THERE IS LITTLE DOUBT THAT AI will play a profound role in the coming elections. And it won’t be visible just in revolts over data centers, or questions about state ownership, or arguments over regulation. It will be seen in the way AI systems provide basic facts to voters, too.

Perhaps the clearest illustration of that today comes on immigration, a topic where emotions run hot over basic word choice. An AI chatbot’s response to simple questions can vary in significant ways, in the process changing how voters might perceive core issues at the heart of the debate.

The other day, I asked the four most popular AI chatbots a question that someone just engaging in politics might ponder: “In one sentence, tell me whether immigration is a threat to the United States.”

Here are the results:

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AT EVERY TURN SINCE DONALD TRUMP regained office, Delaney Hall, the detention center in Newark, New Jersey, has been central in the struggle against the administration’s cruel approach to immigration enforcement.

Democratic lawmakers have been arrested and physically harassed at the site. Detainees there have launched a hunger strike to draw attention to what they describe as its deplorable conditions. And as the protests have grown more regular, so too have the violent efforts by federal agents to quash them. The facility, situated in an industrial strip a stone’s throw from Newark Bay, is a composite of all that emerges from Trump’s punishing mass-deportation system.

But why Delaney Hall? What is it about that place that has made it the center of these clashes in Trump 2.0?

Part of it is that New Jersey lawmakers have proven keen to directly confront the administration.

Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.) is one of them. He showed up at Delaney in late May to monitor a hunger and labor strike launched in response to “disease, overflowing toilets, poor ventilation, and worm-riddled food.” While on site on Memorial Day, he attempted to de-escalate a confrontation between protesters and ICE agents and got pepper-sprayed for his troubles.

Kim, who has since said that that week was one of the most difficult of his life, says violence felt almost inevitable that day. He said he hasn’t seen New Jersey so close to the edge at any point in his time in office. The problems, he added in an interview with me, start with the facility itself.

Delaney Hall is run by the GEO Group. The private prison giant was last year awarded a $1 billion contract lasting fifteen years that quadrupled detention center space in New Jersey. The Delaney Hall compound is so shoddily constructed that four detainees broke out last June.

“First, the facility needs to be shut down. It’s not up to any type of standard,” Kim told me. “When there was this breakout of four detainees last year, I actually went to figure out what happened. GEO Group refused to let me in at first. Someone that worked there told me the exterior wall of that cell was just made of mesh and drywall.”

“It’s an exceedingly old building, not up to standards, which is causing so many of the problems and poor conditions—like the extreme heat detainees are complaining about now,” Kim said of the facility. Built a quarter-century ago, Delaney was used for much of the last decade as a halfway house; it reopened last year as a GEO-run immigrant-detention facility.

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The facility’s location is another reason it has become so central to the story of Trump’s immigration horrors. New Jersey is a “warehouse” state, as Nedia Morsy, director of Make the Road New Jersey, which is part of the ICE Out of New Jersey coalition, noted. Which means there are ample targets for an administration looking to ramp up workplace enforcement. On top of that, Delaney Hall is close to both a major airport and the second-largest port in the country—each critical pinchpoints for ICE operations. Morsy, whose group has protested Delaney Hall and advocated for immigrant rights, described it as the ideal place for the administration “to pilot and launch the deportation matrix.”

“What we’re seeing is a symptom of the infrastructure the fascist regime has laid out in New Jersey,” she added.

In fact, the first workplace raid of Trump’s second administration occurred in Newark. The Ocean Seafood Depot was raided in January 2025, within seventy-two hours of Trump returning to office. At the time, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka described the “indignity” experienced by a Puerto Rican veteran whose military credentials were questioned after he was swept up in the raid. Four months later, Baraka, who has long sought to close Delaney Hall, was himself arrested outside it.

In Trump world, though, we cannot overlook the political component when explaining why Delaney has become Ground Zero for Trump’s deportation efforts.

Flush with confidence from Trump’s victory in 2024 and his overperformance in the traditionally blue state, MAGA allies began viewing New Jersey as a swing state. Trump installed his personal lawyer, Alina Habba, as an acting U.S. attorney in New Jersey. And she quickly looked to make a splash. Confrontations with Democratic lawmakers were a simple way to impress MAGA zealots and further press Republicans’ “advantage” on immigration. Delaney Hall was the staging ground.

It didn’t hurt matters that the site sits not too far away from New York City. The Trump administration got the major media market publicity it craved without the risk of a swell of protesters fighting back.

“There was in late 2024 and early 2025 a push by Republicans saying New Jersey is a swing state and gains have been made, and Habba had been stoking that, talking in political terms about turning New Jersey into a red state,” Kim told me. “Early on this just became a real proving ground for Alina Habba’s ambitions and her efforts to perform for President Trump.”1

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‘The who is the most important part of the story’

It’s worth recalling that in those early days, when Habba was ascendant and dreams of a red New Jersey didn’t seem so far-fetched, many Democrats thought they were powerless to stop the cruelty the president was imposing on undocumented immigrants. But not all Democrats. Some, like Rep. Joaquin Castro down in the Dilley facility in Texas, chose a path of greater resistance.

In New Jersey, one of those Democrats has been Rep. Rob Menendez, whose district includes the seafood depot raided in January 2025. When federal agents pushed around Rep. LaMonica McIver at Delaney and then blamed her for inciting violence, Menendez was there, shielding her.

Menendez has placed a high priority on uncovering the true story of Delaney. He has conducted oversight visits at the facility fifteen times, and, along with other New Jersey Democrats, is demanding accountability for systemic and life-threatening medical neglect there. I asked how many people Menendez has helped, both at Delaney Hall and including family members and people detained elsewhere and his office responded with pretty shocking numbers.2

Menendez told me that, while Newark hasn’t seen the paramilitary response from the administration that cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis have endured, Delaney Hall illustrates the vision “Stephen Miller and others had” around mass deportation. It also, he added, shows what happens when people push back against that vision—“how it’s been falling apart and how you’ve seen a huge erosion of support for the president’s immigration policies.”

Trump sold the American people on going after criminals—not ordinary immigrants. So, as bad as the conditions in the detention center are, Menendez says, “the who is the most important part of the story.”

Menendez described to me the cast of humanity he has seen behind the doors of Delaney Hall:

• Pregnant women—whose presence in the detention facility was, until recently, denied.

• Immigrants with Alien Registration Numbers who believe they have been wrongly detained.

• Medically vulnerable people—like Emanuel Rodrigues, 38, who requires crutches or a wheelchair and was deprived of both for forty days, then moved to medical isolation for four months.

• People who have protected status—like Adriana Quiroz Zapata, who, because of the horrors inflicted upon her by her ex-boyfriend and his police buddies in Colombia, should have been protected by the Convention Against Torture yet was shipped to the Democratic Republic of Congo instead.

“I talk to parents: mothers who got their kids ready for school and left their house to go do a routine ICE check-in and never came home to their children,” Menendez told me. “And only by the grace of God and my grandparents being from Cuba instead of Guatemala or Honduras, I get to go back to my kids after visiting Delaney Hall.”

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DELANEY HALL IS THE MOST VISIBLE manifestation of the administration’s cruelty in New Jersey, but it’s not the only one. There are other people detained nearby in the state.

Margarita and Filemon Ruiz are grandparents. They own 3 Hermanos Mexican Restaurant in Rockaway, New Jersey. It’s a 45-minute drive from Delaney Hall. Margarita has diabetes, while Filemon recently had back surgery.

I spoke to their son Osmar. He was told his parents are being held at the Elizabeth Contract Detention Facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey. He hasn’t heard anything about how they’re coping. But Osmar couldn’t talk long. With his parents gone, he was taking the restaurant’s orders. There was, as before, work to be done.

Rep. Menendez, in our talk, emphasized that these stories matter just as much as those from Delaney.

But he also acknowledged that the people inside Delaney were special to him—not because they had experienced dispiriting cruelty but because of how they had risen above it.

“The place is meant to break people,” Menendez said. “The place is meant to take humanity away from our communities, strip it all away. But to see them create something there to hold on to, to keep faith and keep hope, you have to do everything you can, and it’s powerful to see.”

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THE DIVIDING LINES in the 2028 Democratic presidential primary are coming into focus. And they’re running right through the issue of immigration.

Ro Khanna, the ubiquitous California congressman with one eye ever on the White House, put his fellow Democrats on blast this week, saying anyone who supported the Laken Riley Act—one of the first major laws passed during the second Trump administration—should be disqualified from becoming the party’s next standard-bearer.

“Nine swing-state Democrats gave permission for mass deportation,” Khanna told me. “No one who voted for the Laken Riley Act should have any role in the future leadership of the Democratic party in this country. . . . It’s disqualifying, just like the Iraq War vote.”

His remarks offer an early preview of the fraught and complex immigration debates yet to come among Democrats who aspire to the presidency. While the party is fairly united in opposition to Trump’s use of ICE and his pursuit of mass deportations, there remain sharp disagreements over how much they should lean into aggressive interior enforcement policies and tough talk on border security. The Laken Riley Act, in particular, has potential to become a major point of friction.

The bill, which was signed into law in January 2025, grants law enforcement a wide berth to detain immigrants arrested for low-level crimes like shoplifting, whether or not they are ultimately convicted of the offense. When it was considered by lawmakers, Democrats were still reeling from the 2024 elections, during which the party had been tagged as insufficiently responsive to voters’ worries about illegal immigration. Twelve Democratic senators voted for it. Nine are from swing states: Sens. John Fetterman, Ruben Gallego, Mark Kelly, Catherine Cortez Masto, Jacky Rosen, Jon Ossoff, Raphael Warnock, Gary Peters, and Elissa Slotkin.

Of those, Gallego, Kelly, Ossoff, and Warnock are often discussed as—or are seemingly positioning themselves to be—potential candidates for president in 2028. Khanna, who is heading to South Carolina (a critical early primary state) this weekend, criticized those senators for “political opportunism” in voting for the bill.

“If you didn’t have the guts to stand up to Donald Trump then, why will you have guts as leader of this party?” he said.

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Khanna, whose mix of progressive views and technocratic capitalism idiosyncratically bridge the left and centrist wings of his party, and who vaulted to national attention over the last year because of his work exposing the Epstein documents, made these comments during a wide-ranging interview on immigration. The topic is already testing the party in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. As I’ve written before, simply saying “Trump is bad” and “mass deportation is terrible” can only take Democrats so far. Voters disgusted with Trump still need to be persuaded by Democrats that they will not just do a better job on immigration, but bring forward a strategy that includes everything from revamping our asylum system to modernizing our borders to, yes, establishing pathways to legalization and citizenship.

The officials who are going to have the most influence in filling in those blanks are the ones most likely to run for president. And Khanna himself has made no secret of his interest in that office. The congressman has said he believes he has the right economic vision for the country. In our interview, he cast Trump as a vestige of the past, someone whose ideas about how to build wealth are locked in a 1980s frame (including the focus on acquiring land). Khanna argued that what the country really needed was someone who knows how to position the economy for the twenty-first century. And as a congressman representing Silicon Valley, he might just fit the bill.

“I want the economic future in my district for every American,” he told me. “That success—I get it, as the son of immigrants. We have that roadmap, and I want the Democratic party to be that party, and I have a clear sense of where I want to lead.”

Khanna said immigration reform and economic growth go hand-in-hand, noting that immigrants helped found a significant proportion—he puts the figure at 40 percent—of venture capital–backed tech companies that went public, including Yahoo, Intel, eBay, and Google. Khanna, to be clear, has not announced a candidacy for the White House. But apparently envisioning what he would do as president, he told me he would prioritize legalization for immigrants who have weathered a brutal assault from the Trump administration. He even offered that he would do so during the first six months of his hypothetical administration.

“You have to have a real path to legalization and citizenship,” Khanna said, “but we won’t stand for another Democratic president promising the moon and not getting legalization done.” He argued the first thing immigrants are interested in securing is not the right to vote, but the ability to live and work here without fear of getting dragged out of their car by masked police and thrown in detention.

“In the first six months, we would get the immigrant community out of the shadows,” Khanna said.

While some Democrats have recoiled at the immigration rhetoric the party adopted during the Joe Biden era, Khanna seemed comfortable embracing some of it. He called to “abolish ICE—first of all—tear it down,” saying the agency had vastly outgrown the purpose of its post-9/11 creation, which was meant to coordinate immigration issues with national intelligence around terrorism threats. Instead, Khanna called for the dynamic that existed under the previous Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), where it served as the lead enforcement agency, operating under the Department of Justice, as it had for six decades before its abolition.

I asked Khanna if he believed Trump has done anything right on immigration. He said the president was right to say we need a secure border. But he didn’t frame it as a matter of national security so much as economic exploitation. Without border protections, Khanna said, big corporations are able to exploit undocumented immigrants for lower wages, which in turn undermines unionization efforts.

Some of the country’s biggest corporations have roots in Khanna’s district. I asked him if he had any exhortations to offer tech leaders like Mark Zuckerberg, who quickly abandoned their past pro-immigrant positions once Trump returned to power, or others like Peter Thiel, whose company Palantir helped build tools to make immigration enforcement easier and more precise.

“Have some courage,” Khanna said. It was a statement directed at several CEOs he knows, like Google’s Sundar Pichai and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, who themselves had to navigate the immigration system before their stratospheric success. “You had no trouble telling Biden what he was doing wrong, but you’re seated with Trump and can’t say ‘Hey, Mr. President I was on an H-1B visa.’ Tim Cook is giving [Trump] gifts but has no guts to say [that he doesn’t] agree on his assault on immigrants in the country, which has quietly impacted [his] company. None of you were quiet with Biden on crypto and regulations, but [you] have sat, muted, with a total lack of courage with Donald Trump.”

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Palantir and the True Cost of Mass Deportation

Standing in front of a lectern that said “ICE KILLS, PALANTIR PROFITS” at a press event in February, Khanna became the first Bay Area Democrat to agree to return contributions from the Thiel-founded company. He also pledged that he would accept no future contributions from its employees, either. Palantir secured a $30 million ICE contract to build an “Immigration Lifecycle Operating System,” or “ImmigrationOS,” to enable the agency to track self-deportations almost as they happen. The company also enjoys a $1 billion purchasing agreement to provide future services with the Department of Homeland Security.

But Khanna’s not entirely clean here, either. He filed a stock transaction disclosure in January that showed his wife bought up to $125,000 in Palantir stock last year. According to NOTUS, her transactions include a $50,000 stock purchase on April 22, days after the news broke about ICE’s contract with Palantir for “ImmigrationOS.”

Khanna told me his wife has a trust that his in-laws set up prior to marriage that he has no say over. “Neither of us trade, .001% of it has some transactions with Palantir. It’s like looking at a mutual fund and picking one stock, but I have zero say in it.”

Khanna wasn’t combative when I pressed him on the stock transactions, but he did slow down the interview to more clearly explain his position. He then requested that it be properly explained to readers, cognizant that the situation could be used to come up with “attack lines,” as he said. The moment opened a small window into the other ways immigration policy—and how the Trump administration has conducted it—will shape Democratic politics in the years ahead.

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The more immediate matter, though, is the mass deportation machine that keeps humming along, even as Republicans, wary of its unpopularity, insist it no longer exists.

It’s still visible in the actions of the White House, as when earlier this month Trump issued an executive order leaning on banks to look into the immigration status of customers, or as Markwayne Mullin, the newly minted DHS chief, floats the idea of canceling international flights into sanctuary cities. And it’s evident in local communities, too, as in the case of Wendy Hernandez Reyes—an Alabama woman who was deported from Louisiana, where she was detained, to Honduras without her toddler, who was then killed by a violent uncle. ICE actually blamed her for her tiny child’s murder.

Khanna recently spoke up at a hearing about the Reyes case. And he mentioned it to me, as well, arguing that Trump’s cruel mass deportation policies undermined a central American project, Frederick Douglass’s Reconstruction-era vision of a “composite nation” built on absolute equality.

“It undermines the principle of America as an immigrant nation, as a nation where anyone can come from any background, education level, and help contribute to our culture, help build a life for themselves,” Khanna said. “People are being deported without any respect for their dignity, for their rights, deported even though they’re paying taxes, and are peaceful neighbors.”

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THE NEW HEAD of Immigration and Customs Enforcement will be David Venturella, a former executive of the GEO Group, which I think of as the Coca-Cola of immigrant detention—the ubiquitous, hugely profitable, default option wherever you go. (That would make CoreCivic, America’s second-largest provider, the Pepsi of private prisons.)

Trump’s appointment of a veteran of the prison-industrial complex is a shocking display of how intertwined private industry and government bureaucracy have become over the last sixteen months. It also shines a light on the state of the Department of Homeland Security and hints at the authority (or lack thereof) of its new leader, Markwayne Mullin.

But first, let’s chat about Venturella.

This isn’t one of those things where, as part of a long career, Venturella held an executive post a dozen years ago.

No. From 2012 to 2023, Venturella was a senior vice president of a company that holds $1 billion in ICE contracts. According to the SEC, even after retiring from the GEO Group, Venturella continued to advise on new and existing contracts, serving as a paid consultant until January 2025. What ever could have happened in January 2025 that led Venturella to give up this gig?

And, how unusual is this?

Well, ethics rules bar federal employees from working on contracts awarded to their former employers. But the Washington Post reports the Trump administration conveniently granted Venturella a waiver. Within two weeks of leaving his consulting role at GEO Group, Venturella joined ICE as a senior adviser. At the time, ICE reassured the press that Venturella would have “no role in reviewing, approving, or recommending contracts.” If that state of affairs was ever true, it’s over now.

Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.), a staunch critic of ICE and of Mullin’s predecessor, Kristi Noem, said that only a few years ago it would have been “unimaginable” for a former private prison executive to oversee the awarding of contracts to his former employer.

“Private detention centers that contract with ICE will now run ICE. That’s probably the easiest way to explain it,” Ramirez told me. “This administration is trying to push and push and push and see how far they can go. And what they’ve proven is they can go pretty damn far. You’re talking about a private prison company profiting off of the pain of immigrants now having their employee be the new head of ICE.”

Ramirez added that Venturella’s appointment tells Donald Trump’s campaign and inauguration donors—like GEO Group and CoreCivic—they have the green light to maximize their profits, minimize expenses, and worsen conditions at detention centers because, at the end of the day, their people are now calling the shots on contracts.

Readers who have seen the vast corruption of the Trump administration may resign themselves to thinking this is all unsurprising. After all, elections have consequences. The New York Times reported Venturella favors quieter immigration enforcement than the carnival of horrors Noem, Corey Lewandowski, and little angry Greg Bovino brought to town. But here’s one story about him worth telling.

Last summer, Paolo Zampolli, a former modeling agent and longtime Trump friend (who actually introduced him to Melania), needed a favor. In order to win custody of his son, Zampolli wanted his Brazilian ex-girlfriend, in jail for fraud charges, to be deported. No biggie. Zampolli reached out to the Trump administration, and an ICE official scrambled to get it done. The official called the Miami ICE field office telling them it was important to someone close to Trump.

That ICE official serving as Trump’s hatchet man that day was David Venturella.

Homan Up, Mullin Down

A private-prison insider taking over ICE is further evidence that in the second, more brutal, Trump administration, the mass detention and deportation machine will continue to hum.

Still, it’s worth taking a step back to see where the agency finds itself now. With Noem, Lewandowski, and Bovino out, Border Patrol agents are no longer making headlines for spraying constitutional observers and protesters with chemical agents. The steady stream of corruption allegations that dogged the agency under Noem has slowed—for now.

“Dozens of civilians I still talk to—they’re thankful that the Kristi Noem, Chief Bovino, Corey Lewandowski vein of activity is going to be investigated and reviewed because of how harmful it was to carrying out the mission,” said Jason Houser, who served in the Biden administration as chief of staff at ICE.

Following the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, DHS had already drawn back from its indiscipline and violence amid invasions of (blue) American cities—before Markwayne Mullin’s installation as DHS chief. During his confirmation hearing, Mullin laid out the new goal: Get ICE out of the headlines.

“My goal in six months is that we’re not in the lead story every single day,” he said. “My goal is for people to understand we’re out there, we’re protecting them, and we’re working with them.”

He sang a similar tune on Fox Business last week. “We’re not going into New York like another Minneapolis,” he said. “We’re going to go after the felons.”

That approach, while jibing with Republican leaders’ strategy of quietening down about “mass deportations” because of the policy’s abysmal poll numbers, runs afoul of Trump’s feverish base that wants millions of deportations, skulls cracked—U.S. citizen, visa holder, or not—and legal immigration severely cut (with certain exceptions, of course).

But while Mullin is in the hot seat, it is in fact Tom Homan, the border czar known for Cava lunches and cartoon bags of cash, who has been empowered in the post-Noem era. To those alleging that President Trump is getting weak on mass deportation, Homan bellowed: “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

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In conversations I had with former DHS officials who served in both the Biden and Trump administrations and remain in contact with their old colleagues, it became clear that employees who believe in secure borders and interior enforcement are worried about how that mission squares with election-year politics.

“There is nervousness about the fact Congress is giving them hundreds of millions to carry out a mission that is now being pulled back a bit, of mass arrests and mass detentions,” Houser told me, echoing others I spoke to.

One thing Mullin had taken a keen interest in, though, was the appointment of the new head of ICE.

Instead of Venturella, Mullin had “weighed in pretty heavily” in favor of a different candidate, a former DHS official told me. Mullin particularly liked Vic Regalado, the controversial sheriff of Tulsa County, Oklahoma. Regalado had no experience in federal immigration enforcement, but he has posed for pictures with Eric Trump and cast doubt on the 2020 election results. He also spoke at a “Health and Freedom Conference” at Rhema Bible College in Oklahoma, which, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, ended with a ritual mask-burning ceremony. Because of course it did.

The Daily Beast’s PunchUp Substack also called Regalado “Mullin’s favorite.” But while the Daily Mail wrote last week that others had “big dogs” in the fight, Mullin had only a “chihuahua.”

Homan liked Venturella.

Peter Mina, a civil rights lawyer who spent a career working at DHS and ICE including a stint in the second Trump administration, said Regalado would have been a “ridiculous” pick and a “lightning rod.”

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Let’s unpack this. Mullin wanted someone from outside DHS and outside ICE. It seems likely he also wanted someone from his home state—which he represented in the Senate before becoming secretary of homeland security—to be his guy at the department’s most prominent agency. Regalado fit those criteria, and he had some additional political advantages: As a Latino, he could have helped the administration defend against charges that ICE engages in racially discriminatory practices. As a wackjob, he would have driven the president’s critics nuts—which in this administration counts as a policy win. But his lack of experience would have ultimately made his appointment inadvisable. The last thing the administration needs right now is inexperience at DHS causing more bad news stories. (Well, maybe second only to revelations of more connections between Trump and Jeffrey Epstein.)

Maybe Homan and the powers that back him—especially Stephen Miller—still had fresh memories of a different DHS head with too much power causing them problems with her lack of experience and poor decision-making. So the first time Mullin wanted to put his stamp on the agency, they overruled him.

But as it is with the Trump administration, one near terrible pick gives way to an insidious one. As Rep. Ramirez told me, people should be outraged.

“The intentionality is to normalize the corruption and therefore normalize the pain,” she continued. “The idea you would have the very same people that are getting maximum contracts now controlling the contracting process—if that is not just the ultimate level of corruption, I don’t know what is.”

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AMERICANS MAY BE REJECTING the execution of Trump’s mass deportation program, but if Democratic candidates want to have a shot at sustained electoral and governing success, they will need to offer a new path forward on immigration. A top advocacy organization has released a report exclusively to The Bulwark it hopes will mark the first steps towards restoring badly damaged public trust in the rule of law and returning credibility and humanity to a broken immigration system.

The American Immigration Council (AIC) report recognizes the country is at a crossroads regarding immigration enforcement. It lays out how Americans’ views of mass deportation have soured. In fact, the polling has become so negative that in March the Trump administration urged Republicans to stop talking about “mass deportations.” But this strategy of reticence hasn’t worked. (Just this week, Tom Homan, the White House border czar, promised that “mass deportations are coming”; the Cava enthusiast put quite a point on it, saying, “You ain’t seen shit yet.”) An April Politico poll found that “half of Americans—including one quarter of [Trump’s] 2024 voters—said Trump’s mass deportations campaign, including his widespread deployment of ICE agents, is too aggressive.”

AIC hopes Democrats will back their framework on interior enforcement as a constructive new approach to immigration. Built around four pillars—compliance, safety, proportionality, and accountability—it recommends fourteen areas of reform. The plan emphasizes making rules that people living in the country can follow; law enforcement that protects communities from threats rather than treating the community as one; consequences for civil immigration violations that are “tailored, reasonable, and humane”; and holding agencies—and individual agents—accountable, up to and including by firing those who abuse their power.

“We’ve seen Democrats over the last six months have become more aligned with what they are against on mass deportation,” said Nayna Gupta, AIC’s policy director, “but now we are at the moment where we have to absolutely pivot to what they stand for.”

The stakes couldn’t be higher.

Even if GOP majorities get washed away in a blue wave this November, polls and focus groups show that voters turned off by Trump aren’t in love with the Democratic party. For decades, Democrats have failed to present a proactive and motivating vision for the immigration system, and their perceived softness on immigration played a role in Trump’s rise. It is essential going forward that Democrats convince voters they have a plan to recalibrate a system that has been twisted and abused by this administration and made to punish everyone—from undocumented immigrants to people with visas and legal status (such as torture victims), to even U.S. citizens who have been targeted, beaten, and detained, often because of their language or presumed racial identity.

Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), who has forcefully advocated for the children and families stuck in the detention center in Dilley, Texas, told me he’s encouraged these conversations have begun. Castro envisions that in January 2029, the presidency, House, and Senate will all be under Democratic control, but he cautions that power can be fleeting and Democrats must make substantive changes to a system Trump exploited.

“This period has been an ugly reminder for the country about the value of immigrants and is another period in American history where we let nativism and anti-immigrant sentiment take us in a very cruel and inhumane direction,” Castro said. “For Democrats, it’s one thing to criticize Donald Trump when he’s committing abuses against immigrants, and another thing once we have power to actually put all your energy to help pass substantive immigration reform. A big part of the reason the country was frustrated with us is we would go on the campaign trail and say we’re going to do this or that, then we get into power and try half of it. People need to see you making an earnest effort to do what you said you’re going to do.”

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A key section of the AIC report proposes reforming civil immigration enforcement by creating a new agency—or, Gupta told me, reappropriating funds for an existing agency like Citizenship and Immigration Services—that would act in a far less punitive fashion than ICE under Trump 2.0. Since the vast majority of immigration violations are civil, not criminal, there is a need for an agency that provides law enforcement without roughing up, handcuffing, and imprisoning detainees indiscriminately, including immigrants who have lived here for decades without a criminal record.

Jason Houser, chief of staff of ICE in the Biden administration and a Homeland Security counterterrorism official, advised AIC on the report and connected them with law enforcement sources around the country for feedback. He agreed that ICE, the Border Patrol, and DHS are not hallowed institutions breathed into existence by the Founding Fathers, but post-9/11 creations that can be altered. While Houser, like the AIC, believes enforcement is necessary, he also supports officers using far less aggressive measures.

“We believe these institutions, to carry out our laws, have to be here, but we’re in a moment, reflexively, where we have to question that,” he said. “I like the idea of challenging the need. There’s always going to be some enforcement that needs to be handled, but the massive gap is in the management.”

Houser said he hopes Democrats take advantage of the opening created by a framework like AIC’s, which runs counter to simplistic narratives and glib slogans about immigration that leave no space for nuance. He sees a deeper vision as being particularly necessary at a time when Republicans are ramming through $70 billion more for ICE and the Border Patrol in the face of rising gas prices and inflation.

“If we’re going to fund systems at those levels, how do we also create pathways for migrants?” Houser said. “Our laws protect more than just Americans, they protect noncitizens as well.”

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I spoke to Gupta, AIC’s policy director, about the bevy of horrendous policies that have emerged from the mass-deportation era: masked agents refusing to identify themselves; flying migrants to Guantanamo Bay or El Salvador with nothing like due process; canceling visas for political reasons; ending programs for hundreds of thousands of people here under temporary protected status; immigration enforcement outside schools and churches; busting into homes without judicial warrants; and accosting and assaulting U.S. citizens. Gupta told me that the only thing that prevented many of these abuses in the past was agency policy, not laws. She said these thin protections for people’s rights demonstrate the critical need for new legislation to reform the immigration system, where laws on the books like the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act gave Trump a legal opening to terrorize people by, for example, putting people with civil immigration violations in detention.

Gupta said DHS has famously operated by issuing internal memos that “are subject to the whim and political interests of political leaders” and can therefore shift year to year. She warned Democrats who might be hoping to govern with a light touch via agency memos of their own that “there’s no way to guarantee [Border Patrol] and ICE agents hired under a second Trump administration are going to listen to memos by a new administration, whereas laws written by Congress create a consistent, stable rule of law.”

Houser agreed about the need to get away from relying on memos and internal policy to direct immigration enforcement.

“We know now that fails,” he said, “and it fails over and over again.”

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How Trump Has Destroyed Our Faith in the Rule of Law

Kelly McCarthy is one of the people in law enforcement who has seen the scope of the mass-deportation regime’s failure up close. She is chief of police for Mendota Heights, a small town in Minnesota bordering St. Paul and across the river from Minneapolis. Kelly testified to Congress on federal agents’ stark lack of professionalism after the invasion of the Twin Cities earlier this year. She describes acting as a legal observer outside a Spanish-language Alcoholics Anonymous meeting near her home on a day off in January. A border patrol agent she encountered called her a “paid agitator” and told her to “get a job.” Kelly said she would have been embarrassed if the man had been one of her officers.

“All government is is the embodiment of the rules and processes we’re supposed to follow. We all came together and said, ‘These are the rules to this game,’” she told me, describing the deep damage Trump has done to both the rule of law and the perception of law enforcement in America. “When you have the referees and the arbiters not following the rules, it leads to a helplessness and a fear, and that fear spreads and impacts everyone’s daily life. If you’re not trustworthy, they don’t trust you in every avenue, and it’s everyone for themselves.”

Because Democrats are, after all, still Democrats, I asked Gupta: What’s the danger if, charitably, Democrats take the easier path, saying mass deportation was a very dark stain, but deciding to rely on those memos and internal policy to change enforcement instead of wading deeper into the fight over fundamental differences—or, less charitably, if they don’t do anything on immigration out of cowardice?

“The danger is, this is an extreme moment we’re in,” Gupta said. “The failure to act and make significant changes to the system is actually a threat to our rule of law and the credibility of the United States government.” She added a further warning: “They’re using the immigration system as the tip of the spear to go after political opponents, state and local leaders, and rights enshrined under the Constitution, and using the immigration system to encroach on principles of federalism and authority we give states to govern their communities.”

McCarthy was more succinct about the wisdom of a new way forward.

“If you had a cliff, and everyone fell off the cliff, you wouldn’t get more ambulances. We would install a fence on the top,” she said.

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ICE AT THE WORLD CUP. Will it actually happen?

There are reasons to believe it will. After all, in February, ICE Director Todd Lyons, who has since announced he is resigning at the end of May, said at a congressional hearing that ICE would be a “key part” of World Cup security.

And there are reasons to be skeptical. One is that the high-profile ICE raids of the first year of the Trump administration sparked so much political backlash—especially after Homeland Security agents killed two American citizens—that they cost former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem her job, forced Border Patrol frontman Greg Bovino into retirement, and compelled the administration as a whole to switch to a lower-profile strategy. ICE, notably, did not show up at the Super Bowl—even despite the Bad Bunny of it all.

But what if the answer to the question falls somewhere in between? That’s what sources in national immigration politics and in Texas are bracing for. They told me they think the more likely danger isn’t that ICE sets up checkpoints on the way to or from World Cup matches, but that agents

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ICE FINALLY STUCK IT to one of their detainees. Except this person is no criminal, no murderer, no monster. She is a torture victim from Colombia, one who—as we wrote last year—was repeatedly beaten and raped by the police buddies of her ex-boyfriend.

Adriana Quiroz Zapata finally escaped Colombia with her life, only to find more mistreatment at the hands of U.S. federal agents.

Because the Convention Against Torture prevented her from being deported to Colombia, ICE instead packed her onto a bus and tried to abandon her in Mexico, a country where she has no ties. But Mexican immigration authorities declined to take her after hearing details of her harrowing journey.

I wrote that story last April. On April 16 of this year, Zapata was finally removed from the United States. Along with fourteen others, she was shipped off to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)—once again, a country where she has no ties.

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Rep. Rob Menendez (D-N.J.) who counts Zapata’s family members as constituents, told me the Trump administration clearly wanted to dump her in Africa with no actual plan or respect for her ability to survive.

“There’s no limits to their cruelty and I think that’s what’s really important for the American people to know, there’s a complete misalignment with what they sold the American people,” he said. “Americans are being shot in the street, people with protected status are being removed to third countries in Africa. Think about the hypocrisy on so many levels: They said they had to cut $1 trillion in fraud, waste, and abuse yet they’re using taxpayer money to remove people with protected status and flying them to the Democratic Republic of the Congo.”

On the House floor, Menendez slammed Republicans for being “silent” and “complicit” with respect to Trump’s mass deportation campaign brutalizing our neighbors—and said of Zapata, “If we do not get her back she will die.”

Menendez’s office and Zapata’s lawyer, Lauren O’Neal, both told me that the medical issues we wrote about last year have only worsened. Zapata’s prediabetes became diabetes due to her diet in detention, and she has been prescribed medication that officials in the DRC told O’Neal cannot be provided. Zapata did not respond to my request for comment about how she is doing mentally and physically; O’Neal told me her client is “fragile” and “very sensitive” right now.

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In an April 23 letter to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services requesting Zapata’s expedited humanitarian parole back to the United States, O’Neal said that Zapata is being provided only bread and water, with escorted access to a convenience store. And O’Neal alleges that even the DRC may just be a way station: She says that DRC representatives, in conjunction with diplomatic officials from Colombia, have engaged in pressuring tactics. Their goal is apparently for Zapata, and other detainees like her, to sign documents agreeing to relinquish their rights—which, in Zapata’s case, would send her back to Colombia where she could be in grave danger once again.

“It seems the lawlessness is commonplace, it’s almost like I’m living in some twilight zone,” O’Neal told me. I pointed out to her that there seems to be some personal animosity in the actions of U.S. immigration authorities against Zapata, not just for filing a complaint in the past, which got an agent reassigned, but perhaps for how much she and her allies have fought for her release.

O’Neal agreed with the suggestion that Zapata was being targeted in that way, as did Menendez. O’Neal received a call from an ICE agent in the days preceding Zapata’s removal to the DRC where she learned Zapata was being given medical treatment. O’Neal asked if it was for an old broken arm injury or for her diabetes but was told Zapata was given a yellow fever vaccine—a prerequisite before being sent to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. O’Neal told me she could hear the “glee” in the ICE agent’s voice as they delivered the news.

Menendez said Americans should be horrified by the inhumanity of this situation, and by the affront to the rule of law that Zapata’s case represents. And he took a parting shot at Republicans who have stood by as Trump’s deportation forces have rampaged through communities only now wanting to moderate on the issue ahead of midterm elections.

“This is the same party that wraps themselves in religion, but they don’t say a word when a person is tortured in their country of origin, tortured here, then removed to the DRC,” he said.

O’Neal told me her Jewish background informs the slippery slope she sees for an administration that has come for immigrants now, here legally or not, and that could come for others later on.

“I want Americans to know what they should have known the whole time: that this administration’s utter and complete lack of due process of law should strike so much fear in us,” she said. “Today it serves their interest to do it to immigrants, but it shows how little you have to protect yourself . . . unchecked federal power is what our forefathers didn’t want.”

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THE SMOKE FROM ERIC SWALWELL’S POLITICAL IMPLOSION has not yet cleared from the California gubernatorial race, but one figure is deploying a giant political box fan to give himself some visibility. Billionaire liberal donor and environmental activist Tom Steyer’s recent ad buys total around $115 million, almost thirty times the total of his nearest Democratic competitor.

Swalwell’s exit from the scene appears to have benefited Steyer: He is leading at 20 percent in a new Emerson poll, with former congressman and HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra1 close behind at 19 percent, also enjoying a bump in support following Swalwell’s exit.2 Steyer also picked up a major endorsement from the influential California Teachers Association, which had supported Swalwell before he withdrew from the race.

But while some of Swalwell’s collapsed political presence has been recouped by other Democrats still in the race, much of it is now that swirl of political smoke: There is not yet a clear frontrunner, which gives rise to the distant possibility that Democratic disarray will allow two Republicans to sneak in to the gubernatorial runoff thanks to California’s jungle primary system.

Steyer is no dummy: While a Washington Post poll last fall found that 75 percent of Democratic voters and 60 percent of independents thought spending by billionaires on political campaigns is either bad or very bad, those voters also overwhelmingly oppose ICE, and Steyer has worked hard to position himself as the anti-ICE candidate. He has called for abolishing the agency and jailing its agents who have broken the law; in a blog post he published last week detailing these plans, he described ICE as a “violent extremist group.” Don’t just take my word for it (or his). New York Times opinion contributor Jean Guerrero, who last week moderated a California gubernatorial debate, wrote that while the Democratic candidates should be stronger on immigration, Steyer “came across as the boldest defender of immigrants” on the debate stage.

“We need immigration services, we need it absolutely, but we don’t need a criminal organization with masks and assault rifles terrorizing our citizens and racially profiling them, and it’s not right,” Steyer told me in an interview a week ago.

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For his efforts, Steyer has received the backhanded gift of Trump lashing out over Fox News’s coverage of his candidacy, which Trump worries could have the effect of “putting him [Steyer] ‘into play’” to win the race.

It wasn’t just Trump who bristled at Steyer’s rise. Elon Musk retweeted a screenshot of the opening to Steyer’s blog post about his five-point plan for ICE with a single word of commentary: “Wow.” The plan calls for not just abolishing ICE and forbidding all law enforcement agencies from racial profiling, but also creating an investigative unit to monitor ICE in California, as well as conditions in the agency’s detention centers. Steyer told me he also wants to create a legal-defense “superfund” for people who have been “kidnapped” by ICE—a plan modeled on an initiative he took on with his wife in 2018 wherein the couple provided around $3.3 million to cover legal representation for people under threat of deportation during Trump 1.0.

Steyer is proud of the criticism and alarm he’s elicited from Trump and Musk, and by all accounts, he’s serious about opposing ICE in California. But there is one thing that could trip him up in the lane he’s chosen for himself in this race—what some call his “original sin” on immigration.

“Is He Ready to Atone for Those Sins?”

In 2004, Steyer’s former hedge fund bought tens of millions of dollars’ worth of stock in the company now known as CoreCivic, a publicly traded detention company that has made hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts under Trump, tallying up allegations of poor medical care for sick detainees along the way.

Chris Newman, the general counsel for the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) and an attorney for Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man who was wrongfully sent to a prison camp in El Salvador last year, rejects the idea that a billionaire should be elected in California. He told me Steyer is “obviously” trying to “buy his way into the immigrant rights champion lane.”

“The guy profited from investing in commercial prison companies—is he ready to atone for those sins?” he asked.

Steyer has called this investment a “mistake.” When we spoke I asked him about it again, noting that his opponents see it as fundamentally undercutting his anti-ICE position.

“We did invest in it—it was twenty-two years ago—I realized over twenty years ago it was a mistake and got rid of it,” he told me, noting that he has since been endorsed by the leading rehabilitative-justice organization in the state, Smart Justice. “But I didn’t just do that,” he continued:

We worked for the next twenty years to push not just for fair treatment of immigrants but also against the era of mass incarceration. We worked to make California a sanctuary state in 2019, which means that California law officers cannot cooperate with ICE legally except with regards for violent felons. We pushed also in 2019 to make sure the state could not have contracts with private prisons.

Steyer framed the decision to invest in private prisons back in 2004 not just as a mistake or failure of judgment, but as an important personal turning point—“a wakeup call” that “changed my life,” he said. “And there’s a reason I walked away from my business and billions of dollars: because I want to have a different life than that, and being in that situation puts pressure on me to do things I’m not willing to do.”

Hiring the Most-Sought-After Influencer in the Nation

Loyal readers of Huddled Masses may remember Carlos Eduardo Espina, the influencer whom every 2028 Democratic hopeful is courting thanks to his charisma, positive content, and platform of more than 22 million followers across Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook.

Steyer, too, is hoping to benefit from Espina’s influence with Latinos and immigrants: The billionaire recently brought him aboard as a campaign adviser in the sprint to the June primary.

I asked the typically forthcoming Espina how much he’s being paid for his work on the campaign, and he said he would be happy to tell me—but contracts go two ways, so I would need to ask the campaign. Steyer’s team declined to share that juicy bit of info.

Espina’s choice has given rise to some criticism among his followers over his decision not to instead endorse a Hispanic candidate like Becerra. (Espina told me he didn’t want to criticize Becerra during our call, but did acknowledge that the congressman’s time as HHS secretary under Biden—a role in which he oversaw shelters for migrant children—left a bad taste in his mouth.)

Espina, a Texas native, said he wasn’t sure about getting involved in California, but a large portion of his followers are from the state, and he counts Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) as a friend and was swayed by Khanna’s endorsement of Steyer, whose team soon pitched him on advising the campaign on Latino issues and engagement.

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Espina has already advised Steyer’s campaign to do more events in the Central Valley, Modesto, and Madera. And he’s been tapping his Californian followers to help hone Steyer’s policy focus: A Google form he posted with questions on the top issues they’re concerned about got close to a thousand responses, he told me. He learned that immigration and ICE raids are by far the number-one issue for these Latino Californians, followed by the economy.

Steyer described Espina as a “trusted ambassador” to a broad swath of Californians he hopes to reach through his campaign. And one of the things he wants to communicate is a position that will doubtless anger his MAGA critics.

“One of the questions has always been . . . should we be providing health care for people without documentation? The answer is: Yes, absolutely,” Steyer told me. “Health care is a right; the people of California need to have health care.”

Espina’s crowdsourcing also found that working-class Latinos tend to see the Golden State as increasingly unaffordable—another area where Steyer feels he has a valuable political message to offer them.

Latinos are the biggest group in California, Steyer said, and they disproportionately work in physically difficult and underpaid jobs. Helping them, he said, dovetails with his campaign’s commitment to affordability.

“When I’m talking about dropping the cost of rent, dropping the cost of health care, dropping the cost of electricity, putting a windfall profits tax on gasoline and sending it back to California directly, I’m talking about Latinos,” he said. “I’m talking about people who do the hardest jobs for the lowest money. . . . Anytime I’m talking about costs coming down, I’m talking about Latinos being able to afford the life they want. Anytime I’m talking about bringing in money so that we can have better education so our kids can do better, I’m talking overwhelmingly about Latino kids.”

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WHEN DONALD TRUMP, Kristi Noem, Ron DeSantis, and local Florida officials opened the Everglades detention center last summer, its harsh location and cavalier nickname—“Alligator Alcatraz”—gave rise to a lot of brutal joking about what awaited detainees at the facility, especially any who might try to escape.

But the jokes and the nickname weren’t funny to the native Miccosukee tribe, whose lands are adjacent to the detention facility grounds. They have joined lawsuits against state and federal authorities alleging that construction was greenlit without a tribal consultation or an environmental impact study, overlooking important lawful requirements, they argue, for such a project at the site.

“The Everglades is meant for our tribes, it protects life, it shields it. It’s not meant to detain life,” one member of the tribe said.

But detaining life is what it does—thousands of lives so far. The Everglades detention center is a key site for Trump’s mass deportation regime. So it makes good fractal sense, then, that Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), in an interview with me after an unannounced visit to the facility last week, described it as a “monument to cruelty.” The part reflects the whole.

One Cage, 32 Men, 3 Toilets, Zero Privacy

One of the first things Wasserman Schultz told me was that she wasn’t being provocative or inflammatory in calling the living quarters “cages”: It’s simply what they are. The congresswoman introduced the No Cages in the Everglades Act in the House last summer, but it never became law; she told me she saw 1,500 detainees housed in cages at the site, a cage area that smelled like urine, and one cage configuration where detainees appear to have no option but to go to the bathroom in front of everyone.

“It’s a vile, disgusting place that you would never want anyone you care about to spend five minutes in, let alone be warehoused in cages there,” she told me.

The facility, which was ordered closed by a district judge last summer due to the lawsuit from the tribe and others, before being reopened two weeks later by two Trump-appointed appeals court judges, already has a bad reputation for its poor treatment of immigrants. But often, things at the facility allegedly get even worse, sometimes declining for months at a time. This alarming pattern might owe to new guards coming in, or to more aggressive attempts to stamp out protests inside. That’s what I was told by Thomas Kennedy, a veteran Florida immigration activist who stays connected to the family members of detainees and has made it his business to bring what is happening at the facility to national attention.

New trouble began after a federal judge ruled in late March that the detention center must give free access to, as the Associated Press summarized the order, “timely, confidential, unmonitored, unrecorded outgoing legal calls.” Days later, guards cut off the phones entirely without warning or explanation. This happened on April 2, according to a Miami Herald report published this week. Things escalated from there. As the Herald put it, after the phones were cut off, “the beatings began.”

Raiko Lopez Morffi was dragged out of his cell and severely beaten, leaving him with a black eye, as seen in photos taken by his attorney and presented to the court as part of the lawsuit. (Morffi’s black eye can be seen in a screenshot from a Zoom call included in the Herald story.) He also sustained injuries to his shoulder and arm and was kicked in the head; at one point, an officer pressed a knee against his neck to restrain him. One of Morffi’s fellow detainees had his wrist broken. All men in the cage were pepper-sprayed, and one of the older men lost consciousness apparently as a result.

This was far from the first example of grievous mistreatment of detainees at the facility. Days before the judge’s phone order and the guards’ phone suspension, Sens. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) published a three-page letter to new Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin requesting information about the use of “the box”—a punishment that resembles those meted out by totalitarian governments and police states.

“Detainees placed in ‘the box’—located outside and in direct sunlight—are reportedly forced to endure high temperatures, high humidity, and ‘horsefly-size mosquitos,’” the letter states. “One Nicaraguan man reported that his ‘hands and feet were painfully shackled’ when he was placed in ‘the box’ in the recreation yard, prohibiting any movement. He reportedly remained in ‘the box’ directly exposed to the sun and heat for hours, with no water.”

This is unconscionable. But Kennedy, the immigration activist, told me that in the past month, he’s heard that things at the facility have gotten even worse.

“We don’t know why,” he said. “It goes in waves, maybe because there’s a lot of turnover with the guards. It was more calm at the beginning of the year. But over the last month, I’ve heard awful shit.”

An Amnesty International report from December tells some of the story. It’s entitled: “Torture and enforced disappearances in the Sunshine State: Human Rights Violations at ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ and Krome in Florida.”

Krome is another Florida detention center; it is located in Miami. Wasserman Schultz visited it as well and described the conditions as also being “awful.”

But Kennedy, who is in touch with families of Everglades detainees, shared a startling observation about the two sites.

“Krome has seen multiple civil rights and human rights complaints,” he told me. “But people in ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ still say, ‘I want to get sent to Krome.’”

Cubans Voted for Trump—Now in “Alligator Alcatraz”

Kennedy is in a group chat with eighty or so women—the mothers and wives of immigrants held at the detention center. Through that chat and his advocacy, he has learned that a large number of Cubans are being held at the Everglades facility.

“Predominantly, the population are Cubans whose families voted for or supported Trump, and they’re pissed,” Kennedy said.

Wasserman Schultz agreed.

“The most significant evidence that points to that is Eileen Higgins’s election,” she said, referring to the new Democratic mayor of Miami who swept into office on the strength of high Latino support. “In elections across the country, the Hispanic vote is shifting dramatically to Democrats. Even if people voted for Trump, the cruelty threaded through this administration’s policies and priorities is not what they signed up for.”

Kennedy has seen it up close.

In the group chat, the family members share videos and memes about Trump with one general message, he said: “This guy is a fucking lunatic.”

He shared screenshots of some of them with me.

One depicts Trump and Melania Trump with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, while another shows Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu in handcuffs. They also share videos of speakers declaring the “insanity” of Trump, pointing to him losing his mind, and they have recently been very upset by Trump attacking Pope Leo XIV.

But the general vibe is perhaps best captured by a YouTube video that recently made the rounds in the group. It’s a short clip of a song performed by the rapper YG at Coachella in 2016. As the crowd cheers, he sings “Fuck Donald Trump.”

The sentiment is only too easy to understand. Wasserman Schultz told me that when she says the Everglades detention center is a “monument to cruelty” and that the “cruelty is the point,” she wants to underscore that she sees the facility as a means to an end.

The reason DeSantis and Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier chose to place the facility “in the middle of the broiling hot swampy environment,” and the reason they have since made so many jokes about the perils that await escapees outside its fences, she told me, is that they want people to be afraid of getting sent there.

“They want to make it so awful people self-deport,” she said.

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WANT TO KNOW WHAT A WIN for liberalism looks like in the Trump administration? Sometimes you can spot it in the things that are not said.

Last month, Republicans floated a strategy for this year’s midterm elections that could be summarized as instructing their candidates to stop saying “mass deportations.” It was an admission that Trump’s anti-immigrant zealotry had become a liability with voters and that acts of pushing back can actually work.

Those acts are visible now both on the national stage and in communities across the country. One of the latest instances appeared last weekend: a fight against new border-wall construction that threatens to rip up the beloved Big Bend National Park.

The crowd of more than 2,000 people of all political affiliations—including many who wouldn’t normally participate in a political protest—gathered on the steps of the Texas State Capitol to deliver one message: Not in our backyard.

Texas Democratic state Sen. Cesar Blanco told me he was heartened to see the strong response to the planned construction, including the flood of letters his office had received from constituents sharing stories to underscore what Big Bend means to them.

“We’re living in interesting times,” Blanco said. “We had Republicans and Democrats coming together, people who aren’t involved in politics from different walks of life who showed up with a message of let’s not destroy this beautiful treasure we have for a wall that is ineffective. We heard from land owners who have concerns on eminent domain, people who are campers and hikers, and river rafters who are concerned, and folks who care about wildlife, which a wall would impact.”

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A crowd of a few thousand people—some motivated by a love of flora—is never going to get the headlines of a multi-million person national rally against Trump’s authoritarianism. But don’t discount its significance. Trump’s numbers on immigration have taken a dive not just because of a massive national shift in sentiment as people have seen what his mass-deportation regime looks like in practice but also because of steady pockets of resistance like this. People in local communities have been quietly opposing Trump throughout his second term. And as support for his handling of immigration continues to wane, that open opposition has grown louder and become more emboldened.

A CNN poll released last week found that in addition to Trump’s approval rating on the economy hitting a new low, 55 percent of Americans said he had gone too far in pursuing mass deportations. When it came to the DHS funding impasse and the resulting government shutdown that created interminably long lines at airports and left TSA workers without pay, 39 percent blamed Republicans while a quarter blamed Democrats; 28 percent said both groups shared equal blame. When asked whether Trump sending ICE agents to airports helped things, 40 percent said it made things worse, while 21 percent said it improved the situation.

This polling came after a University of Massachusetts Amherst poll of 1,000 respondents, also conducted in late March and released April 1, found that roughly 6 in 10 Americans disapproved of both Trump’s handling of nationwide protests against his immigration policies and the investigation of the killing of U.S. citizens in Minneapolis by federal agents.

Trend lines also show support dropping for specific controversial policies. Those in favor of deporting people to countries they are not from fell from 20 percent last July to 13 percent today, while support for separating kids from their immigrant parents has fallen a comparable amount, from 18 percent last April to 11 percent now.

But again, the national numbers don’t tell the full story. To understand the full extent of the deteriorating environment for Trump on immigration, you need to drill down to what is happening in local towns and cities. I recently reported on DHS’s preparations to spend $38 billion overpaying for warehouses intended to house up to 10,000 immigrants; companies have been backing out of those deals after facing intense scrutiny from local municipalities and local residents who didn’t want detention centers in their backyards. Some local city governments even passed zoning ordinances to stop ICE’s plans for mass detention center, and in a small town in Georgia, the city manager put a lock on the water meter pending the agency’s demonstration that its planned facility won’t put undue strain on local infrastructure.

During the long days, weeks, and months of the second Trump administration, these are what wins often look like—not massive, decisive victories, but rather delaying, slowing, and jamming the gears of the mass-deportation machine instead of letting it roll unimpeded into your town.

DILLEY, TEXAS IS THE SITE of other recent attempts to stall the deportation machine. The town’s detention center came to national attention after Liam Ramos—the boy who you’ll remember was wearing his blue bunny hat in a heartbreaking photo—was taken with his father from their home in Minnesota and shuttled 1,200 miles away to be incarcerated there. The pressure has been constant to release the families and children at Dilley. They have told loved ones and reporters about their harrowing struggles with securing access to prescribed medicine, clean water, and food. On Wednesday, the Hollywood Reporter published a story about a recent petition for the detention center to be closed; over the past month, it reached 215,000 signatures, including those of a bevy of celebrities including Jodie Foster, Ben Stiller, Pedro Pascal, Madonna, and Javier Bardem.

Rep. Joaquin Castro, who has already helped to secure the release of some families and children from the facility including Ramos and his dad, has continued to put pressure on the detention center in Dilley, not just by getting detainees released but by doing regular Instagram updates on the latest news out of the center and by continuing his periodic visits. The thorn-in-the-administration’s-side congressman appears to have caused enough frustration to elicit a response from federal agents: This week, he said that ICE has started locking down the facility when members of Congress come, apparently permitting no detainees into the common areas where they might speak with lawmakers.

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Even if Republicans are trying to avoid using the words “mass deportations,” Americans still understand that Trump’s extreme immigration policies go far beyond providing traditional border security, which polls consistently show people support. And those policies have caused—and will continue to cause—disruptions to families, disorder in local communities, and damage to local economies.

A successful border policy, Blanco, the state senator, told me, “depends on the type of border security.”

“You can’t use a first-century method to deal with the situation in 2026—you have to figure out what’s effective and what’s not,” he said. With an eye on the protests that started last week, he added: “Big Bend has a big economic impact for our region, and a cross section of folks—Republicans, Democrats, and independents—said this is overreach.”

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POP QUIZ: WHICH CITY is leading the nation in ICE arrests so far this year? It’s not the Twin Cities, which clocked in at over 5,000 arrests from mid-December to mid-March. And it’s not Chicago or Los Angeles, which were targeted by Donald Trump aggressively last year; they have had, respectively, about 4,900 and 3,300 arrests so far this year.

It’s Miami. The ICE field office in that city led the nation in arrests from December to March, with about 9,900. That comes to roughly 120 a day, more than Dallas, Atlanta, and San Antonio, which follow on the list. Since Trump took office last year, the total number of arrests made by the Miami field office is over 41,000, more than 35 percent higher than the next highest city (Dallas), according to New York Times data.

It’s a remarkable distinction considering Miami’s status as a metropolis that became MAGAfied thanks to Trump’s gains with Latinos. Yet the destabilization that ICE has caused in this bilingual, bicultural South Florida city has received scant media coverage and little attention from the rest of the country—at least compared to what accompanied ICE raids in Minneapolis and Chicago and L.A.

But that could be changing soon, in part because a political backlash is growing. In addition to the ICE raids—and perhaps to some degree because of them—Miami is also experiencing a hard political swing away from Trumpism. It even appears to be returning to its status as a Democratic bastion.

No Democrat better exemplifies the major changes underway in Miami than the city’s mayor, Eileen Higgins.

When she took office 106 days ago, Higgins became the first Democrat to serve as Miami mayor in almost thirty years. She was also the first woman ever elected to the office, and the first non-Hispanic since the 1990s. Facing off against a Republican Latino opponent, she received 59 percent of the vote in the city of almost half a million people, where seven in ten voters are Hispanic.

When I spoke with her this week, I wanted to know:

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WHEN I’M NOT COVERING IMMIGRATION, I like to watch prestige TV. I treat it as a way to unwind and give myself space from the chaos and human suffering that often comes when covering immigration in the Trump era.

Which is why it was so jarring last week when one of my favorite shows, The Pitt, centered its episode on the main topic of my reporting over the last year: the disruptive impacts of ICE.

For those who haven’t seen it, The Pitt is a popular hospital drama where each episode depicts roughly in real time an hour of a day in the emergency room. The show tries to put us in the shoes of people we are not like or whom we have not often considered. It asks us to have empathy and compassion for these patients as well as the people trying to help them within a hospital system, where frustration and emotion can often run high.

Last week’s episode, “5:00 P.M.,” stayed true to those elements, only this time the source of the frustration, drama, and emotion was ICE agents who came storming into the ER.1

Things get rolling when some commotion in the ER attracts the attention of Dr. “Robby” Robinavitch (Noah Wyle) and Dr. Cassie McKay (Fiona Dourif). They look up to see two federal agents hauling in a terrified immigrant who is clearly in immense pain.

The immigrant is named Pranita (Ramona DuBarry), and she is a restaurant worker who was caught up in the chaos of a raid and thrown down a flight of stairs, which has likely torn her rotator cuff. It’s hard to find a more true-to-life premise in television right now: Pranita’s plight evokes the memory of so many similar stories we’ve seen and heard over the last year of immigrants trying to flee federal agents or being hurt by them. And of course the two agents who have apprehended Pranita won’t let her call her daughter to let her know where she is.

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The presentation of the two ICE agents speaks volumes. The first one, agent Russo (Juju Alexander), is tall and masked; the camera looks up at him in a way that reinforces the sense of threat and intimidation, and you can see the way this sense radiates out to various members of the hospital staff, from the main characters to the other hospital personnel and patients waiting in the ER. The second agent, Correa2 (Josell Mariano), goes without a mask and for that reason alone seemed infinitely more human than his partner. The Instagram algorithm later served me Mariano’s post about filming the episode: “I found myself imagining what it would feel like to find my own mother or father in that same situation,” he wrote. He highlighted several behind-the-scenes photos, which he offered at the end to, as he put it, “hopefully make you not hate me.”

I found the actor’s reflections on his performance fascinating, so I reached out to ask for an interview. When we spoke, Mariano told me

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THE MOST SOUGHT-AFTER INFLUENCER in Democratic politics is a Uruguayan-Mexican-American social media personality who once ran a summer camp providing free soccer to low-income kids in central Texas.

Carlos Eduardo Espina may not be a household name in establishment circles in D.C. But if you’re in the business of winning elections, or planning a 2028 presidential run, there are few people more notable or desirable.

Just this month alone, three Democratic governors widely considered to be mulling presidential bids have invited Espina to events around the country, eager to test-drive their likability among a Latino audience by filming low-friction videos with him. Previously, Espina met with three other potential White House aspirants: Rep. Ro Khanna, Gov. Wes Moore, and Pete Buttigieg.1 And in between, Espina put his cultural influence behind two of the most promising Democrats in Texas—state Rep. James Talarico and Tejano singer Bobby Pulido—helping each rack up big numbers among Hispanic voters in their respective primary wins.

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The 27-year-old’s influence is tied to the size of his audience with 22 million followers across TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. But unlike other influencers, he has built up that following not just by posting fun videos, giving man hugs, and snagging invites to high-profile events, but by positioning himself as a voice, advocate, and even gatekeeper for the Latino community. Espina noted to me how it felt to watch ex-presidents speak at the funeral of the recently passed civil rights leader Jesse Jackson.

“There are not that many leaders in the Latino community like that—who are part of politics but still distant from it,” he explained.

Espina migrated from Uruguay to the United States when he was 5 years old and grew up in College Station, Texas. (His father was a U.S. citizen, so Espina was a citizen even before coming to the country—“like Ted Cruz,” he jokes.) He went to college in the liberal arts bastion of Vassar and, from there, got a law degree at the University of Nevada. His work, primarily, was in the world of NGOs. In addition to connecting socioeconomically disadvantaged kids with soccer, he founded another nonprofit in 2019 to support migrants in ICE detention centers, called the Detained Refugee Solidarity Fund.

His entrance into the content-creation game started when he began posting videos that featured citizenship information in Spanish, which is not widely available online in a digestible way. He had been inspired by helping his mother study for her citizenship test. His audience eventually asked him for videos on other immigration topics, which led to his foray into politics.

He didn’t just find his voice. Over time he also became viewed as a trusted validator and messenger, which translated into political clout.

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WHEN DONALD TRUMP announced he was dumping Kristi Noem as his secretary of homeland security and replacing her with Sen. Markwayne Mullin, some framed the decision as a much-needed refresh for a beleaguered agency.

Noem accumulated more than her share of baggage during her fourteen months atop the nation’s main immigration-enforcement department. She’s been accused of launching a massive ad campaign with her as the star; handing out a sweetheart no-bid contract for part of that PR blitz to a company that subcontracted some of its work to the firm of a top aide’s spouse; commissioning the purchase of a luxury jet with a bedroom in the back; and carrying on a brazen affair with her adviser and “special government employee” Corey Lewandowski.

But while Mullin hasn’t done anything quite like the above, the soon-to-be head of DHS can hardly be considered baggage-free.

Consider the chaos this winter that consumed Minnesota following the ramp-up of ICE and CBP forces there. The Oklahoma Republican repeatedly defended the aggressive enforcement actions, according to an extensive review by The Bulwark of his television appearances and public utterances during that time. He kept up the cheerleading even after two U.S. citizens were killed by federal agents.

When officers shot Renee Good as she attempted to drive away from the scene of an ICE protest, Mullin echoed Noem’s assessment that Good had engaged in an act of domestic terrorism. “They are terrorizing their city right now,” he told News Nation. “What [Noem] said was absolutely, 100-percent correct.”

During a CNN interview a few days later, reporter Kaitlan Collins pressed Mullin on whether authorities should investigate Good’s killing—something that Noem and the FBI have both resisted, even going so far as to refuse cooperation with local officials. “If they’re investigating anything, they need to be investigating the paid protesters, and who’s paying them to obstruct federal officers,” he declared at one point.

In another CNN interview, Mullin was presented with video showing that ICE officers shot Good two times from the side of the vehicle, in addition to once from the front. He discounted the video. “That’s very selective imaging that you guys are using,” he told host Jake Tapper.

Weeks later, when Alex Pretti was shot and killed on the streets of Minneapolis after he moved to protect a woman who had been pushed by ICE, Mullin again attacked the victim.

“Tell me what crime that ICE is doing other than doing their job,” he told Fox News. “Unfortunately, a . . . deranged individual that came in to . . . cause max damage, with a loaded pistol, with an extra mag that was completely loaded, was shot and killed. How much more of this is going to go on before the Democrat leaders there take responsibility for their words?”

In a separate interview with Fox Business, he responded to his colleague Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who had said ICE was murdering U.S. citizens. Mullin made clear that he was mad as well—at Murphy. “Well, these American citizens are actually impeding federal officers from doing their job,” Mullin stressed.

Mullin is well liked by his congressional colleagues, and his comfort with media appearances has turned him into a messaging asset to the administration and helped sand down his once-gruff public image. Some former Mullin foes have come around. For example, Sean O’Brien, the head of the Teamsters union—whom Mullin once challenged to a fight during a public hearing—now sees the senator in a positive light, praising his nomination to lead DHS. But on the topic of immigration and border enforcement, Mullin took positions that were directly contradicted by publicly available evidence or were deeply insensitive to the families of the ICE victims. He has never recanted or walked them back, according to a review of the public record.

Mullin’s office did not respond to specific questions about his past comments.

Mullin’s past statements belie his new bipartisan tone

MULLIN’S APPROACH to his upcoming nomination hearings will signal how both he and the Trump administration view the current politics of immigration. Last week, the senator said all of the right things when asked if he would meet with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who has described DHS as being so far gone with “rot” that changing out the head may not meaningfully change the department’s culture.

“I want people to understand . . . when I go into this position, yes, I’m a Republican, yes I’m conservative, but . . . regardless of if you support me or don’t support me, regardless of what your thoughts are . . . my focus is to keep the homeland secure,” Mullin told reporters. “If Mr. Schumer wants to sit down and talk to me, I’m going to sit down and talk with him. I want to try to earn their support, and I’m going to be open and honest with them.”

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His effort to present himself as open to various viewpoints, including those of his critics, mirrors the Trump administration’s own attempt at a revamp in response to the way its relentless and often unlawful immigration enforcement policies have made their brand toxic with the American people. In a closed-door briefing Tuesday in Florida, James Blair, one of the president’s deputy chiefs of staff, told House Republicans to stop talking about “mass deportations” and instead focus their rhetoric on the removal of violent criminals, Axios reported.

Of course, this doesn’t mean the administration actually intends to moderate its policies—only that they want voters to think they are moderating. But after a year of extreme rhetoric and nihilistic hype videos from DHS, it’s hard to imagine the public will simply give credit for a communications strategy that is more gentle and reasonable about immigration. As Bobby Pulido, a Tejano singer who won the Democratic primary to face Rep. Monica De La Cruz in Texas’s 15th Congressional District, put it: “Too late cabrones....ya’ll already said the quiet part out loud.”

Pulido told The Bulwark that Mullin’s nomination is just an effort to put lipstick on a pig of an agency that won’t change under Trump.

“People see it, this is not even about deportations anymore, this is about corruption,” he said. “Noem wasn’t doing this without their authority, she just fell on the sword for them. I have no doubt he [Mullin] is going to do what they tell him to do.”

Mullin certainly has been a steadfast ally of the White House, even when the going was tough: When reporters asked him to account for the most controversial policy pursuits of Noem’s tenure—the ones that alarmed Americans and plunged voter approval over the last year—he remained a dutiful loyalist, often parroting Noem’s talking points.

Mullin was unmoved by the attempted deportation of Liam Ramos, a 5-year-old child of an undocumented immigrant in Minneapolis. After pictures emerged of a bunny hat–wearing Ramos being detained outside his school, the senator said the press was deliberately misleading their readers and viewers about the circumstances of the case.

“This story that they’re blowing up about this 5-year-old kid is so false, is so untrue that honestly, there probably should be some lawsuits filed against this,” he said of an incident that even his fellow GOP senators insisted they found disturbing. “Because I spoke to Secretary Noem yesterday and today about the case. They’re not even reporting the facts.”

Mullin’s view of the unrest in Minneapolis following ICE’s larger deployment there was that the agency’s aggression and belligerence toward protesters was justified. It was the people following, filming, and whistling at agents who had gone beyond their constitutionally protected rights and were instead impeding law enforcement in politically motivated and potentially criminal ways. He accused them of being paid by liberal donor George Soros, who he insisted was “obviously behind this.” Despite no clear evidence, he said the Soros connection was “not even disputable at this point.”

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Soros isn’t the only figure Mullin has chosen to villainize. He also accused the media of “stirring this discontent across the country, and they’re getting people killed because of their false reporting.” And he has attacked district court judges for issuing rulings that had forced ICE to slow, stop, or even reverse some of its most aggressive tactics. Asked by Fox News host Will Cain about the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador, which proceeded despite a judicial order prohibiting the administration from sending him to that country, Mullin went after the judge for overstepping what the senator considers his proper zone of authority.

“I’m not an attorney,” the former plumbing-business operator said. “But when you are a guest inside the United States, you don’t have the same due process, if you wanna say, as an American citizen or even an LPR, a legal permanent resident.” The U.S. government had at this point already admitted that the deportation of Abrego Garcia was an “administrative error,” and they later brought him back to the United States.

These statements are all in line with things Noem said that contributed to her position atop DHS becoming so tenuous. They also reflect some of the main points of contention that emerged during her participation in oversight hearings just before she was fired.

In spite of his controversial statements, Mullin is unlikely to lose support among Senate Republicans, who have the votes (assuming there are no more than three defections) to get him confirmed when his nomination is considered in the coming weeks. That’s because many of the positions he advocated have become matters of doctrine for the GOP, such as the belief—which Mullin articulated in December 2020—that the 2020 election was “stolen” from Donald Trump; or his argument—expressed years later—that the January 6th riots were the result of inaction from then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

But Mullin’s positions could spark contentious questioning from Democrats at those confirmation hearings. The senator might soon be on the spot to explain his support for sending National Guard troops into Los Angeles, and to explain his argument against requiring ICE to obtain judicial warrants in order to carry out some of their deportation-related activities.

“If they actually required you to have a judicial warrant on every individual you picked up that was here illegally, the entire country would become a sanctuary city,” he told Fox News.

Mullin also has an aggressive position on one of the biggest sticking points in the current debate over funding DHS: a Democratic demand that legislation be passed requiring that ICE agents no longer wear masks. The senator, like Noem before him, is vehemently opposed.

“The reason why they want the ID and they want the mask taken off is because they want to dox these individuals, and they want to threaten them,” Mullin told Fox News host Brian Kilmeade. “There’s no other reason why.”

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BEFORE SHE WAS INFORMED YESTERDAY via a presidential Truth Social post that her tenure as secretary of homeland security is about to end, Kristi Noem was battered by Democrats and Republicans alike at congressional hearings this past week. A couple of Republicans made news by eviscerating her tenure in office, but I thought a different back-and-forth was at least as revealing.

Last week, Noem admitted that her department had arrested and deported DACA recipients—the “Dreamers” who are shielded from deportation and have had work authorization since 2012—at unacceptable levels. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) grilled her about the startling confession:

Durbin: Do you understand that people that are covered and protected by DACA have to go through a background check which includes a criminal check? Yes or no?

Noem: Yes.

Durbin: You do. Last week your agency informed us that last year ICE arrested 261 DACA holders and deported 86 of them. We learned about a DACA recipient who’d lived in this country for decades, was arrested by ICE at her green card appointment. In tears she hugged her daughter goodbye, she was deported to Mexico within twenty-four hours. Madam Secretary, why have you deported dozens of DACA holders who had to comply with a criminal background check to be eligible for DACA?

Noem: Sir, we follow all laws as applicable to the Department of Homeland Security in how we handle detainment and deportations.

Durbin: Why did you deport them?

Noem: I will not—I don’t know the details of that specific case you just read but I will look into it, sir.

Noem added that DHS has followed the law, to which Durbin responded that she had “clearly violated the law.” But I was struck by Noem’s words: “the details.”

Do we expect the DHS secretary to know “the details” of every case in the country? Of course not. But we should expect her to care about them.

THE WOMAN DURBIN WAS REFERRING to is Maria de Jesus Estrada Juarez, 42, who lived in the United States for 27 years and has a daughter who is a U.S. citizen. I wanted to know what it’s like when the government—one’s own government—says you can live and work here legally, before betraying you at a green card appointment and plucking you unceremoniously from your family, job, and life. So I spoke to Maria, who is currently living with her mother in Mexico, to find out what she’s been through and what it says about Trump, Noem, and the relentless deportation machine that continues to break the law.

Maria, from Sacramento, is a hospitality area manager for Motel 6 properties. She had been looking forward to her green card appointment on February 18. Though she is able to live and work here legally under DACA, her daughter Damaris, 21, is now old enough to sponsor her for a green card. For Maria, a green card would “open doors” to visit different countries, she told me. Growing up in a Catholic family, she dreamed of visiting the Vatican in Rome. She was so excited for her appointment that she did her hair and makeup.

But that excitement turned to dread as Maria was detained and deported back to Mexico the next morning.

“I feel like it was entrapment,” she said. “The moment they told me I was going to be deported, first I felt like they killed me right then and there. But seeing my daughter devastated was one of the hardest moments I had in my life. I was thinking, ‘What am I going to do?’”

Life has grown hard. Maria helps her mother with the stand outside the front door where they sell vegetables, candy, tortas, water, and soda. She misses her life and her daughter, but also the other markers of American life. She enjoys Mexican food but misses Chinese, Indian, and Thai food.

Damaris has vowed to see Maria return to the United States, and she was in the audience during Noem’s oversight hearing this week. She also met with Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), who used his time at the hearings to call for Noem’s removal, whether by resignation, firing, or impeachment. Damaris says he told her that he would do everything he can to help her mother.

I asked Maria what it means that her daughter is advocating so strongly for her. While Maria remained stoic throughout the conversation, I could hear her pride through the phone as she spoke about Damaris.

“To me, it means my whole entire world that I raised a good daughter, a daughter that is not going to let go,” she told me. “Standing up for me and fighting, being a voice for those that cannot speak, it means a lot. That I did a good job as a mother and raised a good citizen.” She was moved when Damaris decided to accompany her to Mexico, dropping her off at abuela’s house to make sure Maria was safe despite her ordeal.

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THE STORY IS GUTTING, but it doesn’t end there. Democrats and advocacy groups have pegged the economic benefit of Dreamers at somewhere between $280 billion and $390 billion.

But what of the human impact that goes beyond those sterile numbers? Maria was working with a shelter program to house fifty unhoused families at one of the Motel 6 properties she managed, she told me. The Trump administration likes to paint immigrants as hostile, violent drains on American society. Maria was just the opposite, and thanks to her deportation, housing for those fifty families may now be in doubt.1 The U.S. government is deporting hard-working people who help the country grow, Maria said. “Why not give them the opportunity to be part of that country? We decided to go to a different country, we were taken as minors, but we built a life there. It’s very devastating.”

Maria’s message to the Trump administration is that in their zeal to remove criminals who are bad for the country, they have targeted good people like herself who are “assets to the country.” She also underscored that, in addition to helping those homeless families and other community work, she doesn’t live on government assistance, welfare, or food stamps.

“I try to help as much as I can. I do a ‘Feed the Homeless Day’ every year on my own, with my own money,” she said. “I never do it with the intention that I want people to see I have a better living than them. It’s from my heart, from my kindness—a lot of these families, they are U.S. citizens.”

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DURING A PRIVATE CALL last Wednesday, Department of Homeland Security official Heather Honey vowed to election officials around the country that ICE would not be at the polls in November, calling the idea “disinformation.”

“There will be no ICE presence at polling locations,” she said, according to Politico.

But others who dialed in to the conversation didn’t leave convinced. Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, who was on the line, waved away Honey’s promises as empty on account of her past efforts pushing the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.

“I can’t depend on an election denier like that for the truth under any circumstances,” he told Politico. Honey—who serves in a newly created role at DHS, deputy assistant secretary for election integrity—was an activist in Pennsylvania whose research Trump attempted to use to overturn the 2020 election.

Fontes’s skepticism is justified. Trump has already called to “nationalize” elections—and Republicans in the House passed the SAVE America Act, which stipulates national voter ID requirements—to stem voting by “illegal aliens,” as the president alleged is happening in his State of the Union speech. Others on the call expressed sentiments similar to Fontes’s.

“I did not walk away from this meeting reassured that the federal government wouldn’t try to interfere in state sovereignty over the election,” Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows told NBC News.

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Concerns over what Trump may do to influence the 2026 elections are serious enough that Democratic-run states are already taking steps to mitigate the threat. Even before the Wednesday call, advocacy groups, lawyers, and organizers were preparing for ICE to try to come to the polls. In particular, they are bracing for the Trump administration to engage in acts of voter intimidation and voter suppression, especially in areas with voters of color. The result could be a huge swath of voters either being prevented from exercising their democratic right or being made to feel too nervous to even try to exercise it. All of it done in an attempt to keep Republicans in power.

A clear example of proactive, preventive work at the state level can be seen in Arizona, where earlier this month Republican lawmakers tried to pass a law basically “inviting ICE to the polls,” as my colleague Andrew Egger put it. It ultimately was pulled, with residents standing in line for hours to testify against the measure.

LUCHA Arizona, a political organizing group that has been at the forefront of Arizona’s turn from red to purple (the state went for Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2024, and it now has two Democratic senators and a Democratic governor), was among those that saw the legislation as an important early bout in the national fight against ICE showing up at the polls.

Alejandra Gomez, the executive director of LUCHA AZ, said hearing ICE could be at the polls was a “chilling factor” for her two thousand-strong membership. But even though the legislation was pulled, there are many challenges ahead. For one, the bill can be resurrected at any moment. There is also the possibility that rebellious county recorders or other officials could ignore the law and allow ICE at the polls. In anticipation of such a scenario, she said, her group is preparing for legal challenges and an organizing fight.

Gomez said that LUCHA and the coalition it’s a part of, Activate 48, are prepared to “hold the line for democracy,” as Arizona groups have already done once with the recent legislative fight against ICE at the polls. They will also be active in the governor’s race and in working to flip the state legislature. Their goal is to knock on close to one million doors.

“This is a direct attack on immigrant and Latino communities, but right now it is having an effect on all communities,” Gomez told me. “What people witnessed with Renee Good and Alex Pretti is that ICE is a rogue force that uses violence to oppress and to scare people, and in Arizona, people are worried about violence when ICE is deployed.”

THAT FEAR IS REAL AND TANGIBLE. ICE may not show up at the polls in November, but just the prospect of Latinos, immigrants, and brown people getting detained by masked federal agents simply for deciding to exercise their right to vote could prove chilling.

Charles Kuck, a Georgia-based lawyer who often sues the Trump administration—he’s gone after them in response to their $100,000 fee gambit for H-1Bs and defended international students whom the administration tried to strip of legal status—said that while he believed the courts would rule against ICE being allowed to have a presence at the polls, the fear that the agency might try and show up poses a major problem.

“I don’t understand what legal basis they would have to have ICE at the polls,” he told me. “I think lawsuits would be filed that morning, and ICE would be forced to leave the polls. But the mere threat that it might happen would intimidate people from going to the polls, which is why voting early and absentee is so important.”

Mi Familia Vota, a national group that works to mobilize Latino voters in the eight states of Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, and Texas, is working on voter education efforts to let prospective voters know their rights and ICE’s limitations.

They recently partnered with Mundial Media, an ad firm that works to reach Latinos digitally, to create more community comfort with elections. The groups showed advertisements of Latinos who have worked to make local elections safe, such as poll watchers. Those ads, an official said, helped increase strong voter intent 3 to 4 percentage points among English and Spanish respondents and lowered intimidation fears by 6 percentage points.

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Mi Familia Vota’s national director of campaigns and programs, Angelica Razo, said that in addition to the digital work, the group plans a $10 million national campaign of voter engagement and education. It would involve old-fashioned, on-the-ground, direct work with voters to answer their questions and assuage their fears so they feel empowered to cast their ballots.

This kind of work involves group members showing up at polling locations—libraries, schools, courthouses, places “where we have already seen ICE target people,” Razo said—to offer support.

Mondale Robinson, the founder of the Black Male Voter Project, a national group that has done voter mobilization work in Georgia, said new fears around ICE are a natural progression of previous kinds of election interference.

“ICE is new, but it isn’t new,” he told me. “What’s the difference between ICE and massive investment in sheriff departments among southern rural populations where black people and brown people are overrepresented? ICE is everybody with a badge.”

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Voter education also includes rapid-response messaging if there are threats and intimidation when voting begins. But reducing fear is also about presenting voters with options, like early voting, which can increase turnout without voters going directly to polling places.

“On the proactive side, we’re making sure people early vote and vote by mail,” Razo told me. “As an organization that works across various states on vote-by-mail campaign strategy, our work is around ‘How do we bolster that?’”

Robinson put it more plainly: “Our people are already counting on the fact that ICE and armed people are coming to the polls; we’re already prepared for that because Trump can only hold power without respect for constitutional norms.” He says that his main message to black voters is simple: “Assholes are working to try to create fear at the polls, but they can’t stop you. Do your shit and get out.”

This type of work could make a profound difference in overcoming potential efforts to suppress the vote. But it’s also grunt work—the kind of necessary but not flashy labor that doesn’t always garner national attention or the support of big-moneyed donors. They have, so far, been reluctant to give.

Razo’s group, like others that exist at the crossroads of Latino voting and immigration, still need financial support to help fund their work. When I wrote about the topic last year, I found that immigration groups were yelling from the rooftops that democracy-defense initiatives intersected with the urgent immigration work. It was also clear that progressive donors were gun-shy about publicly challenging Trump on immigration (his strong suit at the time) out of fear of drawing the administration’s wrath.

Razo and others are still waiting for those donors to get off the sidelines—since ICE itself is clearly ready to engage.

“Investing in our communities is investing in democracy for the long run,” she said. “Latino issues are everyone’s issues.”

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SEVEN MONTHS AGO, the Florida detention center nicknamed, with equal parts triumphalism and cruelty, “Alligator Alcatraz” was all the rage. The Department of Homeland Security was hailing the abominable new prison as the first of many and proudly announcing a “Speedway Slammer” in Indiana and a “Cornhusker Clink” in Nebraska. But now the alliteratively named detention centers are facing a massive backlash, because it turns out that the public cares much more about rampant child abuse than a catchy name.

The online celebration of 5-year-old Liam Ramos’s release from a detention center in Dilley, Texas was tempered by the awareness that many other kids remain trapped in terrible conditions, often with their entire families. Public pressure has helped to free some of them—Mariela Sobrero Chillitupa and her three children, for example, were released last weekend—but the harsh reality is that many more children are still inside, coping with inadequate food, unsanitary conditions, and the rapid spread of disease.

A two-month old baby, Juan Nicolás, had recently been detained with his mother. While in detention, Juan developed a persistent cough that grew worse on Valentine’s Day.

After the fragile newborn started throwing up and choking on Monday, his mother told Univision journalist Lidia Terrazas, he was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance. There, he briefly became unresponsive. Doctors diagnosed Juan with bronchitis, according to Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), who has been advocating for the baby and his family.

Juan was discharged from the hospital a few hours after arriving Monday night, and Tuesday morning his mother was told by an immigration judge that she would be deported; she was not told when or where. Juan was sent back to Dilley, but the situation was so chaotic that it was unclear to Castro and other advocates where the baby actually was. They received their answer Tuesday night, when the Nicolás family’s attorney confirmed that Juan, his sixteen-month-old sister, and his parents had been deported to Mexico with only their commissary money, which totaled $190.1

Castro called the decision to deport a sick baby and his family “monstrous” and said it was possible the family was subjected to backlash for speaking to the media about their situation and advocating for their baby.

“It’s also possible they [federal immigration agents] know the baby is in bad health, and they don’t want to be responsible for what may happen to him in their care, so they deport them,” Castro told me.

The San Antonio congressman has been at the center of the fight to get kids released from Dilley. He met with Liam and his father, whom he personally escorted back to Minnesota following their release, and also pushed for DHS to free 7-year-old Maria Isabella and her mother, asylum seekers from Venezuela. Castro said when it comes to their journey to America, the pair “did it the right way” and “followed all of the rules.” Maria Isabella, whose asthma had been worsening at the detention center, was released with her mom just ahead of her eighth birthday on Monday; they spent the special day together at home with her dad and grandmother.

FOR EVERY HIGH-PROFILE CASE that gets attention from the media (including this newsletter), there are untold other abuses that aren’t yet known—and may never be. Castro told me his office also advocated for a 12-year-old girl who made a sexual-assault claim; she was recently released back into Texas with her mother.

Too many people—including children—are being caught up in the immigration dragnet for the government to quash all their stories, and time and time again, cases that have been brought out of the darkness and into the spotlight have led to

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LIAM RAMOS WAS THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG. Dilley Immigration Processing Center, the facility from which 5-year-old Liam and his father were discharged on February 1, is a place where many other children are still being detained. Their stories are almost too much to bear.

There was the 18-month-old baby, Amalia, who was suffering from respiratory failure and was rushed to the hospital, where she spent much of the next ten days on oxygen. Upon release, federal officers took her right back into detention at Dilley, words that boggle the mind to write, and there she was denied daily medication prescribed after her hospital visit, according to a new lawsuit filed last week. Amalia and her family were finally released last Friday in response to an emergency habeas petition, but for many families in similar situations, there is no clarity about when they or their children might leave, or under what conditions.

Carmen Ayala, an aide to Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), has been in contact with many of the detainees at Dilley, as well as with their families. She told me about Valery, a 13-year-old who attempted self harm at Dilley with a knife from the cafeteria.

Valery’s family arrived at Dilley on December 13, one day after they were detained near their home in South Florida. The family fled Colombia for the United States because the father was sexually abusing the two daughters, aged 8 and 13, Ayala was told by the girl’s family. But after the asylum claim for Valery’s family was denied in January, they faced deportation.

“It was a sense of hopelessness,” Ayala said of Valery’s suicide attempt. “They’ve been in there for months, she’s depressed and wants to get out. She saw no way of getting out, she thinks she’ll be there forever, and that was her way out.”

Crockett’s office received a privacy waiver from the family and has opened a congressional inquiry to advocate on the family’s behalf. When I asked why Valery’s treatment for self-harm seems to be exclusively a prescription for sleeping pills, ICE did not respond.

THEN THERE IS THE CASE of Mariela Sobrero Chillitupa, 31, who was in the hospital for a few days in December for tests to determine if she had breast cancer. The tests weren’t conclusive, so her doctors called for a biopsy in the new year to know for sure. Mariela wanted to delay biopsy until after a court date she had scheduled for January 14. She didn’t think it would be anything major. She spent the night in a hotel with her three children, aged 2, 8, and 11, and had breakfast with her sister-in-law the next day. They said their goodbyes and Mariela told her sister-in-law to wait nearby, it would likely only be two hours. Later, however, she received a call: “We’ve been detained, don’t wait for us.”

Her sister-in-law, Mari, who asked to be identified by only her first name, said that Mariela has complained to her about her deteriorating health and treatment inside Dilley.

“Mari, they don’t give me my medication, only when they want,” Mari says Mariela told her, adding that her breast “gets hard like a rock,” and she is only given her medication when the nurse arrives. If the nurse doesn’t come, she doesn’t get her medication. Ayala was also told by Mariela that her breast is turning beet red. She told Mari that a week ago she asked a guard to give her fussy 2-year-old to his father, who is also in detention, because her breast was causing her so much pain; she was told “No, you have to keep him, he can’t be with his father.”

DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin did not respond to specific questions about Mariela’s treatment, why her medication has been withheld, whether she will be allowed to seek outside medical attention, or if she will be released given her medical condition. She said only, “That doesn’t sound right but we’ll run this down,” before asking for identifying numbers for the children, which I provided.

ICE did not respond to questions about operations inside Dilley. For example, why can’t Mariela pass her 2-year-old to his father when she is in pain? And what is being done to follow up on the biopsy ordered during those inconclusive tests in December?

Mari told me she can’t understand why people like Mariela are being treated this way.

“As a Latina . . . and as a mother, it worries me more the situation for the mothers because they’re in there with their kids suffering, but they have to hold in the pain to protect their kids,” she said in Spanish, adding that her 2-year-old nephew doesn’t understand where he is and is getting aggressive in a way that he never was before.

“I think the conditions and the suffering is inhumane and they shouldn’t be going through that. They should have respect because of the kids. Adults, we can suffer, but the kids don’t deserve to be treated this way,” she said.

She called for Dilley to be shuttered. “It’s inhumane and they should let Mariela come home with her children.”

AS I WROTE THIS NEWSLETTER on Thursday, Ayala told me of a promising new development for Mariela. The court gave her more time, until March 10, to fight to remain in the United States, but unfortunately, they ignored the medical records she brought with her. The judge said that there is nothing he can do regarding her medical issues and that the detention center is responsible for her treatment.

Sadly, these stories aren’t outliers—they are more common than we’d like to admit. ProPublica reported this week that 3,500 detainees have been at Dilley since it reopened, and more than half of them have been minors. And while a legal settlement in effect since 1997 holds that children can be held in immigration detention for a maximum of twenty days, ProPublica determined that more than 300 kids have been at Dilley for longer than a month.

Letters from inside the facility, obtained by ProPublica, are unfailingly heartbreaking. Just like Liam Ramos, the kids who wrote them miss their friends and Happy Meals from McDonald’s. Susej Fernandez, 9, who was in Houston when she and her mom were detained, has had her opinion on the United States forever changed. “I have been 50 days in Dilley Immigration Processing Center,” she wrote. “Seen how people like me, immigrants are been treated changes my perspective about the U.S. My mom and I came to The U.S looking for a good and safe place to live.”

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A window inside Dilley from a former employee

A FORMER DILLEY EMPLOYEE who served in the U.S. armed forces spoke to me—on condition of anonymity—about what they witnessed inside the facility. They said they took the job because it paid the most in the area, and they had been led to believe there were only women in the facility. They soon realized the unsettling truth: Not just women but entire families were detained inside, including children and even newborn babies. This former employee struggled daily with what they saw, being politically opposed to ICE and what the Trump administration is doing, but rationalized their involvement as a way to help those in detention—to counterbalance the fact that almost everyone else who works there “is for Trump, is for ICE.”

Of the food, which has been described as overly seasoned and “nasty,” the former Dilley employee explained that one day detainees receive chicken, another day beef, and every few days, they get hot dogs.

“They’re tired of it, that’s why they’re saying it’s nasty,” they told me.

They said when people go for medical attention—because they’re vomiting, for instance—more often than not they’re just given Tylenol or Advil.

“All the kids are sick. I’ve never gotten sick before, but when I worked there I was always sick,” they said.

It’s hard for the children to sleep because the lights are always on in the rooms.

“They’re treated like they’re criminals, but most of them have done it the right way—they were picked up at their court appointments,” the source added. “People complain that they’re doing it the ‘wrong way,’ but when they do it the right way, you detain and deport them, so it’s a lose-lose situation.”

And forget about the twenty-day detention limit for minors and little ones. The former employee said they know a mother who has been there 130 days. That woman’s 11-year-old daughter has been with her the whole time, and her depression has gotten bad enough that she won’t eat.

“They’re all sad,” the source said. “They’re locked in there sad and depressed.”

I asked the former employee to say a few words about how they’ve been doing since they left the job. They said seeing how things are on the inside has forever changed them.

“This isn’t what I fought for [while in the military]. . . . I have PTSD as it is. Now adding this, I can barely sleep, thinking about those families,” they said.

They said “100 percent” Dilley should be shut down and the children should be sent home.

“Kids shouldn’t be going through this,” the former employee said. “If I knew this was happening, if I knew it was really like this, I wouldn’t have served.”

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FORCED TO GO THROUGH an unimaginably terrifying ordeal, 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, Adrian Conejo Arias, were finally released from a Texas detention center 1,200 miles from home last Saturday. After Liam was reunited with his now-famous bright blue bunny hat and Spider-Man bookbag, he had a request. He asked for papitas—french fries. That’s how he ended up with a Happy Meal from a McDonald’s down the road from the Dilley facility where he had spent over a week in federal detention. ICE’s use of the little boy as bait to lure out his father and other family members to be detained sparked nationwide outrage and contributed to the intense scrutiny of the actions of federal forces in Minneapolis.

Liam’s return to his family is a rare example of a positive outcome for a person targeted by DHS. I wanted to get the full story, so I contacted Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), who was instrumental in getting Liam released.

Through luck or fate, Castro had already requested to visit the Dilley facility along with Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), giving the required seven days’ notice, before Liam was taken by DHS. But when he saw the now-iconic photo of the scared little boy being loaded into a vehicle by masked agents, he felt he needed to act.

“When I saw him and the cap and the backpack, I just thought, ‘I can do something about this, I’m already scheduled to go there,’” he told me. His visit date was Wednesday, January 28.

Castro and his staff prepared for a week. They were going to visit with Liam and Adrian, but they wanted to be prepared to talk to other detainees. They ended up speaking to hundreds of parents and young people.

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Dilley is a small rural town in Texas, and Castro estimates that 90 percent of the ICE staff, including administrative workers and career people, are Mexican American. Upon entering the facility, he and Crockett and their staffers were taken to a makeshift courtroom and given a brief overview of how the facility works. Castro said staff told him that they’ve been at the facility for years and have enacted the policies of each administration, whether it was Obama, Trump during his first term, Biden, or now Trump again. “That’s how they justify being part of this whole system,” he said.

Crockett asked a staffer who said he had been there under the Biden administration whether he had seen a difference in the way the facility had been run under different administrations. That’s when Carmen Ayala, a bilingual staffer who accompanied Crockett for the visit, saw one of the man’s colleagues frantically signaling “to shut up and not answer the question” by covering his mouth with his hand, she later told me.

The group was taken to the medical facility, which they were told was closed that day because of a public protest a couple days prior where parents had yelled “Libertad!” demanding the children be released. The group then walked through the commissary before heading to see Liam. When the detained mothers and fathers heard Ayala ask a question of staff in Spanish, they crowded close to her and Crockett, telling stories of their treatment, and of food and water that were “nasty,” Ayala told me.

As I wrote last week, Castro noticed that Liam didn’t seem okay; the boy was reportedly sleeping a lot and possibly depressed. When Ayala walked over after speaking with several women about their treatment, Crockett leaned in. “Carmen, I don’t even have to speak Spanish to know something is wrong with that baby. Come with me to translate so I can ask questions,” she said.

They learned from Adrian that Liam’s medical care since arriving at Dilley amounted to one meeting with nurses that lasted just two or three minutes, where the only questions they asked him were about how much he was eating and sleeping. Adrian shared with the visitors that Liam was sad, missed his mother, and wanted to go back to school.

The next day, Castro requested another visit to Dilley for a week later, but he received a response that a measles outbreak at the facility meant everything would be shut down until February 14. News of the outbreak added an urgency to Castro’s work to free the child: The highly contagious disease was like a ticking time bomb for Liam, Adrian, and everyone else at the facility.

Then on Saturday, some news broke on the legal front. U.S. District Judge Fred Biery ordered Liam and his father released, angrily chastising “the government’s ignorance of an American historical document called the Declaration of Independence.”

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The judge maintained this fiery register throughout the opinion. The case of the young boy was born of “the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children,” Biery wrote, adding:

Observing human behavior confirms that for some among us, the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency. And the rule of law be damned.

Biery concluded his opinion in a highly unusual way. Below his signature, he included the widely circulated photo of Liam in the bunny hat being held by a federal agent, and below that, two citations from scripture: Matthew 19:14 (“Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these”) and John 11:35 (“Jesus wept”).

Bringing Liam Home

CASTRO WAS IN AUSTIN on Saturday, January 31, for an afternoon rally with Texas state Rep. James Talarico and others when he heard from Liam’s legal team. They were asking if Castro’s office could facilitate picking Liam and his father up at Dilley. Castro offered to do it himself, and soon he was driving the two and a half hours it takes to get from Austin to Dilley.

Castro was met by Dilley Mayor Alexandria Inocencio and six police officers—the town’s entire PD. “They were kind to [Liam], they gave him a cross and a trinket,” Castro said. It was then that Liam and his father were asked what they wanted to eat. Liam got his Happy Meal before heading to San Antonio.

Castro, who represents the city, called longtime friends he knew had a spare guesthouse, and within a few hours, Liam and his father were settled for the night. Castro picked them up again at 4:30 a.m. the next day to take them to the airport for their flight back to Minneapolis. They were escorted by San Antonio police. The pilot for their flight home gave Liam a tour of the cockpit and a pair of junior pilot wings. It was an early morning flight, so the other travelers were slow to realize who Liam and his father were. That changed after ABC News journalist John Quiñones started taking video of their return home.

With the big problems in the rearview, only smaller problems remained. Castro didn’t take a jacket or coat to Minnesota, wearing only his suit and congressional pin, and you can see him grinning and bearing it in a photo taken on the tarmac after the group landed and met up with a coated and scarfed Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who represents the area where Liam and Adrian live.

Castro had a ticket for an immediate return flight back home; he hoped to be able to make it to his son’s 11:30 a.m. birthday party. He dropped off Liam and Adrian at a fire department, where Liam’s mother thanked him on FaceTime. Castro then said his farewells to the father and son whose story had captured the hearts of a nation. After giving Liam a hug, he raced back to the airport. In the end, he made his son’s birthday party just in time.

Meanwhile, back in Dilley, there are plenty more Liams. “All these parents, with TVs in the rooms, they all heard stories of Liam and how he got out, so they want the same thing for their kids,” Ayala told me. She says that family members have been texting her photos of their young relatives and asking her, “Please put them up online so people can see.”

They want their kids released, too.

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WHEN DON LEMON WAS ARRESTED after reporting on the aggressive protest of a church whose pastor allegedly works for ICE, the Trump administration claimed that Lemon and another journalist present at the event had violated federal laws meant, in part, to shield churches from having their services disrupted.

The administration’s message was clear: Disrupting church services and taking away the right of others to worship freely and in peace is unconscionable. How dare protesters infringe on those congregants’ First Amendment rights! Who would do such a thing?

Well, one of the first things this White House did after Donald Trump’s second inauguration was to rescind the 2021 guideline that required CBP and ICE agents to do everything in their power to avoid conducting operations in or near “protected areas” like churches, hospitals, and schools.

It wasn’t long before agents were showing up at just those sorts of places in the apparent hope of surprising their targets. And over the past year of increasingly cruel immigration enforcement actions, a hallmark of the administration’s deportation campaign has been operating close to formerly “protected” areas to create an atmosphere of anxiety—one that has kept worshipers, documented and not, from attending church services for fear of being grabbed and disappeared to a detention center in another state without access to counsel or family. (This, it’s worth mentioning, is precisely the outcome the rescinded 2021 guidance was intended to prevent.)

According to a multi-bylined story in the National Catholic Reporter published late last year, DHS hadn’t yet raided a church building, “but immigration agents have arrested immigrants on or near church property in at least a dozen instances so far” following the administration’s move to end the protected areas policy.

ICE leadership recognizes that this is a delicate matter and has insisted that it is operating out of respect for places of worship.

“You could take the NYPD, they’re not going to go ahead and target a church or synagogue, we’re not going to do the same thing,” the agency’s acting director, Todd Lyons, told CBS News. “If we’re in a pursuit of a criminal alien or a felon and they run into a hospital or a church, we’re going to continue that pursuit. Nothing’s off the table when it comes to that. But we’re not actively targeting schools, we’re not actively targeting hospitals. That’s just—no law enforcement agency would do that, we don’t do that.”

But the public utterances don’t match the actual record. According to faith leaders, organizers, and reporting on the ground in recently targeted cities such as Chicago and Minneapolis, the administration has conducted a variety of actions on church properties in the cities they have singled out for DHS’s paramilitary occupations.

Let me take you back to Los Angeles last summer. On June 6, agents started tackling landscapers and chasing street vendors alleged to have been making dangerously delicious hot dogs and Mexican food, eliciting intense protests; the next day, Trump signed a memorandum deploying the National Guard to the city to protect federal agents, and on June 8, the troops started heading to L.A. Things continued to escalate. By June 11, federal agents were surrounding a man in the parking lot of Downey Memorial Christian Church, even pointing a long gun at a pastor. Then, on June 20, two Catholic churches in San Bernardino County became backdrops to scenes of fear and despair: Agents took a longtime parishioner near Our Lady of Lourdes Church, while other agents chased men into the parking lot of St. Adelaide Church and detained them there.

Days later, Iranian asylum-seekers were arrested in L.A., adding to the number of churchgoers taken into immigration detention despite having lawful status. A Christianity Today piece titled “ICE Goes After Church Leaders and Christians Fleeing Persecution” described how a pastor was called by two members of his church, a husband-and-wife couple, because CBP agents were going to take the husband. The wife collapsed and began to convulse on the ground; she appeared to be experiencing a panic attack. Agents barred the pastor from approaching her to give her comfort.

The pastor told the agents the couple had come to America to flee religious persecution in Iran. Terrible things could happen to them if they were deported back.

“They came here for freedom, not like this,” the pastor said. “I know you are doing your job, but shame on you. Shame on this government.”

Actions like these—operating aggressively outside churches and often targeting churchgoers—has left a deep mark on faith communities across the nation.

“You ever been in a living room with a family who’s very, very deeply committed to Christ and can’t go to church for a month, and that’s their community? And faith is what sustains them,” Rev. Dr. Gabriel Salguero, president of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition, told CBS News. “They’re telling you in the living room with tears in their eyes, ‘Pastor, I want to go, but I’m too afraid.’ What do you do?”

Similar actions by agents were reported in Chicago and in Charlotte.

In October, in the Rogers Park area, ICE agents stopped a man in front of St. Jerome Catholic Church as a Spanish-language Mass was going on inside.

“I think they’ve been casing the church,” a bystander told the local news, noting that the church’s Mass schedule was publicly posted. She added that parishioners were terrified to walk outside after the service concluded that day.

In Charlotte, a May operation at Central United Methodist Church on the east side of the city brought armed agents to the church’s grounds at preschool pickup time, alarming the community. Right before Christmas, Charlotte was again rocked when a community member was taken at a Casa de Dios church event. Video recorded by the pastor showed congregants who had fled inside the church when the agents approached; children huddled together anxiously, and one woman openly wept.

While she doesn’t lead a predominantly Latino church, Rev. Sadie Lansdale, minister for the Unitarian Universalist Church in Greensboro, said her congregants have been “emotionally and financially affected,” by the administration’s crack downs. She noted that government support for health care coverage had been cut dramatically while funds were “going into terrorizing our neighbors.”

In Minneapolis, where another pastor had a gun pointed at him by federal agents, church grounds have been targeted since ICE and CBP invaded the city. Evangelical pastor Doug Pagitt of Vote Common Good helped me get a sense for how deeply local churches have been affected by immigration enforcement actions in the city.

“A week ago, eight to ten churches asked for clergy to come and provide support to create a protective band so people could come to church, because dark-skinned people are afraid to come to church,” he told me, noting that churches that used to have 300 to 800 people on Sundays now routinely see small groups of just 50 to 75 people.

Pagitt shared with me his own view of the situation involving Lemon and the church protesters the administration had condemned.

“The idea that they want to protect people’s freedom to worship and yet sit outside and specifically target their churches in the sixty days since they’ve been here goes against their argument,” he said.

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