How ICE Became Trump’s Secret Army

25:52The United States is one of the only countries in the developed world that detains families. I think Australia is the only other because it's really, really difficult to detain kids for long periods of time and to do it in a way that's considered safe and humane. And so family detention finally ended under Biden, but reopened immediately and is set to expand now under the Trump administration. at our largest family detention center in Dilley, Texas. I reported on families there and heard from really every single one of them that the food was unbearable, especially for kids. I had parents tell me that their children would vomit just from the smell of the food before they even entered the cafeteria.

26:33And kids would lose really significant weight because they would refuse to eat the food because they found it so disgusting. The reason, I think, why you see the food quality that you do, and this is written about in a book that I mentioned in my story called Immigration Detention, Inc., that just came out by a professor, Nancy Hiemstrus. She's at the Stony Brook University in New York. She looked at vendors within detention centers and found that, of course, the way that they make money is by minimizing their costs. the federal government is going to pay them a set amount of money for the services that they provide.

27:16And so, you know, the less they spend providing food or when it comes to medical care, the less that medical providers spend providing that care, the greater their profits, of course. So it really is, I think, a matter of pinching pennies. And that book documents very well how these facilities really are economic engines. There are so many different people and organizations making money within immigration detention centers. And all of it is predicated on spending as little as possible, of course, on the people who are detained there. Well, this is one of the suggestive points in your story, that we are not only building facilities, but we're building vested interests.

27:56That people whose livelihoods, the guards, most obviously, but many others, people's livelihoods depend on the preservation of the system. Once done, it's hard because one might think, well, if there's a political change, just abandon it. But that may be harder to do than one assumes, according to you. That's right. Funding for immigration detention and really immigration enforcement overall has almost never increased in the history of its existence because of these vested interests. So when an immigration detention facility opens in an American community, it's often been fought over. You know, communities will campaign to bring these facilities in because they bring jobs and often hundreds or even thousands of jobs depending on how large they are.

28:43And so you'll have county sheriffs who campaign, you know, promising to bring ICE to town. And as soon as those jobs are created, families depend on them. These facilities tend to be in rural areas where there's not a lot of other economic opportunity. Of course, the land is cheaper, so you can build a big detention facility there. But then the community really comes to rely on it, and it becomes a big political problem to try to close it down. And you also have the major private prison companies that operate the facilities who lobby in Washington to, of course, keep them open and grow them. and then the many, many other contractors that operate within them that are all doing the same thing in order to continue providing these services and to expand these services, which have grown in recent years.

29:29So now ICE detainees have access to tablets that they can use to speak with their family, for example. That didn't exist before. That's one more company that's trying to keep these facilities open and keep them large so that they can continue to make profits. How hastily are we able to move people out of the facilities to return them to the country, ideally, of which they are a citizen? I mean, you witnessed on that harrowing trip you wrote about for the Atlantic through Panama. Different people come from different countries with different degrees of oppressiveness. Mexico is a pretty nice place.

30:08It's unequal. It's hard to make a living, but it's basically a free country. Other countries are much worse. How quickly can we get people back to where they are supposed to be if it's an acceptable place? Or is that just taking forever as the bureaucracy gets bigger? It's taking a very long time. Immigration cases can take months. They can take years. The average time that someone spends detained fluctuates quite a lot. But at this point, most people are spending months at the very least in ICE detention. And that's an important question that I raise in the piece as well is, is this massive expansion of the detention system actually the best way to carry out the administration's goal?

30:51If President Trump really does want to deport up to a million people a year, I don't think that it is. because at the same time that the administration is moving to expand attention, it's firing many immigration judges. Those are the only people who have the power to hand down a deportation order. You can't deport someone without one of those. And the main hurdles that we all talked about in advance of President Trump taking office to his immigration campaign really are legal ones and diplomatic ones. So when people land in immigration detention, they're going to fight their case. They're going to apply for a form of relief, particularly if, like many detained people have now, if these are people who've been here for a very long period of time, they may have the right to some form of protection.

31:43And then you have the diplomatic hurdles. So you've got to get these receiving countries on board and willing to accept hundreds or thousands of their nationals on a monthly basis in order to hit these high goals. Detaining lots and lots of people doesn't necessarily lead to the outcome of removing lots and lots of people, but it is very expensive. And we can talk about if you want to get into the relationships between the private prison companies and the federal agencies that they work with in immigration enforcement and how I've seen that kind of lead to expansions of detention historically that may not have been necessary.

32:22For years, and this has been true, it's important to point out in Democratic and Republican administrations, the highest ranking officials at ICE have often retired into executive roles at these private prison companies, including GEO and CoreCivic. And what that does is put private prison executives across the negotiating table with their former underlings, deciding whether or not to expand the immigration detention system, and underlings who may also hope to, and who often do, end up retiring into these executive roles at the private prison companies as well. So I reached out to both of them.

33:05Gio got back to me and said that there's no evidence to support that this revolving door of hiring leads to lower accountability or higher prices. But for many years, advocates have raised questions about why these detention facilities and these detention contracts expand as dramatically as they do when they don't seem to lead to the outcomes that ICE will promise at the beginning of a given year? You know, deportations have really been stagnant over the last several administrations without a huge amount of fluctuation. And so why do these contracts continue to grow? And what's the connection between these relationships that exist and the incentives built into them and the contracts that result?

33:52You're describing a system that is becoming increasingly voracious at picking people up, increasingly capacious at storing them for a long time, but not improving at removing people who ought to be removed. And so we're creating this kind of intake, detention, but not removal. And one of the things that this is an incident that probably has now, because of the rush of events, been forgotten. But one of the places where people are supposed to be removed to is the country of Colombia. Colombia is a country with a history of significant violence, but that has achieved a kind of uneasy peace in recent years.

34:28And the Colombian government, Colombia has normally been governed from the right, but they currently have the left of center president. And he said, I'm going to continue to receive people. I have one condition. They must be treated with dignity. No shackles. That's the deal. If you don't shackle them, we'll take them. Our nationals, not everybody's nationals, our nationals. And the Trump administration said, oh, yeah, shackles. and blew up. And then we got into a trade war with Colombia, which is an important strategic partner of the United States and a country with which the United States has a free trade agreement negotiated by President W.

34:58Bush and signed by President Obama over the issue of should people be shackled? And one of the things that I'm sorry to make this point so long that the legitimation of what the Trump administration is doing depends on the idea that these people being detained are very dangerous. That's why you have to shackles because the numbers, there are not a million people a year of dangerous people in the United States to remove. So if you're going to remove a million people, most of them will be people who are out of status, but who are not dangerous. And you don't need to shackle them. You just need to say, okay, we have laws.

35:28You're out of the law. Get on the plane. Here's your hot meal on the plane. Welcome back to Columbia where you come from. Exactly. You're pointing to an issue, and there are many examples of it, where the administration says it wants to do one thing, but then behaves in a way that really runs directly counter to it. And a lot of it comes back to this fundamental disconnect between a promise to deport the worst of the worst and a promise to deport a million people a year. You just simply can't do both. If the administration wanted to focus on the worst of the worst, for example, it really wouldn't need to massively expand the detention system that exists because these would be people who have extensive criminal records who are not eligible for any form of immigration relief and whose cases would move very quickly through the courts.

36:15You might run into diplomatic issues with their home countries being willing to take them in, but it's a smaller number of people who would move quickly through the immigration system and who I think have been targeted aggressively under the last several administrations, both Republican and Democrat. Obviously, Trump wanted to do a better job and and wanted to do a better job of vetting in particular large numbers of people who came in during the Biden administration, that is all doable without a massive expansion of the detention system. But when you do expand the detention system, you end up sweeping and you set these very high goals in terms of numbers.

36:54You, of course, end up, as you pointed out, sweeping up lots of people who've been in the United States for a long period of time, have no previous interaction with law enforcement and whose deportation becomes difficult to justify. So with Colombia in particular, it boggles the mind why the administration would blow up its own ability to achieve a goal that it's laid out. You know, ICE has been sending out emails with their weekly worst of the worst, where they find the example of the person with the most extensive criminal record they possibly can who they have arrested and celebrate it. And they could continue to do that in a much less chaotic way without spending all of this money.

37:39And that's why I felt the story was so important to write because, you know, yes, the country voted for a president who wanted to carry out a vast deportation campaign or an aggressive deportation campaign, whether it meant focusing on people who were very dangerous or focusing on large numbers. But do we actually need to spend all of these taxpayer dollars in order to do it? We don't. And so on top of having a campaign underway that the public is really starting to question and be troubled by, we now have a massive amount of taxpayer dollars that could have been spent elsewhere and more effectively.

38:18Let me pick up on your point about diplomatic issues. So one of the countries from which a lot of recent people have come, either as asylum seekers or straightforward illegal immigrants is Venezuela. And Venezuela is an authoritarian regime under an un-American, anti-American dictatorship, first Chavez and then his successor, President Maduro. And significant human rights issues, a country very much on the Cuban model. At another time, the United States might say, well, it's pretty reasonable that a person would run away from Venezuela and seek freedom somewhere else. But the numbers are very large.

38:54and so the Trump administration wants to return the Venezuelans. And it looks like the price of doing that has been to rehabilitate the Venezuelan regime diplomatically. So we are letting, it's not just that diplomacy is a constraint on the deportation project, it's actually deportation is reshaping the foreign policy of the United States and making Venezuela a more acceptable or seemingly more acceptable partner to the Trump administration than you would think based on its internal policy and its external policy, it ought to be. So immigration and deportation does provide an opportunity for diplomacy.

39:30And if the Trump administration were to play its cards right, it really could have influence. You know, it's had influence in Venezuela, could have influence in other places that where we're concerned about the politics, you know, places where we're concerned about whether these countries have been willing to take our advice or accept our support, work with us in terms of trade. There is a real opportunity there. And I think with regard to Venezuela in particular, there was a deep desire on behalf of the current regime to bring back as many people as possible, you know, to prevent the country from emptying out as has been happening in the last few years.

40:12And so they're a little bit more open. But, you know, one wonders why didn't some of the funds that I mean, we're talking about money and diplomacy. It's two different things, but it isn't at the same time. You know, could we have spent far less money on expanding our enforcement infrastructure in the United States and spent instead a bit on negotiating with countries to help them, whether it's change, you know, and improve human rights conditions that we're concerned about, improve democratic freedoms and openness, perhaps even build reception centers for welcoming people who are willing to go home home because there are just simply legitimate concerns about accepting large numbers of deportees as well.

40:59So you're right that deportation and immigration really does open a diplomatic door. And the question is, how well will the administration manage those conversations? They've been very clumsy, as you know, and have lots of times blown up. And that's not usually an effective way to improve relations. Here's the last topic area I want to ask you about, which is this strange business of third country deportations. Normally, the rule is you return people where they came from. And some of the places people who are here illegally come from are pretty nice. If you come from Mexico, if you come from Brazil, if you come from Argentina, obviously the United States offers higher wages, so that's attractive.

41:44But it's not so horrible to live in Mexico, Brazil, or Argentina. On the other hand, if you get here from North Korea, we shouldn't send you back. You're a genuine asylum seeker or refugee. But there seems to be growing up a practice of taking people who come from one country and sending them back to a completely other country, often very far remote from any South Sudan. And what someone who speaks Spanish is supposed to do in South Sudan, it's hard for me. What is going on there? How is this justified? How prevalent is this practice? Is it growing? Add this to the list of previously unfathomables for the main reason is that it's legally dubious.

42:24I mean, we have yet to have a final determination on these three third country deportations. They have been challenged in court and so far continue. But this was the Trump administration's kind of creative, if you will, way of leapfrogging the diplomatic hurdles that I mentioned earlier. Instead of convincing Colombia and Venezuela and Honduras and Guatemala and, you know, the Caribbean countries and all the places where deportees are coming from, instead of convincing all of them to accept their own nationals, simply go instead to, for example, El Salvador and convince them to take thousands of people to go to the country.

43:04people from all over the world. It's easier. It's one negotiations instead of 20 or 25, but it is legally dubious. There is no precedent for in large numbers, except for in very extreme and individualized cases, deporting people to countries that are not their own. And so yes, it is growing because we've never done it en masse before, and it's still being challenged in court and will continue to be. It's hard for me to see a world in which ultimately this practice stands up because it challenges the sovereignty of the home country of the deportee and that that's receiving these deportees. I mean, it really questions what is nationality?

43:50What is citizenship? If you don't have travel documents and you don't have permission to move from one place to another. How valid are these borders that we're working to uphold? So it is, you know, underway for the first time, but. It would be already bad enough if you took somebody who's here from Venezuela, put them on a plane to El Salvador, opened the door and said, bye, there's the bus to town. Hope you have some El Salvadoran money with you. But we're not doing, we're not doing even that. We're saying, oh, and then we're putting you in a prison in El Salvador forever without any trial that you've done or any show.

44:28I mean, we have an allegation you've done something wrong, but normally in America or anyone under American jurisdiction, if we put you in a prison for the rest of your life, we prove that you've done something heinous to justify putting you in a prison for the rest of your life. That's right. And that's a whole other legal problem with these third country deportations, not just that we're sending people to a country they didn't come from, but that we're putting them into a situation where there is no clear form of due process, no clear way to ever get out of these facilities. And that ultimately is on our hands.

45:04You know, these individuals have families who remain in the United States. Will they go after the U.S. government? That's just one legal route that I can imagine being pursued among the many. It's a reflection of something that I reported a lot on during the first Trump administration, which is that, you know, the apparatus of people in the White House who are focused on deporting as many people as possible. They're led, as we know, by Stephen Miller, who has been focused on immigration for more than 10 years in Washington and has really studied the federal code in and out for legal ways of deporting people, but has also spent a lot of time with other lawyers racking their brains about ways that haven't that are untested, that are unprecedented and that we don't know to be legal to deport many people.

46:00as possible. I mean, it's a real creative exercise that they have constantly underway, and they're not afraid to try something, even when lawyers are cautioning that it may not hold up in court. That's part of the strategy is try something new. And even if it ends up being shut down, you might be able to achieve some of your goal because those legal cases take time. So they might be able to deport thousands of people through these third country deportations. And even if ultimately the practices ended, they'll be a little bit closer to the ultimate goal. They don't see that as a bad thing. But there's one thing that they're not doing because it takes a lot of creativity, but it's the most obvious thing to do.

46:45And the thing that would work best is the thing they don't want to do, which is instead of sending ICE agents and bandanas, you send a team of accountants to large employers in the home building and meatpacking industry. So let's see, we don't have to see any people here. We want to see your files, Mr. Employer. Let's go through the files. It doesn't look like you've done the procedures right. And here's your half million dollar fund. And eventually the home builder or the construction company or the meatpacking, I guess we should check people's status. And once the word goes out to the world, all those people who are risking their lives, whom you so courageously traveled with, they're acting as rational economic actors because they know if you get across the line, you might be deported, but you will still be able to get a job because they, in fact, even now, this crackdown administration is not doing serious work with the forensic accounting and the finding of employers because that's off limits in a Republican Congress.

47:36It's exactly right. A really important point. I'm glad that you brought it up. And another big question for me that I raise about this massive investment of money to carry out immigration enforcement, I don't think it's necessary. It's not rocket science to find undocumented immigrants in the United States. We know the businesses that they tend to work for. They're on virtually all of the farms and dairies in the United States that require manual labor. They're in restaurant kitchens. They're caring for elders in assisted living facilities and in our homes. They're landscaping. They're cleaning.

48:09They're working in other hospitality jobs. I mean, this is readily available information, and it does not require complex spyware technology in order to track people down, but it would require employer accountability. And the Trump administration is already butting up against that, already getting pushback from the agriculture industry, from the hotel industry. I mean, it's been reported that Trump himself has had undocumented workers on his properties because we know what industries rely on them so heavily. And we do continue to this day as a country to send a deeply mixed message to immigrants.

48:48At the same time that you hear politicians in the news saying, you know, do not come to the United States or touting the deportation campaign that's underway now, the jobs are always there. And I think it's confusing for people, but at the end of the day, their decision is led by that rational economic thinking that you pointed out that, you know, even though there is a risk, there's also a very clear desire for their presence. And when people get to the United States, it always amazes me how quickly they're employed. People will be employed within a week, they'll have something. And then within a month, they'll have something better.

49:30And then within two months, they'll have two or three jobs because the need is so extreme. And so that is something that the Trump administration is going to have to face. The tension between its goal and its economic interest is going to come up again and again and is going to break at some point. So here's the last thing I want to ask you. As you look back on your trip on foot on the immigration route, do you have any, at this distance in time, later reflections on what you saw and what it meant? That's a big one. I mean, there were so many different things going on in the Darien Gap because I was reporting on people who were fleeing all different types of circumstances from the Venezuelan regime to, you know, economic constraints to climate change, all of them kind of come to a head with regard to immigration.

50:24I think I can say that you alluded to this a little bit earlier, you know, in a previous time, what's happened in Venezuela politically would have made Venezuelans kind of the ideal asylee in the United States. As much as asylum exists as kind of a benevolent force, it's also a diplomatic tool and a way of showing to the world that our form of government is the best form of government, that a free democracy, a capitalist free democracy is the best system. I mean, that's how the United States has positioned asylum and refugee resettlement historically. And yet the opposition to the massive amount of migration from Venezuela was obviously much stronger than the diplomatic interest that may have existed in past decades.

51:22A lot of that relates to social media and to the ease of movement and access to movement that didn't exist in decades past and that does now. I mean, there are so many different groups that have capitalized on smuggling, on moving people from country to country because these systems that attempt to control migration have been ineffective. I mean, I think maybe a final thought, and this is in my reporting about the Darien Gap, but I still believe it to be true, is that when you go about trying to control migration as we have through simply law enforcement and punishment and trying to close holes by pressuring other countries to revoke access to visas, you know, all trying to stop people from ultimately reaching the United States.

52:17What's happened instead of discouraging migration is private industry has popped up. People have figured out ways to make lots of money by getting people through and getting them into the United States. And so I think I go back again and again in my Darien Gap reporting and in many stories that I've done to the idea that, you know, immigration policy really has to be holistic. You can't ever be successful by focusing on one thing. So it's not just detention and deportation, as you said. It's turning toward American employers who employ undocumented immigrants. And really, I think toward the country, you know, having an honest conversation about our need for immigrant work and an honest conversation about our relationships to immigrants.

53:08I think there are a lot of Americans in the United States who think that in general they may support mass deportation except for the one friend they have at church or except for their daughter's mother who they think is an exception. They're one connection to somebody who doesn't have legal status. And these people in our lives and in our communities aren't exceptions. They're the rule. They're in every community. We all have relationships and connections to them. And so we just need to have a more honest conversation as a country about that in order to come up with a law enforcement infrastructure that's effective and a diplomatic strategy that's effective and a way of allowing people in the United States to live and work here and don't break the law to live as full people with rights and protections and not live in the state of terror.

54:07that many are now because of this sort of chaotic and disorganized sweep that we are seeing and that we've just handed a massive paycheck to with this one big, beautiful bill act. Caitlin Dickerson, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you for your work for The Atlantic. You're a star among us all. Thank you. Bye-bye. Thanks so much, David.

54:39A few months ago, I invited Atlantic staff writer Charlie Worzel onto the David Frum Show. As podcast hosts, we talked about the pressures and temptations of the medium. Outrage often gets rewarded. Nuance does not. Charlie doesn't take that bait. On his show Galaxy Brain, he covers the ways technology is changing how we think and how we live. Not just the obvious stuff, but the subtle ways it shapes what we believe, how we talk to each other, how we see ourselves and our neighbors. If you've ever wondered how smart people end up believing implausible things online, Galaxy Brain is worth your time.

55:16It's thoughtful, surprising, and a little unsettling in the very best way. Find it wherever you listen or watch.

55:27Logging off. Rebuilding our attention spans. Trading in smartphones for dumb phones. Why Why are people trying to get off their screens? And what are they really after? I'm Natalie Brennan, a producer at The Atlantic. And I'm Julie Beck, a staff writer at The Atlantic. This season, we're exploring the often fraught, always changing relationship people have with technology. And examining the ways our devices affect our connection with one another. New episodes of How to Touch Grass come out every Monday. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you to Caitlin Dickerson for joining me today on The David Frum Show.

56:02Before I sign off, I want to make a personal announcement, not something I often do on this platform, but just this one time. Those of you who are watching the program as opposed to listening to it will have noticed over my shoulder a photograph of my daughter Miranda, who died in February 2024. I keep the photograph there to show the world what is in my heart and in my head and that Miranda is always with me and that I'm always thinking of her. That sad news this week has been relieved by some happy news. My wife, Danielle, and I would like to welcome to planet Earth a new granddaughter, Abigail Ann Frum, born to my son, Nat, and his wife, Isabel, our daughter-in-law, in New York City on August 14th.

56:43This is the first piece of happy news my family's had in a long time, and I can't help but share it with the audience and friends of The David Frum Show. Thanks to the Picton Gazette for their hospitality for this program. Thanks to the production team here at The David Frum Show. as always the best way to support the work of this program and of all of us at the Atlantic is by subscribing to the Atlantic and also by sharing and liking this program on whatever audio or visual platform you may use. I help us to get out the word. We're trying to do something here that's a little different from what many podcasts do.

57:16We're trying to talk to smart people about subjects they know about. That's an unusual path, but we think it's worth a try. See you next week on the David Frum Show. I'm David Frum.

57:51This episode of The David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grine. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Abed is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I'm David Frum. Thank you for listening. Logging off. Rebuilding our attention spans. Trading in smartphones for dumb phones. Why are people trying to get off their screens, and what are they really after? I'm Natalie Brennan, a producer at The Atlantic. And I'm Julie Beck, a staff writer at The Atlantic. This season, we're exploring the often fraught, always changing relationship people have with technology.

58:32And examining the ways our devices affect our connection with one another. New episodes of How to Touch Grass come out every Monday. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.