Are ICE immigration agents acting outside the law?

0:00Anthony:This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

0:30Anthony:for all the great deals happening now. Save big money at Menards. The CIA has been carrying out covert operations around the world for decades. How has it shaped how people feel about the U.S.? I'm Asma Khalid. And I'm Tristan Redman. And together, we host the Global Story podcast from the BBC. As part of our series to mark the United States' 250th birthday, we're exploring the CIA's hidden history. Do you think the word of the United States will be trusted? in years to come? For more, check out The Global Story on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Donald Trump came to office promising the largest mass deportation program in history, and pretty much he seems to be doing it.

1:17Anthony:Are Americans pleased? Well, no, it seems. In fact, he is going down in the polls on specifically the subject of immigration that used to play so well for him. So what is going on? What is happening with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the ICE officers? Who are they? How are they behaving? Are they detaining people they shouldn't be detaining? And what do Americans really make of it all? Welcome to AmeriCast. AmeriCast. AmeriCast from BBC News. When Donald Trump calls, they say, yes, sir. Right away, sir. Happy to lick your boot, sir. We are the sickest country in the world. Oh, dear.

1:58Are you worried that billionaires are going to go hungry? Of course the president supports peaceful protests. What a stupid question.

2:03Anthony:Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?

2:12Anthony:Hello, it's Justin in the worldwide headquarters of AmeriCast in London, England. And it is Marianna sitting next to Justin in the worldwide headquarters. 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.

2:50Yeah, 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, Customs and Border Patrol handle 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.

3:33And 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. And Anthony, when it comes to the goal that ICE has now, how many people are they expected to detain? What are the targets? The target, according to Stephen Miller, the Deputy Chief of Staff of 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.

4:11And 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.

4:39Anthony: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. It's just 3 ,000 people. 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.

5:15And 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 were 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 or murder or ticked through the list.

5:55But 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.

6:16Anthony: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? 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.

7:03Those 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. I guess as well, kind of on that point you were making, Anthony, about when it was initially sold as it's the bad guys who we're getting rid of from this country, that you could see why that had mass appeal.

7:44But when people start to see it impact their sort of daily lives or people that they interact with quite regularly, who they like you say, like a landscaper or someone in 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.

8:13Anthony:Yeah. 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.

9:01Anthony: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. 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.

9:49but Minneapolis because of what happened to Renee Good 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 goods 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.

10:39Here's how Minnesota's Governor Tim Walz described what's going on in his state.

10:43Anthony:Armed, masked, under-trained 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. And the mayor of Minneapolis as well has been weighing in.

11:24Anthony:Jacob Frey speaking out to CNN last Sunday. Right now we have about 600 police officers and they've got 3 ,000 or so ICE agents and border control that they are now talking about deploying 1 ,500 military. this is, well, it's ridiculous, but we will not be intimidated by the actions of this federal government. We have tens of thousands of people throughout the city that are peacefully protesting. Of course, they're marching. Of course, they're expressing their First Amendment rights. Yes, they are able to record what is taking place. I mean, that's part of their right as citizens of the United States.

12:06And no, ICE agents can't stop, nor can they hide from a recording that is taking place. And at the same time, the message is very clear that we are not going to take the bait. And 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 best want to characterize them. Some of the most shocking ones, though, have involved kids in particular. So there's this story that's popped up today, actually. It's Thursday, of this little five-year-old boy. He's in a blue hat with his backpack on and a shirt.

12:45His name is Liam Ramos. And he was arrested in the drive of his home in Minneapolis and sent to a detention centre that's more than 1 ,000 miles away. Even people who support the policy. Would start to think, oh, why are you focusing on people like that?

12:57Anthony:Yeah, 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 Chongli 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. And they haven't explained why he was arrested. Why they took him in the first place. Yeah. I think they said it was he looked like someone they were looking for. And and then they realized not only was he not the person you were looking for, he's a U.S.

13:39citizen. He was from Laos, had come over to the United States in the large number of immigrants who come over among 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.

14:22So it feels arbitrary. It does feel at times capricious. 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? 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.

15:06But 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 that 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.

15:49And that is angering a lot of Hispanics who didn't think they were going to be caught up in all of this.

15:54Anthony:Okay, 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. 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.

16:42Anthony:In reality, the opposite is true. Here we are. Let's hear as well from the president himself. This is what he was saying on the same day on Tuesday. 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're dealing with rough people. Are they 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.

17:28Anthony:It's a tragedy. It's a horrible thing. Everybody would say, ICE would say the same thing. But when I learned 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 was, I hope he still feels that way. I don't know, it's a hard situation. But her father was a tremendous, and parents were tremendous Trump fans. There was a tinge of regret, I suppose, or emotion over her situation, but standing by what immigration authorities are doing and trying to characterize them as getting the worst of the worst and ticking 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.

18:30And 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.

18:43Anthony:OK, this is a really good moment to go to our guests. So Marianna 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 Sandweg is his name and John is on the line. John, 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.

19:16Anthony: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. 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?

19:53The 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. And I think there's a strategy behind this, which is to turn ICE. Not that it was a small agency before. It had 14 ,000 agents. but into an agency that's even bigger, that you could sustain these deportation, 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.

20:29And 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 their 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.

20:58What 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 LA. 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 with a lot less training than they had before.

21:19Anthony: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? 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. Their thinking is exactly that, that we don't have to give as much training to those people who are cops. Let's say they're a state policeman, a city policeman, a highway patrolman in some state. So they're throwing a lot of money.

21:49They'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.

22:18But, 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.