ICE

10:29Peter Markowitz:That was played over and over again on CNN. The bomb ripped a hole in the building, causing portions of all nine floors to collapse. We are seeing injured people everywhere. Rescuers continue to search for survivors in the rubble.

10:44Rodger Werner:168 people died. Hundreds more were injured. Law enforcement officials raced to find who was responsible. And at first, journalists and police speculated that the attackers were from the Middle East.

10:58Peter Markowitz:They're looking for two, perhaps three, most likely two Middle Eastern men. She says that they were dressed in Arabic clothes with a vernouse, which is that long veil on their head with the band around the forehead. There was initial speculation about foreign terrorism. That speculation was quickly, you know, people were quickly disabused of that notion because it didn't take long for them to identify Timothy McVeigh as the bomber.

11:23Rodger Werner:This is Peter Markowitz.

11:25Peter Markowitz:I'm a professor at Cardozo School of Law in New York City.

11:29Rodger Werner:He also founded the Catherine O. Greenberg Immigration Justice Clinic, where he defends immigrants facing deportation and works on policy. Peter and Roger Werner agree. This moment in the mid-90s was crucial. It became a turning point for immigration enforcement in the United States. But Peter says the irony is the attacker in this case was a U.S. citizen. So a domestic terror, the worst domestic terror incident in American history by a white man, you know, born and raised in the U.S. How does that connect to the story about immigration?

12:09Peter Markowitz:It doesn't connect well in any kind of logical way. But what it does is it provides the catalyst for this new big piece of anti-terrorism legislation. The kind of mood of the moment allows people with anti-immigrant agendas to kind of pack these bills with all sorts of immigration provisions under the specter of the kind of the foreign terrorist threat, though the terrorism that it actually was intended to address had nothing to do with that threat.

12:43Rodger Werner:Within a year and a half of the Oklahoma City bombing, Congress passed new immigration reform legislation. And it brought a few big changes to the immigration enforcement landscape. First, the new laws expanded the categories of who could be deported even further. Now, any undocumented immigrant who was convicted of a crime was fair game.

13:06Peter Markowitz:People are arrested for things like unlicensed driving, for selling, you know, counterfeit goods, turnstile jumping, shoplifting, marijuana possession. A person like that, if they had contact with INS or ICE to follow, that person could suddenly be subject to, you know, what the Supreme Court has called the loss of all that makes life worth living, deportation. exploitation. Even people here were talking about who have been here lawfully, who might have a green card, who might have been here decades, who might have U.S. citizen children or family or even served in the U.S. Army of businesses.

13:43Rodger Werner:At the time, the prevailing view was that local police didn't have the power to enforce federal immigration laws. But, and this is the second major change introduced by the 96 laws. Suddenly, that was an option. The federal government was offering to train and deputize local police to act as immigration officers, basically saying, hey, just so you know, you can help us out here if you want to.

14:10Peter Markowitz:And what's remarkable is in the years that followed, states and localities said, thanks, but no thanks. We don't want to do that. And they did it because Because law enforcement leaders across the country said, A, we have a job to do and it's crime fighting and we don't want to divert our resources to immigration. And B, if we did engage in this, it's going to undermine our crime fighting mission because we need to have good relationships with our immigrant communities so they can come forward as witnesses and victims of crime. And we don't want to be seen as immigration agents. So that invitation that Congress extended, the law enforcement leaders across the country rejected.

14:49Rodger Werner:Call it Chekhov's invitation. It'll be back. Another variable here was money. The INS budget had already gone up since the 80s and showed no signs of slowing. In three years, the budget increased by around 50%. And then came 9-11. Coming up, ICE is born.

15:19Peter Markowitz:Hi, this is Mike from Key West, Florida, and you're listening to Threeline from NPR.

15:28Rodger Werner:Part 2. No pre-9-11 thinking.

15:37Rodger Werner:November 2002. It's been a little over a year since 9-11. President George W. Bush walks briskly down a red carpet at the White House, flanked by eight people in suits. A wall of news cameras follows him with their lenses as he sits down behind a small desk. There's a big sign hanging from the front edge of the desk, with PROTECTING THE HOMELAND spelled out in all caps. And as the applause continues around him, President Bush signs a piece of legislation to massively reshape the structure of the U.S. government.

16:13Peter Markowitz:It's now my privilege to sign the Homeland Security Act of 2002.

16:19Rodger Werner:The Homeland Security Act created a brand new department in the federal government, the Department of Homeland Security. And to do that, President Bush consolidated nearly two dozen federal departments and agencies under one roof. The idea was to increase and improve communication. With this reorganization, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, or INS, ceased to exist. Many of its agents were moved over to the Department of Homeland Security. And alongside U.S. Customs agents, became part of ICE. And all of this happened very quickly, especially by government standards.

17:01Peter Markowitz:Remember, between that Homeland Security Act in November of 2002 and the formation of DHS was only like five months. It was a very short window.

17:17Rodger Werner:Roger Werner had been working for INS. Now he was part of ICE. And he says as far as the actual work was concerned.

17:26Peter Markowitz:I transitioned smoothly. My job fundamentally did not change.

17:31Rodger Werner:The changes were promoted as the government's response to 9-11, organized and intentional. But on the inside, Roger says some DHS employees just experienced it as a bureaucratic mess. Some of them called it mayhem, you know, that first day because nobody knew what to do. But Roger says as far as he was told, the mission stayed the same. Immigration enforcement officers were supposed to go after the worst of the worst. Gangs, sex offenders, and also anyone who might be plotting an act of terrorism.

18:06Peter Markowitz:So if there was somebody who overstayed their visa or should not be here, they should be prioritized and looked at. Or even somebody who maintained a green card. If this put them in the realm that they violated the status of their green card, do everything you can to make sure that they were identified. That and the counterterrorism mission. So it was just a continuation of what I was used to in the INS of prioritizing criminal individuals and individuals that are high risk.

18:34Rodger Werner:And high risk translates, just so I understand, to convicted of a crime of some kind?

18:41Peter Markowitz:Convicted of a crime or had significant interactions with, say, law enforcement that warrants this person might be dangerous. Do you want to take the risk that person is going to not hurt somebody? If they're not here on solid legal immigration grounds, how many bites of that apple are you going to let them have until they murder somebody or seriously injure somebody? So you have to always make those risk-based assessments.

19:06Rodger Werner:I think, you know, some folks listening might hear that and say, well, that seems like a stretch to go from someone, let's say, having an altercation with a police officer to they're going to go out and murder like a family of four. So how would you respond to that?

19:20Peter Markowitz:I would respond to that saying any police officer or law enforcement officer has a wide degree of discretion. They have their own experiences. They have their own understanding of factors. And they have to make risk-based assessments of each individual they encounter. Because remember, we don't have all the time in the world to spend with every person in the country that may be out of their immigration status or here illegally. So you have to look at who are the threats. Who wants to risk that? And I'm never going to live with myself if somebody got hurt because I didn't decide to pick up the phone or make a call or look into somebody.

19:55Peter Markowitz:So there were different, there's always been different priorities. Other people have different perspectives. I mean, I will say this, that, you know, one retiree reminded me of a saying that we had that I think is very important. It's against policy to engage in pre-9-11 thinking. Meaning we'll never take somebody's word for it at the border that they're just here visiting somebody. when we have information or a gut instinct because the risk is too great. It may be unfortunate, but at the same time, too, is I would never take that risk.

20:28Rodger Werner:It's important to remember that at the time DHS and ICE were created, 9-11 was still extremely raw. In 2004, the Congressional Commission created to investigate the attacks finally released its report. Here's former National Counterterrorism Coordinator Richard Clark testifying to the 9-11 Commission about that day. To those who are watching on television, your government failed you.

20:57Peter Markowitz:Those entrusted with protecting you failed you. And I failed you. We tried hard, but that doesn't matter because we failed.

21:13Rodger Werner:In the decade after 9-11, the United States deported more people than ever. A research group called TRAC collected and analyzed data about this. And it says the vast majority of people the U.S. government deported after 9-11 were not flagged as terrorism threats or violent criminals. Immigration attorney Peter Markowitz says ICE's mission has never been restricted to just immigrants with criminal records.

21:39Peter Markowitz:Because if you look at the reality, at its inception, the goal was 100 percent enforcement to deport each and every non-citizen that could potentially be deported. So the data is consistent with that original strategic plan and very inconsistent with the rhetoric which says we're going after the worst of the worst.

22:04Rodger Werner:We asked Roger Werner about why immigrants without criminal records often make up such a large proportion of the people ICE detains and deports. Quite honestly, they violated the law.

22:17Peter Markowitz:Because if I go into a consulate and I say, I'd like to go to the United States, knowing full well I'm going to go there to work and never return, well, I've committed fraud misuse of visas. I might have lied to a consular official. I might have shown that visa to an airline if I get it. I might have showed it to the inspector. I might have lied to the inspector. Just because a person wasn't arrested or convicted for him doesn't mean they didn't commit them.

22:41Rodger Werner:Just to be clear here, overseeing a visa in the United States is a civil offense, which means the government can fine those people. And it can even deport them. But it cannot charge them with a criminal offense. Entering the U.S. illegally is a crime. The first time, it's a misdemeanor. After that, it's a felony. What I'm hearing you say is like, well, there was an original crime that was committed by even entering illegally.

23:10Peter Markowitz:Yes. And I don't think generally in the American public, based on our research, like that. They don't like people gaming the system because nobody else games the system in any interaction with the federal government. When you apply for a visa overseas and you say, I'm going to come to the United States, I'm going to visit New York and Disneyland, that's what we expect from you. Not have a plan to immediately get to the United States and start working. That wasn't what you got the visa for. So, you know, I think there's a, to keep the system fair, it has to be well regulated.

23:42Rodger Werner:After 9-11, a Gallup poll found that more than half of Americans thought immigration levels should decrease. And now, the return of Chekhov's invitation. In the 90s, the federal government had given local police the option of collaborating with immigration enforcement. At that time, departments around the country said no. After the events of 9-11, more of them said yes. Here's Peter Markowitz.

24:08Peter Markowitz:Under the Bush administration, when ICE was created, they had a few thousand ICE agents. They had hundreds of thousands of local and state police across the country, and they wanted to figure out how to get their hands on those folks. First, they started kind of dumping some immigration kind of information into what's called the National Crime Information Center database. And that's the database when you get pulled over by a cop for speeding and they take your license back to the car. It's one of the databases they're running you through to see if you're wanted for kidnapping in Idaho. And they started dumping certain categories of immigration into that, trying to bypass the kind of leadership and the policymakers on the state and local level and go straight to the local cops.

24:55Rodger Werner:So in practice, if someone got pulled over for, say, speeding or a broken taillight, the police officer might run their name through that database and see an immigration warrant.

25:05Peter Markowitz:And the big innovation, and this is the second thing that kind of has precipitated our era of mass deportation, was something called secure communities. And what secure communities is, is whenever somebody is arrested anywhere in the United States and they are fingerprinted, those fingerprints are eventually sent to the FBI to make sure that they're not wanted somewhere else in the country. Secure communities diverted those criminal fingerprint checks, and they're now sent from the FBI over to the Department of Homeland Security. And the Department of Homeland Security can say, oh, wait, that person might not have a serious criminal problem, but we want them for deportation.

25:45Peter Markowitz:And so that was the innovation that really allowed them to bypass the policymakers on the local level who have said we didn't want this entanglement because they have no choice. When they run their fingerprints, it is automatically immediately checked by ICE.

26:01Rodger Werner:By the end of his time in office, President Bush had deported more than twice as many immigrants as any president before him. That trend continued during the Obama administration. In every year of his first term, he set a new deportation record.

26:17Peter Markowitz:I think there's been a pretty consistent through line in ICE's behavior. Not entirely. There are exceptions that we can point to. But a pretty consistent through line regarding immigration enforcement from Clinton to Bush to Obama.

26:30Rodger Werner:But things did change under President Obama. His administration expanded Secure Communities, the program that shared fingerprint records collected by law enforcement with ICE. Under President George W. Bush, just 14 jurisdictions had participated in the program. By 2013, under President Obama, that number was up to more than 3 ,000 in all 50 states. And it wasn't optional. The other thing that set the Obama administration apart was a man named Tom Homan. If that's ringing a bell, it's because he's currently President Trump's border czar.

27:07Peter Markowitz:When you enter a country illegally and you know you're here illegally and you choose to have your assistant child, that's on you. That's not on this administration. If you choose to put your family in that position, that's on them. So Tom Homan, he was a Border Patrol agent back in the day. And he rose kind of precipitously through the ranks of the Department of Homeland Security and had a leadership role under Obama. He was the head of what's called Enforcement Removal Operations, which is the biggest piece of ICE. They're the guys who go out and arrest people.

27:37Rodger Werner:Tom Homan advocated for tough and punitive border policies. He went so far as to propose separating parents from their kids at the border if they were caught trying to enter the country illegally. At the time, his colleagues in the Obama administration thought it was too extreme. Put a pin in that. But meanwhile, deportations soared. Immigrant rights activists referred to Obama as the deporter-in-chief. And then in 2016, Donald Trump was elected president for the first time. How different was ICE under his administration compared to the Obama administration and the Bush administration before him?

28:21Peter Markowitz:Yeah, I think in Trump 1.0, there was more of the same than there was different, right? But the big differences in Trump 1.0 between what had come before were first in rhetoric. When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best.

28:38Rodger Werner:It started even before the election, during the campaign.

28:42Peter Markowitz:They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists.

28:46Rodger Werner:And it continued into President Trump's first term. The president often highlighted violent crimes committed by undocumented immigrants, though several studies found that, as had been true in the past, immigrants were less likely to commit crimes overall.

29:02Peter Markowitz:There was, you know, a phenomenon of horrific rhetoric coming out of the White House and coming out of the Department of Homeland Security. And there were some real horrors that were being visited upon immigrant communities. But those horrors were not different in kind than what I had seen over the previous couple of decades that I've been doing this work.

29:22Rodger Werner:And Tom Homan was back. In 2017, the Trump administration approached him to lead ICE. And this time, the idea of prosecuting adults and separating parents from their kids at the border, the one Obama administration officials thought was too extreme, it got the thumbs up. Soon, audio leaked of what it sounded like.

29:48Rodger Werner:We just don't have a lot of details about the conditions inside or how the children are faring after being separated from their parents. That policy, officially enacted in 2018, led to more than 5 ,500 children of immigrants being separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border.

30:05Peter Markowitz:And that is why the audio that was released earlier this week from ProPublica was so jarring.

30:11Rodger Werner:The voices of children crying, calling out for their mothers and fathers. People were outraged. Homan was grilled in Congress.

30:21Peter Markowitz:Mr. Homan, I'm a father. Do you have children? How can you possibly allow this to happen under your watch? First of all, your comments are disgusting. I've served my country. I've served my country. I've served my country.

30:33Rodger Werner:And on TV.

30:34Peter Markowitz:You're separating mothers and their children over a misdemeanor? We're separating mothers and their children because they chose to violate this crime. But you just said it was a misdemeanor. We're enforcing the law.

30:46Rodger Werner:There was so much backlash that President Trump ultimately ended the family separation policy with an executive order a little more than a month after his administration had officially rolled it out. But the protests continued. And over the course of the spring and summer of 2018, they coalesced around a theme, abolish ICE. Thinking about that sort of abolish ICE movement that emerged, you know, in 2018, what would a world without ICE look like? And does that even solve the problem?

31:19Peter Markowitz:So this is something I've spent some time thinking and writing about. And I think it would look a whole lot like what we see in other administrative realms, right? ICE is an administrative agency in the federal government. There are lots of administrative agencies in the federal government. The IRS monitors tax. You pick your agency. The OSHA monitors workplace safety. All of them have a scheme, a statutory scheme, that sets legal limits that they need to enforce. All of them enforce those civil legal limits without huge militarized agencies that put people in cages, right? When the SEC finds a business that is out of compliance with securities law, its first instinct is not to prosecute that agency to the fullest and hammer it with the harshest penalty possible.

32:11Peter Markowitz:Its first instinct is to use something called cooperative enforcement, which says, is there a way to bring this company into compliance with the law? That should be our first approach with immigration. Right. And when ICE identifies somebody who is out of compliance, they don't have to arrest them and lock them up and start removal proceedings. They could say, hey, I'm giving you a 30 day, a 60 day window to initiate an affirmative application to regularize your status. If you don't do that, we might come for you.

32:41Rodger Werner:Roger Werner says any country you go to will have some kind of immigration enforcement or border control. And the version of that we have in this country is the one Americans voted for.

32:53Peter Markowitz:I mean, they vote at the polls and they decide. People get elected on different things. And it's usually based on that the American people get tired of something. We let too many people, you know. So, I mean, maybe we let too many people in. Maybe we let too many people in and out of jail with criminal records without any type of deterrent factor. That doesn't work.

33:19Rodger Werner:When Joe Biden was elected in 2020, he relaxed many of President Trump's policies. Many more people came into the country, though deportations also continued. And then in January 2025, Donald Trump took office for the second time. We spoke to Peter in July. And already, he said, things are very different.

33:42Peter Markowitz:Things have shifted in a way unlike anything I've seen in the 20 years that I've been doing this work.

33:50Rodger Werner:That's coming up.

34:00Peter Markowitz:Hi, this is Angel from Paonia, Colorado, and you're listening to ThruLine on NPR.

34:08Rodger Werner:Part 3. The Pendulum. I got three words for him. Shock and awe.

34:17Peter Markowitz:You're going to see us take this country back.

34:21Rodger Werner:Shock and awe. That is how Tom Homan kicked off the Trump administration's second-term approach to deportations. President Trump is pushing through a mass deportation campaign.

34:32Peter Markowitz:Immigration rates are up all across the country. Thousands of National Guard troops and hundreds of Marines have been called to Los Angeles by President Trump.

34:42Rodger Werner:Agents, often armed, wearing plain clothes and masks, are showing up at places where Latino workers are known to gather. Hardware store parking lots, car washes, street vendor corners, and rounding them up. They've grabbed people at bus stops or dragged them out of their cars. For the past few months, it's felt like Americans are seeing ice everywhere. It's been hard to scroll Instagram or TikTok without hitting a video. of workers in hairnets at a meatpacking plant being herded into a break room by ICE agents. A woman crying as she's put into a white truck. A black ICE van accelerating as a group of protesters pushes against its hood.

35:29Rodger Werner:Some of the videos are posted by ICE itself. The ICE agents' faces are blurred. The people they're detaining are not. Immigration attorney and law professor Peter Markowitz says this moment what he's seen unfolding online and in his own work, is unlike anything he's experienced in ISIS history.

35:49Peter Markowitz:The examples I might point to are like the deployment of non-immigration agents, National Guard, other military and law enforcement agencies in a kind of sweeping, heavy-handed, very visible manner. That is something that is unfamiliar to me in what I have seen in immigration enforcement. in the time that I've been doing this work, and really in any time in my lifetime.

36:21Rodger Werner:Since the start of President Trump's second term, ICE is averaging more than 600 immigration arrests every day. In some states, that's more than double the usual amount. Though government attorneys say there's no quota, Trump's deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, has set a goal of 3 ,000 detentions per day. That would mean a total of more than 1 million arrests every year. The repercussions are rippling out globally. In March, the Trump administration sent hundreds of immigrants to a notorious facility in El Salvador. And in July, it deported eight immigrants who'd been convicted of crimes in the U.S.

36:59Rodger Werner:to South Sudan. Only one of them was from there. Peter Markowitz says that as far back as its creation, some of ICE's work has always been about optics. And this is where historian and DHS employee Roger Werner agrees. Speaking as a researcher and private citizen, he argues that detaining immigrants at such high rates, and even deporting them to countries they have no attachment to, could be a powerful deterrent.

37:27Peter Markowitz:I recommend you all go to the southwest border sometime. Imagine walking 50 miles, like an old lady or a kid, 50 miles. Wow.

37:39Rodger Werner:But that, I mean, but that, doesn't that transmit a level of like desperation on their part to do that?

37:44Peter Markowitz:Yes, but it also is the amount of risk you would take. You put your kid through that. Is one thing an adult male going across and say, hey, listen, I'll send you money. We'll figure out how to get here. I can totally understand that. But, you know, and putting a four-year-old child maybe in the hands of a smuggling organization, a cartel based. These people are absolutely brutal.

38:04Rodger Werner:No, I hear you. I guess, I guess in my mind then I'm like, I have a two-year-old. But I think about it. I'm like, what would compel me to ever put him in that situation? It would be things have gotten so bad in my present circumstances would be like, that's just how in my brain, that's how it works.

38:20Peter Markowitz:I totally understand it. But you also have to say, is the risk worth the reward? Meaning, are you likely to remain in the United States? That's the real driver. The driver isn't that, you know, where you're going to risk your children. It's, are you going to. Right.

38:35Rodger Werner:If there isn't something worth it on the other side. Yeah.

38:37Peter Markowitz:If you show and say, and we're talking theoretically here, I was not involved in these operations. If you show and say that, hey, you're not going to be allowed in no matter what you do, would you sell everything and try? No, you would look for another alternative.

38:52Rodger Werner:We asked ICE about this. A statement from ICE in response to our questions read in part, quote, It's baffling that anyone would even question a nation's decision to enforce laws enacted by Congress to deter crime. Peter Markowitz says, optics aside, he's noticed two other major changes in ICE's operations. The first has to do with the judicial process, when cases go to court.

39:20Peter Markowitz:You know, if you go to the immigration court at 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan, where I often represent clients, What is happening there is different than what I have ever seen before. The agency is moving to terminate cases, which normally, if you're representing an immigrant, the termination of a case is a victory. But the plan here is to bypass the immigration courts and to use extrajudicial mechanisms to deport people. So they can use a mechanism called expedited removal. and it's a mechanism where ICE gets to act as the judge, jury, and executioner. They don't need any immigration judge and there is very little federal court review available and an agent determines on their own that this person is going to be deported with almost no due process.

40:13Peter Markowitz:And so they move to terminate these cases for the purpose of using that alternative mechanism, notwithstanding the fact that an immigration judge has a process underway and the person is fully compliant with that process.

40:27Rodger Werner:This is happening around the country. A statement from ICE in response to our questions read in part, quote, ICE is now following the law and placing these illegal aliens in expedited removal, as they always should have been. If they have a valid, credible fear claim, they will continue in immigration proceedings. But if no valid claim is found, aliens will be subject to a swift deportation. End quote. Since ICE's detention numbers began to rapidly increase, there have been reports of overcrowding, poor sanitation, and lack of food at ICE detention centers. Peter says all of this is happening at places where conditions were poor to begin with.

41:10Rodger Werner:Have you ever been to one of those facilities?

41:14Peter Markowitz:Many times.

41:15Rodger Werner:What is it like, you know, inside one of those facilities?

41:19Peter Markowitz:It is indistinguishable from the jails and prisons that I've also routinely visited. In fact, sometimes they're exactly the same facilities. You know, there are medical care of the poorest quality. People routinely die in immigration detention because of inadequate medical care. There's a couple of big private prison companies that manage the majority of these. And through a profit motive, sometimes you have to pay for things like soap or pay for things like toothpaste. And so it is really kind of the most minimal provisions that are provided to folks.

41:53Rodger Werner:The second major change Peter has seen since the beginning of President Trump's second term is money. The one big beautiful bill is directing more than$175 billion to immigration enforcement. If you leave out the U.S. and China, that's more than any country in the world spends on its military in a year. ICE alone is set to get$75 billion of that money. Rogers says American voters are the ones who decided what our immigration enforcement system looks like when they cast their votes for president. Peter says the new funding complicates that.

42:29Peter Markowitz:I think it is really difficult, even for me, and I spend all day long thinking about this stuff, to wrap my head around and what that's going to look like on American streets. And to be clear, the$75 billion can be spent over several years. We know they're going to build a ton of immigration detention. The scale of detention is going to be astronomical.

42:54Peter Markowitz:They are going to have massive physical presence of militarized agents on the streets. I anticipate that that's going to become a norm. I anticipate that we're going to be seeing checkpoints. And so I fear that level of funding is so out of scale with what has come before that we are at real risk of kind of becoming a police state. And we've already seen that ICE doesn't hesitate to move against citizens when it perceives the need to do so. So I think increasingly people are going to feel that in a very, very kind of visceral way.

43:32Rodger Werner:What does that mean for the agency to have that kind of influx of funding?

43:38Peter Markowitz:A lot of responsibility, I would say, from a historical perspective is spend the American taxpayers wisely. Make sure that they're getting the best use of their money and it's not wasted. It's a big responsibility with that amount of money coming into an agency quickly that, you know, I hope historically the right thing is done with it. You know, that serves both the American people, the interests of the United States, and the people that are taken into custody. You know, they deserve the rights that are available to them under the laws that Congress has passed.

44:17Rodger Werner:But in spite of all the money heading ICE's way and the responsibility that comes with it, Roger doesn't think this moment is fundamentally different from the rest of ICE's history. Or, for that matter, INSs.

44:30Peter Markowitz:This is nothing out of the ordinary. None of this has been out of the ordinary over the years, as it's been a result of funding and congressional and executive and political support, and largely driven by the American people. This comes in waves about every 30 years. With our immigration policy, we become too generous, and people feel that we're being taken advantage of. So then they want a more firm hand or, you know, more thorough examination of things. There's always a pendulum swing. But there is, you do have to have a deterrent because we can absorb everybody inside the United States. So it depends on where you sit on the issue is how you're going to judge that, I guess.

45:14Peter Markowitz:You know, if you think we should let in everybody, then, you know, but that's not what the majority of the American public believe in. So that's not where the polls are. They want some degree of immigration enforcement. What that looks like, that's always a, you know, that's that pendulum swinging back and forth.

45:31Rodger Werner:Peter disagrees. He says if you look at current polls, you'll see that most Americans actually oppose the kind of immigration enforcement that's being carried out by ICE today. And he worries that we've entered an era where ICE is amassing more and more power. And he feels like the checks on that power are disappearing.

45:50Peter Markowitz:In the first Trump administration, there were institutional players in the White House and DOJ and DHS said, wait, wait, wait, we have to follow the law. Those people are all gone. There are no internal checks going on anymore. Beyond that, what are the other checks? The immigration courts are being purged. Anybody who is not kind of aligned is being pushed out. What I had hoped was that the Supreme Court may actually provide some kind of check against the most extreme examples. And with one or two notable exceptions, that has really not been the case, right? Over and over again, they're letting them remove people to countries they have never come from or had any connection to.

46:39Peter Markowitz:They're allowing the revocation of hundreds of thousands of TPS holders, status Venezuelans. They're stripping hundreds of thousands of people of humanitarian protections. And so the Supreme Court is no backstop either. And so no internal backstop, no immigration court backstop, no Supreme Court backstop. We are in a really, really, really precarious place as a country.

47:08Peter Markowitz:I would impart to the listeners that you really have to understand that the men and women who work for these agencies, especially Immigration Customs Enforcement, have dedicated their life to public service. Tom Homan keeps saying, just wait, just wait, we're just getting started. And I believe him.

47:34Rodger Werner:This is the first episode in our series on how immigration enforcement became political and profitable. Next week, how the U.S. southern border went from a line in the sand to a fence to a wall.

47:55Rodger Werner:And that's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah.

47:58Peter Markowitz:I'm Ramteen Arablui, and you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me and me and Sarah Wyman, Amber T.

48:09Rodger Werner:Casey Minor, Julie Kane, Lawrence Wu, Anya Steinberg, Christina Kim, Devin Kadiyama, Irene Noguchi.

48:18Peter Markowitz:Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vocal.

48:21Rodger Werner:This episode was mixed and mastered by Gilly Moon. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band Drop Electric, which includes...

48:33Rodger Werner:Thank you to Felicia Arriaga, Jasmine Garst, Stephen M. McMartin, Ida T. Silva, and Isabel Patricia Vasquez. Thanks also to Tony Cavan, Nadia Lancey, Johannes Dergi, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell.

48:51Peter Markowitz:And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on this show, please write us at throughlineatnpr.org. and make sure you follow us on Apple, Spotify, or the NPR app. That way, you'll never miss an episode.

49:05Rodger Werner:Thanks for listening.