they just, actually just work as walkie-talkies so- 

Oh, lovely. I mean- It's- ... but, but, but, body cameras, what are we talking about here? can you talk about that a bit? Because, it's just i- 95, 96, 97% of the time, whatever, those body cameras are gonna be used to facially scan anybody that they're having an interaction with.

Maybe it will pick up on, officers doing horrible things in immigration enforcement, but they might just turn them off. And we also have endless footage of the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, and there's still been no accountability. It's just w- we need to only be talking about abolishment, and that's it.

Oh, absolutely. 

Yeah. 

Abolishment and, prosecution- 

Yeah ... 

for those who are, are murdering people in our streets. A- a- a- and this is, again, I, I, I write about this quite frequently in the book because this is not just an ICE issue. This is a local law enforcement issue across the country, right?

what is the screening process, when someone applies to be a member of law enforcement in, pick your, smaller city or town or, or area. who, who, who, who are, who are these people who have guns and badges, right? and how do they even get onto a force? And then when they get onto the force and do something like this, how are they held accountable, if at all?

And what we've seen is, public outrage and, public action leads to accountability and has to be done to lead to any sort of accountability. To lead to any sort of conversation, you need a public to, rise up, right? Mm-hmm. I'm thinking of the gentleman, oh, man, the gentleman who was jogging 

f- 

Oh, gosh

in Georgia. 

Hunted down by- 

And two dudes- Yeah ... just hunted him down. These weren't law enforcement, but these were, like, George Zimmerman-type- Yes ... characters who- 

Arbery? 

V- v- Yeah. Yeah. Ahmaud 

Arbery, yeah. 

Yeah, right? Uh, tell me the name again. Ahmaud 

Arbery. Ahmaud, 

Ahmaud Arbery- 

Yeah ... 

who was going for a jog.

Yep. 

These two, this father and son hunted him down, killed him And the public didn't hear about it, I think, till weeks or maybe a month or more later, and then the outrage led to accountability. And so first, how are you even getting l- the application should dismiss you from even being able to join law enforcement, get a gun and a badge, and then when you get one, how are you being held accountable?

And this is why, after, George Floyd was lynched, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act was such an important piece of legislation, moved through the House quickly, and then Cory Booker and Tim Scott, just Couldn't come to an agreement. Wow, what a surprise. And the bill didn't move in the Senate at all.

And, in that bill, we wanted to end qualified immunity- Yes ... if I remember correctly, which is, because right now it's very hard to hold law enforcement accountable when they do something like this. Even in New York City, a place like New York City, there's like millions, tens of millions set aside to settle cases as opposed to holding law enforcement officials accountable.

So ending qualified immunity, someone having... you could be in law enforcement and do something really bad in one city, and then transfer to another city and it doesn't follow you to that city, so now you're in law enforcement again in another place. It's just, further emphasize the need for overall criminal justice reform.

Of course it emphasizes the need to abolish ICE and then prosecute ICE, but also going back to what we always talk about, which is electoral politics. 

Yeah. 

We gotta vote these people out of office, man. and we need everybody to, to organize and everybody to vote, because that's still a issue. We still have not 80% of people voting, right?

We, we don't, we're not reaching the numbers we need to reach to really get champions in office that could really change things. 

Yeah. And it, it does just, when I see something like this, you see how it's basically a federalizing of broken windows policing. Yeah. And what communities, particularly in cities of color, have been dealing with for decades and decades.

And even the use of gang databases, right? Like, the way that they're putting together, these lists of immigrants and trying to round them up. for years and years, gang databases have served to essentially tag, people with some sort of vague criminality to trump up charges against them, whether it's a gun charge or a drug charge, and then that's with them forever.

a- and we're the number one jailer on the planet. I was read- 

Still. 

Still. We're 

not talking about it as much, but we still are. Y- 

but you know who's- Yes ... Zohran come, came up earlier. I was super moved by him going to Rikers- Yes ... and watching the World Cup. Yes. Like, that's something where- 

And that wasn't his first time in Rikers.

No. Like, he's been there multiple times in just, six months. Yeah. 

And, and, and, a, a p- a pollster or a pundit or a consultant would say, "Hey, that's not, there's no political advantage for you to go there and, be seen with criminals," or whatever. But it was just the right thing to do. Yeah. And, he's using his political capital to bring up conversations that have been told, we were told after Jor- or, George Floyd and everything, we're too woke and we're t- p- damaging us electorally.

That it just wasn't the case. you just have to foreground a- how to make people's lives better materially, and then no one's talking about him going to Rikers in this negative way. No one's talking about how he stands up for trans people, which were seen as too touchy for other Democrats to handle, but it's because he leads with his affordability agenda, and then all of that stuff is folded in.

He leads with his humanity. 

Yeah. 

The reason why I've always loved Zohran- ... is because I see his humanity, and you can feel his humanity when you... With the way he shakes your hand. Yep. The way he has a conversation, the way he gives you a p- a pound and a hug. There's a humanity that leads his politics, and what we all want is we want our elected official, officials to be public servants and to lead with human rights first.

Yeah. if they did that, we would, solve, a lot of problems, and, the stuff that they claim to care about, they meaning, the- the- the psycho capitalists, the stuff that they care ab- about like GDP would actually improve. 

Yes. 

Right? i- if- if you, uh- New 

York's doing super well economically right now.

Yeah, 

right, right? Yeah. And it could be doing even better if we gave the people that we've redlined and marginalized access and opportunity in the same ways we give other communities. Mm-hmm. We would have a better GDP. We would have better health outcomes. We would have better education outcomes. We'd have better social outcomes.

We would spend less on healthcare overall, and we would spend less on jail and prisons overall, and law enforcement, because people have less freaking stress in their lives. 

Yeah, yeah. 

Engaging each other as human beings versus this... What are we even doing some of the time? being in the House just be so frustrating, 'cause it's yo, what?

We can't raise the federal minimum wage? Really? Yeah. we c- we can't figure that out? We, we are still at $7.50? 

It's insane. 

Like, what? We, we can't do that? We, we can't provide healthcare? it's just, it's crazy. 

I want to bring in another person from your piece, Lydia. she's a mother and a grandmother from Minnesota who, was driving to work one morning in January when she was pulled over.

tell us what happened to her. 

Yeah, it's a January morning, 5:45. Lidia works, or worked at the time as a, as a cleaner at a retirement home, in a town in Minnesota, maybe about 30 miles outside of Minneapolis. And she realizes suddenly that there are two ICE cars behind her. and she gets pulled over, and she ha- happens to be on a Zoom while she's driving.

it's piping in through her car speakers, it's on Bluetooth or whatever. and it's a, it's a morning prayer session that she does with her husband and, a number of other community members and a group of nuns. And actually, the way she informed her family that she was being arrested was she said on this Zoom, "I'm being arrested."

And her husband, who was already at his job working, this is 5:45 in the morning, hears that and calls their son. So Lidia has three kids. One has DACA. one... two are US citizens, but one is a minor. And the oldest son, uh, Alexis, who's 21 and a US citizen, he is the family's, kind of emissary to the outside world during m- moments like this.

he is the only one basically who is on, unquestioned legal footing. 

Right. He's solid legal footing, but he's also helping them navigate their way through what they had already been afraid might happen to them. So she's arrested. She's held in a van disguised to look like a construction vehicle.

It has ladders. It has fluorescent vests displayed in the windows. And I bring up that up because this detail stopped me. It stopped me because it means that these operations are happening around us, and many of us don't even know it. 

I'm gl- glad it called out to you that detail, 'cause it's an incredibly striking detail.

even before the current Trump administration, ICE has engaged in practices that are, misleading probably, to put it most politely, to try to convince people, say, to open their doors and so on. but what we're seeing now, of course, is a, a level of unfettered behavior that, certainly I haven't seen in my lifetime, which is, not only plainclothes agents in, wearing masks, driving, unmarked cars- Right, which we've seen videos of those

essentially abducting people on the streets. Yeah. 

Yes. 

That's right. That's right. I- i- in this case, Lydia and this other man are being held in this van, and the idea is to try to cause as little outward disruption as possible while these agents continue to try to make more arrests. and, Alexis, her son, drives over to the site of where she was arrested immediately.

He gets there while they're still taking her away. he says to them, "Listen, I'm a member of the National Guard." He's a member of the Minnesota National Guard, and in fact, last year, Lydia had put in a special application for a form of, of legal relief based on the fact that he was a member of the Minnesota National Guard.

Do you have evidence or have you, in her case or others, that, that the application itself actually flagged ICE? 

I, I, I don't, I don't know in this case, I have to say plainly. I don't, I don't know. I do think one of the scariest things for hundreds of thousands of people who are in this country actually lawfully...

we're talking about people who have temporary protected status, people who entered under Biden-era parole programs, people who formally applied for asylum, is that these are all people who've interacted with the federal government, who have gi- willingly given their information to the federal government, which now is most certainly being weaponized against them.

And one of the, the trends that we have seen that I can speak to with authority is that people who have interacted with another agency at the Department of Homeland Security, it's called Citizenship and Immigration Services, USCIS is the full acronym, people who show up for routine appointments there, legal adjustment interviews, fingerprinting appointments, green card interviews, naturalization interviews, citizenship interviews, is that some people are actually getting arrested by ICE agents at those appointments.

So there is some collusion between this other agency that administers the legal immigration system and ICE, which is enfor- enforcing immigration laws and making arrests. So that is a definite reality across the, across the board. I don't know in Lydia's case specifically i- if that's what happened or if she was flagged.

the other reality in all of this, a darker reality in some ways, is there is also rampant racial profiling that is at the center of so much of the administration's enforcement agenda. and in fact, the US Supreme Court basically gave ICE the green light to use race, to use the fact that someone speaks Spanish- Mm-hmm

as one, one element of their decision to pull someone over. Mm-hmm. And so that's- It's- ... also a possibility in this case. 

Right. It's gone well beyond those who have criminal records. It is, it is those who are visibly from, from other places. 

That's right. 

And her story, she shares, her family shares with you that, she, she witnessed and she experienced within, the detention center real pressure for her to sign to be deported.

And to be deported where specifically? 

Well, she's, Lydia's from Mexico. Mm-hmm. and so You know, it's, unlike, for example, someone from Cuba who faces this really grisly prospect of being deported to Mexico, which is something that's happened in large numbers, of, of Cubans being sent to Mexico and basically now being stuck in a country where they don't have legal status and they're back at square one, only in Mexico.

for Lydia, the threat was that she would be worn down to such a point that she would just agree to be sent back to Mexico. And one of the things that Alexis said to her, her son said to her, the moment that she was arrested was like, "Mom, don't sign anything." And she repeats that over and over in her head.

And, she is basically determined not to be pressured into leaving. and, and this at a time, of course, when half of the people in her unit, agree to be deported. L-Lydia, as someone who was arrested in Minnesota as pa- as part of Operation Metro Surge, was basically shunted to Texas at a time when the administration was using Camp East Montana to deal with the high number of arrests that it was making in another state.

and so the fifth and final tent that was constructed at Camp East Montana was used largely, if not entirely, for people who were arrested in Minnesota. and, in-- Sure, there was already chaos, reigning at Camp East Montana, but they're gonna-- A-all of whatever protocols, however meager they were, are out the window for this population.

And so it was three weeks before Lydia actually got the full health screening that you normally get when you enter a facility. So she, for three weeks, was essentially wearing the clothes that she was arrested in. She slept at night in the jacket that she was arrested in. At one point, she got COVID in her tent, and only found out later that that tent was full of people with COVID and jail authorities put up signs outside the tent to warn contractors not to go in there because people had COVID, but the people inside the tent weren't told.

So she has COVID. She's going through a-all of this. And, again, it just, it, it, it reinforces a point you made earlier that I, I can't stress enough, which is the administration is using immigration detention to try to effectuate this goal of forcing more deportations. Immigration detention, it cannot be said enough, i-is not supposed to be punitive.

This is not like someone who's been arrested for a crime and who is serving a prison sentence that is part of that person's punishment. The idea of, an immigration infraction is it is a civil infraction, and y-you can't use... it sounds almost quaint to say under the circumstances, but the government cannot weaponize detention, legally, morally, cannot weaponize immigration detention as a way of trying to punish people and engineer outcomes.

We're at a really dangerous point with this national deportation policing force, which is what we call the cannibalization of federal law enforcement and state and local law enforcement to serve the mass deportation agenda.

And so what we see all around the country is that, law enforcement agencies, sometimes the entire law enforcement agency, are deputized to work for ICE. There's a huge financial incentive for them to do so. They can get performance bonuses. They can get people's salaries paid for, new cars, new phones.

What it means is that you have signed up to work for ICE. And so we see, for instance, highway patrols in some states just posting up their weekend duty is to set up checkpoints and have ICE in cars nearby, and they stop people for the purpose of funneling people to ICE. You've got local police who are in Florida.

they're seeing people and saying, "Hey, you're walking your dog in the wrong part of the beach. No dog walking here. And by the way, where were you born? You seem to be speaking with an accent. Oh, I've got to call ICE." So what we have now is local police doing ICE's bidding. And I think from a democracy perspective, what's so dangerous about that is that ICE is not just a law enforcement agency.

It is a political tool of the White House. They've made no bones about it during the funding shutdown, last year. the president threatened to deploy ICE to the airports and did so really in a blatant political stunt to try to put pressure on Congress and say, "Look, I've got ICE, and I can send them after you if I don't like what you're doing.

If you're putting the squeeze on me, I'll use ICE to put the squeeze on you." So if you Look not very far into the future and you think about, well, there's more than 50,000 law enforcement agents that are now working for ICE. with ICE directly, from another federal law enforcement agency, as, as you've reported from the FBI, from state and local police, they've got more than 50,000.

Every day there's even more law enforcement agencies signing up to work for ICE, and now they can be deployed by the president, by Stephen Miller, to go after dissent. That's not a hypothetical. That's not a hypothetical 'cause we've seen it in states all around the country. In our report, which was just looking at 2025, we identified more than 780 people who were engaged in First Amendment protected activity.

They're documenting ICE's behavior. They've got their cell phones on recording. they're not, trained legal observers, they're just people. But there's also members of the clergy, elected officials, journalists, more than 780 of them who were targeted or subjected to misconduct by immigration agents, and I think that should scare all of us.

When ICE is tear gassing people, we documented 132 times when immigration agents were directly targeting people with chemical irritants, like spraying them in the face. That is brazen, and again, thinking about that as a politicized force, concentrated power at the beck and call of the president, not just here in Washington, DC, but in states all around the country, it is truly frightening from a, the perspective of our democracy.

You mentioned the reporting that I did in May on, on the FBI redirecting a quarter of its staff, over 9,000 personnel, to target immigrants, and at the state and local level, cooperation between federal immigration agents and local police has exploded under Trump. In his first year alone, the number of local and state police departments partnering with ICE to do immigration enforcement increased by 600%.

As of July, ICE has partnered with more than 2,100 such agencies. Noreen, you touched on this a little bit, but, Naina, I wonder if you can elaborate on how those specific partnerships are making this deportation machine possible. 

Let me start with the diversion of resources from other federal agencies. One thing here that's important to talk about on both fronts is public safety.

These are agencies, federal agencies, that have typically focused on core public safety priorities like political violence, domestic terrorism, human and drug trafficking. Instead, these are now officers that are focused on low-level immigration enforcement with very little understanding of the immigration system altogether.

That is a way to supercharge this mass deportation agenda at the federal level, but also a way in which it undermines safety for all Americans, not only immigrant communities. At the local level, this expansion of partnerships between local sheriffs and the federal government absolutely, as always, can serve as a force multiplier for ICE.

That means police officers out on the street using routine traffic stops that can turn into detention, deportation, family separation, or even death. there was the young three-year-old boy who died because his mother had been deported, and she had been picked up by a local police officer during a traffic stop.

That is an example of how these partnerships have real human harms. Now On the public safety front, what we know is that when local police are deputized to work as ICE agents, of course they lose the trust of community members because communities become afraid that reporting crime or contacting public government services will result in deportation and detention.

Earlier in the administration, we saw a public post from a sheriff in Tennessee who said that a baby died in the care of a non-citizen caretaker who was too scared to call 911 in Tennessee because of recent raids that had just happened at the hands of Tennessee State Police officers and federal agents.

So those public safety implications are real, and at the council, we have been talking to sheriffs around the country who do not want to enter into these partnerships because of how it erodes their credibility and how it works against public safety. These are sheriffs in places including, North Carolina who say, "We can't investigate homicides in immigrant communities if we're in bed with the Trump administration and ICE."

We've seen the most conservative sheriffs in Florida who cozied up to this agenda saying, "Wait a minute, why are we going after people who pose no s- safety threat for these kinds of arrests?" So this kind of collaboration, as Noreen said, it obviously has implications for our democracy. It's growing our federal police force, but it also has terrible negative effects for actually protecting public safety and maintaining public trust of public institutions.

And we can expect the kind of violence we're seeing, not only at the hands of federal agents, but also local police officers if we continue to see the administration expand this kind of collaboration. 

I'm not really sure people grasp just how unprecedented the amount of federal money we're giving to ICE and CBP is compared to when those agencies were created after 9/11.

Congress just gave ICE and CBP another $70 billion on top of the money allocated in Trump's economic bill last year, which allocated $170 billion over four years for federal immigration enforcement. Noreen, can you put in perspective for our listeners that explosion in funding, and how is that money shaping what federal immigration agents are doing, what resources, and, and the kinds of weapons that they have?

The $240 billion injection that the Trump administration has given ICE and Border Patrol make these agencies, which already were the largest federal law enforcement agencies, makes them far larger than anything that we've seen at the federal law enforcement level. Their budgets are bigger than that of many, actually, most militaries around the world.

So most militaries around the world are funded less than ICE and Border Patrol at this moment in our nation's history. If you think about where ICE even comes from, like how it came into being, it came into being after the 9/11 attacks and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. It's a pretty young agency as they go, less than 25 years old, and even after 9/11, which, it spawned a lot of legitimate concern and also a lot of hysteria about terrorism and immigration, even after that, we didn't see this kind of funding.

Nothing near this kind of funding. We've actually got a bar chart that shows just how enormously, like a staggering amount of money this is in comparison to anything ICE and Border Patrol got before, even if you compare it to the first Trump administration, even if you look at several years combined, it does not meet $240 billion.

So what can they do with this money? I mentioned that they want to create the Amazon Prime of deportations. It means that they can not only expand ICE's footprint directly in terms of hiring, but they can do more of what we've been talking about, which is incentivizing state and local police to join their ranks through a program called 287G.

Millions of dollars on detention, and detention, not to make it more safe. It will be deadly. It will be large facilities where people are just left to suffer all kinds of abuse and all kinds of medical neglect, and of course, just to deport as many people as they can. It's worth remembering that their ambition is to deport 100 million people.

That's what they've said on their social media platform. 100 million, which is about a third of the country, that's how many people they want to get rid of, and they've got a lot of ideas about how to do it. So they will be spending that money unless Congress takes it (CLIP END — Clip #5: Intercept Briefing - National police force & funding) back, and we will certainly be looking for members of Congress now to make that commitment that they will take that money back because it is just too large a sum.

Well, well, as you're making clear, the work of Resisting police brutality, racism, impact on community has a lot of levels and a lot of aspects, and I know that the project fits in there in a particular way.

I wonder if you could just tell us about some of the elements of resisting, of upending this system that you're working on. I know, for example, qualified immunity is one issue area, but what, what are some of the big pieces that the project is focusing on? 

Yeah. I think we, have a, a two-track system for change or theory of change at the National Police Accountability Project.

We are trying to stop police violence at, at all of its levels from happening. In the first instance, that kind of goes back to what our calls were around ICE presence in the streets. I think we have similar policy proposals for local law enforcement that, we get them out of traffic stops, that we get them out of mental health crisis intervention, all these places where we know it is likely for law enforcement actions to escalate to violence.

So we, we are working on the policy front to remove police from situations where we know that they're likely to commit violence, and that, that goes for ICE as well. ending surveillance technologies, ending kind of the, the technical side of over-policing that often leads to physical violence.

So that's the one track. And the other track is to ensure that there's accountability and consequences when violence does happen. And so that is more where we're focusing on reforms like ending qualified immunity. That's where we're more focused on ensuring that victims of ICE and police violence have an advocate.

A, a big part of our work this year has been focused on training, attorneys, civil rights attorneys, plaintiff side's attorneys, and even, kind of people who've, who've never done a plaintiff side case to bring lawsuits against the federal agencies when this type of ICE violence happens because we know that there are so many people who are being impacted by federal law enforcement violence due to these ICE surges in communities that have never really had to deal with that before.

And so that's really been, a lot of our work and a lot of our focus this year. 

And your-- the National Police Accountability Project is a network, right, of attorneys and advocates. so it's a, it's a big group of folks who, who coordinate their efforts around these issues as opposed to, just one organization.

Is that right? 

That's right, yeah. So we have our members who are litigating these cases. We have, community partners across the country, ge- grassroots groups, and then we also have, partnerships with other national organizations working on criminal legal system issues. And then, yeah, we have our 550 members, all across the country.

And so we're a big network and a big group and, are doing work at, kind of varying levels of policing systems. 

Well, let me just ask you finally, folks are... There's a high point of outrage right now and focus and attention on these ICE killings as well there should be, but folks have a lot of other things going on, you know, and there's a, there's a lot of distracting, bad things happening.

And so when there is a flashpoint of attention, folks really wanna, wanna use it, wanna make the most of it, and where folks often wind up is call your representative, call your senator. And I think while that is crucial and that kind of political engagement is important, I think it's frustrating for people to come away from something that feels so visceral, that has, that has made them so angry, that has made them cry, and then to, you know- get on the phone and leave a, a 10-second voicemail on their, their senator's, line.

And I think folks are looking for other ways to plug in, other things to do. Do you have thoughts for people, just regular folks who are, who are trying to, to do something about this, who are trying to use their anger for something? 

Yeah. I think it's so important to, to go that a extra step and attend a protest.

I think the protests that we've been seeing at Susan Collins' office in Maine have been really effective in pushing back on the narrative that, "Oh, I, I got them to stop. Police stopped," right? And making it be an issue that elected officials can't just let go away with, putting out a, a mild statement or, claiming that they influenced a policy that was immediately reversed or whatever.

Those feet in the street can really make a difference. And I would also say that, it may not feel great, but those calls to your senators, calls to your, representatives, they're making a difference. We have more and more people, like, coming out and saying that they really wanna curtail ICE funding, elected officials that would never take that position in the past.

I would also say, though, if you wanna be more engaged and, I know people have limited time, there are so many great grassroots groups, some of our grassroots partners across the country that have accompaniment programs. So, being able to go with your immigrant neighbors to places where they might be, likely to encounter ICE and just being able to be a presence and an observer and someone who can maybe give them a little bit more protection and confidence, if they have to go to a court hearing or a doctor's appointment or all these places that we're seeing more and more ICE agents popping up.

So I, I think that there's a lot of ways to engage and, even a simple Google search would allow you to, to get plugged into that and, it really... Those programs really are based on your availability. It, it's a short training and then, it's, driving someone to the pharmacy or something.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. it is a, an easy way if you have, even a free hour once a week, to, to try to be a source of support and a, a source of resistance for the immigrant community around you.

And Finally, Section C, The World Watches & The People Fight Back

Mexico files criminal complaints in the US over migrant deaths in custody. Go ahead and read the lead for you here. Mexico has begun filing criminal complaints with state prosecutors in the United States over the deaths of its citizens in US immigration custody and during enforcement operations, the Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday.

Mexico's government has also sent cease and desist letters to US detention centers where Mexican nationals have died, the ministry added in a statement. The filings follow the deaths of at least 14 Mexican nationals in ICE custody and several others during arrest operations, including the recent fatal shooting of a Mexican citizen by an ICE agent in Houston.

That story, of course, has been one of the ones that really has reverberated both here in Mexico and, of course, in the United States. This was a man who was known in his community. We've seen his son actually play a leading role in denouncing that. And I think it's, Right. Very eloquent ... in some ways- Mm-hmm, 

mm-hmm

a, a qualitative change- Mm-hmm ... I think. We're seeing very much like the, the, the ICE killings o- of, Renee Good and Pretti that really galvanized the community. What we're seeing here in Houston, which the city itself is somewhat more on the liberal side, but of course is based in very Republican Texas.

We're seeing a lot of people coming out, these spontaneous mobilizations, these actions. Again, I really wanna highlight the role of this young man, his son, who has done a, an incredible job talking about this case. but I also wanna, before we, move on here and break this story down for you, wanna share with you the actual communiqué from the government of Mexico, from the Secretary of Foreign Affairs, talking about exactly what they're doing.

As we see here, and we saw in the story, a complaint to the United States Department of Justice. So this is not just a diplomatic note, which is what Mexico had been doing previously, but actually submitting a formal complaint from one attorney general's office to another about what's going on.

Complaints to state-level prosecutors as well, not leaving it only to the federal sphere. Filing complaints with state prosecutors, civil, civilian, civil actions as well, law- lawsuits, cease and desist letters to the detention centers, in particular the, in particular the Adelanto Detention Center in California, which has been flagged by the Mexican government on numerous occasions.

Precisely because, as we can see here on the screen, four Mexican nationals have actually died at that detention center. In particular, it's been at the center of criticism. We've talked about that center, previously here on Soberania, and of course, a communication as well to the United States, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, raising this issue w- with Volker Türk, the High Commissioner for Human Rights at the United Nations, about the deaths of Mexican people in ICE custody, raising it to the international level as well.

Okay. So you're right, there's a lot to break down here, Jose Luis. the first thing we have to, I think, say very clearly is we send out our, our most heartfelt condolences to the family of Lorenzo Salgado. That's just, beyond the pale. We've been following, on this podcast and on Sin Muros, the cases of ICE, today's modern-day Gestapo, and, their brutal practices, across the country.

And as you said, the cases of, Renee Good and Alex Pretti galvanized the community, in Minneapolis, right? And then after Minneapolis, there appeared to be, a lowering of, of the actions of the tensions. I was in Chicago shortly afterwards, and the migrant community there in Pilsen saying, "Yeah, they've, they've, they've toned it down a bit."

Right? they thought You know, not they hadn't stopped anything, but they'd stopped the most flagrant, high-profile cases. 

And 

the question, of course, always was, how long was that gonna last, right? And as we've seen, was not all that, not all that long, right? and this is, indicative of, of an ICE and a border patrol that's out of control, right?

in the case of Lorenzo Salgado, they weren't even looking for him. he was on his way to work, someone who's been in the, United States for decades. He was on the... just on the cusp of getting his work permit, right? And of course, they always trundle out the story that, he was resisting arrest and was trying to get away and was trying to, act aggressively against ICE officers, which has proven to be, in every single case, bar none, a lie, an absolute lie.

And then after the Lorenzo Salgado case, we had the case, of course, in Biddeford, Maine, with a Colombian, citizen, who was a legal resident and was, shot and killed, I think, with his daughter in the back seat, and then just, hustled out of the vehicle, like a sack of potatoes. And then just very recently, we had another death in San Augustine, Florida, Jose Luis, by somebody, again, who was at, an ICE, stop, attempted, to flee and was hit by a tractor trailer.

So that's three just in this week. So, whatever, change of strategy or tactics might have happened after Minneapolis, ICE is back, and of course, ICE never went away. And we're talking about, some fifty people who have died in ICE custody, and, ICE killed them. Whether they actually put a gun to their temple or not, they're victims of ICE just as much.

And now we have ten people who have been physically shot by ICE, including the cases, of Houston and in Florida... I'm sorry, of Maine, and then of course the, the Florida case where the person was hit, by a vehicle. And so the-- in the face of that, what does the Mexican government do? What can the Mexican government do?

Because it's operating in a different legal jurisdiction. So, their... legally, their hands are somewhat tied. But as you very correctly pointed out at the beginning, this does represent a fundamental shift in the Mexican government at the beginning, in the first few months, the Sheinbaum government was obviously using the cool head strategy in battling off tariffs and fending off Trump's, threats of invasion and the like, and, the boat bombings and the kidnapping of, Maduro and the, asphyxiation of, of Cuba.

There was an all-out assault against the entire region. And within there, the rhetoric about the ICE killings and shootings was, fairly muted. It was there, but it was fairly muted, right? What we see now is a shift in strategy away from this, the diplomatic note, right, the nota diplomatica, towards direct legal action, and you've just laid out what those four were.

an official complaint at the federal level from one attorney general's office to another. You see complaints being filed at the state level. and then you see, cease and withdrawal letters being sent to these private prisons. This strikes me as particularly important. Mm-hmm. beyond the criminal cases at the federal and state level, sending these cease and withdrawal letters to...

We've talked about them abundantly on these shows, right? CoreCivic and GEO Group, these four private disgusting companies running gulags across the country where they're giving people rancid food. They've got people stuffed in small spaces. They're not giving them the medical care that, they're legally required to give, so they are responsible for killing these people as much as if they'd killed them So this is the strategy now, and of course, taking it to the United Nations High Commissioner for, the High Commission, as you mentioned.

Now, will these complaints go anywhere? No, they won't. But it could set the stage for future legal action. You have to go through the hoops. You have to file the complaint first. That could then become part of your legal case down the road. You have to file the cease and withdrawal case first with these private prisons, so that can then be the basis for a future civil suit.

And I hope Lorenzo Salgado's family and all these families, sue the hell out of these people in the civil-- in civil courts, because it's very hard to go after individual ICE officers, criminally. They're protected. Although, they could use, federal tort law to go after the federal government in general for wrongful.

But civilly, they could go after these people, and I hope they clean them out, Jose Luis. And I hope the Mexican federal government continues to step up its actions, however difficult it is. just to conclude, we saw how difficult it was in the case of Mexico's lawsuit against American gun companies, right?

Which was eventually thrown out because, we know how, the US, system works. And of course, because, gun manufacturers have immunity against, what happens with their guns, and that apparently extends across the entire world, what happens with the guns that they sell. Mm-hmm. so, legally, it didn't go anywhere, but it did bring more legal attention to the issue.

And now we see the issue of US guns going into Mexico being talked about like it's never been talked about before, very consistently, both on the US and on the Mexican side. So at the very least, that's gonna come out of this. But Mexico has to keep up the pressure, Jose Luis 

In a memo obtained by The New York Times back in June, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote, quote, "Coral Garrido has used his presence in the United States to conduct political activity in support of the Petro government," unquote, and accused Coral of undermining US foreign policy interests in Colombia.

Since Trump's return to office, Rubio has used his power as the Secretary of State to target individual immigrants for prosecution and deportation like, oh, student protesters such as Palestinian advocate Mahmoud Khalil. But according to The Times, this memo appeared to be the first to recommend the deportation of an activist in relation to a presidential election in a foreign country, in this case, Colombia.

Beto Coral reportedly arrived in the United States in 2015 on a tourist visa and had a pending asylum application. After a month in ICE detention, Beto Coral dropped his asylum claim and returned voluntarily to Colombia on July 16th. He's joining us now from Bogota, Colombia, and we're joined by his attorney, Elizabeth Shaw, a partner at Humanitas Legal Group in Boston.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Beto Coral, let's begin with you. Can you talk about the day of your detention by HSI agents? Where were you? What happened? 

Thank you for joining me. I was detained in, on June 16th by no ICE agents, HSE agents while, they tell me. I was, grocery shopping with my son and when I arrive, home, they, raises their weapons.

But as soon as they saw, that I was with my young son and my dog, they lowered down the guns. they then allowed me to go into the apartment to put away the groceries, leave my son and my dog there because you know the, the weather in Phoenix in Ju- in Ju- in June, in June. And I tried to call my son's mother so she call me, uh, pick me, h- pick him up, my, my son and my dog.

they never present me, with a warrant or any other legal document. They simply handcuffed me once I got into the vehicle, put me in the shackles. What was most surprise was that after we started driving, one of the HSE- EC agents asked me, "What, why you did it?" And I'm very surprised because that guy's, they tell me and they, they don't have reason, don't know the reason.

It's very, I, I am very surprised and th- this situation was very large. Beco, I, 

I want to explain to our viewers and listeners around the world when you say HSI agents, that's Homeland Security Investigations. So they take you, and you end up in ICE detention, which jail, for a month. And explain what happened to you there.

Yes. After that, I, I was taken to detention facility in Florence in Arizona where I was, beaten and, within... Sorry. The days, the, the ICE agents in Florence don't give me water, don't give me, a food. they struck me my legs and put me the shackles on my hands and my feet and my, hips. I was held there for about four hours.

Then around 3:00 PM, they, kick m- kick, kick my, my legs and sh- show me out to detention facility. put me into a van and drove me through northern Arizona, crossing the border into New Mexico. However, when then headed south, which, seemed very strange. Looking out the window, I noticed that we were, approximate to El Paso, maybe 10:00 PM.

soon after, I realized we were arriving at the detention facility in El Paso. In El Paso, I was don't give any food or water. I remain there for, for a day, one day and half. After that, I was transported by plane to Omaha, Nebraska, then to Minneapolis, then to Alexandria, Louisiana. from there I was taken, by bus to Mississippi, and after five days in Mississippi, I was,

transferred to Jena in Louisiana. through this entire time, I was always keep in solitary confinement. During the transfer, I was never, given any food. Only, after we arrived to each detention facility. I was don't given water either, and the treatment I received was, inhuman, and I was always singled out and, handcuffed.

I wanna bring, your lawyer into this conversation, Elizabeth Shaw, one of the lawyers representing our guest, Col- from, Colombia because he was deported there. Franklin, Franklin Humberto Corral Garrido, better known as Beto Coral. Elizabeth Shaw, explain exactly, after being here for over a decade, why Beto was picked up, and the clarity of this memo that The New York Times got ahold of, written by, Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, specifically talking about his support for candidates in his own country of Colombia

Right. I think we only really need to look at the timeline of events that took place here. The weekend before Beto was a- arrested in Arizona, he was actually in Miami, Florida with other Colombian ex-pats, and they were, demonstrating and speaking out about their political opinion in regards to the upcoming election that was happening the following weekend.

And when he arrived back home, there was the memo issued by Marco Rubio that morning, and by that afternoon he was detained by HSI agents. and on the same day, the incoming president, de la Espriella, had, made tweets, that honestly looked like they did allude to Beto's arrest. and so it's very clear that he was exercising his First Amendment speech in Miami, returned home, and then was arrested for that speech.

This is a part of a clip you posted on Instagram outside a luxury apartment building in Miami, Bristol Tower, where far-right Colombian President-Elect Abelardo de la Espriella at one point owned property. He's a lawyer and a businessman who's faced scrutiny over the source of his fortune and his alleged links to Colombian clients, including Alex Saab, an ultra-wealthy fixer for former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who's currently in federal custody in a Brooklyn jail awaiting trial.

Let's go to that clip of, of Beto Coral. This 

apartment 

was purchased with money belonging to Venezuela's poor, which is why I'm here in Miami, a city teeming with such stories, fortunes, luxury apartments, and properties acquired by individuals directly or indirectly linked to the Venezuelan regime.

And yet from here they spend their time criticizing. 

So clearly Corral is, speaking, as an activist. if you can, Elizabeth Shaw, respond to, Marco Rubio saying, quote, "Corral Garrido has used his presence in the United States to conduct political activity in support of the Petro government." Petro, democratically elected president in Colombia.

what he is condemning is everyone's right here in the United States to have and hold their own political opinion and the problem that Marco Rubio and the Trump administration has is that that stated opinion, which is widely followed, on Beto's various accounts across social media is that that is against what they are in support of.

And so where does his case stand now? Already deported to Colombia. 

and I would like to clarify that point. Beto was not deported. we, his legal team had negotiated a deal for him to accept voluntary departure, meaning that he is not deported from the United States. He left on his own accord and without expense to the United States government.

And so at this point, he has withdrawn his asylum application in accordance with the grant of voluntary departure, and, is now in Colombia, making his plans for his next steps for safety. 

I see Miguel here in the chat says, "ICE is a rogue institution." Absolutely. I... the only acceptable demand I think in this is for the dissolution of ICE. Mm-hmm. It shouldn't exist. That's it. 

A rogue institution is part of a rogue state.

It's reflective. One is reflective of the other. And you're absolutely right. with, Renee Good, we have how many different videos of it happening? The agent involved was simply shifted somewhere else and continues to be on duty. What good did the, the video cams do there? And to pick up on your point, I think this is very important about, what's to be commendable about La, Claudia Sheinbaum about this.

She has very little to gain on this, in dem- pure terms of domestic political capital, right? The migrants are not a big voting constituency within Mexico. there's not a groundswell here within, Mexico, on this for, historical reasons of a kind of a disconnect between sometimes Mexico and the migrant community that a lot of been- people have been trying to, to work on and address.

So it's high risk and little gain in the most narrow terms of political capital. But with regards to the dignity of the country and with regards to human rights, with regards to protecting Mexican citizens, wherever they may be, it's fundamental, and that's what's so important about this. But there's gonna be blowback.

There's gonna be blowback on this, right? as United States is trying to blackmail Mexico with the, USMCA, revision, right as, Lindsey Graham is dead and, may he never rest for a moment of peace wherever he is. 

But Lindsey- Certainly 

no friend of Mexico ... no friend of Mexico, and Lindsey Graham was leading the charge to, have cartels being declared as foreign terrorist organizations, even before Trump, did it.

And now it turns out that the United States was negotiating with the Sinaloa cartel the whole time, right? Watch our episode, from last week. So it's in this context of constant pressure, economically, diplomatically, militarily, that Sheinbaum is sticking out her neck for Mexican citizens who are amongst the most invisible, right?

Because there's not a huge constituency here within Mexico, standing up for them, and within the United States, they're in the most precarious of situations, being hunted down like dogs, right? and that's why it's so important that it not just stay at another diplomatic complaint. You've gotta take it to the courts, and you've gotta take it beyond the courts, obviously.

You've got to really mobilize, the migrant community in the US. The problem is that, remember a few months ago when Los Angeles was erupting, Sheinbaum was just immediately being attacked by, "Oh, you s- she's, stoking riots in Los Angeles from, the National Palace." Which she obviously wasn't doing.

But this is the thing that the, Sheinbaum said at the Mañanera, "This should be something that unites us as Mexicans, protecting our citizens wherever they are." The sad truth is that it doesn't. It unites the Mexican public, it unites the Mexican left. It does not unite, the PRI and the PAN, who constantly punch down on the migrants and bash them and say, "They were asking for it," basically.

All right? So this is, an area where she's calling for national unity, and there should be that. But you have, a right wing here which is, very comfortable seeing Mexican c- citizens mistreated because, what do they care, right? 

Before we move on, I wanna highlight this comment here from our regular viewer.

Bill Ackman contributed 10,000 to the GoFundMe campaign for the agent who shot Renee Good. So we can see how precisely there is almost a, a confluence around some of these issues from the oligarchs. And I say that because it's cr- really quite curious, and it's a, it's a bit of an aside, so I hope you allow me.

But as I was looking through this article, Kurt, look who's quoted, our friend Tony Payan- . Mm-hmm ... from the Baker Institute. But how about this? I did not realize this until now, but the Center for US and Mexico at Rice University is now named after Claudio X. Gonzalez.

I just couldn't let that 

sit. Claudio X. Gonzalez Center. Oh, that is so pathetic.

Can you believe that? But it, it, it speaks to the point I'm trying to make, right? We see how the very wealthy, the oligarchs in Mexico, the oligarchs in the United States, use their money to drive their agendas, right? To, to, to have these puppets for them speak for their ideas in these public spaces, to fund these criminal assassins who kill people who are just simply trying to protect their neighbors from being kidnapped in the case of Renee Good.

Yeah. And so, just to close out, I was in Chicago a few months ago. The Chicago community is very organized about this, and I think this is gonna spur a lot more organization on this. We're seeing Lorenzo Salgado and that whole case, it's spreading beyond Houston now. It's spreading beyond Houston in the way, in the, the way the Renee Good case became s- became symbolic of, Minneapolis.

Lorenzo Salgado case is becoming symbolic, right, of, o- of treatment of, of the Hispanic community, right? Because it's, it's a Mexican here, it's a Colombian in Maine. We don't know who it was in San Agustin. amongst the 50 people, who have, yes, been killed in ICE centers, I think 16 of them are Mexicans, right?

So about a third. Okay? This can't go on. This can't go on. All right? This is... it's like for the slave patrols of the 19th century. It's like the posse vigilantes along the border, right? Taking their law, taking what's left of the law in the United States into their own hands with absolute and utter impunity.

Can't go on. It can't. There has to be a huge mass rising up against this. Mm. And the Mexican government is doing its part, but there has to be, has, there has to be, The strategy has to be coordinated with the people on the ground there as well 

That's right. But we are seeing an uprising.

And I think, think that while there was a lull there- Yeah ... perhaps because of other events of great import, like the US assault together with Israel on Iran, which appears to be picking up once again. Again. Trump can't seem to help himself. But of course, the World Cup all things served in a lot of ways to shock people.

But we're seeing that obviously now start to wind down, and we're seeing protests start to wind up. It's something we'll be 

following closely. 

We turn now to news that Citizens Bank has severed financial ties to CoreCivic and the GEO Group, two of the nation's largest private prison operators that work directly with ICE to run immigration jails. The national bank has faced significant pushback from social justice groups and activists for providing more than $2.5 billion in financing to the two private prison companies.

Earlier this month, Citizens Bank said it was ending its lending relationships with the GEO Group and CoreCivic, insisting that the move was a, quote, "business decision based on changed commercial circumstances and unrelated to protest actions and the growing boycott of Citizens Bank." Three days before Citizens decided to end its financial relationship with the GEO Group and CoreCivic, the township of Montclair, New Jersey voted to pull its $91 million account from Citizens Bank.

This is Montclair Mayor Rene Baskerville speaking in favor of divesting from Citizens Bank at a Montclair Township Council meeting earlier this month. 

It's not just a one-out. It's, like a wake-up call that I think that we need to be more diligent about who we're doing business with, who we're investing with, what contracts we're giving out.

And really, when we're doing these things, that maybe we should be, just a little bit more aware and take a look at the, the behind-the-scenes types of things. And even when we were talking about, well, what next? You take it from Citizens, and I'm saying, well, let's make sure that we know wherever we go, whether it's Valley, Bank of America, whoever it may be, that we know who, they're doing banking with because there's a lot of other categories, none as urgent as this is immediately in this setting here and now with what's going on at Delaney.

Montclair's decision follows a decision last month by Jersey City in New Jersey to divest from Citizens Bank and close its over $250 million account. The GEO Group runs the Delaney Hall Federal Immigration Detention Center in Newark, New Jersey, and CoreCivic operates the Elizabeth Detention Center in Elizabeth, New Jersey.

Jake, let's begin with you, Council Member. talk about how this happened. this is happening all over the country, but piecemeal in a way that people don't realize, how much pressure has been brought on Citizens Bank, whether or not they admit that, this has led to their decision. 

Yeah, it, it really is pressure.

And just first, thank you so much for having me on the show. It's really an honor to be here. before I was on Jersey City Council, I got my start, as a Democratic Socialist of America member organizing the Abolish ICE movement, fighting against ICE detention centers and jails in New Jersey, and just at the beginning of this year was elected, for this first term as a, a city council member in Jersey City.

And the pressure at Delaney Hall was growing. the conditions were deteriorating, and the resistance on the inside led by detainees was escalating, particularly by hunger strikers and labor strikers. and Delaney Hall in, in Newark, includes residents of Jersey City, so this was, of course, a concern of my constituents being there.

And, it just so happened that the De-ICE Citizens Bank movement, these amazing activists who are identifying just how much financing, of GEO Group, which operates Delaney, as you mentioned, and of course, Civic, just how much financing Citizens Bank does. 2.5 billion, I think, was the amount of financing going to these companies.

De-ICE Citizens Bank was doing this great work. I had just started hearing about it maybe days or a week before a city council meeting where I was reviewing the agenda, the week before the city council meeting, and I noticed that we had, a vote, to authorize where our money essentially was being held in different banks.

And I saw that Citizens Bank was on this list, and that raised alarms for me right away. So it was absolutely thanks to the incredible work of the activists with the De-ICE Citizens Bank movement that I would even know to look out for that. and I immediately told the administration. I worked with, my other DSA counterpart, Councilman Joel Brooks, on our city council, and we demanded the full divestment of the 200 plus million dollars that we had in Citizens Bank.

and we put forward a resolution that was unanimously voted on by our city council. And to their credit, the administration under Mayor Solomon, they acted immediately and made that divestment happen. 

So Citizens Bank is the 17th or 18th largest bank in the US. Have you heard, any responses from people who have accounts at Citizens Bank, and were any of them among the activists who pushed for this decision?

There were some, concerns that I heard on the ground, here and there from people who might have accounts. we are not served enough in Jersey City by, by banks, and there's not enough banking, especially in the south side of Jersey City. and there are a couple branches of Citizens Bank there. but it was incredibly important, and I think there was a overwhelming consensus that, those questions, need to be tackled on their own and we need to tackle this, like, serious moral, political, and, material concern of having 200-plus million in Citizens Bank.

recently we had Julie Cohen and Paul Barrett in the studio. They privately had a Citizens Bank account. Paul Barrett had worked for the Wall Street Journal and other places. Julie Cohen is the Oscar-nominated filmmaker who made RBG. Earlier this year, she and Paul Barrett wrote an op-ed for NJ.com about their decision to close their accounts over the bank's complicity with Delaney Hall.

we wanna go to a clip of Julie speaking at Bloomfield, New Jersey Town Council earlier this month. 

I think it's important to be really clear that this is about Citizens' complicity with ICE. my husband and I actually closed our own accounts at the Citizens, b- branch on Broad Street in December after we learned, that Citizens was providing financing for GEO Group and CoreCivic, the private prison companies that are behind, the now notorious, I- ICE detention at Delaney Hall, at Dilley in Texas where there are, parents and children together in a center where there are zero criminals, at Elizabeth Detention, and a lot of places where there are, there's a lack of due process and where there are all kinds of human rights violations.

we didn't want our own money going to that, and we certainly don't want our tax dollars in bank accounts that are associated with ICE and that really enable some of ICE's worst behavior. 

So that's, the Oscar-nominated filmmaker Julie Cohen, who together with her husband, Paul Barrett, pulled out their accounts from Citizens Bank.

We're joined in Boston by Reverend John Edgerton, senior minister of the Old South Church in Boston, board member of the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization, which has withdrawn $3 million from Citizens Bank. if you can, Reverend, talk about your decision. And, we're talking about cities, now we're talking about churches.

What was the decision of the church, and did Citizens Bank respond?

So we've been involved in this with our sister congre- our sister organization, Greater Cleveland Congregations, with the De-ICE Coalition Coalition, which is an all-volunteer grassroots-led organization for many months. We attended the annual shareholders meeting in Rhode Island and informed the board, informed the pres- informed the, the CEO, Bruce Van Saun, i- in the wintertime of our concerns about this.

We asked for a meeting to discuss this, and they never actually made that meeting happen. And so we told them, "If you won't meet with us, won't discuss our concerns, then we will withdraw a million dollars on this date," and we did so, and they didn't reply. And we then withdrew $2 million from that. And then of course, when Jersey City and Montclair withdrew $356 million, municipalities just have more zeros at the end of their bank accounts than churches do, and so this was really a broad movement.

And the pressure became s- too much for Citizens to bear, and they had to do the right thing. 

And so Reverend Edgerton, do you hope that other, churches follow suit? And is there any indication, have you heard anything, about how that may, happen taking your example? 

So this, so this became really quite a broad movement very quickly.

We originally had about $13 million that were organized of people who said that they would be willing to withdraw their money. That quickly drew, grew to $24 million. And those organizations still have those deposits pledged, and so we're going to be watching to make sure that Citizens follows through with what they've said that they're going to do, that they will in fact cut ties completely and quickly with CoreCivic and GEO Group.

We want to verify that they have, that they have done that, and there is plenty of public pressure to make that happen. 

Reverend Edgerton, Citizens Bank said, quote, "Citizens has been disappointed that the activists have dragged into what is largely a political matter." If you can respond to that. And also, did Citizens' CEO say he would meet with you, and did he?

So CEO Bruce Van Saun committed at their annual shareholder meeting to meet with Greater Boston Interfaith Organization, said that he would ha- make it happen within two weeks. That didn't occur, and then later on they sent us a letter saying that they were reneging on that promise to meet with us because we were making false and misleading statements.

They didn't let us know what exactly we had said that was wrong. We stand by the things that we have said. We would very much like to meet still with CEO Bruce Van Saun. There has been a lot of reputational damage done to the bank that we bank with, and we can give them some good advice about how to rebuild that trust.

This is a situation that has become terrible for Citizens Bank. Because of their own decisions, they are stuck between a rock and a hard place, on the one hand of a public that realizes that what they're doing is unconscionable and does not want to bank with such an entity, and a regulatory structure which is vindictive and would punish them if they were seen to go against the administration.

That is because of Citizens Bank own choices to put themselves into that position. Nobody forced them to get involved in the private prison business. In 2021, almost every big bank got out of that dirty business. Citizens stayed in it, they shouldn't have, and now they need to repair their reputation with the people of this country.

That's going to be it for today.

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The additional sections of the show included clips from;

Radio Atlantic

Today, Explained

The David Feldman Show

Factually! with Adam Conover

The Majority Report

Fresh Air

CounterSpin

The Intercept Briefing

Soberanía: The Mexican Politics Podcast

and Democracy Now!

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