From 9/11 to Minneapolis: How ICE Became a Paramilitary Force

0:00By the way, guys, did you see this morning that they arrested Don Lemon? I feel like it's this moment we've been bracing for where they're actually criminalizing journalism in America. It is totally terrifying, honestly. And you remember what happened, which was Trump's people tried to get him arrested in Minneapolis. And the judges up and down the line said, no, we're not going to issue an arrest warrant. So he goes to California and they arrest him there. Yeah. I mean, the idea of federal agents arresting a journalist is one of those threshold moments. And I think one of the things that we're all thinking about right now is what are the threshold moments?

0:39And I'm keeping reminded of this. There was a quote that I wrote years ago about China describing how tyranny arrives. And I said, it doesn't arrive in an instant. At first, your eyes adjust. It's sort of like twilight. And now all of a sudden that dynamic seems like it's how I have to think about this country, which is pretty mind bending.

1:04Welcome to The Political Scene from The New Yorker, a weekly discussion about the big questions in American politics. I'm Jane Mayer, and I'm joined by my colleagues, Susan Glasser and Evan Osnos. Hi, Susan. Hey there. So great to be with you. Hi, Evan. Good morning, guys.

1:25So we had planned to be off this week, but what's happening just felt too consequential to sit out. America's, and in fact the world's, eyes are on Minneapolis. Last weekend, the federal agents that Trump sent to Minneapolis killed a second American citizen in less than three weeks, Alex Preddy. The streets of the city are now surging with armed and masked ICE and Border Patrol agents as protesters turn out in droves to resist the unprecedented federal paramilitary presence there. The surge has thrust ICE and Border Patrol into the national spotlight, and a lot of Americans are asking, who are these agents beneath these masks?

2:13How did we get into this, and how do we get out? So, Susan, I'll start with you. How are you feeling, and how are you reading this moment? Well, I mean, in some ways, right, it's a sort of chronicle of a tragedy foretold. Donald Trump went searching for battles to fight and dragons to slay. And in launching this kind of unprecedented surge of thousands of federal agents into Minneapolis, he sort of got the war that he was looking for. And what's been remarkable to me is to sort of try to track the political fallout from this moment and to see kind of the Trump damage control playbook kicking into gear here, including, by the way, all of the kind of, oh, actually, we're deescalating and we're dialing it down.

3:08You know, there's a headline yesterday that just, you know, in the gut, you wanted to scream, right? It was like, oh, the calming, the calming presence followed hours later. We're having this conversation on Friday morning. We wake up to Donald Trump. Is he dialing it back? Is he pivoting? No, of course not. He's calling the dead person an agitator and perhaps insurrectionist. And I just, I feel like here we are, Donald Trump, he's got the January 6th playbook. And by the way, that's his Superman armor, right? The man who could come back from January 6th, who could say and do anything to wiggle out of that and to be reelected after that.

3:47You know, he believes that there's essentially no scandal that will take him out, no matter how horrible. Evan, how are you feeling about this? Look, I think what we are seeing right now is a clash of systems. And I use the word systems deliberately because it's not individuals. It is networks of ideas and people that have developed over time. On one side, you've got this kind of amazing improvisation on the ground in Minnesota, or what frankly can look like an improvisation by regular people who have decided that they simply can't abide this anymore. And it turns out that there is a level of impressive coordination and let's call it what it is, courage of people getting up and standing in front of extraordinary harm and risk to themselves, people who never imagined themselves as political activists.

4:38And some of the reporting that I think has been coming out of Minneapolis that evokes that reporting by Emily Witt and The New Yorker and others is really important to understand. The other system that they're clashing with is this bizarre and opaque creation that we call ICE, but is in fact this combination of federal agencies that is essential for us to begin to understand. And then there's a third piece of this, the third system, and that is the federal government and its clash with local and state governments, because that's another thing that's being tested here is the relationship between different parts of the government.

5:17So all of this is playing out almost hour by hour. And it's excruciating, frankly, because the stakes are so high. I can't remember a moment when it feels to me as if we're learning as much about the anatomy of the actual Trump era state than we have recently in watching the power that it has to kill people on the street and then pretend nothing happened. And we had a thought about really the perfect person for this. While I'm on the road this week, you guys have interviewed a friend of ours, Garrett Graff, who, as some people will know, is a terrific journalist and happens to be really expert on the subject of ICE and how these agencies came to be.

5:58Susan, you guys have worked together in the past on this topic, I gather. Yeah, well, very unintentionally, I guess back when I was editor of Politico magazine, we set Garrett on this path of expertise. The very first piece he wrote for me as a writer on that magazine back in 2014 was a, I think, almost 10 ,000 word investigation of the history of the Border Patrol and really its modern incarnation, which began after 9-11 with an enormous surge, kind of like the enormous surge in hiring we're seeing today. So I'm really glad we're having this important conversation with Garrett today. He's now, more than a decade later, an expert on the subject, actually testifying before a public commission in Illinois, convened by Governor Pritzker after a surge to great controversy into Chicago.

6:55Welcome, Garrett Graff. I'm so glad you could join us today. Thank you. I think we have to start with Minneapolis. And you have written a piece recently in Wired saying that we have never seen anything quite like this in America's history. So I'm hoping you can just lay out, as someone who really knows the history of immigration enforcement in the country, what exactly is different that's going on there? What are you seeing? Yeah, to me, as someone who covers federal law enforcement and has written a lot about sort of modern American political history, what stands out in Minneapolis, and Minneapolis is the worst, but it's just the latest in a string of cities that we have seen, you know, going back through Chicago and Portland and Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., where you all are.

7:47This is the first time in modern American history where we are seeing federal force being deployed to abuse the civil rights and civil liberties of American citizens and not to protect them. That when you look at the entire modern history of federal law enforcement and, you know, National Guard deployments and the deployments of, you know, military elements of the 82nd Airborne or the 101st Airborne, it has always been used as a force of last resort to protect civil rights and civil liberties when local and state officials fail to do so. And I'm thinking of moments like John F. Kennedy sending federal marshals into Alabama to protect civil rights protesters after they've been attacked.

8:48You know, I'm thinking of Dwight Eisenhower when in 1957 they were trying to integrate Little Rock Central High School and the Arkansas governor, a notorious racist, deployed the Arkansas National Guard to block the integration. And Dwight Eisenhower then had to federalize the National Guard, deploy it to protect the students integrating the school. And that what we're seeing in Minneapolis is really like the black mirror version of how federal forces have been used in the past, where the federal agents are coming to do the violence, not protect against violence. You know, Gary, you and I have been talking about this for many years, as it turns out.

9:40You know, both of us immediately thought back to this article that you wrote when we worked together at Politico magazine, looking at the history of how did we end up with Border Patrol and ICE, which has now become shorthand for the people at the center of this crisis. Tell us a little bit about how we got there, because I think it's remarkable. I had forgotten until rereading this remarkable piece of yours the extent to which our modern immigration and border patrol agencies are a creation of the post-9-11 sort of panic over the idea of terrorism and that we didn't have control of our borders.

10:22And the result was something which was a massive, huge hiring increase that led to all sorts of problems and nightmares. And now that we're spending billions of dollars on a massive, huge, you know, increase that's leading to all sorts of problems, it seems like this is the kind of history we might want to pay attention to. You know, Susan, you and I have talked about this over the last decade, that Donald Trump, to me, has always been a symptom of what is wrong in American politics and not the underlying disease. And I think that there is nowhere that that is more clear than on the issue of immigration and that in some ways Donald Trump is president and the transformation of CBP and ICE into a presidential fascist mass secret police on America's streets feels very much to me in almost entirely foreseeable and natural outcome.

11:23of the shift that we saw after 9-11 about how we approached immigration in the United States, where we moved immigration from the Justice Department, where it had sat for 60 years, sort of underfunded and under-resourced in what was then known as the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which, let me be very clear up front here, IAS was nowhere near a perfect or good or even well-run organization, but that we reimagined immigration as part of the Department of Homeland Security, then what we did was we turbocharged CBP, which of course includes the Border Patrol. And the Bush administration set this incredibly ambitious hiring surge goal of doubling the size of the Border Patrol as fast as it could.

12:22Now, anyone who was paying attention over the last year, this might ring some bells about ICE. So the first sort of mission of DHS was to double the size of the Border Patrol, take it from 9 ,000 agents up to 19 ,000 and then 21 ,000 at its Obama era peak. and what they did were all of the things a law enforcement agency shouldn't do when it is rushing to hire people. They cut training standards. They cut background checks. They did this hiring, most of this hiring without the polygraph that sort of other federal law enforcement agencies like the FBI or the Secret Service use as a routine part of the hiring process.

13:10And it was a notable problem when the Border Patrol began to use polygraphs and they started washing out 70 % of the applicants who would have been previously hired under the pre-polygraph roles. So they brought in thousands of new agents. This created huge management problems, supervision problems, training problems, and kicked off this tidal wave of crime, misconduct, and corruption that CBP still struggles with today 20 years after this hiring surge began. I'd love to just add a statistic from one of the pieces you've written where you say that in 2018, there was an agent arrested every 36 hours, which is either equal to or more than the crime rate that has taken place among undocumented immigrants.

14:09There were so many crimes committed by these agents. And I loved a phrase you used, which was you said they were hired by the pound from the pound. So, okay, so you've got this thing. It preexisted Trump's presidency, but something has really changed now. There's a sense that it's evolved into something far darker. Yes. I mean, obviously a lot has changed, but there are a couple of policy choices that we have made that I think are worthy of highlighting here. The first is, you know, again, ICE is not some brand new agency that Donald Trump created at noon on January 20th last year. ICE has been around for 20 years, and it has managed to do its job for 20 years in a way that it was not a social pariah, nor did it regularly endanger the lives of ordinary Americans in the course of doing business.

15:13And in fact, actually, for much of its history, ICE deported more people from the United States with criminal records than Donald Trump is able to do today. You know, for all of the attention that we hear about Donald Trump getting the worst of the worst off the streets, they have actually changed the way that ICE operates in a way to actually decrease the number of people being deported with criminal records. And what I mean by that is for most of its modern history, ICE has operated under a strategy of what was called prosecutorial discretion. This is actually a policy that the Obama administration came up with.

15:59And what the idea was, was the very straightforward fact that is still true today, which is Congress funds a certain number of deportations per year. This is a choice that Congress makes, not ICE, not an administration. And so the idea was, let's focus on the biggest bang for the buck for the American people. And let's go after the actual worst of the worst. Let's go after the gang members, drug dealers, human smugglers, the sex traffickers, the people with records of violent crime. Last spring, according to sort of what we can understand transpired in the Trump administration, Stephen Miller shows up at DHS and sets this entirely arbitrary goal of 1 million deportations a year.

16:57which if you do your math works out to be ICE and CBP need to be making 3 ,000 arrests a day to meet Stephen Miller's completely arbitrary quota. The instant they changed that last May is the instant that we began to see these incredibly aggressive tactics on America's streets begin to play out because all of the prosecutorial discretion goes out the window when you're trying to make quotas. And so what we've seen is ICE and CBP, you know, in these high-profile deployments, but also sort of all across the rest of the country, switch from going after the worst of the worst to the literal lowest-hanging fruit that they can find.

17:46This is how you have CBP SWAT teams in sort of full invading Fallujah gear rolling into Home Depot parking lots to roust a bunch of day laborers. That's exactly the point I want to get to now, Garrett, because it's this militarized presence in American cities. So quotas are part of it. The other thing that strikes me as a change that has led directly in some ways to these tragic killings of both Alex Prendy and Renee Good in Minneapolis is they've gone after American citizens who are protesting this militarized presence in our communities. And they have used aggressive tactics. You know, I mean, America has a long history of dealing with first-Embed protests, right?

18:43You know, crowd control, basic 101, it seems like the Border Patrol and the ICE agents are violating every known rule of how to treat American citizens in their own communities, literally on the streets where they live. They are actually beating the shit out of Americans who dare to protest with words what they're doing. How did that come about? Are there any precedents for this? Is this just because we've given a bunch of poorly trained macho guys guns and an unlimited mandate? Or is there some actual order that they think they're following in treating American citizens this way? This is a great point, and I'm really glad you raised this, Susan, because it's the other thing that really stands out, which is we see all of these viral videos and pictures of these agents leaping out of unmarked vans wearing these big tactical vests that say police on them.

19:37ICE and CBP are not police. They are very specifically, actually, not police. They operate in these incredibly narrow lanes focused around border security and immigration enforcement. They are not trained in the way that we would expect even midsize American police department to be trained in First Amendment freedoms, in civil rights, in civil liberties, in basic due process. They are not trained in de-escalation tactics. And a lot of this has to do with a mentality that the Border Patrol specifically brings to their jobs, which is most American cops, if you are a small town cop, a big city cop, a deputy sheriff, if you're a state trooper, you spend most of your time interacting with people who are not criminals.

20:40and that changes the mentality that they approach their day-to-day life with. They spend most of their time in non-hostile environments, walking into convenience stores, walking into grocery stores, you know, interacting with random motorists. The Border Patrol doesn't. The Border Patrol is used to a situation where they are operating usually by themselves or with very limited backup in very remote regions of the country where every single person that they interact with on a shift is at least guilty of crossing the border illegally. And that's not a major crime. You know, a lot of them are asylum seekers at this point who are trying to find Border patrol agents to turn themselves into, et cetera, et cetera.

21:39But they are trained to approach their day-to-day interactions with people in a different way. And the border patrol has never been intended to be a force that is routinely interacting with American citizens, full stop, period, let alone routinely patrolling American cities. We should be sort of as shocked and surprised at the idea of border patrol convoys rolling through American cities and doing policing as we would be if armored SUVs of the U.S. Coast Guard started driving through suburban cul-de-sacs and tossing tear gas canisters out the window. Like, this is a paramilitary border security force that is not meant to be a police force on America's streets.

22:41We're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, more of our conversation with the journalist and historian Garrett Graff. This is The Political Scene from The New Yorker.

23:00If you've been enjoying the show, please leave us a rating and review on the podcast platform of your choice. And while you're there, don't forget to hit the follow button so you never miss an episode. Thank you so much for listening. Wired has always put a microscope on the people, power, and forces shaping our world. Uncanny Valley brings that same fearless reporting straight to your feed. Is Doge finally over? Will AI actually democratize American healthcare? Each week, Wired journalists from across the newsroom are going to unpack where politics, technology, and Silicon Valley collide. From conversations with tech leaders across Silicon Valley, internet fandom investigations, and government crackdowns on rigged gambling, we're taking you all over the news cycle, going straight inside the priorities, pressures, and power plays driving today's biggest decisions.

23:55Uncanny Valley tackles the questions keeping you up at night and helps make sense of the future taking shape right now. Listen to new episodes every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.

24:14you know we've all watched the tremendous pushback um the civil unrest and protests taking place in minneapolis in sub you know zero freezing weather and we've seen that senate Democrats have said that they're going to try to hold the funding hostage in order to get some reforms in ICE, you know, masks and maybe body cams and, you know, some sort of badges that reveal the identity of the officers. But you've also written, and I was interested in this, that there really is very little leverage that opponents of this have structurally in the way that the Constitution is designed. And so I wonder, do you think that the protests have been effective?

25:04And can you explain, is there a sort of a limited amount of power that opponents of this have? Yes, in some ways, no, in other ways. But to answer the broader question first, what is actually really striking to me is I think Donald Trump's experiment in creating a fascist secret police to terrorize America is actually failing. There's a lot to worry about about what's to come over the next year or two as, you know, the one big beautiful bill turbocharges, doubling the force of ICE officers, adding more CBP officers, et cetera, et cetera. But putting that aside for a moment, Donald Trump's deployments of CBP and ICE are actually incredibly limited.

25:56That he has really been able to only pull this off in one or two cities at a time, two or three cities at a time across the country. This is not me downplaying the actual terror and trauma of these deployments against these cities, which is real. But that what we're also seeing is that the amount of force that he needs to bring to achieve these ends is increasing. That in Chicago, you know, that deployment midway blitz in the fall was like a thousand agents. Minneapolis is smaller than Chicago, and they are now having to deploy 3000 agents there. And those agents are losing. The residents of Minneapolis are resisting them at a scale that is unsustainable for the Border Patrol and ICE deployments.

26:54and they are creating a playbook for how this is also unfolding in other cities. I actually think, again, I want to be clear, there's real trauma, there's real violence. There are American citizens being shot dead in the streets by these agents. This is not me downplaying any of that. But I think that there has been almost a nuclear half-life decline in the effectiveness of these deployments as a terror campaign city to city over the last six months. And what you are seeing is the creation of this playbook where you have massive organized resistance on the street level, court lawsuits that end up, for now at least, being pretty effective at circumscribing the behavior of ICE and CBP officials in the states.

27:47Like when Greg Bovino and his CBP cavalry pulled out of Chicago, it was basically because like they had been driven out by court orders. So I think that there's this sort of like liberal fantasy that like Tim Walls is going to call out the Minnesota National Guard for like armed conflict with ICE officers in the streets. and that's just not going to work in our system of federalism. But I think this playbook of sort of organized citizen resistance, judicial orders, and really terrible, the terrible press that comes out of these deployments. I saw one report this week that like Melania Trump intervened over the weekend because she's concerned about how the CBP headlines are washing out the triumphal news of her new movie.

28:44I don't know whether that's true, but, you know, like the Trump administration realizes that this is not looking good for them on America's streets. I'm just curious. We know this is the policy. Donald Trump loves these spectacles of militarized force. Stephen Miller does. I'm a little bit worried here going forward, Garrett, that what's going to happen is they understand the messages, don't screw with well-intentioned liberal white bystanders to your crackdown on poor brown-skinned immigrants. And we don't know what's happening inside of these facilities. If these are the violent acts that CBP and ICE have been willing to undertake while being filmed, you know, I guess my concern is that what happens when the spotlight goes away or they become savvier about targeting people with less publicity?

29:39Yeah, and I think there's a lot of reason to be concerned about that. And let me give you one very specific example about that, which is the one big beautiful bill pours a tremendous amount of money into ICE for new personnel, doubling the size of ICE. a lot of reasons to be concerned about the trends that we're going to see coming out of who those officers actually are, the training they receive, and what behavior they will have on the streets in the months and years ahead, given our history of that hiring surge with the Border Patrol going so poorly. It also pours$45 billion into detention facilities.

30:20What a number. What a number. Taking the number of detention facility beds in the United States from in sort of round numbers, about 45 ,000 beds a night up to somewhere around and north of 110 ,000 detention beds a night. What they didn't put money into was the actual legal process around immigration, dealing with the already months and years long immigration case backload dating to the Biden administration. And so what I worry about is that we are building these detention facilities, which are, by the way, supposed to be civil facilities. They are not an expressly intended not to be criminal prisons because the immigration detentions are civil proceeding.

31:16that these civil detention facilities are being built almost with the express purpose of becoming concentration camps. That is a terrifying sentence. It totally is. And Garrett, I just, you know, to close, I wanted to give you a chance to make a point that you have made in your subsack very, I think, eloquently, which is, and I'm just going to try to read a little bit from it, that this is what fascism looks like. There's no bright line between democracy and autocracy. It's a spectrum. And not all of the country will experience that switch at the same moment or in the same way. But let's be clear, there is a U.S.

32:04city living under occupation by fascist presidential secret police right now. So have we arrived at this moment? I mean, people keep saying, are we at inflection moment where we're going to change away from it? Or are we in fascism? How do you see it at this point? I think so. And I wrote a column actually in August of last year, as we watched the National Guard be deployed to Washington, D.C., that said that, that I think Americans misunderstand how this happens. And, you know, Susan, I know, you know, you lived in Russia, basically, like, as this happened. But there is no light switch that turns from democracy to autocracy, and then everyone wakes up the next morning and they're like, all right, we're now in an authoritarian, totalitarian state.