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The Political Scene | The New Yorker

What Happens After Someone Is Arrested by ICE?

The Political Scene | The New Yorker

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Obama, News, Wnyc, Washington, Barack, President, Lizza, Wickenden

4.23.3K Ratings

🗓️ 13 August 2025

⏱️ 47 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The New Yorker staff writer Jonathan Blitzer joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss how Donald Trump’s second-term immigration agenda has shifted from border enforcement to an unprecedented campaign of interior deportations. They talk about the expansion of detention through military bases and state-run facilities, the changes to long-standing arrest protocols, and the strategic transfers designed to separate detainees from their families and lawyers. Plus, they examine how these tactics have eroded due-process protections, why Democrats have struggled to mount an effective response, and whether public outrage could slow the Administration’s most aggressive deportation measures.

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Transcript

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0:30.9

Before Trump was elected, he vowed to deport, I think it was a million people in a year.

0:36.9

You've been covering immigration for a very

0:38.7

long time. When you hear that number and you hear that time frame, does it seem realistic

0:44.8

to you or does it seem impossible given how hard and complicated it is to deport someone?

0:50.6

Yes. So I have actually like a very specific emotional intellectual response response to seeing that number. From a kind of purely logistical standpoint, that number is unrealistic. That does not mean I don't regard the vow to deport a million people a year as an incredibly dangerous, scary prospect for all kinds of reasons, not least of which is,

1:12.4

you know, the government's ambition, even in charging toward that number, is going to lead to all

1:16.7

kinds of abuses and already has. The other thing that's really striking that I think immediately

1:21.1

makes these kind of numerical quantifications of deportation numbers kind of hard to gauge when you

1:26.5

pan out and look at the historical context is typically a large share of deportation numbers, kind of hard to gauge when you pan out and look at the historical context is, typically, a large share of deportation numbers, when you look at them annually, have come from arrests and deportations at the southern border.

1:37.2

Those numbers have dropped pretty substantially. They were dropping in the final year of the Biden administration.

1:42.0

And now, since the Trump administration has taken over, they've, I mean, virtually gone to nothing, I mean, to levels I've certainly never seen before,

1:48.0

which means that when you see raw arrest and deportation numbers now, they may look the same or

1:55.0

slightly lower, say, than they were during the Biden administration. But that doesn't mean

2:00.0

that the kind of impact of them

...

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