How local police extend ICE's reach, even in sanctuary cities

Code Switch

NPR

Society & Culture

4.6 • 14.9K Ratings

🗓️ 21 January 2026

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Sanctuary policies have been described on both sides of the aisle as protecting immigrants. But in many ways, in practice, they have given rise to a specific kind of policing that gives ICE a much wider reach than it might otherwise have. We talk to anthropologist Peter Mancina, who is the author of a recent book, On the Side of Ice: Policing Immigrants in a Sanctuary State about his on-the-ground research embedding with police in New Jersey.

See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.

NPR Privacy Policy

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Just a heads up, y'all, this episode has some cussing. Just be advised.
0:06.1	What's good, y'all? You're listening to Code Switch, the show about race and identity from
0:09.8	NPR. I'm Gene Demby. And today on the show, what it looks like when ICE comes to a sanctuary
0:16.7	city. All right, so it's a November morning back in 2019 in a town in New Jersey.
0:24.5	And there's this guy who is in his late 30s.
0:27.4	He's Mexican.
0:28.4	He's driving his teenage son to work.
0:30.7	But as they're leaving the house, ice agents pull up.
0:35.0	And the ice agents hem this dude in in a way that he can't really drive away
0:38.8	around them. And those agents are trying to tell the man to get out of his car. And again, he's in
0:43.5	the car with his son, so he ain't budging. Ice planned it this way in a certain sense, instead of trying
0:48.4	to get him at his house, because then they could drive up their cars and block him in so he couldn't
0:53.7	get away.
0:56.0	That's Peter Manchina.
1:02.7	I'm a visiting scholar at the Center for Immigrant Justice at Rutgers Law School, and I'm also an anthropologist.
1:07.1	So his work involves learning about groups by basically embedding with them.
1:13.2	When he was researching ICE in New Jersey, he watched hours and hours and hours of police body cam footage to better understand how things were unfolding on the ground and in the streets.
1:19.1	That body cam footage is how he knows exactly what was going on in this particular encounter with
1:23.8	ICE. They call cops, even though there's not really an emergency situation,
1:27.6	they just call them to do crowd control. Two local officers show up and they park their squad car
1:32.9	in this way. So now this dude is really fenced in. Those officers talk to the ICE agents on the
1:39.6	scene a little bit and an agent tells them that the man barricaded himself in the car. I mean, he was just
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from NPR, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of NPR and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.