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- [00:00]
A
You appear like you might be coming at us from Guantanamo Bay, which, given your research, I think is important.
- [00:06]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a full immersion experience. Yeah, this is a recent move, kind of austere settings, but we're all right. Our connection is good.
- [00:13]
A
Your article in the New Yorker about what's happening at Fort Bliss Camp East Montana made me like want to chain myself to the fence of an ICE facility. Kind of like the environmentalists did in the 60s. They changed themselves to the big trees to prevent them from getting cut down. Like that's kind of where I was. I almost stroked out. So I want to spend the whole pot on that. But first, I just think since it's relevant, I think we should just talk briefly about the latest in Maine. You were in Maine, I guess for a hot minute, you told me. But the big announcement yesterday was DHS said that they're going to pause these traffic stops because ICE agents have murdered two people and they weren't even the people that they were looking for in the streets. In the past week, Susan Collins, Maine center, had said she'd called Mark Wade Mullen encouraged, and she was encouraged that they were gonna stop those ICE Kavanaugh stops today. This morning, right before we got on Trump, rug pulled that we cannot stop the traffic stop. It must continue. Otherwise we're playing into the criminal's hands. So I just kind of curious your thoughts on what's happening in Maine.
- [01:20]
B
I mean, it just, in a way, it just confirms all of our skepticism. No, after they announced that they were gonna give a pause to that policy, I mean, almost immediately, even before Trump came out, Tom Homan, the President's so called borders are already said, oh, this is just a temporary measure. This isn't really going to change much.
- [01:36]
A
Obviously it's interesting that the border czar has, has kind of purview over Biddeford, Maine.
- [01:42]
B
Well, I mean, this is the whole game. I mean, this is the whole game. You know, it's like this starts, I mean, this is, this is, this is the whole perverse logic of, of the President's campaign to quote unquote, secure the border. It's like right now virtually no one is crossing the border. And the whole idea has always been to convert the kind of impunity of federal agents in the US Northern Mexico borderlands into kind of free reign over the interior of the United States. And so it's actually incredibly telling that Tom Homan as border czar is the person who presides over all of these operations in American cities far from the border. But, yeah, I mean, in many ways, I wasn't surprised. I mean, like everyone else, I don't have any unique insight into the. Just the general mendacity of the administration. So, like, they announce a pause to sort of try to calm the waters. But within whatever hours, Trump is back, insisting that he has nothing to apologize for. I see Vance kind of making his usual comments. Homan is saying that they're staying the course. And so it doesn't really seem like much is going to change. And, and again, this is like. I mean, you and I spoke. I feel like we spoke around the time of Minnesota the first time. And so it's like, here we are again. And this was supposed to be part of a. A kind of a rebranded effort inside DHS under Mark Wayne Mullen as secretary, to kind of be, I guess, more discreet in how it conducted its operations. But it's inevitable when the imperative is to make a huge number of arrests where agents who are totally unaccountable are driving around in unmarked cars. I mean, this is following a period of 10 days in which ICE officers made 10,000 arrests across the country. That's 2,000 arrests a day nationwide. It's extremely high number. I don't want to say it's inevitable that these sorts of things happen, but frankly, given how this campaign has been unleashed and the lack of accountability, this is what we're going to keep seeing. It's, It's. It's an unspeakable tragedy.
- [03:29]
A
Yeah. Actually, when we last talked, this is a little bit ominous for me to say this, but it was the day before they killed Renee Goode, so the stuff of Minnesota was starting to happen, and it really escalated after there. So, you know, hopefully that is. That's not a bad omen. I guess my question for you, since you've been. You spend so much time at the border covering the type of enforcement they do at the border. On the one hand, I think the latest reporting for the Atlantic is the person that killed Juan Guerrero was a new recruit who was maybe not trained properly, but in some of these other cases, it's actually been people that they've taken from the border and they're using these kind of more aggressive. I don't know what word you would use, but the type of police enforcement work they're doing targeting cartels, targeting innocent immigrants, etc. At the border is, like, different. It's not what you would do in a city or in a hamlet in Maine. And so, anyway, I'm just kind of curious.
- [04:27]
B
Yeah.
- [04:27]
A
Yeah. Your Thoughts are on that, given the time you spent covering this.
- [04:31]
B
I saw that Atlantic piece as well, and in many ways, that document something we would have expected. I mean, it's really valuable reporting that, you know, as part of their general recruitment push, they've ISIS hired what, 8,000 new agents in a very short span. And they've, you know, rushed them through training. They've cut training time in half. And so, you know, this demonstrates, at the very least, a lack of preparation, the fact that, like, people who are unqualified to do this work are getting these jobs, and that they're being rushed through and put out immediately on the street, tasked with something that, frankly, ICE has never really been tasked with doing before, certainly not at this scale. So that's a recipe for disaster, then, as you say, there's. There's. At least until recently, certainly in the case of Minnesota, a big part of that wasn't just ICE agents. It was Border Patrol and cbp, Customs and Border Protection agents on these roving patrols across the country. That's where Greg Bevino, the infamous Greg Bevino was. And so that kind of tactic, that kind of, you know, just overly aggressive, completely unapologetic. I mean, I'm trying to come up with, like, sort of polite words for
- [05:37]
A
not a lot of consideration for habeas. Yeah.
- [05:39]
B
For instance, you know, among other things, you know, you were seeing that unleashed in the interior of the country. And obviously, you put that in, like, an urban setting, and there are a lot more bystanders, there are protesters, there are onlookers. And, like, these are not people who are in any way respectful of the rights of onlookers to be protesting or to be documenting what's happening. So there was all of that. And then to go back to, you know, the case of Renee Goode, in that instance, the ICE officer who shot her and killed her was an agency veteran. And so that also speaks to the fact that it's not just a matter of individual training, but rather the circumstances in which these guys are being kind of deployed. And deployed itself is a word that's pretty suggestive, but I think the right word under the circumstances. So I think, you know, it's interesting.
- [06:33]
A
Deployed to Biddeford, Maine.
- [06:34]
B
Right. The heart of the crisis. I. You know, it's interesting. At the start of last year, I was spending a lot of time reporting on Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas. His. The kind of state of his immigration enforcement crackdown, which was known as Operation Lone star, like an $11 billion massive enforcement operation that led to all Kinds of horrors. And one of the interesting things that started to get reported, I would say around 2023, 2024 in cities like El Paso, but also elsewhere along the border, was that there were high speed vehicle chases by Border Patrol agents in urban settings. And there were a series of car crashes and innocent bystanders were killed and including, you know, drivers, pedestrians. And, and this was also an instance in which you were unleashing, you were kind of giving freer rein to Border Patrol agents to kind of conduct these almost militaristic operations. But you're grafting them now onto settings where, you know, this isn't just some sort of like, open road along the border in a rural, remote area. You're doing this, you're having a high speed chase in the middle of a city where people are walking by, there's car traffic. And it's interesting because I know that's also cropped up again with Trump's enforcement push, really, since he took office, that, you know, you have people in these, you know, cities across the country basically saying you're making our city a more dangerous place. Not just because you have armed masked agents who are arresting people, you know, just based on racial profiling and all the rest, or who are, you know, attacking people for documenting what's happening, but also you have these unmarked cars speeding through cities, unaccountably scaring the hell out of people. You know, regular drivers don't know what to make of an unmarked car speeding out of the blue and chasing you. And that's actually part of this too. I mean, DHS claims. And at this point, we see through all of these explanations or whatever lies, but, you know, that people are weaponizing their vehicles. And it's like, first of all, all of the, you know, all the evidence we can get contradicts those claims. But also, just imagine the implications of this. You're, you're driving down the street, doing your thing, and all of a sudden, out of the blue, an unmarked car starts following you. I mean, that's an overwhelming thing and it certainly leads to panic. And I will say there was a, there was a this American Life episode several months ago with that. That played footage from 911 calls in different cities where enforcement operations were taking place. Charlotte, Chicago, Los Angeles. And I was incredibly struck by what these phone calls sound sounded like. I would encourage people to listen. A lot of reporters across the country have done amaz, filing public records requests to get 911 calls from, from sites of these federal incursions into American cities. And you actually have ordinary people on the phone talking to 911 operators saying like what do I do? Like what am I right? Can I fight back? Like here's someone who, I don't know, who's not identifying himself as a federal officer who's accosting me with a weapon. Like do I run? Can I run? Can I push him away? How am I supposed to engage? And it was just incredibly, just viscerally very jarring to hear that kind of footage because you're hearing people just try to make sense of what the hell is going on around them.
- [10:02]
A
You see it in the situation in Biddeford with Carrera, right? It's like and thank God nobody else got hit. I mean they fire six shots, it's like why are you firing six shots? You can watch the car, it's going three miles an hour. Three year old is on the scene, you can just see that it's like this downtown, little quaint main town.
- [10:20]
B
The whole thing is totally, everything about it is macabre. It's really unbelievable.