Trump’s ICE shakeup

Speaker 1 President Trump's immigration crackdown has already sown anger and confusion.

Speaker 2 This guy in the glasses kicked his gun out and cleared innocent bystanders right there.

Speaker 4 Some in the community say the tactics are too aggressive. Video taken last weekend shows agents using tear gas at a Halloween parade.

Speaker 1 But here's the thing: the White House thinks this doesn't go nearly far enough.

Speaker 7 You're okay with those tactics.

Speaker 8 Yeah, because you have to get the people out, you know.

Speaker 1 President Trump is shaking things up with ice, and he's doing so with an explicit goal.

Speaker 6 More arrests, more deportations, more chaos.

Speaker 10 While the next phase of Trump's immigration agenda could be even more dramatic than the previous ones.

Speaker 1 That's coming up on Today Explained from Box.

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Speaker 15 This is Today Explain.

Speaker 16 I'm Andrew Prokop, Senior Politics Correspondent, Vox, covering all sorts of politics stuff.

Speaker 17 I'm pumped for us to be chatting.

Speaker 18 I feel like this is going to be the first of many in our future.

Speaker 16 Yes, I have a, I think I have the medal as the most frequent today explained guest.

Speaker 17 You know, I'm pumped to talk to you also because I think your story was so helpful.

Speaker 19 I particularly love the first line where you pointed out how ICE is a symbol to many Americans of Trump's callous treatment to immigrants.

Speaker 19 But of course, there's a big cohort, particularly on the right and in the White House, who think that ICE has not gone far enough when it comes to things like deportations.

Speaker 19 And then last week we had news of a big shake-up that the White House was doing when it comes to immigration enforcement. Can you take me through what that shake-up was and why is it happening?

Speaker 16 So what happened was essentially that

Speaker 16 several leaders of ICE field offices across the country got removed from their posts.

Speaker 16 And it became known, it leaked out, that Border Patrol officials were going to be moved into ICE to take over their jobs.

Speaker 16 And apparently they were, these ICE officials were at first going to be fired, but then due to intervention from some ICE leadership, they're just being reassigned to headquarters or something, but basically pushed out because

Speaker 16 the White House slash DHS powers that be think that they haven't been aggressive enough, they haven't been tough enough, and there's another agency, the Border Patrol, that has.

Speaker 16 And that agency is now being empowered more and more. And they're essentially trying to import its way of thinking and tactics into ICE, which has traditionally operated quite differently.

Speaker 19 So it seems as if, in the power rankings of immigration enforcement, ICE is down and the Border Patrol is up, at least in the White House's view.

Speaker 16 Yes, so there is this core difference between how these two agencies have long operated, which is that ICE, they prefer, as a matter of typical practice, to know who they are targeting in advance, at least somewhat, to have a name, a list of names, a workplace, to have information in advance about who those people are, what's happening at that workplace.

Speaker 16 Oh, there's unauthorized immigrants being employed there.

Speaker 16 So we should go in and do something about it. Border Patrol, you know, The term cowboy gets used a lot.
Like they're at the border. They view themselves as patrolling kind of

Speaker 16 chaotic, lawless area, just going out and looking for people who look suspicious.

Speaker 16 Because they, you know, by necessity, they don't have information on who the exact person is that they're seeing if they've just recently crossed the border.

Speaker 16 And so they have these more aggressive tactics that are just along the lines of just going out and trying to question people, to grab people, to detain people.

Speaker 21 Video shows federal agents striking a man in the head as they try to rescue him.

Speaker 21 Why are you doing this?

Speaker 16 You know, they're not the only ones using these tactics now, but these are the tactics that Border Patrol has used at the border that are now being imported into American cities and being used by a variety of agencies.

Speaker 13 Wait, that's not how you arrest him. Get on the ground.
That's not how you arrest.

Speaker 13 Get on the ground.

Speaker 19 It seems as if this is somewhat coming from the top down.

Speaker 19 What do we know about the debate happening within the White House and the kind of factions among different camps when it comes to immigration enforcement?

Speaker 16 Yeah, so it's basically a debate between the hardliners and the harder hardliners. You know,

Speaker 16 there's no squishy moderates around the Trump White House on this issue exactly. But

Speaker 16 so Stephen Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff.

Speaker 22 It is fundamental and essential to the idea of sovereignty and national survival to have control over who enters and doesn't enter the country.

Speaker 16 He is just infamous for in the first term and in this term, just constantly having meetings, calling up officials at agencies and chewing them out, saying, why aren't you arresting enough people?

Speaker 16 What are you doing to deport more people? And just like berating them until they do it, like sort of at risk of their jobs.

Speaker 16 Then at the Department of Homeland Security, you have at the top of it, Secretary Christy Noam.

Speaker 23 Just because you think you're here as a citizen, or because you're a member of a certain group, or you're not a citizen, it doesn't mean that you're going to be protected.

Speaker 16 And Corey Lewandowski.

Speaker 1 We will find you. We will apprehend you.

Speaker 8 We will put you in a detention facility.

Speaker 16 He's basically acting as Chrissy Noam's chief of staff, even though he doesn't have that title officially. But he is working with Noam, trying to

Speaker 16 implement

Speaker 16 their own version of the hardline DHS crackdown. And their main rival has been Tom Homan, the White House border Tsar.

Speaker 24 The governor and the mayor should be calm, President Trump, and thanking him for taking public safety threats off that street.

Speaker 16 And

Speaker 16 he was initially like the face of mass deportation. But Homan has been compromised a bit by the report that he accepted $50,000 in cash in a kava bag last year.

Speaker 25 It was from FBI agents posing as business executives in an undercover sting.

Speaker 26 Officials within the Trump administration saying the probe was politically motivated.

Speaker 16 But even before that,

Speaker 16 Christy Noam had soured on him, reportedly because she was annoyed he went on TV more than she did and was getting out in front of her at various TV announcements.

Speaker 16 So all sorts of high-minded policy concerns at work here in the Trump administration. But it all comes back to

Speaker 16 how

Speaker 16 Miller wants the mass deportations. Noam and Lewandowski also want to look tough.
And they have really

Speaker 16 fixated upon, oh, maybe Border Patrol can do what we think ICE can't or won't do.

Speaker 16 Because there was a big turning point earlier this year in about May. Stephen Miller summoned various ICE officials to Washington and chewed them out and saying,

Speaker 16 you're taking too long. You're too slow.
You're not arresting enough people. You're not doing enough.
And then he asked the question specifically, why aren't you going to Home Depot?

Speaker 16 He said, why aren't you going to 7-Eleven? That's when we saw this real new phase of immigration enforcement start in Los Angeles. And we're seeing it now in Chicago, especially.

Speaker 16 Those are the two most high-profile cases, but they are in some form like rolling it out in other cities or preparing to roll it out in other cities.

Speaker 16 This is the more aggressive street patrols, highly militarized, lots of like,

Speaker 16 you know, they're making all these videos about how tough they look going around the city.

Speaker 16 And a lot of that is from Border Patrol.

Speaker 16 ICE has become the shorthand for Trump's immigration crackdown, but

Speaker 16 most of the viral videos that

Speaker 16 show these really aggressive or outrageous tactics, probably most of them are Border Patrol.

Speaker 19 You've mentioned the Chicago and LA incidents as I think the immigration enforcement raids that have garnered the most attention.

Speaker 19 And your story points out one CBP officer, Gregory Bovino, who's pretty emblematic of their tactics overall, and that was at the center of those operations.

Speaker 10 Can you tell me about him?

Speaker 16 Yes, Bovino was a longtime Border Patrol agent who

Speaker 16 was

Speaker 16 higher up in the El Centro, California area. And he kind of led this Los Angeles crackdown, which was the first big post, why aren't we going to Home Depot operation.

Speaker 29 When someone steps in the way, then that may not, again, that may not work out well for them.

Speaker 29 And if we need to effect an arrest of a U.S. citizen or anyone else, then we'll do that.

Speaker 16 The administration evidently really liked what it saw there. They've seen him, you know, deploy really tough tactics with protesters, especially.

Speaker 16 Bovino is actually seen throwing a tear gas canister personally at protesters.

Speaker 27 Possibly violating a judge's order.

Speaker 30 Border Patrol Commander Greg Bavino now must meet with a federal judge every day over tactics used by federal agents.

Speaker 16 A lot of the stuff that looks like racial profiling, that is basically what he's unleashed. And he has become the face of this.
He

Speaker 16 is just heavily featured, like always in his

Speaker 16 Border Patrol garb, looking tough, looking like walking around with

Speaker 16 his tough guy entourage.

Speaker 17 Yeah, Trump loves a tough guy performance. This guy is matching the bill.

Speaker 16 And

Speaker 16 they've been using this as,

Speaker 16 you know, all sorts of, you know, short form video from him set to like peppy music that like the MAGA bass loves.

Speaker 29 This is how and why we secure the homeland. For Ma and Pa America, we've got your backs, whether it's here in Sacramento or nationwide.
We're here and we're not going anywhere.

Speaker 16 They love the optics optics of this. So in a sense, Border Patrol is being empowered, first, because

Speaker 16 ICE wasn't hitting the numbers Miller wanted, but second, because they love the optics of Bovino being tough. And they think that the politics of that are good for them.

Speaker 16 That is a questionable assumption because these are also, you know, some of the most controversial things that Trump's crackdown has unleashed.

Speaker 16 But Miller and people in the White House, they have this gut sense that if it's between law enforcement and unauthorized immigrants, if it's between law enforcement and left-wing protesters, the public is ultimately going to side with law enforcement.

Speaker 16 And so that is kind of the bet they're making, and the MAGA base loves it too.

Speaker 1 Fox's Andrew ProCop.

Speaker 1 Coming up, we know what Trump thinks about immigration. What does the public think? And how has that changed since Trump has come back into office?

Speaker 1 That more coming up.

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Speaker 1 It's Today Explain, and I'm Estead Herndon. Recently, I've been curious about how the public is reacting to Trump's immigration raids.

Speaker 1 Because on the one hand, he promised all of this, and you could argue voters knew what they were signing up for. But now that they're seeing it in real life, is America having buyers' remorse?

Speaker 11 Molly O'Toole has covered immigration for years, most recently at the LA Times.

Speaker 1 And she says, Trump's got to leg up here because he's figured out something important.

Speaker 32 What Trump has done very effectively, and in particular the people around Trump, but Trump as a messenger very effectively, is shifted the entirety of the immigration conversation, the sort of political conversation, the American public's perception on immigration, shifted the entire thing to the right.

Speaker 32 Whereas if you look at the polling, you know, there actually is much more sort of bipartisan support

Speaker 32 for immigration and sort of broadly positive views on immigration writ large than you would think based on sort of the rhetoric that we've heard and also the the electoral successes, right?

Speaker 32 That the sort of MAGA Trump movement coming down the escalator and, you know, talking about crime and fear. Right.

Speaker 33 They're sending people that have lots of problems and they're bringing those problems with us.

Speaker 33 They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists, and some, I assume, are good people.

Speaker 32 Then again, on the other hand, obviously,

Speaker 32 instead of this sort of conversation about, okay, illegal immigration, bad, you know, refugees, asylum seekers, quote-unquote legal immigration good, which is sort of broadly speaking with a broad brush, how the debate kind of broke down before,

Speaker 32 but in the pre-Trump era.

Speaker 32 Now you just have all immigration bad.

Speaker 32 And there sort of is no immigration good sort of side of the ledger. And in that way, I think the Trump administration has been remarkably effective at sort of shifting the nature of the conversation.

Speaker 18 That speaks to something the Democrats have done over the last several years, which I think kind of agree with Trump's premise that this is an issue that needs to be kind of dealt with rather than kind of stepping out on their own affirmative vision.

Speaker 27 Is that how you have seen it?

Speaker 18 Is that what you're kind of saying in terms of the success of Donald Trump shifting the narrative broadly over the last eight years?

Speaker 34 There doesn't seem to be that counterbalancing force.

Speaker 32 Yeah, exactly. So, like, it.
Not only has it been like a fairly smart, concerted effort, you know, really over the last dozen years longer

Speaker 32 from people who, for whom this issue is like, is ideological and not just sort of politically strategic. Like, you know, the fear of the other.

Speaker 32 I mean, this has been one of the most like common tropes within American politics, you know, from the history of the country. Yeah.

Speaker 32 But I do think it's also, so there is a strategy there and it has been effective, but it's easier to shift the whole conversation to one side of the spectrum if there is is no counterbalance.

Speaker 10 There were two polls that recently came out. First was a New York Times Sienna poll that showed registered voters really disapprove of Trump's recent actions on immigration.

Speaker 9 And while they want mostly immigrants who come to this country illegally to be deported, they don't necessarily like what he's doing now.

Speaker 27 What is your reaction to this?

Speaker 12 Like, because it's kind of weird, right?

Speaker 19 Like voters wanting deportations, but not like this.

Speaker 32 So I think when you sort of get into the complexities of this, which people, you know, know, in political messaging, right, is not exactly known for its nuance.

Speaker 32 When you get into the complexities of what the legal barriers are, how much that would cost, how many American citizens are going to get swept up in the meantime, what civil rights, broadly speaking, might be eroded in order to achieve this goal, the billions upon billions of dollars that would be required.

Speaker 32 required in order to achieve some of these goals.

Speaker 32 When you start to get in the details of that and then also just see how this plays out in your community, I don't think that it might be one thing for, you know, a significant part of the American public to say, well, that sounds pretty good.

Speaker 32 Like let's remove, yeah, let's remove the criminals. Let's remove

Speaker 32 violent offenders.

Speaker 32 But because they shifted this conversation to all immigration bad, you know, the American voter was not making the distinction between, well, wait, actually, a lot of these actions are targeting people who have permission to be here.

Speaker 32 They're asylum seekers. They're not these scary sort of criminals that

Speaker 32 boogeymen that the Trump campaign was talking about. That's not who they're going.
That's not who they're going after.

Speaker 26 And while I do appreciate all the hard work that the ICE officers have been doing, taking the worst of the worst, it seems to become more aggressive recently.

Speaker 31 They said we're going to get rid of the criminals and the gang members first, right?

Speaker 31 And now we're seeing like Home Depots get raided.

Speaker 5 Like that's crazy.

Speaker 1 There was a Gallup poll this summer that really drove this hole for me.

Speaker 10 In 2024, 55% of people wanted to reduce all immigration, which I think is helpful to understand what was fueling Donald Trump's comeback.

Speaker 10 But this year, the same poll found that that number had dropped by almost half.

Speaker 18 Just 30% of people wanted to reduce all immigration.

Speaker 10 It seems as if now that Donald Trump is there, maybe the sentiment or the public effort has at least swung back to the other side.

Speaker 32 I mean, I think that poll is absolutely fascinating, but it's really hard to know what to attribute that to. Is it because people are like, great.

Speaker 32 You know, problem solved. Like, you know, numbers are way down at the border.

Speaker 5 New data obtained by CBS News shows unlawful crossings at the southern border are at the lowest level in 50 years.

Speaker 15 In Eagle Pass, Texas, during the Biden administration, more than 2,000 migrants crossed into the U.S. in a single day.

Speaker 15 But now, under President Trump's policies, officers encounter just 20 migrants a day here.

Speaker 32 Which is honestly that sort of whole, it kind of it's a very limited statistic when it actually comes to understanding what's going on in terms of broader migration trends.

Speaker 32 And it's actually a pretty limited statistic when it comes to even like measuring the effectiveness of U.S. policy, because that's at the tail end of people's journeys, right?

Speaker 32 So that's actually not telling you a lot.

Speaker 32 But it is the number that we do sort of tend to focus on.

Speaker 32 So so it's hard to know to what extent that that shift and really quite dramatic shift sort of back towards a pre-2021 um you know feeling on on immigration is that because people feel like okay well yep we looked at trump and he fixed it or does that have to do with this sort of um people seeing what those promises look like in practice and being like, wait a second, I didn't vote for that.

Speaker 10 Yeah, I signed up for deporting criminals.

Speaker 17 I didn't sign up for deporting. Exactly.

Speaker 32 So it's sort of hard to know to what to attribute that to. But I think there's a few other things that are really interesting about that.
I mean, I think the sort of...

Speaker 32 politics of fear of the other, while it is a very potent force in American politics, villainizing the immigrant and sort of blaming them, you know, for economic concerns, despite the fact that there's very limited data actually showing and broadly speaking, immigration being a sort of net benefit economically.

Speaker 32 So I think part of it is this,

Speaker 32 if you're going to come back to fear over and over and over and over and over and over again, I think some of the potency of that gets diluted, gets diminished.

Speaker 10 It seems as if the White House is pushing forward.

Speaker 9 We know that these kind of immigration ramp ups or even the images of these sweeps are important to people like Stephen Miller and Donald Trump.

Speaker 9 And we also know that there seems to be growing evidence that the public is liking it less and less and that Trump's actually actions on immigration are unpopular.

Speaker 12 Your normal politics brain would say, you know, isn't that a bad thing to do?

Speaker 20 There's midterm elections coming up. There's all these other things.

Speaker 9 Why do we think the Trump administration seems completely kind of removed from that sort of calculus?

Speaker 32 I do think that the Trump administration and the sort of Trump movement very effectively sort of used the media to really

Speaker 32 you know, suck up all the oxygen in the room, get all of the attention as a way to really magnify their sort of messaging.

Speaker 32 These memes that are being sent out by, you know, the Department of Homeland Security, a sort of taxpayer-funded Twitter account, right?

Speaker 32 We're seeing these memes that are pretty explicit in terms of this sort of nativist era of American politics that they're hearkening back to.

Speaker 32 You know, here's the historical roots of that. Here's why it's troubling.
Here's the fact check. Even when the media is doing that, the Trump administration doesn't really care, right?

Speaker 32 Like what they want is for that message to get out. And you're, but it's a great question.

Speaker 32 Like your politics brain would be like, don't they want to sort of be speaking to or being seen to represent the majority of people in this country? Like that's how you win elections, right?

Speaker 32 But I think that what we saw in 2016 and I think what we saw in 2024 is that that isn't necessarily how you win elections, right?

Speaker 32 You can can have a very impassioned vocal minority that can win an election, even if what they support is not necessarily what a majority of the American public supports.

Speaker 32 And so, I think the messaging, even though it seems counterintuitive, right? Like, that's who it's geared toward. Like, that's it's geared toward their die-hard supporters

Speaker 32 on the top level, I think.

Speaker 32 And then I think there's another level on which it's operating in that they want people to self-deport.

Speaker 32 They want people to be afraid.

Speaker 16 Point is the intimidation. Exactly.

Speaker 32 So, not just of immigrant communities, though. They want people to be afraid to protest.
You know, they want people to be afraid to come out.

Speaker 32 But I think time will tell also whether it turns enough people off,

Speaker 32 you know, that it becomes a less effective political strategy.

Speaker 1 Molly O'Toole, Immigration Reporter.

Speaker 10 She's writing a book right now about all of this.

Speaker 11 Keep an eye out for her.

Speaker 8 Today's show was produced by Denise Guerda, edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Laura Buller, and engineered by Patrick Boyd.

Speaker 1 I'm Estead Herndon. This is Today Explain.

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