The True Purpose of Stephen Miller's Reign of Terror

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Donald Trump's “big, beautiful bill,” which passed earlier this month, shoveled $170 billion toward immigration enforcement and border security, transforming ICE into the largest law enforcement agency in the history of the federal government. Even before that money is spent, the Trump administration's immigration crackdown has been its signature policy, even as polls show it to be wildly unpopular . On this week's episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick spoke with Aaron Reichlin-Melnick , senior fellow and former policy director at the American Immigration Council, a pro-immigrant nonprofit, about the ways in which the Trump immigration dragnet—the raids, detentions, and deportations—has been demonstrating on the ground as it is simultaneously being dealt with in the courts and long before it is funded at its hoped-for scale. Their conversation, which appears below, has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Dahlia Lithwick: What has changed about immigration enforcement in the past six months?

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick: The biggest changes have been in the use of personnel from other law enforcement agencies, the change in underlying tactics, and the goal of what internal immigration enforcement looks like. We've had thousands of federal agents, from the FBI, the DEA, the ATF, the Marshals Service, the Postal Inspection Service, and even the IRS's financial crimes investigators, reassigned to bolster the manpower of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, easily doubling the number of people they have to go out and do immigration enforcement in the field.

The other big shift has been who they're targeting and how. When you and I talked back in January , I said most of what ICE does is targeted enforcement: Officers have lists of names, they go out into the community, and they arrest specific people. Under the second Trump administration, they started expanding the use of so-called collateral arrests, where they would not just arrest the one person they had on their target list, but if that person was near anyone else, they would just question those people about their statuses and arrest anyone they found who was undocumented. But those were still fundamentally the same kind of targeted arrests that ICE has been doing for decades.

But in May, unhappy with the pace of deportations , Stephen Miller called together all 25 field office directors of ICE enforcement and removal operations, and all 25 field office directors of ICE Homeland Security Investigations (the two main components of the agency). Miller gathered in a room in Washington with those officers, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and lobbyist Corey Lewandowski, and reportedly screamed at the ICE officers, telling them they were not hitting the numbers he wanted them to be hitting, the numbers Trump had pledged to hit on the campaign trail. From now on, it was about quantity over quality.

Within days of that meeting, things started looking very different. The raids in Los Angeles began a week after that. We started seeing immigration court arrests and ICE check-in arrests, people going to places where immigrants were complying, showing up for their court hearing, and rearresting them. We have seen a far more aggressive enforcement posture since then, with ICE hitting daily “arrest” records. But, you know, I put arrest in quotes here, to some extent, because some of this is re-detention. It's not that they're arresting new people; they're just re-detaining people who are already in the system.

That shift in May had ICE doing things that we haven't seen them doing since the bad old days of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, in the 1970s or the '60s, when you had the kinds of roundups you hadn't seen in the era after professional policing became a thing.

Along with those immigration court arrests and those wide-scale roving patrols in LA, which eventually led to the deployment of the National Guard, you've also seen a massive increase in worksite raids. During the first Trump administration, there were only four or five major workplace raids—although one of those did involve raiding seven different meatpacking plants in a single day. Now we're seeing one or two of them a week , and they're not just going after places they've spent months investigating. They're doing I-9 audits at random restaurants and businesses. They've raided nail salons, meatpacking plants, racetracks in red states and blue states alike.

All of this combined is a far more aggressive pace of enforcement, a change in how that enforcement is being carried out, and a change in who they're targeting when they are doing targeted arrests. The primary targets are still people with some form of criminal record or final order of removal, but when they're doing these broader operations, they're just going after anyone they can find, and as a result, the percentage of people they're arresting that have had any prior interaction with the criminal justice system has plummeted. Not surprisingly, after this new pace of enforcement stepped up, these raids became far more visible, and Trump's approval rating on immigration plummeted too.

So we are also seeing ICE and Border Patrol agents conducting what seems to be conflated with domestic policing all around the country, and they're doing so far from the borders and certainly far from the 100-mile enforcement zone . But I'd love for you to explain these streams of law enforcement: the kinds of people who do domestic policing, and also the military and why they're not supposed to all be doing the same mission at the same time.

When you look at ICE and DHS in general, a lot of people tend to conflate them into one big blob of immigration enforcement. But the reality is, Border Patrol and ICE do a few different things. Border Patrol has primarily been a reactive agency for the past century of its history. They were stationed at the border with the goal of catching people coming across. They were not going out and trying to find people who were in violation of immigration law. By contrast, ICE, which evolved from the INS interior enforcers, their goal was to find people who had made it past Border Patrol, or who had overstayed a visa, and take those people into custody. The key difference between those two goals is that Border Patrol could not determine who would go into their custody, because they were just waiting for people to cross, and then they'd stop them. But ICE knows who they are going after, generally speaking, and that's how they've operated for decades.

All of that is distinct from ICE's Homeland Security Investigations arm, which is actually the old US Customs Service criminal investigation arm. They're a bit more like the FBI. They have to actually go out and arrest people for violations of criminal law, which means getting together the kind of evidence you need to convict someone in court beyond a reasonable doubt. So all those different agencies have operated differently, historically. What we are seeing now is all three of those agencies increasingly being put together to work toward the one purpose of interior enforcement. And that all looks like what ICE enforcement and removal operations have done in the past—a much lower evidentiary burden, with a goal of just rounding up as many people as possible.

Border Patrol has done some kinds of internal enforcement before. They do these things called roving patrols, which is where—a little bit like a beat cop—a Border Patrol officer will drive around in their SUV, and if they spot somebody who they suspect is violating immigration law, they can pull them over, check their status, and then, if they turn out to be undocumented, arrest them. A lot of the videos we're seeing of the Border Patrol coming out of LA are roving patrols, and that's what a judge in the city just blocked the government from doing in ways that violate the Constitution. The judge found that Border Patrol's way of determining if somebody might be in violation of immigration law was just saying, “Oh, there's a bunch of Latinos standing at this bus stop. I'm going to pull over and question all of them.” That's not reasonable suspicion of an immigration violation. Los Angeles has an extremely heavy Latino population, many of whom are US citizens or lawful permanent residents, and you cannot tell immigration status from looks alone. That is what the Border Patrol was doing, whereas ICE continues to do mostly targeted operations, where they do at least have a name on a piece of paper, who they're supposed to be arresting. We have not seen ICE doing a lot of this kind of roving patrol.

But it's hard to tell. If a van shows up and grabs somebody and throws them into the van, that is actually more likely to be ICE than Border Patrol.

The administration is arguing that just standing around and being Hispanic in Southern California is sufficient to establish probable cause.

One of the plaintiffs in the case in Los Angeles is a US citizen who works at a car wash. Border Patrol had come to the car wash multiple times and questioned other people there, including other workers at the car wash, and some of them were undocumented. On two prior occasions, Border Patrol had come to the car wash, found people who were undocumented, and arrested them. Now, this third time they come to the car wash, this guy who's been working there for 10 years and is a US citizen is stopped and questioned by Border Patrol. He shows them his ID. They say, “That's not enough. We need to see your passport.” And he says, “I don’t have my passport on me.” And they put him in the back of a car and drive him somewhere else. He's functionally arrested at that point. They check his ID, run him through a database, say, “Yep, turns out he is a citizen,” drive him back, drop him back off at the car wash. Don't even apologize to him. The government argued in court that they had reasonable suspicion to pick him up because he was at a location where undocumented immigrants had been found. The judge pointed out, “You are admitting right then and there that you didn't have reasonable suspicion, because it can't be reasonable suspicion that you are simply a Latino person who is at a location where undocumented immigrants have previously been found.” That, however, is how these operations are working.