ICE Is Back. Has Anything Changed? Ft. John Sandweg

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0:36Potential savings will vary. Good day once again from Newsweek's Long Island Bureau, a.k.a. my parents' house. This country was stone cold dead. We've been taking the show on the road for the last week or two just to escape New York City and the heat. Although the Canadian wildfire smoke somehow actually worse out here than it's been in the city. So what are you going to say, right? You can't win. Our topic today is immigration. The Department of Homeland Security likes to use this phrase. We've heard it all a lot. The worst of the worst, right? They use it all the time. The worst of the worst.

1:09They like to point out the kidnappers, the sexual assailants, the rapists, drug traffickers that federal immigration agents are theoretically sweeping up all over the country and deporting. And don't get me wrong, there's certainly some truth to that. Now, DHS, excuse me, says something like 70 % of the people who are arrested by ICE and other federal enforcement agencies are charged or convicted with previous crimes, right? So that's an important little statement there that we're going to get to with our guests in a little bit. But it's also a very different thing than what a lot of independent analyses, including one really good in-depth one from a liberal hotbed institute known as the Cato Foundation, they've determined that that number is probably closer to 3, 4, or 5%, at least when counting for people with violent criminal histories, which again is a different thing from people who have been charged and or convicted with a crime.

2:01Again, we'll get to why that's important in a little bit. Here's the number though that they'd probably rather we not talk about in the media. Seven. Seven is the number of people who have been shot during immigration enforcement operations just since Trump was inaugurated last January. Two of them this month, six days apart, both in traffic stops, and neither victim appears to have been the actual target of that stop, although in one case it's a little bit disputed. One of these incidents happened in Houston, Texas, the other one in Biddeford, Maine, which is a cartel hotspot right outside of Kennebunkport.

2:32Kidding there, we actually don't know why they're in Maine, which is another question that we're going to get to. So these two immigrants, both fathers, both shot dead in the streets months after two American citizens were killed in Minneapolis, as we all know, protesting some of these tactics that ICE and its other agencies have been using. Long story short, this brings me to my guest today. His name is John Sandwick. He was, excuse me, the acting director of ICE during the second Obama administration about 10, 12 years ago now. John's someone who has seen this agency from the inside. And today I wanted to bring him on to sort of help us grade it from the outside.

3:09So John, thank you very much. Appreciate it, man. Yeah, Carly, thanks for having me. So I have a lot of questions, but I want to start with this incident in Maine that happened several days ago now. Since this person was shot and killed in Biddeford, Maine, ICE suspended vehicle stops related to immigration enforcement. Said they were just going to sort of like, you know, it was temporary. They were going to sort of reassess the tactics they were using. President Trump gets wind of this via reporting in Reuters and elsewhere and then immediately calls for these traffic stops, these vehicular stops to be reinstated.

3:46When you look at the video of what we saw of that shooting in Maine, what are the questions that it raises to you as somebody who did this job for a living? I mean, Carl, there are a lot of questions about it. I mean, look, setting aside the video, right, the video is only a partial video. We've only seen snippets of it. There are a lot of questions here about, you know, when I look at this, originally it was come out. It was the target of the operation. And then I understand the secretary started calling senators back and saying it wasn't the target. you know but look the bottom line is this and that's what i would say is that i had a real concerns after houston especially but really throughout the last year and a half with the use of traffic stops they've never been a core part of what ice does or how the enforcement tactics used by ice we could talk a little bit here about why i think we're seeing an uptick in the use of traffic stops but but the bottom line is this this is not something that the more you know ice agents traditionally have done it they get some basic training on it but not an extensive array of training on how to do these safely.

4:44And typically, when you're doing these high risk kind of traffic stops, meaning you're going out there trying to with an intent to potentially arrest somebody, you want to make sure that something you do is a matter of last resort, right? The reason why is it's dangerous. It's dangerous to the individual, it's dangerous to the public at large, but it's really also really dangerous for the agents themselves. And what concerns me is, you know, look, in every single one of these cases, and you can't work at ICE, you know, and I worked, I worked at ICE, you know, as an acting director, but also spent four years working at DHS closely with ICE.

5:13And you get to know the people at ICE. You know that they don't set out on the day, like, I want to kill someone. That's not how, you know, the thoughts are happening here. They're feeling threatened. And we could talk more about, you know, every case needs to be investigated, whether that belief is reasonable or not. But the point is, why put officers in that situation when it's outside of what they normally do, when it's outside of their training? And it doesn't mean you have to be soft on enforcement. You could take these individuals into custody in a manner that is just much safer for all involved if you just wait until he gets to his destination.

5:41And I guess my big question is, why were we even executing a traffic stop in this case? There was no exigent threat that this individual posed. There were safer ways to do it. Why were we doing it this way? Well, exactly. And that is essentially the follow-up question I have for you. Why are we doing particular stops at all? To your point, anybody who's ever been pulled over by the police, myself included, it's local cops who do this, and they're good at it, right? They do it all the time. You see their local cops or state police. And they're in marked cars, Carlo. They're in a marked vehicle.

6:11And they're in more cars. Exactly. They throw the lights on and you know that you've got to pull over. There's a big difference between stopping you, like on your way to work, because you rolled that stop sign or something like that, and stop doing what is a higher-risk traffic stop, a stop where you're intending to potentially make an arrest, right? And you're doing it in unmarked cars. But exactly, you nailed it. Those patrol officers, that's what they do every day. They train on that. And even then, they will tell you that's one of the more dangerous things they can do. Sure. But you look at it here with the ICE historically.

6:39So let me back up, bore you for just 30 seconds here. Over the last 10 years, what people don't realize about ICE era is that traditionally, the vast majority of people ICE arrests are people who are already in someone else's custody. And so that means getting people out of prisons and jails. That's a huge part of what ICE does. But also the border. And really over the last eight years, not just during the Biden administration, but during the Trump administration, we just had huge numbers of people coming across the border. A lot of what ICE was doing was transferring people into their custody at the Border Patrol, processing them, just dealing with that massive flow of people that came across the border.

7:14So that means there were very few officers doing these at-large operations. And the number of people just arrested in general at large was incredibly low. But when, I mean, we're talking, I mean, probably, I could get talking about this, but probably less than 10 ,000 people annually. All right. So of how they did it, typically the way ICE does it, it's becoming well-known now, these targeted operations. So what that means is you go out there and you say, all right, let's find someone who's a nexus to criminal history, someone who's under a Biden administration, under Obama. We're doing priorities.

7:43We're looking for individuals who pose a threat to public safety defined by their criminal history, the bad guys. We identify them. Now we start building out a dossier on them. Where are we going to find them? What are the addresses? Where do we think we're going to find them? All right, now we send out a team. And you go out about 530 in the morning. You muster together. You're banging on doors first thing in the morning. Ask the person to step out. Take them into custody there. It's the safest way to do it. ICE was very effective at it. That's how they did it. One of the things that's changed here is the border.

8:11So, you know, and credit to the Trump administration. You know, credit to Biden who started this by making some rule changes. But then the numbers dropped like a rock under Trump. What that did was it freed up a tremendous number of ICE agents. And that combined with this mass deportation policy where we start seeing them doing things en masse in the cities, right, at large, going out there, going after the immigrant population. We can talk about who they're going after. It's largely not now criminals for a variety of reasons, but the tactics they were using. They started off, again, using those traditional targeted tactics.

8:44The problem became the numbers. Typically, when you're going after those criminals, when you're doing the tactics I describe as targeted operations, it moves a little slower, Carlo. You make it a little bit fewer arrests. Politically, the administration wants to see those arrest numbers skyrocket. And that's when you start seeing the tactics change. First under Nome, obviously that ended quite poorly with Minneapolis, as a lot of people predicted it would. And then Mullen gets in and Mullen says, we're going to go back to kind of what ICE does best, quiet it down. And he did for the first couple of months.

9:15Then stories are populating again. Numbers are too low. White House wants 2000 the rest of the day. Quotas and all of a sudden, boom, these traffic stops are happening and these tragic incidents happen. Right. Right. So basically, I mean, they're trying to make a number, I think, is the way to boil it down, right? And that's why you're seeing this. And we saw it in Minneapolis. One thing, just on the vehicular stops. Can you walk through the actual ICE, or at least when you were there, what the use of force protocol for these vehicle stops was? What was supposed to happen? And what is not happening now?

9:49I mean, here's the deal, Colin. Again, every case is different, right? So we don't know. And obviously, there are all these credibility questions. But back up. The use of force standards is pretty much consistent across all federal law enforcement. I'm going to butcher the language of it. Basically, you have to have reasonable fear that you're going to an imminent, reasonable imminent fear of serious bodily harm. Right. To yourself or to others. So with that, the problem here is think about a vehicular stop, all the ways it can go wrong. I mean, if you if you apprehend someone and they're walking out of their house, you control the situation and a vehicle can be easily a deadly weapon.

10:22And why would you ever want to try to take someone into custody when they're sitting behind the wheel of what can be a deadly weapon to yourself or others? What can easily turn into a high speed chase where they're tearing up through the city? And now what are you going to chase them or not? DHS policies say you shouldn't be chasing them. But, you know, there's ways in which, you know, you could have a suspect who really is armed and dangerous, who's lying in wait when you walk up to the window. There are so many ways in which that, you know, and you're not able to see them fully because they're obscured by the car.

10:53There's so many ways it goes wrong, really, not just for the officers themselves. I think one of the things that frustrates me is Trump got this one way wrong, obviously. I mean, Trump looks at it as like a soft liberal thing. Oh, you know, I think he tweeted out, you know, giving in to the radical left. This isn't, this is not a soft liberal thing. This is about officer safety just as much as it's about public safety and the subject safety. I mean, this is why are we putting officers in a position to do something that's really hard to do, that they're not well trained on doing, that's not normally been part of their experiences, that can go wrong in so many ways that can create so much more risk.

11:26Why would you ever want to do that when, like I said, you could just take just waiting, pausing a bit. But to answer your question, I do think the pressure, I think the quotas, I think the quotas are putting the agents under pressure where it's like, OK, we can tail this guy for another 15 minutes to when he gets to where he's headed his work. or we can wait in the morning until he walks out of the house, but we've got to make arrests. Let's hurry up and pull him over and get it over with. Carlo, two other things just quickly on that front. You know, look, in immigration enforcement, there's always this tension between quality and quantity.

11:56In all law enforcement, really, we don't judge any other law enforcement agency. This is one of the frustrating things for me when it comes to ICE. We don't judge any other agency by the numbers, right? But at ICE, there's always this temptation to judge ICE by how many people you arrest. without measuring who those people are, right? And what frustrates me is, you know, if you look at the FBI, you know, historically, and you look at any law enforcement agency, you know, you get more points, and the public appreciates more when you get serious criminals, right? The person who's running a complicated fraud scheme.

12:27Big fish, yeah, exactly. Big fish, right. But if the FBI wanted to get numbers, they'd just go out and arrest people on, I don't know, possession of drug offenses or, you know, smoking marijuana, things like, you could hit numbers that way and say, look, we've got all these numbers. The same is true in immigration enforcement. The bigger fish, harder to find, takes more time. And to do it properly and safely for all involved takes a little more time as well. And when you just start putting quotas on and putting political pressure on the agency, the agency is forced to do things it doesn't normally do and go after targets that, frankly, the agency itself doesn't really want to prioritize over the criminals.

13:00Well, on that point, why are they in Maine right now? I mean, I appreciate that, you know, there's illegal immigrants living all across the country. I cannot imagine that, you know, the Portland, Kennebunkport area in southern Maine is a place that is having like an out-of-control immigration crisis right now. And putting aside, and I know you're not like a politics guy, but like Republicans are in a death match for a Senate seat in that state. And it is a blue state. So it just seems like bad politics on top of everything else. But, like, why are they even there? I can't imagine Senator Collins is loving this story at the moment.

13:35Right, exactly. I mean, it's because they're everywhere. You know, it's just 26 field officers spread out around the country. They're everywhere. Undocumented immigrants are everywhere in the country. And right now, Carla, we're not just going after, like I said, look, we're not just going after criminal aliens, as the administration uses the term, right? We're not just going after people with a nexus to public safety because they're hard to find. And this is about volume, right? The administration wants to drive home numbers. And the rhetoric, I think, has changed a little bit. You know, and again, I do give Secretary Mullen some credit.

14:05I think he's done a lot of, you know, he came in here saying we're going to eliminate, we're not going to do these surges. And they were clearly politically motivated in places like Chicago or Minneapolis, L.A. We're going to, you know, we're going to try to enforce the law across the country. And the rhetoric has changed. I'm hearing a little less of the worst of the worst. I'm hearing, you know, they're a little more candor that they're now going after anyone who are immigration violers. But, Carlo, quickly, let me talk about who they're going after. I know it's not what you asked, but people need to understand that a lot of this quota stuff, the stupidity it drives, you've probably heard they're making all these arrests in immigration court, for instance.

14:38The people they're arresting in immigration court are actively in deportation proceedings who are showing up for their deportation hearing. Usually they have an asylum claim, and it's the day of their trial, and they get taken into custody. From a law enforcement perspective, there is no reason to arrest those individuals. And even if you ask 20 ICE agents, hey, should we go get this guy who's shown up for immigration court? They'd say, why? Let's go do some digging and do some investigating and find ourselves a serious criminal over here. They're doing it because they need numbers, and it's low-hanging fruit.

15:07It's an easy way to get numbers. So although these traffic stops have gotten a lot of attention, candidly, to this day, and one of the reasons probably why Trump's hand-picked secretary and acting ICE director, Dave Venturella, right so let's put a pause in on these is because they aren't they still aren't a critically important part of how ice there's no bang for the buck exactly so we're putting officers in danger and look here's the thing carly we don't know we know that there have been at least 17 by my count at least 17 shootings of individuals by ice not cbp but including just ice of which they came out of a traffic stop i think there are 20 total shootings since the beginning of the trump administration 17 in traffic stop that tells you all you need to know yeah that tells you all you need to know on this issue.

15:48Like, this is broken, this piece of it. And let's go fix it. And again, I think Mullen, to his credit, was saying, let's just pause it till I can kind of figure out what is going on. Why do we have 17 people shot? And that doesn't count, Carla. I don't know how many times an officer has been injured. I guarantee you officers have been injured in traffic stops. I guarantee you there have other been times there's been shootings and no one was actually shot that aren't being counted. You know, that makes no sense what Trump did. It just boggles my mind. It's frustrating. Trust your handpicked law enforcement professionals.

16:17This was not a Democrat decision or, as they said, a radical left decision. This was his handpicked ICE director and secretary of DHS who made his decision to trust him. No, it's so true. And I mean, my liberal friends will get on me about this. But I actually do feel a little bit bad for them. I actually feel pretty bad for Tom Homan because these guys are in just a no-win position. Right. Because, like, I think Tom Holman, he worked for Obama. You probably worked closely with Tom. Yeah. We're closer with Tom. Yeah. He seems, by all accounts, a, you know, a cop and a good cop who, you know, works his his life, his career doing this stuff.

16:57So, yeah. Like, why not take his word for it when it comes to enforcement? Right. Yeah, I mean, Tom cares more than anything, and I'll give him credit for this. He cares more than anything about the workforce, right? And when you're in a senior position at ICE, you do need to care about the workforce. And I do feel for them, too. I think they're put in a terrible position. You know, where Secretary Noem, with all the garbage we saw in Minneapolis, they put these ICE officers out of position, asking them to do crowd control, just asking them to do things they don't do. And when you do that in law enforcement, it goes badly.

17:28It can go badly. And it can result, it's bad for the agents, it's bad for the public. Right. And I could not agree with you more. I have a lot of sympathy for ICE. I know I'm going to you know, there's a lot that can frustrate people. But a lot of this isn't the fault of ICE. It's the fault of the policymakers who are putting them under this pressure and these quotas and forcing them to utilize tactics that are outside their training and outside their experience. So let's talk about this particular agent in Maine, which I think is going to get to the point you're just making. I'm not doxing him here because he's been identified not by DHS.

17:59They have not, to my knowledge, identified him. But the Associated Press and others have ID'd him. His name is David Brulé. He was an Army veteran who struggled, evidently, with serious PTSD. His own relatives told the Associated Press that he was in no shape to be in law enforcement. They were shocked when they heard that he got hired by ICE. His ex-wife told NPR this week that he was abusive, that he pointed a gun at her in the shower, that he threw his own 13-year-old daughter through a glass table. She even provided a voicemail with Brulé basically calling her and saying that he wishes she slit her throat.

18:36Are they not doing background checks on these guys? Well, Carlo, this is, again, without commenting, obviously, speaking about this particular case of the agent. Let me back up. You talked about it. This is another concern. There's been a lot of focus on the training that all these new recruits are getting. And there's been some focus on how they're recruiting them, the advertising, right, the type of person they seem to be appealing to. But I think what people need to understand is that, look, before you become a federal agent, a gun-carrying agent, you go through extensive vetting, not just a basic background check, right, like you and I probably go through for our jobs.

19:11But you go through an extensive array of vetting. And the problem is this. When the Trump administration set out to double the size of the agency, all right, and they want to get those agents out there quickly. And they have two goals with this. I mean, a lot of what they're doing on immigration, it's well thought out in many ways. They're looking, one, is to drive up the number of people arrested and deported during the Trump administration. All right. And then two is I think they have a long term strategy, which is rebuilding a new ICE. So that ICE, you know, ICE going from 7 ,000 civil immigration enforcement officers and about 14 ,000 gun carriers total to 28 ,000, 30 ,000, you know, roughly or doubling the size of ICE.

19:48right going forward because that'll be much more robust immigration enforcement in the even in the years when they're no longer in office but they want to get it on board as quickly as possible and here's the problem carlos that dhs traditionally i'm guesstimating here but we probably hired ice on an annual basis 250 to maybe 450 or so new agents every year and that might be i you know somewhere in that ballpark don't call me on i'm just guessing here sure all they're backfilling people right and so when you're hiring people there was an extensive interviewing process selection process, review process, tons of applications come in.

20:20You're looking at all the resumes. Like I said, you're doing a heavy selection process with in-person interviews. Then you're doing background checks that more often than not, you know, often include interviews of family and friends trying to get, it's not just running a computer search open source. And when it is an open source, it's with tools that are more powerful, right, than those that private sector entities have. And oftentimes some of these positions require security clarences and you're doing, like I said, all this groundwork, and that's just to select a candidate. So you select them, then you decide they're suitable by doing all the background checks.

20:50And once you've determined they're suitable to be a federal agent, then they go to the academy. All right, so now all of a sudden you say, hey, we're going to try to hire 10 ,000, let's say, in a compressed three-year period. The offices that do all that vetting are not equipped for that. They're staffed at a level that allows them to vet, like I said, 300 to 500 a year. And the administration says, we're not waiting. And we've seen these examples. I know there was some earlier reporting that they're individuals showing up at Fletzi halfway through the training academy in Georgia, where all ICE officers go, halfway through their training, all of a sudden they say, oh, we just discovered you have a felony conviction.

21:21How did it ever get that far? But it's because of this urgency, this rush to double the size of the agency. I don't care, Carla, if you and I were like, let's go open 10 small businesses and we need to hire 500 people, but we got to do it fast. We're going to make a ton of mistakes. The part of the difference is we're not asking people to wear guns and go out on the street. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, masks. And so that's the big difference here. It's like you can't rush this. And what they're doing is frightening in terms of, because there's no way, and I don't have specific intelligence, but I will just tell you, there is no way, like if you're doing this responsibly, what you do is first say, okay, we're going to do a massive hiring spree.

21:57We need to build the infrastructure of hiring, the human resources, the security office people who do that background vetting. We're going to build out the infrastructure so that we can properly vet all these individuals, make informed decisions about their suitability to be a federal agent, and then also, frankly, build out the academy. Instead, what we know we got was shortened. What they did was compress the training, shorten the training so that we're getting guys deployed less training. And I think this case suggests, again, I don't know all the particulars of this case, but with a background like you're describing here, what it strongly suggests is that there's a massive failures in the vetting operation as well, because individuals with that background typically are deemed insuitable, you know, unsuitable rather for federal law enforcement service.