ICE Expansion Fuels Backlash Over Mass Deportations (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Donald Trump promised when he came to power the largest deportation in American history and it seems he's done that. But what do people really make of it? Are they souring on the idea of deporting large numbers of people from the United States? Is the actions of the Immigration Enforcement Authority damaging Donald Trump politically?

[00:00:21] Speaker 2: Welcome to AmeriCast.

[00:00:30] Speaker 1: Hello, it's Justin in the worldwide headquarters of AmeriCast in London, England.

[00:00:34] Speaker 3: And it is Marianna sitting next to Justin in the worldwide headquarters.

[00:00:37] Speaker 1: And it's Anthony flying solo here in the American headquarters of AmeriCast in Washington, D.C. And before we get into the future of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency and indeed the makeup of it now and what seems to be going on with it, let's just take a step back as it were and talk about how it might have changed under Donald Trump. So they've always been there, these people, haven't they, Anthony? But in a sense, one of the criticisms of them is that they seem to be doing something slightly different.

[00:01:08] Speaker 4: Yeah, ICE, Immigration Customs Enforcement, is an agency that was actually created after the September 11th, 2001 attacks and the creation of the Homeland Security Department and is tasked with essentially enforcing immigration law outside of the borders. Immigration at the borders, at airports, places like that. ICE is the federal agency that enforces immigration laws everywhere else in the country. And they've been around, as you mentioned, for a couple of decades, but they have had a dramatic increase in one, attention and two, funding since Donald Trump returned to the White House. And that is what has generated all this controversy because there are just a lot more ICE agents out there and they have a lot more money to spend.

[00:01:57] Speaker 3: And Anthony, when it comes to the goal that ICE has now, how many people are they expected to detain? What are the targets?

[00:02:03] Speaker 4: The target, according to Stephen Miller, the Deputy Chief of Staff at the White House, and Christine Noem, who's the head of Homeland Security, is about 3,000 arrests a day. That could add up to more than a million arrests and deportations over the course of a year. Now, we didn't see those numbers in 2025, but we do have reports of around 300,000 deportations, which is a significant amount. And part of the reason why they've been able to ramp up the deportation so dramatically over past years is because there's just a lot more money flowing into ICE, tens of billions of dollars. They were given $75 billion just in that big, beautiful bill earlier this year. And that money is going to hiring new people, to expanding detention facilities, and to generally casting a much wider net when it comes to enforcement activities.

[00:02:56] Speaker 1: And it's not just criminals, is it? Because he made that promise on the campaign trail. Then when they first came to power, it was noticeable, wasn't it? They said, well, you know, we're going to start with the criminals, the gang members. And that's where our emphasis is going to be. And that was politically almost certainly the right thing to do, is where the American people were. But that target figure that you've just mentioned, Anthony, that's not 3,000 criminals, is it? It's just 3,000 people.

[00:03:22] Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah. And you can't get to that number, 3,000 a day, without deporting people who the only laws they violated were the immigration laws. And yes, they're in this country without proper authorization. And yes, the federal government has the right to remove them. But doing so on such a massive scale can be disruptive. The administration likes to characterize the people they're deporting as the worst of the worst. If you remember that press conference that Donald Trump just held earlier this week, he had a stack of papers of people, he said, who had been arrested and were in deportation proceedings. And he ticked through the criminal records for all of them. And yes, a lot of them had pretty nasty records, whether it was sexual assault or fraud. It ticked through the list. But you can't get to those numbers without also sweeping up a vast, larger group of people, which is what I think a lot of the people who supported these mass deportations, they didn't envision, as you said, Justin. They envisioned getting the criminals out, but not your gardeners and your landscapers, the people who are building your houses and everyone else.

[00:04:32] Speaker 1: Which then leads to the question, who's in charge, actually? What's going on? I mean, in a formal sense, who are the ICE agents answerable to? But also in a less formal sense, who's actually driving this? Is it Stephen Miller? Is it Donald Trump? Is it another?

[00:04:46] Speaker 4: I think Stephen Miller has been the point person on immigration enforcement for the entirety of this administration. He was obviously a big influence in the first term, too. He was attributed as being the person behind that family separation policy that generated headlines in Trump's first term, where they were taking minors away from their parents who had crossed the border together and filing criminal charges against the parents and then trying to replace or move the minors into some sort of a separate facility. Those are the kind of things that he's pushed. He wants a vigorous, aggressive enforcement of immigration law, not just to get people out of this country, but also to serve as a deterrent to other people who are looking to come into the country. And we have seen that deterrent be effective. The number of encounters on the U.S.-Mexico border during Trump's second term have dropped to near zero. It is a remarkable turnaround compared to the hundreds of thousands a month who were entering during the Biden years.

[00:05:50] Speaker 3: And I guess as well, kind of on that point you're making, Anthony, about when it was initially sold as it's the bad guys who we're getting rid of from this country, you could see why that had mass appeal. But when people start to see it impact their daily lives or people that they interact with quite regularly, like you say, like a landscaper or someone who works for you, it feels different. I think what's really ramped up that feeling different is then also seeing confrontations between the people working for ICE and some either migrants or people who are not migrants but who disagree with ICE. And Justin, I mean, the prime example of that recently has been what happened in Minneapolis.

[00:06:34] Speaker 1: The thing is, the situation in Minneapolis really brought it to everyone's attention, didn't it? There was the killing, the shooting of an unarmed 37-year-old woman. And we did that episode about that appalling event a couple of weeks ago now. But more widely as well, plenty of other confrontations on the street. ICE agents behaving very aggressively, but also, it's worth saying, protesters also being aggressive towards the ICE agents. And this real sense of sort of ongoing conflict on the streets of Minneapolis and that particular state with its problems that it's had with corruption in the Somali community, which we've also talked about in a previous episode, and the racial tensions stoked around that and the political tensions, too, because they've tended in the past to support the Democrats, all these things sort of ebbing and flowing around the central issue, which is that for all Americans, because of what happened in Minneapolis initially, they had to focus on it. Although it's fair to say, isn't it, Anthony, it's much wider than Minneapolis as well.

[00:07:38] Speaker 4: It is much wider than Minneapolis. Minneapolis is just the latest and most dramatic, the most potentially inflammatory example. But we'd seen them here in Washington, D.C. last year, in Charlotte, North Carolina, in Chicago, in Los Angeles, these surges where immigration agents go in and they go neighborhood by neighborhood in immigrant communities, asking people for their citizenship documents, pulling people over, pulling them out of their cars, taking them out of their homes. But Minneapolis, because of what happened to Renee Goode, has has elevated this, I think, in the national consciousness and the response, the protest response has been much greater. But we're talking about thousands of agents now, federal agents, ICE enforcement officials, as well as other government agents in Minneapolis doing this ramped up enforcement. And and you've seen the protests pick up in intensity as well because of Goode's death, but also because of time after time, these dramatic examples of people, sometimes U.S. citizens being taken by ICE, detained, sometimes released, but other times transported halfway across the country into these new detention facilities that all that money I mentioned has been going to build and expand.

[00:09:01] Speaker 3: And I think as well, Anthony, that a lot of I mean, particularly the protests in Minneapolis, for example, have been triggered not just by the the kind of emotion and shock and feeling, but also because the incident has been so visible that as we chatted about on the episode we did. But they're just these very, very viral clips that show what happened in a very sort of average suburban street. And I think that helps to explain why this particular example has especially sort of caught fire. Here's how Minnesota's Governor Tim Walz described what's going on in his state.

[00:09:33] Speaker 5: Armed, masked, undertrained ICE agents are going door to door, ordering people to point out where their neighbors of color live. They're pulling over people indiscriminately, including U.S. citizens and demanding to see their papers. And at grocery stores, at bus stops, even at our schools, they're breaking windows, dragging pregnant women down the street, just plain grabbing Minnesotans and shoving them into unmarked vans, kidnapping innocent people with no warning and no due process. Let's be very, very clear. This long ago stopped being a matter of immigration enforcement.

[00:10:10] Speaker 3: One of the reasons why everyone is talking about this is because a lot of the examples that we're seeing relating to ICE agents are just so emotive, provocative, distressing. I mean, however you want, however you best want to characterize them. Some of the most shocking ones, though, have involved kids in particular. So there's this story that that's popped up today. Actually, it's Thursday of this little five year old boys in a blue hat with his backpack on and a shirt. His name is Liam Ramos and he was arrested in the drive of his home in Minneapolis and sent to a detention center that's more than a thousand miles away by ICE agents. And I mean, Justin, you can imagine the way that people particularly who are not keen on this approach to immigration are responding to this because he's just a little kid.

[00:10:55] Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, just arresting someone in a bunny hat is always problematic. It seems to me politically just to be kind of slightly facetious about it. I mean, the boy, you know, a thousand miles away. This wasn't a sort of arrest where he's taken away and later joined by family members. And it's all done, I don't know, with police officers trained to deal with children or the rest of it. This boy, so far as we know, just grabbed off the street and taken to a place a thousand miles away. And he's five. And I think for a lot of Americans, even people who support the policy.

[00:11:32] Speaker 3: Would start to think, oh, why are you focusing on people like that?

[00:11:35] Speaker 1: Was that what I really wanted? There was another case, wasn't there? This guy who was detained at gunpoint. Again, we're still talking about Minnesota now. Taken out onto the street. And again, there are pictures of him. It's minus 10 degrees. His name is Chong Lee Scott Tao. He's 56. You can see him. His chest is bare, he's in his underwear. He's got a kind of blanket over him. And then they just take him back.

[00:12:03] Speaker 3: And they haven't explained why he was arrested.

[00:12:06] Speaker 1: Why they took him in the first place.

[00:12:08] Speaker 4: I think they said it was he looked like someone they were looking for. And then they realized not only was he not the person they were looking for. He's a U.S. citizen. He was from Laos, had come over to the United States. In the large number of immigrants who had come over, Hmong immigrants who had come over from Southeast Asia, who had helped the United States during the Vietnam War and were given homes and citizenship in the United States. The Liam Ramos case, Ramos was coming home from preschool with his father. And ICE detained them in the driveway. The father ran off. ICE held the five-year-old, had him go up to the door of his house and knock to see if there was anyone else there. And they subsequently didn't detain anyone else in the house, but they took the father and Liam to Texas. And that's where they are right now. So it feels arbitrary. It does feel at times capricious.

[00:13:03] Speaker 3: I've been looking at my undercover voters, my fictional characters with all their profiles across the main social media sites, but particularly at Gabriela. So Gabriela is my kind of apolitical, not that fussed about politics voter. She's also Hispanic. And her feed has been pretty sort of solidly populated by these kinds of images over the past week or so, I'd say. It's that kind of voter that you start to get in trouble with, isn't it?

[00:13:29] Speaker 4: Immigration used to be one of Donald Trump's strongest issue areas. One of the places where he had a distinct advantage over Kamala Harris and Joe Biden before her in the 2024 election. But now you see support for immigration enforcement dropping, dropping to net negative overall. But it is becoming a political liability for Donald Trump. And I think that's one of the reasons why you saw in those off-year elections just last year in places like New Jersey, where we looked at Hispanic-majority districts, those areas, the Hispanic voters had started to turn against Donald Trump because of the breadth of the enforcement effort and the way it was catching people, not based on their immigration status, but maybe by their accent or the color of their skin, which the Supreme Court has held is perfectly reasonable to detain people, at least temporarily, based on just those kind of suspicions. And that is angering a lot of Hispanics who didn't think they were going to be caught up in all of this.

[00:14:31] Speaker 1: OK. And in the light of that anger, let's hear what the administration people are saying to try to persuade people they are doing the right thing. So first, this is the U.S. Border Patrol commander, Gregory Bovino, who's been heading up quite a few of these raids in cities around America. This is him back on Tuesday defending ICE.

[00:14:49] Speaker 6: Our operations are lawful. They're targeted and they're focused on individuals who pose a serious threat to this community. They are not random. And they are not political. They are about removing criminals who are actively harming Minneapolis neighborhoods. For too long, residents have been told that enforcing our nation's immigration laws undermines public safety. In reality, the opposite is true.

[00:15:22] Speaker 1: Here we are. Let's hear as well from the president himself. This is what he was saying on the same day on Tuesday.

[00:15:27] Speaker 7: Murderers, child predators, human traffickers, fraudsters and savage criminals. Why wouldn't you want them removed? The reason is because these are insurrectionists that are doing this work. And, you know, they're going to make mistakes sometimes. ICE is going to be too rough with somebody or, you know, they deal with rough people. They're going to make a mistake. Sometimes it can happen. We feel terribly. I felt horribly when I was told that the young woman who was had the tragedy. It's a tragedy. It's a horrible thing. Everybody would say ICE would say the same thing. But when I learned her, her parents and her father in particular is like, I hope he still is, but I don't know, was a tremendous Trump fan. He was all for Trump, loved Trump. And, you know, it's terrible. I was told that by a lot of people. They said, oh, he loves you. He he was a I hope I hope he still feels that way. And I saw it hard situation. But her father was a tremendous and parents were tremendous Trump fans.

[00:16:42] Speaker 4: There was a there was a tinge of of regret, I suppose, or emotion over her situation. But standing by what what immigration authorities are doing and trying to characterize them as getting the worst of the worst and taking through all of these examples of violent criminals who they have rounded up. What they don't mention, of course, is that it's more than just that. And to hit these numbers, as I said before, you have to start getting people like five year old Liam Ramos in addition to people who have criminal records.

[00:17:16] Speaker 1: OK, this is a really good moment to go to our guests. So Mariana and Anthony have had to go and do other things, but I am joined by someone who's not only worked in US homeland security for many years, mainly as a lawyer, but also. And here is the crucial point, was in charge of all ICE operations as the acting director of ICE under Barack Obama. John Sandwick is his name and John is on the line. Thank you very much for sparing us the time. Really good to have you on. Yeah, Justin, thanks for having me. I want to start with a question, actually not from me. It's from a listener. It's from David in Preston. My question is about the training that ICE agents go through. I'm very conscious they carry firearms. They have lots of responsibility. I read online, says David, that they only do 47 days of training. I wonder if this is actually true. How does it compare to other law enforcement agents? Tell us what the training used to be and what it is now.

[00:18:12] Speaker 2: Yeah, it used to be, Justin. So historically, it was a 13-week basic training course. And then you get out in the field and you get additional training, right, as well as in-service training as you go forward. Here's what's going on. The Trump administration, though, has got all this money from Congress and this big, beautiful bill, right? The Trump administration gets in as part of the president's legislative priority. He wants to massively expand ICE. And he wants to expand it, obviously, in the long term. I think there's a strategy behind this, which is to turn ICE, not that it was a small agency before, 14,000 agents, but into an agency that's even bigger. You could sustain these increased deportation levels in the next decade. So they're going to increase 10,000 agents. But, of course, he wants those agents as quickly as possible so that he can rack up these deportation stats. So the problem is hiring 10,000 people is really hard and training them is really hard. And the training academies aren't built to handle that many agents and the background checks and everything else. So what we've seen is a couple of things. One is they've lowered the hiring standards. They're taking people that are older than they used to. They're taking people, you know, they're not doing as much of those in-depth interviews where you're trying to determine whether this person has the integrity to be a federal agent or not. And, of course, they're shortening the training, the idea being they can pump them through the academy more quickly. So we've seen the training shrink from a 13-week standard course now down to an eight-week. What I don't know and we don't know right now is how many of those new agents are on the streets and all the stuff we're seeing in Minneapolis and Chicago and L.A. I think most likely we're still looking at only a very small percentage of the ICE officers. But I think what probably alarms a lot of people here in the States is that in the next two, three years, we're going to see all these new agents hitting the streets, you know, and with a lot less training than they had before.

[00:19:55] Speaker 1: And are they really being trained from scratch? I mean, do you need, in order to become an ICE agent, do you need, for instance, to be able to fire a gun? I mean, what level of training is actually being offered?

[00:20:05] Speaker 2: A lot of them from scratch. And so one thing the administration is doing, which I'm not critical of, is they are targeting a lot of people with law enforcement experience. And their thinking is exactly that, that we don't have to give as much training to those people who are a cop. Let's say they're a state policeman, a city policeman, you know, a highway patrolman in some state. So they're throwing a lot of money. They've got tons of money right now. So they're throwing huge signing bonuses to those people. They think they can deploy those people more quickly and get them out on the street making those arrests. But yeah, there's people from scratch. And I think the things that are concerning is that that's always been true. This is always in the law enforcement world. I don't want to make it too complicated, but there are different types of agents at ICE. But the agents they're primarily hiring has generally been like an entry-level federal law enforcement position. I don't mean that disparagingly, just that more people with less law enforcement experience are hired into this position. But, of course, here there's one more catch, which is, you know, I'm sure we'll get into it, but also who they're hiring, right? Which not just people with no experience, but might be ideologically view this mass deportation thing as one of the most critical things in U.S. history.

[00:21:11] Speaker 1: I remember from when I used to go to wars for the BBC, one of the big things was always the rules of engagement. And you'd go with a group of soldiers. And it's really important, isn't it, that soldiers need to know. And it's usually with Western armies at least done extremely well because it's kind of absolutely drummed into them. These are the rules when you may open fire, when you may act violently and when you may not. And I just wonder what those basic rules are for an ICE agent. Never mind whether they're being kept to or not at the moment. But first, what are the rules of engagement? If you go out on the streets and you're meant to be looking for people and deporting them, what are you allowed to do or not allowed to do?

[00:21:51] Speaker 2: Yeah, so the rules, the use of force rules are pretty much the same in every U.S. law enforcement agency, including ICE. Of course, where the rubber meets the road is in how you deploy those, right? How those individual officers make those decisions. So just quickly, the rule is you're not to use more force than is reasonably necessary. You're to try to de-escalate things first. And when it comes to lethal force, you can't use lethal force unless you have an objectively reasonable basis to believe that there's an imminent threat to your life or the life of others. Basically, that's the standard. The problem is this, and this is why I think people are just so shocked at what they're seeing, is how the administration is deploying these agents. So immigration enforcement and ICE have been going on. It's always a little bit controversial because immigration enforcement is controversial in the United States. But the way in which ICE was deployed was much more quiet and targeted and specific. And most of ICE arrests, candidly, are happening from people who've been arrested by other agencies. So ICE would be picking up people in prisons and jails or primarily picking up people at the U.S. border who the Border Patrol had arrested. But this administration is putting them out there in a very public manner. And in a way, that's triggering a lot of these protests. And now you're having these encounters between these ICE agents and these protesters. And I think the problem is not the rules of the use of force, but these agents are out of position. They're just having to do encounter circumstances like the situation with Ms. Good, that they just don't have as much experience as other law enforcement agencies. It's not that the rules were different. It's just that ICE agents typically are not encountering people in motor vehicles. And I think that is where a lot of the concerns are arising, is how they're being deployed and the fact that it's inconsistent with what they've been trained to do. Because this is not – we're using them in a way that they haven't normally done.

[00:23:38] Speaker 1: Yeah, that's really interesting because, I mean, it's customs in immigration, isn't it? Presumably before, there was a lot of customs work as well, which would have involved not necessarily anything violent, but actually trying to work out who was smuggling what and where it was ending up and all that sort of stuff.

[00:23:55] Speaker 2: I think this is a huge issue that's kind of being neglected on this, which is that this administration is so focused on these deportations that one of the things they've done is they've pulled – half of ICE was always focused on criminal investigations. And you're exactly right, customs-related stuff, smugglers, drug cartels, money launderers, anything really that crossed the border, including investigating banks who are knowingly laundering money for the Sinaloa drug cartel or even saving children who are being exploited. I mean – and one last thing, most critically, is, of course, the illegal export of U.S. military technology to countries like Iran and North Korea. All right, so what have they done? They said to the agents, hey, guys, that's not as important. We've got to get these immigrants off the streets. And that's kind of lost in this, is that we've pulled these 7,000 agents at ICE who really were just focused on those national security, public safety things. And we said de-emphasize those investigations. They're still doing some of them, but not nearly as many. Get on the streets of Minneapolis and get those immigrants off the streets. Candidly, they're doing it at other agencies, too. They've got FBI agents deployed to ICE. They have DEA agents deployed to ICE. I think there are serious questions about when you look at just like what is the public safety impact of arresting someone who's been in this country 20 years and has no criminal history versus getting that investigation against someone illegally exporting microchips to Russia that are used in drones. But that is a reality and something I think, frankly, the media here in the U.S. hasn't focused on as much because I think there's a real national security impact.

[00:25:17] Speaker 1: Yeah, that's really interesting. So some organized, really serious crime might go by the board, as it were, and not be properly investigated because in part of this emphasis.

[00:25:27] Speaker 2: Absolutely. Just really quickly, look, the administration's not shy about this, right? On day one, they issue all these policies at DOJ. Immigration is our highest priority. So you're seeing all these white collar crime prosecutions drop. You're seeing, you know, and again, just in terms of at ICE itself, all those agents who spend their time trying to stop, like I said, the illicit export of weapons. They're spending way more time now walking the streets of Chicago, you know, D.C., L.A., Minneapolis, trying to get rid of the migrants. I have real concerns with that. Do you think they will, too?

[00:26:01] Speaker 1: I mean, if you're a decent ICE agent, you think you're doing the work that is important for the country and for keeping the country safe. And suddenly you've got people coming in who are not so well trained, but also to go back to the point you were making earlier, not necessarily so well vetted. So they might have all sorts of reasons to do this work. They might just like beating people up, to put it really bluntly, or they might be racist or whatever. And suddenly you as an ICE agent have to have these people coming in.

[00:26:32] Speaker 2: Just hit the nail on the head. I mean, I think what concerns me is in my experience, we're so fortunate here. The majority of these ICE agents, what we're seeing is not because they want to beat people up. Thankfully, it's because they're put out of position and they're put into circumstances that are different in their training and their experiences. We're still lucky that the majority of these ICE agents signed up to make a difference. But you are exactly right. I know from just the conversations I have with current people, I know from conversations I have with former people, there is tremendous frustration. There are people at the agency who say, what we're doing, we are ignoring critical national security and public safety crimes, right? And to focus on just run-of-the-mill migrants and we're undermining our public safety result. And unfortunately, Justin, what we're seeing is a culture change to the agency. Those senior mid-level career public safety law enforcement, those cops, right, who are the mid-level supervisors of ICE, they're getting pushed out. They're being pushed out, they're being marginalized. The people who are ideologically pure are being put in. And that's when it gets scary because that's the culture that really – you can write all the policies you want down in Washington, D.C., but it's about that culture and the people in the field. And when you start losing those responsible, really public safety-minded, focused people, you're taking a major step back. And let me just say one last thing. I mean, my frustration is we're using ICE like it's a political weapon, right, in a way that's advancing a political agenda. But ICE exists to protect, to make America safe, you know, the United States of America, not just red America or blue America. And while there's a lot of agents who feel that way, I think they're becoming an extinct species at ICE, is the sad truth. And I do worry about that in the coming years.

[00:28:05] Speaker 1: There has been a call, hasn't there? Well, it's come from the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, but others as well, saying at the very least they ought to be filming themselves as they go about their work, as some police forces do. But they don't generally at the moment, do they? Can you see that being anything like a solution or a partial solution?

[00:28:27] Speaker 2: I think it's a partial solution. I think it's an important solution, right? In my experience, you know, there's always a little bit of resistance initially with body cameras. You know, it is a growing trend in the United States that every law enforcement officer wear a body camera. ICE, historically, there was a little bit of resistance, but they've adopted the technology. And to be fair, they are rolling it out on a nationwide basis. In my experience, oftentimes it does defend the officer. But, you know, again, at the end of the day, Justin, even with the body cameras, it's about accountability. And I think one piece of this that a lot of people have covered is this administration has dismantled the internal watchdogs and apparatuses that used to keep an eye, you know, try to regulate how ICE does its job. And obviously the administration is sending us, you know, Stephen Miller and Secretary Noem and the vice president are really aggressively encouraging kind of the aggressive tactics they're seeing and promising the agents that we get immunity on the back end. And so, yeah, the cameras will be helpful, but at the end of the day, it's about what are you going to do if you see something you don't like? And that's the million-dollar question.

[00:29:24] Speaker 1: John, we've got to leave it there. But, John, it's so good to talk to you and so fascinating. And people will be fascinated and to some extent, I think, a bit horrified about some of the things you've told us. John Sandwick, thank you very much. Thanks, Justin. Thanks, Hal. That's all for today. You can, of course, get any of our previous episodes wherever you listen to your podcasts. But for now, from all of us, bye-bye. Thank you.