At a press briefing on Thursday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt repeatedly lost her temper with reporters. It’s no accident that what triggered Leavitt were perfectly legitimate questions about ICE’s extraordinary abuses of late. Tellingly, White House officials aren’t even trying to reassure anyone that they recognize that things are less than perfect. This comes as a new report suggests ICE is violating its own protocols pretty seriously and as polling is diving again for Trump on immigration.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick: Thanks for having me back.
Reporter (voiceover): Thirty-two people died in ICE custody last year. One hundred and seventy US citizens were detained by ICE and Rene Good was shot in the head and killed by an ICE agent. How does that equate to them doing everything correctly?
Reporter (voiceover): Are you asking me my opinion? Because an ICE agent acted recklessly and killed her unjustifiably.
Reporter (voiceover): What do you want me to do?
Sargent: So I believe that reporter is Niall Stanage, who’s not a liberal flamethrower by any stretch. Aaron, what’s your reaction to all that?
And in fact, polling so far suggests that a majority of Americans think that the shooting was not justified. And it’s really crucially important to understand, of course, that there is a difference between legally justified within the very narrow line of whether or not a police officer used their force lawfully and the sort of more basic question of should the officer have shot Ms. Good rather than simply stepping aside.
Sargent: Right, and Leavitt is just really frustrated because these questions aren’t, you know, going away. I want to bear down on one point about this exchange, though. Note that the reporter asked about the following things: deaths in ICE custody, arrests of U.S. citizens, and the killing of this woman by an officer whose life was not remotely in danger.
Reichlin-Melnick: Right, of course it’s not. And deaths in ICE custody are worse than ever. 2025 was the deadliest year for ICE detention, driven by a massive expansion of the detention system as we tracked in our new report, as well as the shoddy standards that people were put through in brand-new detention centers being brought online. And 2026 is looking no better. It’s January 15, 2026, and already four people have died in custody this year. So that suggests 2026 is going to be the deadliest year yet.
A CNN poll finds that 56 percent of Americans say the shooting was an “inappropriate use of force,” and a majority, 51 percent, say ICE actions are making cities less safe, while only 31 percent, less than a third, say ICE is making cities safer. Aaron, if you listen to Stephen Miller and other administration officials, all you hear is that ICE agents are heroically facing criminals, gang members, all sorts of scourges. But nobody believes anything they’re saying. Fewer than a third in this country think this is making anyone safer. I find that extraordinary.
And we predicted at the time that this was going to be unpopular, and lo and behold, the administration got $75 billion from Congress to actually start carrying out mass deportations. And it looks exactly like what we said it was going to look like, increasingly police-state tactics, because you cannot round up 4 percent of the U.S. population without fundamentally transforming the relationship Americans have with their law enforcement.
Reichlin-Melnick: Yeah, we don’t have exact numbers, but from what we see, some very limited public data is put out by the administration on this. And from that data, it suggests about 350,000 to 360,000 people were deported by ICE last year. An unknown number of additional people were apprehended at the border and rapidly deported without ever going into ICE custody.
So at that rate, if they don’t manage to increase it at all, it would still take over 30 years of this to actually deport 14 million people. But even presuming they do significantly increase those numbers, we’re still talking about years and years and years of this.
Sargent: Absolutely. And so basically right now they’re under half their target. Right. And I think you told me the other day for a piece that we ran at TNR.com about Stephen Miller. You told me that you didn’t think they would be able to get to even half of the amount that they’d like to remove in Trump’s full term, right?
That said, when I first did this analysis over a year ago, we didn’t know what Congress was going to give them, how much money they were ultimately going to get. And they have bullied and bulldozed their way through a lot of the barriers to carrying out these deportations that we had initially thought that they would have more trouble surmounting.
Sargent: Right. And I think at the end of the day, no matter what happens, there are still going to be millions and millions and millions of undocumented immigrants in this country come 2029.
So we’re looking at a population of long-term residents, many of them married to U.S. citizens, many of them who have U.S. citizen children or U.S. citizen parents, many of them who are working jobs and have been working them for many years, who have very deep ties to the community, and while they are terrified, in many cases they’re not going to give up the United States and the lives they’ve built here because a lot of them feel that they can still survive in this.
I just want to get to a New York Times report on ICE protocol, which was very interesting. Instructions to agents, according to The New York Times, a document they obtained, say that in dangerous encounters they’re supposed to use “minimal force” when trying to pull people out of cars and deliver commands in “professional” tones.
Reichlin-Melnick: It certainly seems like it. And I think that thing The New York Times obtained is a sign that there are still professionals inside the agency who are trying to impose some form of discipline.
The problem now is that you have political leadership that is essentially encouraging officers on the ground to ignore what their supervisors are telling them or what the trainers have told them to do.
I want to highlight two numbers and then ask you to just talk about what you found. One of them is that we’re essentially hitting 70,000 immigrants in detention right now, which is the highest ever. And the other is that over time, with the funding that they’ve now got, they will be able to get those numbers up to 135,000. That is an immigrant carceral state, a ballooning immigrant carceral state. Can you talk about what your report found along those lines?
With immigration detention, the goal of the administration is to shuffle people through the system as quickly as possible, or if they do stay in there to pressure them into giving up their case so they just choose to accept deportation. So the bigger the system is, the more people they can cycle through it with the goal of getting them to be deported, because if there’s no beds, they may have to eventually release some people and let them attend their hearings outside of detention.
Sargent: That’s just incredible. And so just to return to this concept of a forever war against Americans, That’s basically what this is becoming. Trump ran against forever wars, but I guess he only meant foreign ones. He wants a domestic forever war. That’s the funny thing.
Reichlin-Melnick: It’s going to get bigger. It’s going to get crueler and it’s going to get less accountable, at least for now. Right now there is very little pushback from anyone who has power. We’ve seen the GOP and Congress more interested in holding hearings into things that happened years ago. We see the Trump administration—as we chronicled in our report—actually slashed internal oversight bodies.
That might change, though, because if the House changes hands next year, and theoretically if the Senate changes hands as well, you might get some pushback. And the example I’ve been giving on this here to say this money can be taken back is the Inflation Reduction Act and that money for the 87,000 IRS agents. That became a huge issue on the right.
Sargent: That is such an interesting point, Aaron. I just want to remind people we had representatives Dan Goldman and Eric Swalwell on the show the other day. They both said Democrats have to strike a really hard line in the upcoming funding fights, and especially when Democrats control the House.
Reichlin-Melnick: Yeah, this is where the power of Congress really shines. Right now, the power to subpoena the federal government is in the hands of the Republican Party. And they are using that authority, but they’re not using it to really investigate the Trump administration’s actions.
Now, whether that means Kristi Noem is going to be hauled in front of Congress, I don’t know, but the biggest thing there is the ability to get information into the system, to claw out information, claw out data on how many people they’re arresting, how many U.S. citizens have been picked up, what they’re doing with this data, and also to potentially...if they can pass any legislation over a potential presidential veto. That’s obviously the biggest challenge here in a must-pass bill, potentially actually putting teeth into the oversight process.
Folks, if you enjoyed this conversation, make sure to check out the American Immigration Council’s new report on the detention system. It’s a great piece of work. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, always great to talk to you, man. Thanks so much for coming on.
Reichlin-Melnick: Thanks for having me back.
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