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Listen to NPR News Now on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Mike Sharasko and this is Sunday Story from Up First, where we go beyond the news of the day to bring you one big story. President Trump campaigned on a promise of nasty quotations. And since he took office in January, agents from immigration and customs enforcement also known as ICE have been increasing detention to try to meet that goal.
And July, Congress approved $170 billion for immigration and border enforcement. $75 billion of which will go directly to ICE. It's the most money the US government has ever invested in detention and deportation. And it makes ICE the highest funded law enforcement agency in the federal government.
All this prompted our friends over NPR's through line podcasts to take a look back at the history of ICE from the original intent of the agency to its evolution as a law enforcement powerhouse. The episode features two people who spent decades working on opposite sides of the immigration system. I think there's a to keep us system fair. It has to be well regulated.
Roger Werner is currently employed by the Department of Homeland Security. He's worked there since the department was created in 2003 and he was a founding member of ICE. He's also the co-author of the book, The History and Evolution of Homeland Security in the United States. The views he expresses are his own.
He's not speaking as representative of the government. They also talk to Peter Markowitz. My professor at Carter's School Law in New York City. Markowitz founded the Catherine O' Greenberg Immigration Justice Clinic, where he defends immigrants facing deportation and works on policy.
In the through line episode, Werner and Markowitz take listeners through the fascinating history of ICE, starting from his origins as the immigration and naturalization service or the INS, stretching back into the 20th century. And they also explore the question of what's changed in 2025 since the Trump administration took office. We're going to play that final part of the episode about what's changed over the past year. But I strongly recommend that you check out the full episode of the through line podcasts because it offers critical historical context for the moment we're now in.
We'll be back with through line hosts, Run to Abdale, Fatah, who will pick up the story at the beginning of 2025. They have three words for him. Jack and all. You must see a picture of that.
Shock and all. That is how Tom home in kickoff the Trump administration's second term approach to deportation. President Trump is put into a mass deportation campaign. Immigration rates are up all across the country.
Thousands of national guard troops and hundreds of Marines have been called to all Angeles by President Trump. Agents often armed wearing plain clothes and masks are showing up at places where Latino workers aren't known together. Hardware store parking lots, carwashes, street vendors corners, and rounding them up. They grab people with bus stops or drag them out of their cars.
For the past few months, it's felt like Americans are seeing ICE everywhere. It's been hard to scroll Instagram or TikTok without hitting a video of workers and hair nuts at a me packing plant being heard into a break room by ICE agents. A woman crying as she's putting to a white truck, a black ice fan, celebrating as a group of protesters, which is against the hood. Some of the videos are posted by ICE itself.
The ICE agents faces are blurred. The people they're detaining are not immigration attorney and law professor Peter Markowitz says this moment, what he's seen unfolding online and in his own work, is unlike anything he's experienced in ICE's history. The examples I might point to are like the deployment of non-emoration agents, national guard, other military law enforcement agencies in sweeping heavy-handed, very visible manner. So that is something that is unfamiliar to me in what I've seen immigration enforcement in the time that I've been doing this work and really many time in my lifetime.
Since the start of President Trump's second term, ICE is averaging more than 600 immigration arrests every day. In some states, that's more than double the usual amount. The government attorney, say there's no quota. Trump's F.H.G.
of Staff's Stephen Miller has said a goal of 3,000 intentions per day. That would mean a total of more than 1 million arrests every year. The repercussions are rippling out globally. In March, the Trump administration sent hundreds of immigrants to an notorious facility in El Salvador.
And in July, it deported eight immigrants who had been convicted of crimes in the U.S. to South Sudan. Only one of them was from there. Peter Markowitz says that as far back as its creation, some of ICE's work has always been about optics.
And this is where historian indeed has employee Roger Werner agrees. Speaking as a researcher and private citizen, he argues that the taming immigrants at such high rates and even reporting them to countries they have no attachment to could be a powerful deterrent. I recommend you all go to the South West Board of Sondra. I imagine walking 15 miles like an old lady or a kid 50 miles.
Wow. But that doesn't that transmit a level of desperation on their part? That's what it also is. The amount of risk you would take.
You put your kid through that. One thing about now going across is saying, I'm saying, I'm saying, I'm going to get here. I can totally understand that. Putting a four-year-old child, maybe in the hands of a smuggling organization or partelebase, these people are absolutely brutal.
I hear you. I guess in my mind, I'm like, I have a two-year-old. But I think about it. I'm like, what would compel me to ever put him in that situation.
It would be things have gotten so bad in my presence or consensus. That's just how in my brain, that's how it works. Right. I feel like you also have to say, is the risk worth of reward?
I mean, are you likely to remain in the United States? That's the real driver. The driver isn't that, you know, we're even a risk your children. It's, are you going to be there?
There's something worth it on the other side. Yeah. If you show and say, and we're talking through a record here, I was not involved in this operation. I show and say, hey, you're not going to be logged into my window.
Would you sell everything and try? No. You would look for another alternative. We asked Ice about this.
A statement for my response to our questions read in part, quote, it's about anyone would even question a nation's decision to enforce laws enacted by Congress to deter crime, end quote. Be or Marco, it says, off the side, he's noticed two other major changes in Ice's operations. The first has to do with the judicial process. When cases go to court.
If you go to the immigration court at 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan, where I often represent clients, what is happening there is different than what I have ever seen before. The agency is moving to terminate cases, which normally if you're representing the termination of the agency, but the plan here is to bypass the immigration courts and to use extra judicial mechanisms to deport people. So they can use a mechanism called expedited removal. And it's a mechanism where I say it's to act as a judge jury and executioner.
They don't need any immigration judge. And there's very little federal court review available in agent kind of to turn it on the round that this person is going to be deported with almost no due process. And so they move to terminate these cases. So the purpose of using that alternative mechanism, not the same effect as the immigration judge, has a process underway and the person is fully compliant with that process.
This is happening around the country. A statement from Ice in response to our questions read in part, quote, ice is now following the law and placing these illegal aliens in expedited removal as they always should have been. If they have a valid credible fear claim, they will continue in immigration proceedings. But if no valid claim is found, aliens will be subject to a swift deportation.
End quote. Since ISIS detention numbers again, throughout the increase, there have been reports of overcrowding, poor sanitation and lack of food at ice detention centers. Peter says all of this is happening at places where conditions were poor to begin with. Have you ever been to one of those facilities?
Many times. What is it like, you know, inside one of those facilities? It is indistinguishable from the jail some prisons. I've also routinely visited.
In fact, sometimes they're exactly the same facilities. You know, there are medical care of the poorest quality. People routinely die in immigration detention because of inadequate medical care. There's a couple of big private prison companies that are managed to manage the majority of these.
And they're profit-moders sometimes. You have to pay for things like soap or pay for things like toothpaste. And so, it is really kind of the most minimal provisions that are provided to folks. We'll be right back with more of the realign conversation about the history and evolution of ice with run to have the alpha-top.
The second major change, Peter's scene since the beginning of President Trump's second term is money. The one big beautiful bill is directing more than 175 billion dollars to immigration enforcement. If you leave out the US and China, that's more than any country in the world spends on its military in a year. Ice alone is set to get 75 billion dollars of that money.
Roger says American voters are the ones who decided what our immigration enforcement system looks like when they cast their votes for president. Peter says the new funding complicates that. I think it is really difficult even for me. And I spend all day long thinking about this stuff to wrap my head around and what that's going to look like on American streets to be clear 75 billion to be spent over several years.
We know they're going to build a ton of immigration detention. The scale of detention is going to be astronomical. They're going to have massive physical presence of militarized agents on the streets. I anticipate that's going to be coming to the norm.
I anticipate that we're going to be seeing checkpoints, you know. And so, I fear that level of funding is so out of scale with what it's coming for that we are at real risk of kind of becoming a police state. And we've already seen that ice doesn't have to be moving in assistance when it perceives the need to do so. So I think increasingly people are going to feel that in a very, very kind of this way.
What does that mean for the agency to have that kind of influx of funding? A lot of responsibility, I would say, for my historical perspective. To spend American taxpayers on wisely. Make sure that they're getting the best use of their money.
And it's not wasted. It's a big responsibility without a amount of money coming into an agency quickly that, you know, I hope historically the right thing is done with it. You know, that serves with American people, the interest of the United States, and the people that are taken in the custody. You know, they deserve the rights that are available to them under the walls of Congress as passed.
But in spite of all the money heading ice is way and the responsibility that comes with it. Roger doesn't think this moment is fundamentally different from the rest of ice's history. Or for that matter, INS is. This is nothing out of the ordinary.
None of this has been out of the ordinary of the years. It's been a result of funding and congressional and executive and political support. And largely driven by the American people. This comes in ways about every 30 years with our immigration policy.
We become two generous and people feel that we're being taken advantage of. So they're now a more firm hand or more thorough examination of things. There's always a pendulum swing. But there is.
You do have to have a deterrent because we can absorb everybody inside the United States. So it depends on where you sit on the issue is how you're going to judge that. You know, if you think we should let anybody then, you know, but that's not what the majority of the American public believe it. So that's not where the polls are.
They want some degree of immigration force. But that looks like that's always a, you know, that's that pendulum swing back and forth. Peter disagrees. He says, if you look at current polls, you'll see that most Americans actually oppose the kind of immigration enforcement that's being carried out by ice today.
And he worries that we've entered an area where ice is amassing more and more power. And he feels like the checks on that power are disappearing. In the first Trump administration, you know, there were, you know, institutional players in the White House and DOJ and DHS. You know, said, wait, wait, wait, wait, we have to follow the law.
Those people are all gone. Like there are no internal checks going on anymore. Beyond that, what are the other checks? The immigration courts are already encouraged, right?
Anybody who is not kind of aligned is being pushed out. What I hoped was that the Supreme Court may actually provide some kind of check against the most extreme examples. And with one or two notable exceptions, that is really not been the case, right? Over and over again, they're letting them remove people to countries they have never come from or had any connection to.
They're allowing the revocation of hundreds of thousands of TPS holders status, as well as their stripping hundreds of thousands of people of humanitarian protection. So the Supreme Court is no backup either. And so no internal backup, no immigration court backup, no Supreme Court backup. We are in a really, really, really precarious place in the country.
I've been part of the listeners that you really have to understand that the men who work for these agencies, especially in racial customs enforcement, have dedicated their life to public service. How home and keep saying, just wait, just wait, we're just getting started. And I believe to hear the full episode, you can find through line wherever you get your podcasts, there you can also check out the rest of the lines of recent immigration series. This episode was produced by Brenda Abdale Fattah and Sarah Weinman, with help from the rest of the through line team.
It was edited by Casey Meiner. Andrew Mambo produces episode of the Sunday story. The rest of the Sunday story team includes Jenny Schmidt, Justin Gann, Thomas Coltrane, Eliana Semstrom. I executive producer is Irene Macouchi.
I'm Eisir Roscoe and up first. We'll be back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, have a great rest of your weekend.