ICE is keeping tabs on American citizens
The NPR Politics Podcast
NPR
4.4 • 25.7K Ratings
🗓️ 10 March 2026
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This episode: voting correspondent Miles Parks, reporter Kat Lonsdorf, and power and influence reporter Jude Joffe-Block.
This podcast was produced by Casey Morell and Bria Suggs, and edited by Rachel Baye.
Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey there, it's the NPR Politics podcast. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. And we also have NPR |
| 0:09.3 | reporters Kat Lansdorf and Jude Joffie Block joining us today. How do you both? Hey, hey. |
| 0:14.8 | So today on the show, we're going to be talking about how the Department of Homeland Security is surveilling people in new ways, |
| 0:21.6 | because you both, along with NPR's Meg Anderson, have been digging into a bunch of different |
| 0:26.0 | tools that DHS is using to track both people who are in the United States illegally, but also |
| 0:30.7 | U.S. citizens. And I want to start with this example of this woman in Minneapolis named Emily, |
| 0:36.1 | who your story kind of opens with as well. |
| 0:38.3 | Kat, tell us about who she is and what her experience kind of shows. Yeah, so Emily's experience was back |
| 0:43.5 | in late January. She was out driving around her neighborhood in Minneapolis, patrolling for ICE as a |
| 0:49.5 | constitutional observer. I'll just say we're only ID Emily by her first name because she fears retribution from the federal government. |
| 0:57.4 | She told me she was following an ice vehicle at a safe distance into a parking lot when a mass agent leaned out the window, took a picture of her and her license plate, and then rolled down the window and addressed Emily by name and recited her home address to her. |
| 1:15.3 | You know, Emily told us that it really shook her. |
| 1:17.6 | Their message was not subtle, right? |
| 1:19.9 | They were, in effect, saying we see you, we can get to you whenever we want to. |
| 1:24.6 | And it did scare me. |
| 1:25.6 | Emily says she didn't know how they pulled up her information |
| 1:29.3 | so quickly. And that was one of the things we were really trying to figure out with this reporting |
| 1:34.4 | was, you know, we were collecting dozens of stories, talking to people combing through court documents, |
| 1:39.9 | to really try to understand how is this surveillance web that DHS is spinning affecting real people on the ground. |
| 1:47.9 | Okay. So, I mean, tell me more about what your reporting found out. Specifically, in Emily's case, I mean, how was the government? |
| 1:54.0 | Do you have any sense of how the government was able to get this information on her? |
| 1:58.0 | We don't know the specifics. I mean, you know, we asked ICE and DHS and they say |
... |
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