Page 94, the Private Eye podcast.

Hello and welcome to another episode of page 94.

My name's Andrew Hunter-Murray and I'm here in the I-studio with Helen Lewis, Adam McQueen and Ian Heslop.

It's a new year, but it's lots of the same old news.

So firstly, let's go over Helen, to your patch, to America, because we wanted to talk about ICE.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement, not your patch to America, because we wanted to talk about ICE, immigration and customs enforcement, not least due to the, let's say, the fatal shooting of a young American woman, Renee Good.

So, ICE has been around since 2003. However, under the first Trump term, it massively ramped up. And this time it has gone absolutely crazy. They have, I think, doubled the number of agents. They put aside tens of billions of

pounds. Do you remember the big, beautiful bill? Just massively increased the funding to it.

And it always had two parts, one of which was basically like tracking down fentanyl smugglers and,

you know, child trafficking rings and things like that.

And another was finding day-to-day immigrants whose only offence was overstaying their visa

or entering the country legally, whatever. And really it sucked all the resources from that bit,

the smashing the gangs bit, to essentially going door to door and hassling people's

gardeners and stuff like that, right?

One of the ways that Trump has used it is he has sent it along with the National Guard into blue cities, many of which have explicitly declared that their kind of sanctuaries.

They don't, their local law enforcement don't want to cooperate with ICE.

ICE is incredibly unpopular, actually now a majority of Democrats want it abolished because what they do

is they dress up in kind of camo gear and cover their faces and hassle people dropping their kids off

at nursery or whatever it might be. They are renowned as being a kind of, you know, unpleasant

paramilitary kind of style force on American streets. And you've said that if you recruit people in a hurry with none of the usual safeguards, that's who you get. Yeah, I think so they've, as I say, they say it should take about 18 months to train an agent. They just haven't had the time to do that even in the Trump term. You know, where are they getting these people from? Are they vetting them enough? You know, we have the story here in Britain about the Met dropping some of its vetting because they had such a push to put on new officers. So politicians kind of think it's amazing to say, let's have more bobbies on the beat, let's have more ice officers. But, you know, if you shortcut that process, you do it at your peril. And well, the Metropolitan Police have had to drop plenty of officers they recruited

because they've been guilty of various quite serious offences, violent crimes or sexual crimes or whatever it might be.

Although not the case for the guy who shot René Good.

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