How ICE Became Trump's Secret Army

The Atlantic

10 hours ago

On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic 's David Frum begins with reflections on how Donald Trump's sweeping immigration crackdown has transformed America into what he calls a 'society based on fear.' Frum warns that the president's methods risk discrediting not just immigration enforcement, but also law, police, and the very idea of democratic legitimacy.
Then Frum is joined by his Atlantic colleague Caitlin Dickerson, whose Pulitzer Prize–winning reporting has laid bare the human and institutional realities of immigration enforcement. They discuss her latest investigation into the staggering expansion of ICE and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which has supercharged its budget to unprecedented levels. Dickerson explains how billions of dollars in new funding are fueling mass detention, empowering private-prison companies, and reshaping U.S. diplomacy while failing to solve the core challenges of immigration.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
David Frum: Hello and welcome back to The David Frum Show. I'm David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Caitlin Dickerson, a colleague of mine at The Atlantic who has won the Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on immigration, and we'll be discussing today the astonishing growth of the immigration-enforcement apparatus in the United States under the Trump presidency.
I want to open with some personal reflections of my own on the immigration subject. As those of you who have followed my work in The Atlantic may know, I have written about this topic over many, many years, and my sympathies have broadly been with the need for stricter immigration control than the United States has seen in the recent past. In January of 2021, shortly after President [Joe] Biden took office, I wrote an article that worried that his continuing a lax approach to immigration in the United States would prove a consequential mistake overshadowing his entire administration. And unfortunately, that turned out to be correct. The immigration enforcement under President Biden remained very lax, almost to the end of the administration. And indeed, immigration was one of the most important issues that defeated Kamala Harris and elected Donald Trump in 2024.
Since Donald Trump took office in 2025, we have seen an astonishing, breathtaking crackdown on immigration in the United States. You can read the effect of that crackdown in the statistics. The Center for Immigration Studies—a immigration-restrictionist group, but one that does good numbers—reports a net 2.2-million-person decline in the foreign-born population of the United States in the six months since Donald Trump took power. Of that 2.2 million net decline, 1.6 million is accounted for by illegal aliens. But 600,000 of the net decline turns out to be that the United States is losing more legal residents than it is gaining, something that I don't think has happened since the Great Depression.
Now, the raw numbers only begin to tell the story. Much of the story, as told by Caitlin, is a crackdown on the streets, in the public places, in the parking lots and schools and even courtrooms of America where police officers or paramilitary officers—often dressed in non-uniforms, often without badges or identification, often with their faces disguised—are seizing people, most of them without status, but not all of them, some of them even U.S. citizens. Seizing them, putting them into vans, driving them away, offering them no process, and in the worst cases, sending them off to dungeons, prisons, in countries that the person apprehended has never seen before, has no contact with. We've seen people ending up in South Sudan, people who have no connection with El Salvador ending up sent for life—at least, that was the theory—to a prison in El Salvador. Some of the people in the El Salvadoran prison have been released, and they have told of horrors, of conditions that amount to torture, for people who have been accused of no crime, convicted of nothing, who were seized because the authorities believed, maybe correctly, that they didn't have status—but didn't prove anything, and certainly didn't prove that these people had done anything wrong in the United States.
For those of us with a restrictionist point of view, Trump is offering a devil's bargain. He is moving the country toward a more restrictionist policy, but in ways that cannot be sustained, that shock the American conscience and that are damaging the American economy.
We are seeing, also, all kinds of side effects. It has become much more difficult for legal people to travel to the United States. Scientific research in the United States is being impeded and restricted and damaged by this crackdown. We are seeing a revival of a kind of ugly blood-and-soil nationalism in the United States and this kind of pornographic fascism of some of the recruiting videos for Donald Trump's immigration police, which are designed to appeal to exactly the kind of person who should never be trusted with government power and never with a gun, and never with the power to make arrests.
Natan Sharansky, the philosopher and now politician in Israel, once distinguished that there are two fundamental kinds of societies: societies based on fear and societies based on freedom. The Trump administration is turning the United States, for millions of the people who live here, into a society based on fear, and a fear of society cannot be a truly free society. We have had a recent case where an American threw a sandwich at immigration police in a gesture of disrespect. Now, I strongly recommend that everybody show respect for the police, and if you actually express your disrespect through the throwing of a physical object, there are gonna be consequences for that. Nobody needs to send—this happened—20 armed officers to the house of a sandwich flipper, to grab him and seize him off to a courtroom. That is an example of a society converting the rightful request for respect for the police into an insistence on fear of the police that damages the very meaning of what it means to be free.
The worst thing of all, from my point of view, again, as someone who comes from a restrictionist outlook on this, is the Trump administration is teaching Americans to think about immigration in all the wrong ways, and it's teaching them to think about immigration in ways that, because they're so wrong, because they're mistaken, are ultimately going to subvert itself.
The immigration problem to the United States is not a problem of an invasion, and it's not really a problem of crime. Foreign-born people, on average, are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans. I think a way to think about it is immigration is a little bit like rainfall. Too much—you get floods and disasters. Too little—you get death. Success and prosperity comes from having the right amount and control and regulating, to the extent you can, the flow of water in a way that gives life and doesn't flood the society with numbers that it cannot absorb.
Immigration is a resource that must be managed intelligently. It's a question of more or less, and who and why the optimal number of immigrants is not zero, and the practice of trying to eliminate even all illegal immigration is not feasible—not in a free society and not without a kind of level of police intervention that Americans don't want and shouldn't want.
What is going to happen as Americans see what Trump is doing—And as they absorb the consequences in things like fewer people doing all kinds of jobs that need to be done, and that Americans will not do at the wages that the American economy expects these jobs to get (jobs from gardening to roofing, not just agriculture, but construction of all kinds, meatpacking)—there's going to be a blowback. There is going to be a reversal. We are going to find the pendulum, just as it swung very far in the restrictionist direction under the lax policies of President Biden, under the policies of Donald Trump, it will swing as far or farther, as hard or harder, in the opposite direction. Donald Trump is devouring the legitimacy on which any public policy needs to rest. And he is convincing Americans that immigration restriction does not mean the rule of law; it means the rule of police. It means the rule of exactly the kind of police you do not want to have being police.
My discussion with Caitlin will go deeper into all of these issues, but I want to say, as someone who has been on the other side of this, I'm very worried about the direction the country is going and that what the Trump people are proclaiming as success is a self-devouring error that will stain the good name of the United States, discredit law, discredit police services, discredit enforcement, and ultimately discredit the very cause that Donald Trump ostensibly wants to support.
And now my discussion with Caitlin Dickerson. But first, a quick break.
[ Music ]
Frum: Caitlin Dickerson is one of America's most tireless and courageous investigative reporters. She started her career at National Public Radio, where she won a Peabody Award for her work. She then vaulted to The New York Times, and in 2021 joined me and all of us at The Atlantic as a gratefully welcomed colleague. Her reporting on the Trump administration's child-separation policy for The Atlantic won a Pulitzer Prize in 2023. The next year—and this is the most amazing piece of journalism I think I've ever seen—Caitlin Dickerson walked the human-trafficking route through Panama, taking risks that must have harrowed her family and friends.
We're here today to discuss her most recent story for The Atlantic, about the surge in growth of the United States immigration bureaucracy: ' ICE's Mind-Bogglingly Massive Blank Check.'
Caitlin, welcome to the program.
Caitlin Dickerson: Thank you, David. Thanks for having me.
Frum: Okay, so let's start. How big is big? How big is ICE?
Dickerson: It's huge. It's huge, under this One Big Beautiful Bill Act that I wrote about. So, taking ICE alone—it's just one of our immigration-enforcement agencies—its budget was about $8 billion prior to this bill. It's going up to $28. It's more than tripling. And this is at a time when Americans are seeing ICE agents out on the streets, and their communities are reacting really strongly to the aggressiveness of the campaign under way under the Trump administration to deport as many people as possible.
And so you're talking about more than tripling the budget of that one agency alone. They want to add 10,000 new agents. So more than doubling the number of agents that they have. And you've also got $45 billion going toward detention, $45 billion going toward a wall—these huge numbers that I tried to compare to help people wrap their arms around. In total, the $175 billion that's going toward immigration enforcement under this bill is greater than the annual military budgets of every single country in the world, except for the United States and China, and it makes ICE alone the highest-funded federal law-enforcement agency. And it really is going to create an infrastructure for immigration enforcement unlike anything that we've ever seen before, because these numbers are just so large.
Frum: Okay. So, not to sound like Dr. Evil here, but billions, trillions, people can get a little confused. Is $8 billion a lot of money? Is $28 billion a lot of money? Compared to what? Try to make this concrete to us. You say the total apparatus is going to be bigger than the military budgets of everybody on Earth. Relative to the rest of the federal budget, how much is $8 billion or $28 billion that they're going to end up with?
Dickerson: Sure. So for comparison, the FBI employs about 20,000 people. Its budget is around $11 billion. The DEA, the next-largest federal law-enforcement agency, spends about $4 billion a year. I looked at some police budgets as well. The NYPD is budgeted for a much lower amount. Turns out, the NYPD overspends every year by quite a lot, but is budgeted around $6 billion a year, I believe. So again, ICE alone spending $28 billion on immigration enforcement is far greater, obviously.
Frum: So bigger than the FBI plus the NYPD plus the DEA, it sounds like.
Dickerson: Indeed.
Frum: Okay. So, do you have a sense, I mean, now, look—it's a big job. It's a big country. There are thousands of miles, millions of people. Maybe they need this money. Maybe that's what it costs.
Dickerson: Maybe. However, one of the reasons I wanted to write this story is having covered immigration enforcement for so long, I remember, year after year, that Congress is really harsh on immigration-enforcement agencies in general—in particular, ICE, for mismanaging its budget. So every year, they go to Congress and explain why they haven't achieved the goals that they laid out last year, while also asking for more money, and not always complying with reporting requirements that Congress places to explain where their money goes. They do a lot of reprogramming of funds from different programs, so money that's supposed to go toward disaster relief, toward the Secret Service—that will move toward immigration enforcement, in the middle of a year when Congress hasn't approved it in advance. That often can frustrate them. And so just this year, in 2025, you had congressional appropriators, including Republicans, who were really frustrated with ICE because it was spending money that it didn't have. As soon as Donald Trump took office, it increased its spending and was not funded to complete the fiscal year in the green, and even though it was being criticized as an agency, Congress seems to have just accepted the requests of ICE and CBP for these huge pay raises, without asking questions and without attaching any oversight requirements.
So it was really quite surprising for me because it's not just Democrats that have been frustrated with ICE overspending for many years; it's Republicans as well.
Frum: Now with the $28 billion, will they be able to afford uniforms? Because they don't seem to wear them.
Dickerson: They will be able to afford uniforms if they want them. But you're right: A lot of this money is going to go toward hiring new agents—as I mentioned, ICE wants to take on 10,000 more people—but also hiring bonuses and retention bonuses. These are jobs that not a lot of people want to take and jobs that have a lot of turnover, that people leave very quickly. It's always controversial to be an ICE agent. I've known many over the years who don't tell their neighbors what they do for a living, because it's the kind of job that obviously a lot of Americans voted for and can support, in general, but when it comes to your community, when you're face-to-face with the person who's making the arrest—and perhaps also know people who are being arrested by ICE—the relationships get a lot more difficult.
And this is across party lines. And so ICE agents always feel that they're heavily criticized for their work, that they're very unpopular. And they're correct in that. So a lot of money is going to go simply just toward keeping them in this line of work, and trying to grow this federal law-enforcement agency.
And then another big place where this money is going to go is toward technology. So you're seeing rapid expansion of the use of technology in immigration enforcement when it comes to facial recognition, when it comes to data brokering—so gathering people's information, their financial records, their social-media records, their employment records, working with companies like Palantir and expensive government contracts to bring all this information together at once and create really deep dossiers on immigrants who the agency is going after, video surveillance at ports of entry and at airports, things like that. These are all very expensive tools, ones that I argue in my piece aren't really necessary for routine immigration enforcement—but this is what a lot of this money will fund.
Frum: All right. That's such a fascinating point. I want to take a step back with something you just said about the number of bodies. We talked about the amount of money they're getting, so from a human point of view, how big is ICE compared to the FBI?
Dickerson: So ICE is about 20,000 people as well. So similar, very similar in size. But in terms of agents on the ground right now, they've got about 7,000 and they've long argued that those numbers aren't large enough. When you do think about, as you said, a vast country—more than 11 million people in the United States without legal status. But really it's not the number of agents that have limited ICE, in recent years, from making arrests; it's the rules that they face, depending on the administration, for who they're allowed to go after and who they aren't.
President Trump lifted all of those rules, said all immigrants without legal status are fair game. But there are other barriers to carrying out deportations—legal ones, namely. You can arrest someone, but once they actually start to go through the legal process, often they can get out on bond, they can pursue some form of legal status.
Frum: Eight billion [dollars] was what ICE was getting before. Twenty-eight billion [dollars] is what ICE will be getting under the president's fiscal bill. And then you pointed out that there's this larger universe of associated funds that are not ICE-specific, but are generally related to the immigration universe. The total—remind me, you said it was about $175 billion? Okay, so what is that? What's in the $175 billion?
Dickerson: So within the $175 billion, you have about $3.5 billion which is going toward the courts, and that's under a separate federal agency. They're under the DOJ. You have, as I mentioned, $45 billion in expanding detention centers. You've got $46 billion toward building the wall, and you've got at least $10 billion going toward reimbursement funds that have been created. So when states and local governments try to help, like Governor Greg Abbott has volunteered Texas to do, he'll be able to apply for reimbursement funds. And that's true for local governments as well. And then you've got little pockets of money spread elsewhere. But really, the bulk of it is the expansion of detention, the expansion of technology, and the hiring of new officers.
Frum: Tell me about this new prison system that we're building. Not every viewer or listener will understand that the federal system is a relatively small part of America's system of prisons and jails. Most people who are in prison or jail are there being held by the states, or sometimes jails are municipal. The federal system is small. So we're building a vast, new—relative to the existing federal prison system—a vast, new secondary system. How will it be like, and how will it be different from the existing federal prisons?
Dickerson: I'll talk about immigration, in particular. We've got people who are housed in immigration detention in federally run facilities that are contracted by—we have them run by private-prison companies. And then we also, as a federal government, rent beds in county jails, for example, and in state prisons to house immigrants as well.
And the expansion is going to more than double the size of the detained-immigrant population, largely putting them in privately run federal facilities. So these facilities will be operated, more than likely, by the two giants in the private-prison industry: Geo and CoreCivic. And they're expecting tens of thousands of additional detainees. So at maximum, our detained-immigrant population has been about 45,000 people on a daily average, and DHS wants to get that average daily detained population to 100,000. So again, more than we've ever seen before. This means the construction of new facilities from the ground up. It also means the retrofitting of old facilities, jails, and prisons that have been closed.
And a lot of times, what you've seen is a prison that's been heavily criticized because of poor conditions—maybe you had a lot of protesting, political winds changed, and so a big prison closed that was previously used for criminal detainees—and what happens is ICE will then come in and retrofit that facility for immigrants.
Frum: Now we've all read very disturbing stories about conditions in immigration-detention centers that seem pretty shockingly inhumane for people who, after all, don't seem to be criminals, exactly. They've broken the law, but everyone who speeds, breaks the law. Will the new funds ameliorate living conditions in these detention centers? Is that part of what the money's for?
Dickerson: It's not part of what the money's for, and I don't think that that will happen, simply because when you look at the bill, it says that health and safety standards in these new facilities that it funds should be left to the discretion of the secretary. That's actually a really big deal.
So I've reported a lot on ICE-detention standards. These are very hard-fought, extensive rules that have been developed since the early 2000s, when we really started to have a meaningfully sized immigration-detention system. And they cover everything from your medical care that should be provided to basic food needs, access to a law library to be able to defend yourself, recreation—being able to move around—and who can be held in solitary confinement for who can't.
You're right that generally, the legal standard is higher than it is for criminal defendants because the Supreme Court has held immigration detention is not meant to be punitive. And that's kind of hard for people to wrap their minds around, because you're in a facility that looks and feels very much like a prison and it's often identical, but theoretically—because, as you said, immigration is a different type of violation, it's a civil violation, and because you're being held pretrial, you don't have a standing deportation order yet, or you have one that you're appealing—you're supposed to have better access, in fact, to recreation, to the things that make prison, as uncomfortable as it is, are supposed to be slightly lesser for detained immigrants. All of those standards, which were really difficult to uphold, seemed to have gone out the window under the bill, because it explicitly says that standards should be held to the discretion or, at the discretion, rather, of the secretary.
And at the same time, it's important to note that the administration under DOGE, specifically Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, really gutted two offices within DHS that oversaw detention health and safety standards. So there was a detention ombudsman, and then there was a DHS Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. Those offices are fundamentally not functional at this point. And so kind of the opposite of what you laid out is going to happen: massive expansion of detention and very little oversight.
Frum: Yeah. I've not been a regular visitor, but I have, on occasion, had reason to visit people in federal prison, and I've always been shocked at the low quality of the food. It just seems like such a petty economy. And we're spending a couple of dollars a day more per person, per meal, which, in the scheme of things, wouldn't be much. You could just make life a little bit more civilized and buy some—and by the way, remove the single largest grievance that most prisoners have about their daily condition. And you wonder, in a detention center where you're dealing with people who are not criminals and often haven't been convicted of anything, why you wouldn't feed them properly. Something I can't understand.
Dickerson: I agree with you. Having spent time in these facilities and seeing what people eat—you know, lunch meat that's frozen, lunch meat that's moldy, food that's clearly expired. I spent time at a family-detention facility that was actually finally closed under the Biden administration after a long effort to end family detention. The United States is one of the only countries in the developed world that detains families. I think Australia is the only other. Because it's really, really difficult to detain kids for long periods of time and to do it in a way that's considered safe and humane.
And so family detention finally ended under Biden, but reopened immediately and is set to expand now under the Trump administration. And at our largest family-detention center in Dilley, Texas, I reported on families there and heard from really every single one of them that the food was unbearable, especially for kids. I had parents tell me that their children would vomit just from the smell of the food before they even entered the cafeteria, and kids would lose really significant weight because they would refuse to eat the food because they found it so disgusting.
The reason, I think, why you see the food quality that you do—and this is written about in a book that I mentioned in my story called Immigration Detention Inc. that just came out by a professor, Nancy Hiemstra. She's at Stony Brook University, in New York. She looked at vendors within detention centers and found that, of course, the way that they make money is by minimizing their cost. The federal government is going to pay them a set amount of money for the services that they provide. And so the less they spend providing food, or when it comes to medical care, the less that the medical providers spend providing that care, the greater their profits, of course. So it really is, I think, a matter of pinching pennies, and that book documents very well how these facilities really are economic engines.
There are so many different people and organizations making money within immigration-detention centers, and all of it is predicated on spending as little as possible, of course, on the people who are detained there.
Frum: Well, this is one of the suggestive points in your story—that we are not only building facilities, but we're building vested interests. That people whose livelihoods—the guards, most obviously, but many others—people whose livelihoods depend on the preservation of the system—once done, it's hard because one might think, Well, if there's a political change, just abandon it. But that may be harder to do than one assumes, according to you.
Dickerson: That's right. Funding for immigration detention, and really immigration enforcement overall, has almost never increased in the history of its existence because of these vested interests. So when an immigration-detention facility opens in an American community, it's often been fought over. Communities will campaign to bring these facilities in because they bring jobs and often hundreds or even thousands of jobs depending on how large they are. And so you'll have county sheriffs who campaign, promising to bring ICE to town. And as soon as those jobs are created, families depend on them. These facilities tend to be in rural areas, where there's not a lot of other economic opportunity. Of course, the land is cheaper. So you can build a big detention facility there.
But then the community really comes to rely on it, and it becomes a big political problem to try to close it down. And you also have the major private-prison companies that operate the facilities who lobby in Washington to, of course, keep them open and grow them. And then the many, many other contractors that operate within them that are all doing the same thing in order to continue providing these services and to expand these services, which have grown in recent years. So now ICE detainees have access to tablets that they can use to speak with their family, for example, that didn't exist before. That's one more company that's trying to keep these facilities open and keep them large so that they can continue to make profits.
Frum: How hastily are we able to move people out of the facilities to return them to the country, ideally, of which they're a citizen? As you witnessed on that harrowing, harrowing trip you wrote about for The Atlantic through Panama, different people come from different countries with different degrees of oppressiveness. Mexico's a pretty nice place. It's unequal; it's hard to make a living, but it's basically a free country. Other countries are much worse. How quickly can we get people back to where they are supposed to be, if it's an acceptable place? Or is that just taking forever as the bureaucracy gets bigger?
Dickerson: It is taking a very long time. Immigration cases can take months. They can take years. The average time that someone spends detained fluctuates quite a lot, but at this point, most people are spending months, at the very least, in ICE detention. And that's an important question that I raise in the piece, as well, is: Is this massive expansion of the detention system actually the best way to carry out the administration's goal, if President Trump really does want to deport up to a million people a year? I don't think that it is, because at the same time that the administration is moving to expand detention, it's firing many immigration judges. Those are the only people who have the power to hand down a deportation order. You can't deport someone without one of those.
And the main hurdles that we all talked about in advance of President Trump taking office to his immigration campaign really are legal ones and diplomatic ones. So when people land in immigration detention, they're going to fight their case. They're going to apply for a form of relief, particularly if, like many detained people have now—if these are people who've been here for a very long period of time, they may have the right to some form of protection. And then you have the diplomatic hurdles. So you've got to get these receiving countries on board and willing to accept hundreds or thousands of their nationals on a monthly basis in order to hit these high goals. Detaining lots and lots of people doesn't necessarily lead to the outcome of removing lots and lots of people, but it is very expensive. And we can talk about, if you want—to get into the relationships between the private-prison companies and the federal agencies that they work with in immigration enforcement, and how I've seen that kind of lead to expansions of detention historically that may not have been necessary.
For years—and this has been true, it's important to point out, in Democratic and Republican administrations—the highest ranking officials at ICE have often retired into executive roles at these private-prison companies, including Geo and CoreCivic. And what that does is put private-prison executives across the negotiating table with their former underlings, deciding whether or not to expand the immigration-detention system, and underlings who may also hope to—and who often do—end up retiring into these executive roles at the private-prison companies as well.
So I reached out to both of them. Geo got back to me and said that there's no evidence to support that this revolving door of hiring leads to lower accountability or higher prices. But for many years, advocates have raised questions about why these detention facilities and these detention contracts expand as dramatically as they do when they don't seem to lead to the outcomes that ICE will promise at the beginning of a given year. You know, deportations have really been stagnant over the last several administrations without a huge amount of fluctuation. And so Why do these contracts continue to grow? And what's the connection between these relationships that exist and the incentives built into them and the contracts that result?
Frum: You're describing a system that is becoming increasingly voracious at picking people up, increasingly capacious at storing them for a long time, but not improving at removing people who ought to be removed.
And so we're creating this kind of intake detention but not removal. And one of the things—this is an incident that probably has now, because of the Russia events, been forgotten, but one of the places where people were supposed to be removed to was the country of Colombia.
Colombia is a country with a history of significant violence but that has achieved a kind of uneasy peace in recent years. And the Colombian government—Colombia's normally been governed from the right, but they currently have a left-of-center president, and he said, I'm going to continue to receive people. I have one condition: They must be treated with dignity. No shackles. That's the deal. If you don't shackle them, we'll take them—our nationals. Not everybody's nationals; our nationals. And the Trump administration said, Oh, yeah? Shackles. And blew up, and then we got into a trade war with Colombia—which is an important strategic partner of the United States and a country with which the United States has a free-trade agreement negotiated by President George W. Bush and signed by President [Barack] Obama—over the issue of Should people be shackled?
And one of the things that—I'm sorry to make this point so long. The legitimation of what the Trump administration is doing depends on the idea that these people being detained are very dangerous. That's why you have to shackles.
Dickerson: Right.
Frum: But the numbers—there are not a million people a year of dangerous people in the United States to remove. So if you're going to remove a million people, most of them will be people who are out of status but who are not dangerous. And you don't need to shackle them. You just need to say, Okay, we have laws. You're out of the law. Get on the plane. Here's your hot meal on the plane. Welcome back to Colombia, where you come from.
Dickerson: Exactly. You're pointing to an issue—and there are many examples of it—where the administration says it wants to do one thing but then behaves in a way that really runs directly counter to it. And a lot of it comes back to this fundamental disconnect between a promise to deport the worst of the worst and a promise to deport a million people a year. You just simply can't do both.
If the administration wanted to focus on the worst of the worst, for example, it really wouldn't need to massively expand the detention system that exists, because these would be people who have extensive criminal records, who are not eligible for any form of immigration relief, and whose cases would move very quickly through the courts. You might run into diplomatic issues with their home countries being willing to take them in, but it's a smaller number of people who would move quickly through the immigration system and who I think have been targeted aggressively under the last several administrations, both Republican and Democrat.
Obviously, Trump wanted to do a better job and wanted to do a better job of vetting, in particular, the large numbers of people who came in during the Biden administration. That is all doable without a massive expansion of the detention system. But when you do expand the detention system, you end up sweeping, and you set these very high goals in terms of numbers. You, of course, end up, as you pointed out, sweeping up lots of people who've been in the United States for a long period of time, have no previous interaction with law enforcement, and whose deportation becomes difficult to justify.
So with Colombia, in particular, it boggles the mind why the administration would blow up its own ability to achieve a goal that it's laid out. ICE has been sending out emails with their weekly worst of the worst, where they find the example of the person with the most extensive criminal record they possibly can who they have arrested, and celebrate it. And they could continue to do that in a much less chaotic way without spending all of this money. And that's why I felt the story was so important to write—because, yes, the country voted for a president who wanted to carry out a vast deportation campaign, or an aggressive deportation campaign, whether it meant focusing on people who were very dangerous or focusing on large numbers, but do we actually need to spend all of these taxpayer dollars in order to do it? We don't. And so on top of having a campaign underway that the public is really starting to question and be troubled by, we now have a massive amount of taxpayer dollars that could have been spent elsewhere, and more effectively.
Frum: Let me pick up on your point about diplomatic issues. So one of the countries from which a lot of recent people have come, either as the asylum seekers or straightforward illegal immigrants, is Venezuela. And Venezuela is an authoritarian regime under an un-American, anti-American dictatorship—first Hugo Chavez and then his successor, President [Nicolás] Maduro—and significant human-rights issues, a country very much on the Cuban model. At another time, the United States might say, Well, it's pretty reasonable that a person would run away from Venezuela and seek freedom somewhere else. But the numbers are very large, and so the Trump administration wants to return the Venezuelans, and it looks like the price of doing that has been to rehabilitate the Venezuelan regime diplomatically.
So it's not just that diplomacy is a constraint on the deportation project; actually, deportation is reshaping the foreign policy of the United States and making Venezuela a more acceptable—or seemingly more acceptable—partner to the Trump administration than you would think, based on its internal policy and its external policy, it ought to be.
Dickerson: So immigration and deportation does provide an opportunity for diplomacy. And if the Trump administration were to play its cards right, it really could have influence. It's had influence in Venezuela, could have influence in other places where we're concerned about the politics, places where we're concerned about whether these countries have been willing to take our advice or accept our support, work with us in terms of trade. There is a real opportunity there. And I think with regard to Venezuela in particular, there was a deep desire on behalf of the current regime to bring back as many people as possible, to prevent the country from emptying out, as has been happening in the last few years. And so they're a little bit more open.
But one wonders why didn't some of the funds that—I mean, we're talking about money and diplomacy. It's two different things. But it isn't, at the same time. Could we have spent far less money on expanding our enforcement infrastructure in the United States and spent, instead, a bit on negotiating with countries to help them, whether it's change and improve human-rights conditions that we're concerned about, improve democratic freedoms and openness, perhaps even build reception centers for welcoming people who are willing to go home? Because there are just simply logistical concerns about accepting large numbers of deportees, as well.
So you're right that deportation, and immigration, really, it does open a diplomatic door. And the question is: How well will the administration manage those conversations? They've been very clumsy, as you know, and have lots of times blown up. And that's not usually an effective way to improve relations here.
Frum: Here's the last topic area I want to ask you about, which is this strange business of third-country deportations. Normally, the rule is you return people where they came from. And some of the places people who are here illegally come from are pretty nice. Like, if you come from Mexico, if you come from Brazil, if you come from Argentina, you know, obviously the United States offers higher wages, so that's attractive. But it's not so horrible to live in Mexico, Brazil, or Argentina. On the other hand, if you get here from North Korea, we shouldn't send you back. You're a genuine asylum-seeker refugee.
There seems to be growing a practice of taking people who come from one country and sending them back to a completely other country, often very far remote from any—like South Sudan, and what is someone who speaks Spanish supposed to do in South Sudan? It's hard for me. What is going on there? How is this justified? How prevalent is this practice? Is it growing?
Dickerson: Add this to the list of previously unfathomables, for the main reason that it's legally dubious. We have yet to have a final determination on these third-country deportations. They have been challenged in court and so far continue. But this was the Trump administration's kind of creative, if you will, way of leapfrogging the diplomatic hurdles that I mentioned earlier. Instead of convincing Colombia and Venezuela and Honduras and Guatemala and the Caribbean countries and all the places where deportees are coming from—instead of convincing all of them to accept their own nationals, simply go instead to, for example, El Salvador and convince them to take thousands of people from all over the world. It's easier. It's one negotiation instead of 20 or 25, but it is legally dubious. There is no precedent for, in large numbers—except for in very extreme and individualized cases—deporting people to countries that are not their own. And so, yes, it is growing because we've never done it en masse before.
And it's still being challenged in court and will continue to be. It's hard for me to see a world in which ultimately this practice stands up, because it challenges the sovereignty of the home country of the deportee and that of [the country] that's receiving these deportees. I mean, it really questions: What is nationality? What is citizenship? If you don't have travel documents, and you don't have permission to move from one place to another, how valid are these borders that we're working to uphold? So it is, you know, underway for the first time, but—
Frum: It would be already bad enough if you took somebody who's here from Venezuela, put them on a plane to El Salvador, opened the door, and said, Bye. There's the bus to town. Hope you have some El Salvadoran money with you. But we're not doing even that. We're saying, Oh, and then we're putting you in a prison in El Salvador forever without any trial, or any show—I mean, we have an allegation you've done something wrong. But normally, in America or anyone under American jurisdiction, if we put you in a prison for the rest of your life, we prove that you've done something heinous to justify putting you in a prison for the rest of your life.
Dickerson: That's right. And that's a whole other legal problem with these third-country deportations—not just that we're sending people to a country they didn't come from, but that we're putting them into a situation where there is no clear form of due process, no clear way to ever get out of these facilities. And that, ultimately, is on our hands. These individuals have families who remain in the United States; will they go after the U.S. government? That's just one legal route that I can imagine being pursued among the many.
It's a reflection of something that I reported a lot on during the first Trump administration, which is that the apparatus of people in the White House who are focused on deporting as many people as possible—they're led, as we know, by Stephen Miller, who has been focused on the immigration for more than 10 years in Washington and has really studied the federal code in and out for legal ways of deporting people, but has also spent a lot of time with other lawyers, racking their brains about ways that are untested, that are unprecedented, that we don't know to be legal to deport as many people as possible.
It's a real creative exercise that they have constantly underway. And they're not afraid to try something, even when lawyers are cautioning that it may not hold up in court. That's part of the strategy, is: Try something new, and even if it ends up being shut down, you might be able to achieve some of your goal, because those legal cases take time. So they might be able to deport thousands of people through these third-country deportations, and even if ultimately the practices end, they'll be a little bit closer to the ultimate goal. They don't see that as a bad thing.
Frum: But there's one thing that they're not doing, because it takes a lot of creativity, but it's the most obvious thing to do. And the thing that would work best is the thing they don't want to do, which is: Instead of sending ICE agents in bandanas, you send a team of accountants to large employers in the home-building and meatpacking industry, say, Let's see—we don't have to see any people here. We want to see your files, Mr. Employer. Let's go through the files. It doesn't look like you've done the procedures right, and here's your half-million-dollar fine.
And eventually, the home builder or the construction company or the meatpacking owner: I guess we should check people's status. And once the word goes out to all those people who are risking their lives, whom you so courageously traveled with, they're acting as rational economic actors because they know if you get across the line, you might be deported, but you will still be able to get a job. Because they, in fact, even now—this crackdown administration is not doing serious work with the forensic accounting and the finding of employers, because that's off limits in Republican Congress.
Dickerson: It's exactly right, a really important point. I'm glad that you brought it up, and another big question for me that I raise about this massive investment of money to carry out immigration enforcement. I don't think it's necessary. It's not rocket science to find undocumented immigrants in the United States. We know the businesses that they tend to work for. They're on virtually all of the farms and dairies in the United States that require manual labor. They're in restaurant kitchens. They're caring for elders in assisted-living facilities and in our homes. They're landscaping. They're cleaning. They're working in other hospitality jobs.
This is readily available information, and it does not require complex spyware technology in order to track people down, but it would require employer accountability. And the Trump administration is already butting up against that, already getting pushback from the agriculture industry, from the hotel industry. It's been reported that Trump himself has had undocumented workers on his properties. Because we know what industries rely on them so heavily, and we do continue, to this day as a country, to send a deeply mixed message to immigrants. At the same time that you hear politicians in the news saying, Do not come to the United States, or touting the deportation campaign that's underway now, the jobs are always there, and I think it's confusing for people. But at the end of the day, their decision is led by that rational economic thinking that you pointed out—that even though there is a risk, there's also a very clear desire for their presence.
And when people get to the United States, it always amazes me how quickly they're employed. People will be employed within a week; they'll have something, and then within a month they'll have something better, and then within two months they'll have two or three jobs because the need is so extreme. And so that is something that the Trump administration is going to have to face. The tension between its goal and its economic interest is going to come up again and again, and is going to break at some point.
Frum: So here's the last thing I want to ask you: As you look back on your trip on foot on the immigration route, do you have any, at this distance in time, later reflections on what you saw and what it meant?
Dickerson: That's a big one. I mean, there were so many different things going on in the Darién Gap. Because I was reporting on people who were fleeing all different types of circumstances, from the Venezuelan regime to economic constraints to climate change, all of them kind of come to a head with regard to immigration.
I think I can say that—you alluded to this a little bit earlier—in a previous time, what's happened in Venezuela politically would have made Venezuelans kind of the ideal asylee in the United States. As much as asylum exists as kind of a benevolent force, it's also a diplomatic tool, in a way, of showing to the world that our form of government is the best form of government, that a free democracy—a capitalist free democracy—is the best system. That's how the United States has positioned the asylum and refugee resettlement historically, and yet the opposition to the massive, massive amount of migration from Venezuela was obviously much stronger than the diplomatic interest that may have existed in past decades.
A lot of that relates to social media and to the ease of movement and access to movement that didn't exist in decades past and that does now. I mean, there are so many different groups that have capitalized on smuggling, on moving people from country to country, because these systems that attempt to control migration have been ineffective.
Maybe a final thought—and this is in my reporting about the Darién Gap, but I still believe it to be true—is that when you go about trying to control migration, as we have, through simply law enforcement and punishment, and trying to close holes by pressuring other countries to revoke access to visas, all trying to stop people from ultimately reaching the United States, what's happened instead of discouraging migration is private industry has popped up. People have figured out ways to make lots of money by getting people through and getting them into the United States.
And so I think—I go back again and again, in my Darién Gap reporting and in many stories that I've done, to the idea that immigration policy really has to be holistic. You can't ever be successful by focusing on one thing. So it's not just detention and deportation, as you said. It's turning toward American employers who employ undocumented immigrants, and really, I think, toward the country having an honest conversation about our need for immigrant work and an honest conversation about our relationship to immigrants.
I think there are a lot of Americans in the United States who think that, in general, they may support mass deportation except for the one friend they have at church or except for their daughter's mother, who they think is an exception—their one connection to somebody who doesn't have legal status. And these people in our lives and in our communities aren't exceptions. They're the rule. They're in every community. We all have relationships and connections to them. And so we just need to have a more honest conversation as a country about that in order to come up with a law-enforcement infrastructure that's effective and a diplomatic strategy that's effective and a way of allowing people in the United States who live and work here and don't break the law to live as full people, with rights and protections and not live in the state of terror that many are now, because of this sort of chaotic and disorganized sweep that we are seeing and that we've just handed a massive paycheck to this with this One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Frum: Caitlin Dickerson, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you for your work for The Atlantic. You're a star among us all. Thank you. Bye-bye.
Dickerson: Thanks so much, David.
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Frum: Thank you to Caitlin Dickerson for joining me today on The David Frum Show. Before I sign off, I want to make a personal announcement—not something I often do on this platform, but just this one time. Those of you who are watching the program as opposed to listening to it will have noticed over my shoulder a photograph of my daughter Miranda, who died in February 2024. I keep the photograph there to show the world what is in my heart and in my head, and that Miranda is always with me and that I'm always thinking of her. That sad news this week has been relieved by some happy news: My wife, Danielle, and I would like to welcome to planet Earth a new granddaughter, Abigail, born to my son, Nat, and his wife, Isabel, our daughter-in-law in New York City, on August 14. This is the first piece of happy news my family has had in a long time, and I can't help but share it with the audience and friends of The David Frum Show.
Thanks to The Picton Gazette for their hospitality for this program. Thanks to the production team here at The David Frum Show. As always, the best way to support the work of this program, and of all of us at The Atlantic, is by subscribing to The Atlantic and also by sharing and liking this program on whatever audio or visual platform you may use to help us to get out the word.
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Frum: This episode of The David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grein. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.