In short
Inside Trump’s deportation system, using leaked flight data and reporting from Louisiana’s Alexandria airport staging facility, to show how ICE and contractors move detained people quickly and with limited due process, including family separation and mass deportations.
Guests and backgrounds
Manvi Singh, Guardian US immigration reporter who worked on the investigation using leaked data on deportation flights by Global Crossing Airlines; Oliver Loughlin, Guardian US Southern Bureau Chief based in Louisiana, who investigated the Alexandria airport site.
Key claims
ICE expanded powers and funding; deportation flights shuffle detainees between US cities before final removal; Alexandria functions as a secretive hub with limited visitation and lawyer access; the system is likened to “Amazon Prime but with human beings”; DHS and GEO Group deny inhumane conditions.
Notable examples
Badar Khan Suri, a Georgetown postdoc detained and held in Alexandria before transfer; Andri José Hernández Romero, a Venezuelan asylum seeker moved on a multi-stop Global X flight and expelled to El Salvador’s “Sikot” mega-prison; LW, a Chinese mother threatened with separation unless she returned to China; nearly 1,000 children on flights, including infants.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOA Visit to Alexandria Airport
0:22 to 1:57
The host describes a visit to Alexandria Airport and the unusual activities linked to ICE.
“So it was a searing hot day in the middle of summer.”
Unprecedented Powers Granted to ICE
1:57 to 2:59
Discussion on the powers given to ICE under Trump and the impact of these actions.
“unprecedented powers and funding to deport as many people as possible, as quickly as possible.”
The Data Leak Investigation
2:59 to 3:54
Manvi Singh shares insights on the investigation into deportation flights and the data received.
“How people get disappeared in Trump's America.”
The Movement of Immigrants
3:54 to 5:36
Insights into how ICE moves immigrants around the U.S. before deportation.
“And so what it was able to give us was this unprecedented detailed look at all the people transported on deportation flights by Global X over about a hundred day or three month period.”
The Role of Alexandria Airport
5:36 to 7:42
Discussion on why Alexandria Airport is a key location for ICE's operations.
“they were moved at times to locations very far from where they were arrested, far from where their families were, from where their communities and legal counsel were.”
Experiences of Detainees
7:42 to 8:31
Detailed accounts of the harsh conditions faced by detainees at Alexandria.
“It has the highest per capita rate of detention anywhere in the country.”
Case Study: Badar Khan Suri
8:31 to 10:33
Exploring the case of Badar Khan Suri, a student targeted for political reasons.
“And so that's why they will say to us, this is the epicentre of the black hole in Louisiana.”
Legal Challenges for Detainees
10:33 to 13:01
Discussion on the challenges faced by detainees in communicating with their lawyers.
“and then a separate area with more formal cell blocks.”
ICE's Response to Investigation Findings
13:01 to 14:00
Exploration of responses from ICE and the GEO Group regarding conditions in detention.
“So he was eventually able to return home.”
Inside ICE Detention Practices
14:00 to 22:00
Learn about the treatment of detainees and the movement of individuals within the ICE system.
“to both Department of Homeland Security and to the GEO Group, which is the private corrections firm that run Alexandria Staging Facility.”
Show all 15 chapters
Impact on Children in Immigration
22:00 to 22:44
Explore how children are affected by current immigration policies and deportation practices.
“They really tried to shirk that responsibility.”
Evolving Family Separation Policies
22:44 to 28:11
Understand the changes in family separation practices during different Trump administrations.
“Manvi, what do we know about how families are getting caught up in the whole ice machine?”
Consequences of Deportation: Family Separation and Desperation
28:11 to 29:59
Explore the emotional toll and desperation faced by families affected by deportation.
“When people are sent so far away, they don't even get to say goodbye to their children.”
Public Perception and Reactions to Deportation Policies
30:00 to 31:06
Understand how deportation policies are viewed by Americans and their impact on communities.
“I was elected to carry out the biggest deportation campaign in American history.”
Everyday Life Under Immigration Enforcement
31:07 to 32:56
Learn how daily life is transformed in communities experiencing heightened immigration enforcement.
“undocumented and will be personally afraid, but everyone else in the US?”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Maanvi Singh:This is The Guardian.
0:08Maanvi Singh:Today, inside Trump's deportation machine.
0:22Maanvi Singh:So it was a searing hot day in the middle of summer. and I went to this very small rural town of Alexandria, which is in the centre of Louisiana. Oliver Loughlin is The Guardian's US Southern Bureau Chief. He lives in Louisiana and knew that there was something unusual about Alexandria's airport. So I turned up at the airport and you have commercial flights up on the gates, as you would see in any normal airport, from Delta, from American Airlines, there's a baggage claim desk. but actually when you walk over to the left-hand side of the air park that's where you see there's a restricted access road there are all these unmarked jets sort of lining up on the tarmac.
1:04Maanvi Singh:Ollie needed to get a closer look. He and a photographer figured out that the only way to see what was happening on the runway was to go to the golf course next door. We went into the clubhouse, we hired a golf cart from them and we ended up landing at the 13th hole where we could see the panorama of what was going on there. It was over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. The tarmac was kind of shimmering in the humidity. And you just see these lines of people shackled at the feet and at their hands being loaded onto planes. And only a few hundred feet away are people obliviously getting on with their rounds of golf.
1:50Maanvi Singh:To me, it was this kind of extremely telling image of where America is at the moment right now. When Donald Trump returned to the White House in January, he gave ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, unprecedented powers and funding to deport as many people as possible, as quickly as possible. Hey, wait, that's not how you arrest me. Get on the ground. That's not how you arrest me. Get on the ground. Reports quickly emerged of people being snatched off the streets by masked ICE agents. Open the door. No, no, you can!
2:24Oliver Laughland:You can!
2:25Maanvi Singh:Why? This is illegal! This is illegal! Many seemed to simply disappear and were spirited out of the country before their lawyers or their loved ones had a chance to protest.
2:43Maanvi Singh:For months now, the Guardian US investigations team have been piecing together exactly what happens once they're lost inside the system. And the secret side of a Louisiana airport is only part of the story. From The Guardian, I'm Helen Pidd. Today in Focus. How people get disappeared in Trump's America.
3:10Maanvi Singh:Manvi Singh, you're an immigration reporter for Guardian US, and you've been working for quite a while now on this big investigation, which has given us a really fascinating look inside the workings of ICE. Can you just start by telling me when the investigation started?
3:25Oliver Laughland:This investigation started in May when the Guardian was leaked this trove of data. And what the data captured was all of the deportation flights conducted by Global Crossing Airlines. This is a charter airline that provides flight services to ICE, and they're the largest contractor that provides the service to ICE. And so what it was able to give us was this unprecedented detailed look at all the people transported on deportation flights by Global X over about a hundred day or three month period. We were able to see the journeys of 44 ,000 immigrants detained and or deported by the Trump administration, the ages of these people.
4:19Oliver Laughland:And something that really struck out to me initially was the fact that the majority of these flights are between U.S. cities. And so they really signaled the extent to which the government was moving detained immigrants between different cities within the U.S., basically shuffling them around prior to really putting them on a final flight to take them outside the country and potentially back to where they came from. And I should say that we reached out to Global Crossings, but they never responded. That seems crazy to me. Why would ICE be doing that? So ICE has always moved immigrants around the country in this way.
5:00Oliver Laughland:A lot of times during Joe Biden's administration, we saw a lot of people coming to the U.S. southern border and, you know, that region would get really crowded with people. And so they would move people from the border to detention centers or holding centers across the U.S. What we basically found is that these transfers seem to be increasing in frequency for a lot of people. They seem to be putting immigrants on these long, irregular, unprecedented journeys. they were moved at times to locations very far from where they were arrested, far from where their families were, from where their communities and legal counsel were.
5:48Oliver Laughland:A lot of times people said they weren't told where they were being sent or were given either wrong or very vague information. I spoke to lawyers who would spend hours and hours each week just searching for their clients. They might be somewhere in the system, but they weren't sure exactly where.
6:14Maanvi Singh:Oli, you discovered through this data leak that the facility at Alexandria Airport was pretty central to this incredible ramping up that we've seen over the past few months of people being swept off the streets, taken away in vans and deported without any kind of due process. Why Alexandria? What's unusual about it? So what makes it unique is the fact that it opens onto the tarmac of this airport, giving ICE a real ability to kind of move people into detention and then get them deported either very quickly or in a way that is done with a lot of secrecy, effectively. It's been labeled by GeoGroup, which is the private contractor that run the facility and by ICE as a short-term detention center, where people are only supposed to spend 72 hours maximum before they are effectively deported from the US.
7:00Maanvi Singh:And we figured out that over 20 ,000 migrant detainees had passed through the Alexandria airport on Global Excharters. And that was a rate of almost 200 a day. So immediately it stuck out as a really kind of central place that we kind of need to understand more about. And you live in Louisiana, don't you? You live in New Orleans. Yeah. Were you surprised at all to discover that ICE's main deportation hub was in the state that you call home? Unfortunately, it's not that surprising, just given what Louisiana's reputation is in the United States, which is that Louisiana has become the kind of epicentre of immigration detention in America.
7:41Maanvi Singh:It has nine private facilities. It has the highest per capita rate of detention anywhere in the country. And what really happened and accelerated actually during Trump's first term was a lot of former private prisons that were no longer being used were transferred into immigration detention centres. And the American Civil Liberties Union, which is the sort of premier civil rights litigation non-profit in the United States, has spent a lot of time examining what goes on in these detention facilities around Louisiana. And what they will continually tell me is this is a place where people are disappeared.
8:21Maanvi Singh:At Alexandria, where there is no visitation, and as we have come to discover, actually no real way of having a private conversation with your attorney. It's even worse. And so that's why they will say to us, this is the epicentre of the black hole in Louisiana. It was like around 1pm or 2pm when they took me from Richmond. And they packed some 14, 15 detainees with me in a van where people were sitting in the front seat with their knees in their stomach. There was no space and all of us were shackled, like wrists, ankles and waist, everything. But they didn't tell us where they were taking us.
9:00Maanvi Singh:And then all of a sudden we saw that we were at a runway. Then a plane was standing there. Even if we tried to ask where are we going, they won't tell anything. And then when I entered this plane, I saw like hundreds of men and women. Everyone was chained. Probably one of the most high-profile cases to emerge from Alexandria since Trump came in for his second term is the case of Badar Khan Suri, who was a postdoctoral student at Georgetown University and was one of those students who was targeted by the Trump administration for their political views over Palestine. I was feeling very bad about myself.
9:44Maanvi Singh:What have I done to be in this condition? What wrong have I done? And for sure I was thinking that they are deporting me. His case really showed this rapid intention to try and, how he would describe it, kidnap people off the streets and whisk them very far away from their family, their friends, their attorneys, and try and effectively kind of railroad them through the process. I reached in the evening to this Louisiana, knowing nothing, chained, in bad condition, hungry. And then we waited there for hours and then they started taking our name. And then they were removing shekels and then they were giving you a blanket and all and they were putting you in different cells.
10:28Maanvi Singh:From what we understand, there are four large dorm rooms that hold about 80 detainees. and then a separate area with more formal cell blocks. And then there is also a kind of bare bones waiting area lined with metal benches and shackles that basically open straight out onto the tarmac. There were like six phones. So I went there to see and then I read that you can have a free call of 20 seconds. I dialed my wife's number and I was able to hear her. She said, hello. And I could hear my kids talking and everything. I said, hey, I'm here in Louisiana and this and that. But she never responded to me.
11:13Maanvi Singh:She just kept on saying, hello. Seems someone is calling me. Hello. So then I went to the security officer of the dorm. How can I use the phone? I need to talk to my family. He said, those are the phone. Use the way everyone is using. I said, I cannot. It asks for some pin. I don't have that. He said, I can't help you. So I lived there with those phones for three days without an ID or nothing. And in fact, I realized I was able to use it again and again. There was no limit to it. I was able to hear my wife's voice, my children, background noises from my home, but they never responded. Sometimes I wouldn't be able to connect to them.
11:56Maanvi Singh:I would think what happened to them? Maybe someone has also taken them away. I was doing it every 15 minutes. I was calling. I was not able to understand what's happening. Why not they can give a pin where a person can call and tell their family that nobody killed me, I didn't disappear. I still exist. So he spent around three days in Alexandria. And unbeknownst to him, his case came to national attention because he was being targeted as political views. and a legal team kind of manifested around him who had to call directly to the ICE field office director in order to facilitate a very brief phone call with his client.
12:37Maanvi Singh:And that really, I think, sort of speaks to one of the major issues that we found about this detention facility, which is that it's very, very, very hard for lawyers to get hold of their clients. So he was then transferred to a longer-term detention facility in Texas and released in May. and he's still fighting his deportation case along with many of the other students who were targeted for their political views. But he's being allowed to do that outside of detention. So he was eventually able to return home. Is that typical? Bada's case is sort of exceptional in that sense because, you know, he's not an undocumented migrant and he didn't have a removal order.
13:14Maanvi Singh:So, you know, his lawyers suspect they were trying to basically deport him from Alexandria. They have no concrete proof that that's what was happening. But because there was legal intervention, it was blocked from happening. In other cases that I have seen, where people who are undocumented and are taken very quickly to Alexandria, they are often deported before their lawyers even know where they are. Alexandria has become, in many senses, this realisation of what the former acting head of ICE, Todd Lyons, has said, is this effort to try and turn the deportation machine into Amazon Prime, but with human beings.
13:52Maanvi Singh:to move people through the system as quickly as possible and get them out of the country as quickly as possible. So we did present all of the findings in our investigation to both Department of Homeland Security and to the GEO Group, which is the private corrections firm that run Alexandria Staging Facility. Nine of them responded to any of our specific questions, but a spokesperson from the Department of Homeland Security said, any claim that there are inhumane conditions at ICE detention centres are false. and she added ICE has higher detention standards than most US prisons that actually hold US citizens.
14:26Maanvi Singh:Again the GEO Group didn't respond to our specific questions but said in the statement they were quote proud of the role they had played for over 40 years to quote support the law enforcement mission of ICE. They said that all their support services are monitored by ICE and the Department of Homeland Security to ensure quote strict compliance with the agency standards and that when issues are identified, they are quickly resolved.
14:56Maanvi Singh:Manvi, this lack of process and keeping people deliberately, it seems, from their legal teams, it's not just happening in Alexandria, but across the whole country. Where does this leave lawyers trying to help their clients?
15:09Oliver Laughland:Yeah, so one of the people I spoke to was Lindsay Toksalowski, who leads IMDEF, which is a legal nonprofit based in Los Angeles.
15:19Maanvi Singh:It's been a longstanding practice of ICE to move people without notice. It's just never happened on the scale that it's happening right now. For an organization like ours that, you know, we're based in Southern California, the sheer numbers of clients that we're seeing be detained here, be taken from community here. and sent all over the country is just unprecedented during the entirety of my practice.
15:45Oliver Laughland:One of her clients is Andri José Hernández Romero. He is a queer makeup artist. He had initially left Venezuela because he said he faced discrimination based on his sexuality and other factors.
16:03Maanvi Singh:He was someone who we represented in Otay Mesa, San Diego, which is a ICE detention center.
16:12Oliver Laughland:He had been held at this detention center basically since arriving in the U.S., right? And he was awaiting a hearing to decide his asylum case. And he had actually passed an initial screening wherein officials had determined that, yeah, he might have a valid case for asylum in the U.S.
16:35Oliver Laughland:And then one day he was woken up at the crack of dawn and an official said, okay, you're being moved, get ready. And he asks, okay, well, where am I going? Where am I going? And he's not able to get any specifics. The official just says, you're being sent to a better place.
16:56Maanvi Singh:We're calling the detention center. We're trying to speak with him. We're trying to get in contact with his family to see if they had heard anything. We were kept completely in the dark.
17:06Oliver Laughland:So then he was sort of shuffled onto this Global X plane. And he didn't really know where this plane was even going.
17:15Maanvi Singh:We were in Washington, we were in Vegas, and we ended up in Texas.
17:20Oliver Laughland:We looked through the records and we saw that the flight had stopped in Phoenix, Arizona, in Las Vegas, Nevada, in Seattle, Washington, and finally in Harlingen, Texas.
17:37Oliver Laughland:And he said that this flight was almost like a school bus. At each stop, they were picking up more people. A lot of them were also Venezuelan men like him.
17:46Maanvi Singh:After he was moved, the government filed evidence in his asylum case alleging that he was a member of Tren de Aragua.
17:55Oliver Laughland:Which is a multinational Venezuelan gang. You know, Donald Trump had really ramped up his rhetoric, accusing a lot of immigrants from Venezuela of gang membership. He had said that Tren de Aragua, this gang, was a terrorist group, and he had vowed to really do something to deal with these men.
Read the full transcript
18:18Maanvi Singh:We had been hearing rumors about the Alien Enemies Act being invoked, and at this point, you know, we were concerned, but, you know, didn't know what was going to happen. It wasn't until our team showed up in San Diego to go to a support hearing, and he wasn't brought to court. The judge said, you know, where is Andre? Where is the respondent? And the ICE attorney said, well, he has been removed to El Salvador. And the judge said, how could he be removed if there's no removal order?
18:54Oliver Laughland:And the ICE attorney basically said, you know, I'm not sure, Your Honor, I'll have to get back to you. He was one of more than 250 Venezuelan men that the U.S. had expelled to El Salvador's most notorious mega prison called Sikot that was designed to hold gang members. And in Andre's case, and also in the case of several other men I spoke to, they didn't really realize they were being sent to El Salvador, let alone a prison there, until they landed in that country.
19:33Oliver Laughland:He and several of the other men I spoke to, they remember as soon as they arrived, a guard told them, welcome to help.
19:46Oliver Laughland:You know, we've all seen these images where their heads were shaved. They were changed into these all white outfits and shackled and kind of frog marched into this prison. And then once they were there, they were confined to the cell where they had to just kind of sleep on hard cots. They were barely given enough food for the day. Many of them lost a lot of weight. If they got sick, there was basically no real medical attention. And sometimes guards would punish them just for asking for help. Guards regularly beat them. Men were sexually harassed or violated. A lot of them really described it as torture.
20:34Maanvi Singh:Yeah, the God was right when he said, welcome to hell. It does sound absolutely hellish.
20:39Oliver Laughland:Yeah, and they weren't told when they would get to leave. They weren't able to talk to their family, to their lawyers. They had no access to the outside world whatsoever. ever.
20:55A lot of them also told me, you know, the only activity or intellectual mental stimulation
21:02Oliver Laughland:they had access to was like a copy of the Bible. And a lot of them told me that they would read the book of Job, which was really a story about this man who is put through all these trials by God and really has to endure. And that was like, a lot of men separately told me that this is the thing that they would keep going back to because that's what it felt like, that they were just being put through these trials and they had no idea when or how or if they would ever get to leave.
21:45Maanvi Singh:Where is he now? Is he still in El Salvador?
21:48Oliver Laughland:No. So after the U.S. government repeatedly said that once these men had been sent to El Salvador, there's no way we can get these men out. They're just here. It's under El Salvador's control. They really tried to shirk that responsibility. There were many lawsuits to try to get these men out. Finally, one day, they got to leave. They were put on a plane to Venezuela. They landed in, I think, Caracas, and then they were able to return home.
22:22Maanvi Singh:Coming up, the children being swept up in Trump's immigration crackdown.
22:44Maanvi Singh:Manvi, what do we know about how families are getting caught up in the whole ice machine?
22:49Oliver Laughland:Yeah, we found that there were nearly a thousand children on these flights, including about 500 children under the age of 10, 22 who were infants. You know, this is normal. The US does deport children.
23:05Maanvi Singh:And how is it different from what was happening during Trump's first administration? Because I think many of us remember that was those really shocking images of children crying kind of in cages. What's changed between Trump 1 and Trump 2?
23:21Oliver Laughland:So during the first Trump administration, the government adopted what it called a zero tolerance policy at the U.S. southern border. And we saw thousands of immigrants appearing at the border, many of them with children coming to seek asylum in the US. And the Trump administration made it a policy to separate children from their parents or guardians at the border. And that was a scheme that really drew a lot of public outcry, a lot of global outcry. Because we saw these images of, you know, bawling children, like rested away from their parents, put into cages. It really, really angered the public.
24:06Oliver Laughland:Eventually, the Trump administration stopped this practice and shifted this practice, but it never really kept good records of what it was doing with these families. And so even years after the practice changed, the government was not able to reunite some of these families. And what have you learned about how it's being run with
24:27Maanvi Singh:children and families this time around? Yeah.
24:30Oliver Laughland:So what we found is this time around, there is this new sort of family separation policy. And in some ways it's more subtle than the first time around. I reviewed several cases where parents seeking asylum were threatened by the government or by officials, immigration officials, with separation if they didn't agree to get back on a flight to their home country. One of the cases I mentioned in our reporting is the case of LW. She is a Chinese national who came to the U.S. with her son, who is 10 years old, and she turned herself in, asked for asylum, and officials said, you got to get back on a plane to China.
25:22Oliver Laughland:She said, no, I fear that both me and my son would be in a lot of danger if we did that, if we returned to China. We were being prosecuted. We can't go back. And the officials threatened her. They threatened that her son would be taken away from her if she didn't comply. She refused to get back on a plane to China. At one point, she describes that officials just put her and her son into this unmarked car and she realized she was being driven to the airport. and she said no I can't go in there I can't go in there you know she's not very strong in English she's trying to explain to them to the best of her ability that she can't go there that that she and her son would be in grave danger so officials grab her by both arms and try to drag her towards the terminals and she says she drops to her knee she puts all her body weight down so that they're not able to drag her she's emotional her son is crying you know finally they take her back to the detention center where they were being held.
26:26Oliver Laughland:She and her son are initially detained together at what's called a family detention center in Texas. This is where parents are detained with their immigrant children. And eventually they take her son away. They do exactly what they threatened. And he was put under the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
26:53Maanvi Singh:It sounds a bit like you're describing a system of cruelty by design. Is that the point? Is it deliberately cruel?
27:04Oliver Laughland:You know, of course, the administration has denied that they are being intentionally cruel in this way. But of course, in the same breath, they're saying that undocumented people shouldn't be here and that they should accept self-deportation. A spokesperson for the DHS said that parents who are in the U.S. illegally can take control of their departure and use an app that the government has designed to self-deport. The DHS has also said that rather than separate families, ICE gives people a choice and the agency asks parents if they want to be removed with their children or if the child should be placed with someone safe that the parent designates.
27:50Oliver Laughland:Of course, that isn't always the case, according to what immigrants and their attorneys have told The Guardian.
27:58Maanvi Singh:I think that they are being purposely cruel to people in order to get them to give up their due process rights and to give up on any hopes that they can remain in the United States. When people are sent so far away, they don't even get to say goodbye to their children. They're sent to a place with horrible conditions. They aren't able to have anyone visit them. And they're only able to talk to a lawyer through a phone if they have a lawyer at all. you would be so desperate that it's much easier for then a nice officer to come in and say hey listen I can get you on a plane to your home country today as long as you sign this paper saying that you give up your right to fight your case and they're doing that without having any understanding of the particulars of why somebody might be here what they might have fled who they might be married to what their ties might be to the United States.
28:59Maanvi Singh:Is it working as a deterrent in terms of stopping people trying to enter the country in the first place?
29:04Oliver Laughland:You know, that's kind of a complicated question. The U.S. southern border has been very, very quiet. That's in part because it's increasingly militarized, in part because for months the Trump administration had made it pretty impossible to even apply for asylum at the border. So we're definitely not seeing these large numbers of people coming to the U.S. border. But I think this other aspect of it is, you know, they're targeting people who've been in the country for a while. And I definitely have spoken to individual people or reviewed individual cases where this prospect of being separated from their child or their loved ones for months and months on end was too much for them.
29:47Oliver Laughland:And they decided to accept deportation if it meant that they could at least be reunited with their families.
29:54Maanvi Singh:I mean, who knows what Trump is thinking or is going to say at any given moment. But I imagine if he were listening to this, he would say, I was elected to do this. I was elected to carry out the biggest deportation campaign in American history. And people voted for me on that basis. But obviously, it has been extremely contentious. And there have been a number of shootings at ICE facilities, even right this week. But if you take it as a whole, this deportation program, how do you think it's playing with Americans?
30:24Oliver Laughland:Yeah, I mean, if you look at polling, it's not especially popular. I think vaguely during that election, a lot of people did say that immigration was an issue for them. But I don't know that they necessarily thought about how these deportations would happen. But, you know, it's outside of people's, like, doors, right? In so many cities as well as towns, there are these really big raids happening. at people's workplaces, in people's communities. And so I think it's really difficult to not see it. Even if you're not particularly paying attention to the news, it's happening right in front of you.
31:05Maanvi Singh:And what do you think this is doing to communities, not just people who are undocumented and will be personally afraid, but everyone else in the US?
31:13Oliver Laughland:I think it's honestly really changed the fabric of certain communities. You know, I live in the Bay Area in California. The Guardian's West Coast office is based in Los Angeles. These are cities that are really made up of immigrant communities. And, you know, in many ways, people are still going on with their lives because they have to at some point. They have to go to work. They have to send their kids to school because what else are you going to do? But all these little things are changing. People are carrying their documents with them at all times. They're creating like safety plans with their children and with their loved ones to check in with each other.
31:50Oliver Laughland:You know, like restaurants are empty, shopping centers and flea markets are empty. It just, it's like sort of normal because it has to be normal, right? Like at some point, you just have to keep living and do the best you can. But there is something I think that changes in a community when you have this level of immigration enforcement, when you have officers in the streets all the time. Actually, one of the times I went to meet up with Lindsay from the Immigration Defenders Law Center in LA, and basically like right outside her window, there was this man on a bicycle. And suddenly a bunch of agents came out of this white van.
32:36Oliver Laughland:and like he was just riding his bike in the bike lane and they stopped him and handcuffed him and put him in the van. And it was just like, it was so jarring to see. Like it's just everywhere. It's just a sort of daily feature of life in some places. And so I think that is what feels different.
32:56Maanvi Singh:Manvi, thank you.
32:57Oliver Laughland:Thanks so much for having me.
33:00Maanvi Singh:And that's all for today. Thank you so much to Manvi Singh and to Oliver Lachlan, as well as everyone who spoke to them as part of this investigation. And if you appreciated this episode, perhaps you'd consider leaving us a review or even becoming a supporter of The Guardian. Investigations like this take time and money and care, and they're only possible with the support of readers and listeners just like you. If you want to find out more, go to theguardian.com forward slash todayinfocuspod. This episode was produced by Eli Block and presented by me, Helen Pidd. Sound design was by Ross Burns and the executive producer was Sammy Kent.
33:37Maanvi Singh:We'll be back on Monday.
33:51Maanvi Singh:This is The Guardian.
