Armed with cash, ICE plans for rapid growth

Make Me Smart

Marketplace

News, Business

4.6 • 5.4K Ratings

🗓️ 15 August 2025

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has plans to nearly double the number of its immigration detention centers by the end of the year. The agency has an enormous budget to carry out its agenda, but can it find enough workers to do the job? We’ll get into it. And, we’ll play a round of Half Full/Half Empty!

Here’s everything we talked about today:

"ICE documents reveal plan to double immigrant detention space this year" from The Washington Post
"ICE Has Tons of Cash, But Is Struggling to Hire Enough Agents" from Time
"Secretary Noem Unveils No Age Limit for Patriotic Americans to Join ICE Law Enforcement to Help Remove Worst of the Worst from U.S." from the Department of Homeland Security
"Spike in Corruption Followed Last Hiring Surge at CBP and ICE" from American Immigration Council
"Adjustable-rate mortgages make a comeback" from Marketplace
"The White House makes a play for Intel" from Marketplace
"Work weeks are getting more intense for AI startups" from Marketplace
"LA 2028 Olympics to sell venue naming rights" from Axios

We love hearing from you. Leave us a voicemail at 508-U-B-SMART or email [email protected].

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone. I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where we attempt to make
0:11.5	today make sense. And I'm Rima Jerez. Thanks everyone for listening or watching on the YouTube
0:17.4	live stream. It is Friday, August 15th. Welcome to Economics on Tap.
0:23.3	Yes, this is where we have our Friday happy hour. We do some news. We play a game, but first we do
0:29.9	drinks. And Rima, what do you have? I have a very easy and quick concoction of just Diet Coke and then I put like a soured
0:40.8	candy cherry in there with some cherry syrup.
0:44.0	I was trying to look for a line.
0:45.2	Like the actual candy?
0:47.5	Like from the little jar.
0:49.3	I found it in our pantry, something that my husband was using to make a cake.
0:53.3	And so I was like, you know, this will will work let me just drop it candy cherry in there is it you know I
0:59.0	don't actually taste the cherry that much but it makes I don't know makes me
1:02.4	feel fancy and the fact that you put more than one thing in a glass together I
1:08.3	think it's a drink. I was like done.
1:13.1	Yeah. What are you drinking? I have like an overwhelming amount of mint in my garden right now.
1:19.6	And so I haven't made a mint julep this season. And so I went ahead to make a mint julep, which is bourbon, simple syrup, and mint,
1:29.7	but I still had in the back of my fridge some mint simple syrup that I made, I don't
1:35.9	want to know how long ago that I made it.
1:37.5	It doesn't matter.
1:38.5	It's sugar.
1:39.5	I'm assuming that it's still fine.
1:40.5	That's what I tell myself too.
	...

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