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Shikha Dalmia: Welcome to Zooming In, Radley Balko. You and I go back a long way. We were colleagues at Reason magazine for several years, by which point, as I recall, you’d already made quite a name for yourself as the nation’s premier criminal justice reporter. You don’t really need an introduction for our audience, but I’m going to give you one anyway. You broke the story of Cory Maye, a man who shot a police officer during a wrong-address drug raid. Justice Stephen Breyer cited your reporting on no-knock raids in a Supreme Court dissent. Your investigation of expert witness fraud in a Louisiana death penalty case won a Maggie Award. Your first book, Rise of the Warrior Cop, traced how American policing became militarized. And your second book, The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist, exposed junk forensic science and racism in the criminal justice system.
Today you publish The Watch, an excellent Substack where you do deep dives not just into individuals mistreated by the criminal justice system, but also into the abuses being perpetrated in the name of immigration enforcement in Trump’s second term.
I’ve covered immigration myself for many years, as you know, but less and less in recent years because editing and running an organization is a pretty time-consuming job. If I’m being honest, the issue was never pleasant, but now it’s actually become personally quite painful. I came to Reagan’s America when this country touted itself as the shining city on the hill where hardworking immigrants were welcome. Now I’m living in Trump’s America, where immigrants are vilified and dehumanized daily.
It’s been breathtaking to watch Indian Americans like me go from being a model minority to a reviled minority almost overnight. Just last week, Bo French, the Republican nominee for the Texas Railroad Commission, posted a photo of South Asian Indians cheering at a University of Texas football game, just like regular Americans taking pride in their university team’s victory. He called their presence a problem far worse than anyone imagined and said Americans have been displaced by foreigners. There was an outrage, and in response to the outrage, on Saturday, the Department of Education posted not an apology, but a graphic of a packed stadium without any sign of brown-skinned people, under the words “Make College Football Great Again.” It’s hard to imagine a more obvious racist dog whistle.
JD Vance has refused to condemn Bo French, even though his wife is Indian American. But that’s not even the worst of it. Other groups have it much worse, of course. On Sunday in Austin, an ICE agent shot a 28-year-old Venezuelan man who was making a DoorDash delivery. His family wasn’t allowed to see him in the hospital. He was released into ICE custody without his family being told where he was taken.
Radley, I want to get into what ICE has become under this administration with you in a bit, but just to set things up: Last summer, in 2025, you wrote this piece that was headlined “The Police Militarization Debate Is Over.” What is this debate? You surely don’t mean that we’ve won the debate or you won the debate. So, in what sense is it over?
Radley Balko: Yeah, so, I’ve been writing about this particular issue for 20 years or so now, and the argument that I would always have with people on the other side, the pro-law enforcement side, was that they would argue that the police need to be militarized because of the threat they face. Because of the drug war, because of terrorism, because drug dealers tend to be heavily armed, police need to be militarized because criminals are getting more armed.
But there was never any question about whether it was appropriate to send the actual military in to fight crime, to do day-to-day policing. Everybody in law enforcement agreed that that’s a terrible idea, that that’s something that’s directly at odds with democratic norms, and particularly in this country, which was founded on the idea that standing armies are bad, deploying standing armies domestically is disastrous. So there were always these points of agreement, these shared democratic norms, even with people in law enforcement and people on the right generally.
What we saw in the first year of the Trump administration was that all of those norms went out the window. Because Trump decided that he was going to send the National Guard into Chicago and he was going to send the Marines into Los Angeles, and that these cities were experiencing these fake national emergencies or fake crises that Trump sort of invented out of whole cloth—that this was now justification for dispensing with the Posse Comitatus Act, dispensing with the idea that the military is not an appropriate institution for domestic policing. And then, as soon as he made that decision, you had Fox News defending it. You had elected Republicans defending it in public.
This is something for which there’s always been bipartisan, sort of pan-ideological consensus on. If you remember back to the Obama administration, it was people on the right who were freaking out about Jade Helm military exercises in Texas. The idea was that Obama was somehow militarizing the police. When Obama, after Ferguson, tried to impose some policing standards, some federal standards that domestic law enforcement agencies around the country could sort of aspire to (standards that weren’t even mandatory), the complaint on the right was: “He’s nationalizing the police.”
Now that debate is done. The right has completely given in to the idea that there’s nothing wrong with using the military for domestic policing, that there’s nothing even wrong with using the military to settle political scores. When Trump sent the military into Minneapolis, at one point he said it was because state officials had stolen the election from him, that he won Minnesota all three times. In California you had Kristi Noem say the purpose of sending the Marines to Los Angeles was to liberate California from its socialist leaders.
So that’s what I meant when I said that the debate was over. It was just that it had shifted so much that even these kinds of shared principles that the whole police militarization debate was based on were gone.
Dalmia: Instead of us talking about why the police shouldn’t be militarized, we walked into the situation where the military performing policing became the accepted thing.
Later in the conversation, I do want to get into the impact this whole immigration situation is going to have on bringing policing practices back to where they ought to be. Previous presidents have also deported large numbers of people. Obama actually deported more people than Trump has so far done this term, and he was called the deporter-in-chief. And that was possible because of what Bill Clinton had created in 1996 through this law that he passed called IIRIRA, which made minor immigration infractions aggravated felonies for which people could be deported. Minor drug possession or a DUI became deportable offenses. So the legal architecture was there, and then Obama came in and, with a bunch of ICE money, created an actual physical infrastructure, and now Trump comes along.
So is Trump, in your view, different because his optics are different and his speech is different, or is there something fundamentally different between what previous presidents—Democratic presidents included—have done and what Trump is doing?
Balko: Yeah, I think there are some fundamental differences. In terms of sheer numbers, Trump is getting close to kind of where Obama was at this point in his first term at least, or maybe in his second. But Obama had specifically targeted people who had a criminal record. And in some cases we can argue about … I’m not going to defend Obama’s deportation record. But I think that most of the country is OK with deporting people who have committed violent crimes, who’ve committed serious felonies. And so that is who Obama targeted.
And a lot of those deportations during the Obama administration were people who were captured or apprehended just inside the border, within—I can’t remember what the specific radius is, but within a certain distance of the border. And when they were targeting people who had criminal records, they were doing investigations. They were finding the person they wanted and then sending teams out to apprehend those people.
What we’re seeing with Trump—and this was a specific directive from Stephen Miller before they started sending people into Los Angeles—I mean, Miller specifically wants to beat Obama’s record. That’s a goal that he has explicitly set. And so a few months into the new administration, we saw Miller tell ICE agents that they needed to start raiding Home Depot parking lots. They need to start raiding community centers. They need to go places where immigrants gather, cast a wide net.
So it became not about targeting people who are actually a threat or dangerous or have criminal records. It became: “We’re just going to go places where immigrants are and we’re going to grab as many of them as we can, and we’ll sort it out later.” That then just became: “We’re gonna just deport everyone we can.”
Before, if you came to the border and said that you were seeking asylum, your case would basically be adjudicated, you would be released on parole. And I think the numbers are somewhere around 90 to 95% of those people, when they were released on parole, would show up for those hearings. And I think it’s almost 99% when they actually have an attorney. So the best way to actually make sure that people show up for their hearings after they’re granted parole, after seeking asylum, is to give them attorneys. Well, the administration is moving in the opposite direction. They’re making sure that they don’t get attorneys.
“The lies that we see from the Trump administration after these incidents are the kind of lies you tell not to cover something up, but to let everybody know that you can get away with anything. ‘We know we're lying, you know we're lying, and we know that you know we're lying, and there's not a damn thing that you can do about it.’ That's what those lies were about. It was about sort of this exercise of impunity.” — Radley Balko
There was just a story the other day that ICE is now disappearing people from databases after they have removal orders so that their attorneys and their families can’t find them and can’t file appeals. Prior to this administration, when you were seeking asylum, you would get an interview with an asylum officer. You could appeal that to the immigration court.
Trump has made it very clear that any immigration judges who rule against him are going to lose their jobs, because immigration court—as you know but some of your listeners might not be aware—is not an actual court. It is housed within the Department of Justice. The government is both the judge and the prosecution. And Trump has made it clear that if any of these judges don’t rule the way he wants, he’s going to fire them. He already has fired a bunch of them. He’s also completely replaced the Board of Immigration Appeals. So when you appeal an immigration judge’s ruling, you’re now appealing to a board that Trump also appointed after purging it of people he didn’t like.
And if you get that far, then you can appeal to a federal district court, and maybe if you have representation, they’ll hear your case. But they’re also deporting people before it ever gets that far.
The other thing they’re doing is they’ve really expanded this process called expedited removal, where they can basically deport you within hours of apprehending you. It used to be a very small class of people would qualify for expedited removal: people with, I think, felony records, people who already had a removal order, and then people who were caught within—I think it was—100 miles of the border.
Now Trump is arguing that anybody who is here, who is undocumented, is eligible for expedited removal. And they’re also saying that people who were here legally but Trump stripped their status—whether it was people who had TPS or people who were here on parole through the Biden administration through the app that they used to seek asylum—all those people are now eligible for expedited removal as well.
And as the federal courts themselves have ruled—several federal judges now have ruled—even within that parameter, the Trump administration is not giving people proper due process. They’re deporting them before they even get a chance to make their case for asylum. They’re denying them a chance to talk to their attorneys. They’re shuttling them around to immigration centers so that their attorneys and families don’t know where they are. We now know that they’re disappearing people from the databases so nobody can check to see where they are.
It is just … I mean, it is all the worst excesses of the previous three administrations, with the added problem of stripping due process from the entire regime. It’s pretty appalling what’s going on. And that’s even before we get to the conditions inside the detention centers.
I think we’re in uncharted territory, kind of at every level of immigration enforcement at this point.
Dalmia: Yeah, those conditions, and some of the stories coming out, are really horrific.
The ACLU actually has been doing some great work monitoring conditions in some of these facilities. I had a conversation with David J. Bier not too long ago, and we were discussing the Fort Bliss detention center. They didn’t just do the usual—lights on 24 hours, cold conditions, concrete floors—but they were punishing immigrants by beating them while grabbing their testicles. I mean, we talk about CECOT as this horrific, torturous facility!
We are, as you said, in uncharted territory over here, with very little oversight, if any at all.
But to go back to your point: First of all, there’s a big difference, as you pointed out, between Obama’s deportation record and this administration’s record. Obama was concentrating on the border and on actual criminal aliens. Although he did go overboard several times—they were sending SWAT teams to meatpacking facilities and hauling out undocumented immigrants if there were some auditing irregularities in the workforce of the employer. So they did do some pretty draconian stuff.
But what’s still different is that in the first term, Trump wanted to build the Great Wall of Trump. That was his big thing, border enforcement. And ironically, at a time when he’s building monuments to himself, we haven’t heard a whole lot about the Trump wall anymore. They have shifted focus from border enforcement, which led to some pretty horrific practices like child separation policies. They had declared, if you remember, the zero-tolerance border policy, which resulted in its own abuses.
Can you say more about the dangers of interior enforcement? We have effectively moved the border inward. How is that changing ICE? How does that make things much more dangerous from a civil liberties perspective?
Balko: Yeah, so if we look at—the ACLU used to put out a map—[the ACLU has said] that the border, I think it’s within 100 miles of the border, is basically a Constitution-free zone. And that includes bodies of water. So there’s this huge part of the U.S. where the Fourth Amendment doesn’t apply. And I think it’s maybe [two-thirds] of the U.S. population actually lives in that area.
“There was never any question about whether it was appropriate to send the actual military in to fight crime, to do day-to-day policing. Everybody in law enforcement agreed that that's a terrible idea, that that's something that's directly at odds with democratic norms, and particularly in this country, which was founded on the idea that standing armies are bad. And what we saw in the first year of the Trump administration was that all of those norms went out the window.” — Radley Balko
If you’re going to say that everywhere is the border now, you’re expanding that zone to essentially the entire country. I also talked to Bier, a couple of years ago, when I first decided that this is something I needed to cover. And one of the things he told me is that when you’re trying to find somebody with a criminal record, it takes a lot of resources. They have to investigate that person, they have to [get] all the correct paperwork, and then they have to send a team out to find that person. Because the people who are actually dangerous, the people with criminal records who need to be deported, they don’t make themselves available to police, right? They’re hiding. So they’re not working, they’re not showing up at their court hearings. You have to go hunt them down.
What the Trump administration has done is started arresting people when they show up at their hearings. They started literally arresting people for [complying] with the law. What does that mean? Well, one, those people are going to stop showing up for hearings, but it also means that immigrants are going to stop cooperating with police when it comes to reporting crime, being witnesses to crime, reporting domestic violence, because people are terrified. You’ve turned the courthouse from a place where justice is administered, however imperfectly, to now a place that people fear— like they don’t want to go anywhere near it. So you’ve got all of that going on.
Then, on top of that, you have this system where the Fourth Amendment doesn’t apply. It’s not that the Supreme Court has expanded its border zone to include the whole country, but the Trump administration has made the entire country the border, and then they’ve also told all of their enforcement officers: You basically have impunity. You are immune from criminal prosecution. We’re not going to prosecute you no matter what you do, up to and including killing people who are innocent or who didn’t deserve to be killed or didn’t do anything to be killed, including beating people, including pulling people out of their cars, ramming their cars.
And then on top of that, the U.S. Supreme Court has also basically made it impossible to file a civil lawsuit against any federal law enforcement officer. Trump has turned these agents loose on the entire country. They’ve said: cast a wide net, get whoever you can, and no matter how far you go, no matter how much you abuse your power, you’re not going to be held accountable criminally or civilly.
Trump has created a personalist army that has complete impunity no matter what they do.
On top of that, you add that new agents are being recruited with these explicitly white supremacist messages. They’re celebrating and glorifying violence and abuse in these social media posts that they’re putting up and these videos that they put out.
And you’ve got a force that looks kind of Brownshirt-ish in the end. I mean, we try not to get to the Nazi thing immediately, but if you’ve got agents of violence for the federal government that report basically to the president and not to the government or the rule of law, the courts, or the people, and they have complete impunity, and you’re telling them to use force and violence whenever necessary, and you’re sending them out with this kind of white supremacist message—you’re checking off a lot of boxes there at that point.
Dalmia: Actually, there is precedent for this, there is history for this. The CBP’s predecessor was created in 1924, when we first passed our nativist restrictionist law. Till then we had a porous border with Mexico. People could come and go as they wanted.
At that point, they created ports of entry, and you could only enter through these ports. And so the border had to be policed, and they created [the Border Patrol]. And I think it was actually The Intercept that did a really great report on the brutality of border enforcement. The first people to enroll as part of this border protection agency were KKK types.
So it’s kind of woven into the DNA of border enforcement that you’ve got some really reactionary types. And now that ICE is growing as quickly as it is, and all bets are off, you are getting CBP people to enroll in ICE.
To elaborate on your point about what’s different now that the border is moving into the interior of the country: Because there are no standards, because nobody is accountable, CBP practices, which were always pretty horrific, are being moved into ICE, which is an agency that’s actually charged with protecting Americans. I mean, it’s not supposed to operate on the same principles as the border enforcement agency, where, OK, they are dealing with illegal crossers who apparently don’t have any protection of the U.S. Constitution.
And now these people are dealing with Americans on the streets, and they bring the same practices. If I am remembering correctly, Renee Good’s murderer, Jonathan Ross, came from a border protection background.
Balko: Yeah, so Border Patrol, like you said, they have this history. They even have a more recent history. I mean, back in the mid-2010s, so 2014, 2015, there was a series of investigative reports about Border Patrol finding that they had this just incredible history of abuse. Also just lawlessness.
I think at one point there was a stretch where a Border Patrol officer had been arrested on criminal charges, I think it was like once every week or something on average. They also had a history of shooting into moving vehicles, putting themselves in front of vehicles to then give them an excuse to shoot at the vehicles. That was exposed.
Biden actually [appointed] a pretty reformist head of [Customs and Border Protection] who lasted like a year before the union basically chased him out. So there is that history there.
Also, last year I interviewed a former pretty senior-level person at ICE who was fired when Trump took over. And he gave me a ranking of federal law enforcement that stuck with me and I think is worth thinking about. He said the FBI is kind of the varsity team. They’re the most professional of the organizations. He said ICE, you could consider them kind of the junior varsity. And he said Border Patrol is kind of like a drunken office softball team. I mean, they’re the guys that the other agencies sort of look down on. They’re abusive, they’re not particularly professional. There’s very little discipline, internal quality control.
And if you remember, during the George Floyd protests, when Trump really wanted to start cracking skulls, what did he do? Well, Attorney General Bill Barr sent in the cell extraction teams from the Bureau of Prisons. These are the people who handle their prison riots. But then he also sent in BORTAC, which is like the paramilitary force of Border Patrol. And these are the officers who responded to the George Floyd protests pretty violently, but also started this trend of not wearing name tags and masking their faces. This was during the first Trump administration. So we saw a kind of preview of what was coming. This kind of unaccountable, unenforceable, kind of nameless and faceless version of law enforcement.
Dalmia: Yeah. I actually didn’t remember that. That’s very interesting.
Again, with Border Patrol, there was a New York Times series which won a Pulitzer Prize. I think this was actually way back in the 1970s, where there was a whistleblower who was exposing the fact that Border Patrol was already doing some version of child separation. So if families were trying to cross the border, they would catch the youngest kid first and use them as hostages to get the rest of the family that was hiding out in the desert or whatever to give themselves up, telling them, “Well, if you don’t, I’m going to put your child in detention.” And the families would come out, and they would still separate them.
“What the Trump administration has done is started arresting people when they show up at their hearings. They started literally arresting people for [complying] with the law. What does that mean? Well, one, those people are going to stop showing up for hearings, but it also means that immigrants are going to stop cooperating with police when it comes to reporting crime, being witnesses to crime, reporting domestic violence, because people are terrified. You’ve turned the courthouse from a place where justice is administered, however imperfectly, to now a place that people fear.” — Radley Balko
This used to be considered roguish, horrific behavior. And it became our official policy, which meant that you can’t even hold the agents who are engaging in these practices accountable anymore.
Hayek wrote in The Road to Serfdom that if you give the government massive powers to do something people just don’t want to do, they are not going to do it, which will justify ever-increasing rounds of government force till all your rights have been obliterated. And you’ve kind of watched this in action on immigration under Trump.
But going back to some of your own work on this: You did a brilliant series yourself last year, “You Can’t Hide Your Lying ICE.” A very clever title …
Balko: Still doing it. Yeah, it’s still ongoing, yeah.
Dalmia: … in which you went through several ICE encounters and compared what actually happened, after footage and videos and witness testimony had come out, with ICE’s own accounts of how things had gone down. And it was clear that ICE agents were blatantly lying, and they kind of even knew that these lies were not sustainable, they would come out, and they were still lying.
So what was the motive behind that? Because it was not just a cover-up. They were doing something far beyond that.
Balko: So, they were lying from day one, and I think that there was a strategy behind this. I mean, if you remember, in the early days of 2025, you immediately started seeing ICE and DHS officials claiming that people were weaponizing their cars against ICE officers. And they weren’t providing any evidence of this. They were just claiming it, and they were saying there’s been a 400% increase in assaults on ICE officers, right? And that may or may not have been true, but [the raw numbers were small]— which, when you consider how many more ICE officers there were out on the streets than before, wasn’t that big of an increase.
But I also think it’s just kind of a preemptive strike, because when you accuse the other side of doing something that you plan to do yourself, those accusations, it’s harder to make them stick.
And so what we saw is almost immediately, in Chicago, ICE agents started ramming people with their cars—ramming ICE watchers, ramming protesters, ramming immigrants—and then claiming that the immigrants were the ones who did it. That they rammed ICE officers and that they had been weaponizing their cars.
One of the first things we saw after Renee Good’s death was this claim that she was part of this network that was training activists to ram ICE agents with their cars. And of course, the video showed nothing of the kind. She was clearly trying to get away.
Since then we’ve just seen this over and over and over again. ICE agents will claim that somebody rammed them with their car. The video inevitably shows that the ICE agents were the ones, or Border Patrol agents were the ones, who initiated the crash and then unleashed violence and abuse on the people inside.
We just saw it again in Austin. This guy that was shot in Austin—there’s now video; you can see the ICE agents clearly apprehended this person by crashing into them with their truck and then immediately opened fire on the person when they justifiably tried to drive away. I mean, if somebody rams into you in a clearly intentional …
Dalmia: … Unmarked cars—you have no idea who’s ramming into you. Masked people—they could just be some drug cartel.
Balko: … Armed, in street clothes, yeah. I mean, it’s terrifying. And over and over again, this is what people who have been on the receiving end of this have said. They thought they were being attacked. And even if they knew they were ICE, they’ve also seen the videos of ICE beating the hell out of people. I mean, of course your first instinct is going to be to flee.
So to kind of get back to your question, the lies after these cases were so brazen and so hyperbolic and so easily disproven, right? I mean, nobody thought this. Nobody thought that Renee Good was a domestic terrorist, right? Nobody thought that Alex Pretti had planned a mass shooting of ICE officers. Nobody thought that. No reasonable person thought that.
And so it became clear to me that the kinds of lies that we’re seeing out of this administration were not the kind of lies that I have seen over the course of my career from police departments after they shoot someone. Those kinds of lies are like: “this person was no angel. They had a criminal record.” And sometimes it was a lie, sometimes it was exaggerated. But it was always that they were lying because they wanted to cover something up. They wanted to cover up what their officer did, or they wanted to justify it or paint it in a good light.
The lies that we see from the Trump administration after these incidents are the kind of lies you tell not to cover something up, but to let everybody know that you can get away with anything. “We know we’re lying, you know we’re lying, and we know that you know we’re lying, and there’s not a damn thing that you can do about it.” That’s what those lies were about. It was about this exercise of impunity. This flex, right? It’s: “We can do whatever we want.”
Dalmia: There’s another purpose to it, which is that they want to come out with their narrative before the truth is actually known.
So you get your talking points out as quickly as you can, and you build a narrative so that then the other side has to try and debunk you rather than get just the facts out and the truth out.
Balko: There’s a law called Brandolini’s law that exists primarily on the internet. But the idea is that it takes exponentially more effort, research, and verbiage to debunk bullshit than it does to spread it. So when they start spreading these lies, you’ve got to break everything down and explain why they’re wrong and why they’re lying, and it just takes a lot of time and effort.
Dalmia: And it exhausts the other side, right? It puts you permanently on the defensive, and that’s the point.
Has anything fundamentally changed in ICE after Greg Bovino—who was the whole architect of Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis and liked to do Nazi salutes—was replaced with Tom Homan, and Kristi Noem has now been replaced by Markwayne Mullin as DHS head? Has anything fundamentally changed in ICE since then? Has it become less cruel? Is it holding its agents to a little more accountability? Anything?
Balko: Not at all. Nothing’s really changed. I think they’re less boastful and gleeful and triumphant about the violence that their agents used. I think they realized that that was counterproductive and was turning a lot of the country against them.
But the tactics haven’t changed. We can go back to this incident in Austin. After they shot this guy in the back, they left him on the ground. They didn’t give him any medical attention. They then pulled him out of the hospital where he was being treated and put him in a detention facility with the bullet still in his back. They interrogated him without giving him any pain medication. And then they made him sleep on the hard floor of a holding cell at this ICE detention facility, to the point where he had to go back to the hospital because he started getting partial paralysis. Still has the bullet in him. Wouldn’t let his attorney or his family reach out to him.
“Trump has created a personalist army that has complete impunity no matter what they do. We try not to get to the Nazi thing immediately, but if you’ve got agents of violence for the federal government that report basically to the president and not to the government or the rule of law, the courts, or the people, and they have complete impunity, and you’re telling them to use force and violence whenever necessary, and you’re sending them out with this kind of white supremacist message—you’re checking off a lot of boxes there at that point.” — Radley Balko
These are—I was about to say crimes against humanity, but I think that has a very specific definition. These are utterly inhumane crimes, what they’re doing. They do not care about these people. They’ve been dehumanized to the point where they see them as something less than human.
There was another incident in Evanston, Illinois, earlier this week where ICE agents misidentified a U.S. citizen as the undocumented person they were looking for. They just jumped out on him and just beat the hell out of him and then just left him in the street and drove away. It was local police that came and called an ambulance for him. He’s got all kinds of dental problems, he’s got severe head injuries. And they just beat this guy within an inch of his life and just left him on the street.
This is stuff that you see in autocracies, in brutal dictatorships. They are using those tactics. I mean, the masking still gets me. I have written about SWAT teams that cover their faces when they do these raids, but most of the time they leave a warrant. They’re identifiable; you can sue them later.
This idea that now all of a sudden we’re OK with secret police in this country? I mean, you’ve got law-and-order Republicans going on Fox and Newsmax saying: “No, of course police shouldn’t have to identify themselves when they jump out of cars and beat people.”
Dalmia: If you want an even starker demonstration of how much this country has changed, I’m old enough to remember when Janet Reno sent agents to haul away Elián González. You remember that incident?
Elián González was a Cuban boy who was brought to this country by his mother, who came in a rickety boat, and the boat overturned and the mother drowned. The son was rescued and taken to his Cuban relatives in Florida. Castro wanted this kid back. His father was in Cuba.
It was a huge international incident. The family in Florida was refusing to give the child away because his mother had literally given up her life to bring him here. And Janet Reno, to her immense shame, sent a team, a SWAT team, to the family’s home in the middle of the night to haul away this child from bed, who was terrified. And they sent him back to Cuba.
I used to write for The Detroit News editorial page, which is a conservative editorial page, and I wrote a piece about what a national shame it was.
Now this is happening routinely, and the same right that correctly condemned Janet Reno then is just A-OK with what’s happening on the streets.
Balko: It’s literally happening to Cuban immigrants who escaped from the communist regime. And actually, I mean, if anything, Elián González was treated better. I mean, they at least sent him back to Cuba.
Dalmia: To his father. They didn’t keep him in detention in horrific conditions, yeah.
Balko: Right. And a couple of weeks ago, the Trump administration sent a bunch of Cuban immigrants, asylum seekers, to the Central African Republic and just dumped them there with nothing. And they’re not expected to live. I mean, that is a country with a lot of problems. For one, they have, I think, the biggest refugee camps in the world of any country in the world, but it’s also in the middle of basically a civil war.
I mean, you’re dumping people there, they don’t speak the language, they don’t know anyone, they don’t have any money, and you’re expecting—I mean, they’re doing the same to Venezuelans.
Dalmia: And Haitians now. There are gangs on Haitian streets who are going around literally executing people en masse, and they are going to start deporting Haitians who came to the country legally, by the way, through TPS.
Balko: The State Department is saying Haiti’s fine for these people to return to—the same State Department that issued a do-not-travel warning to U.S. citizens going to Haiti. It is such a shame and a stain on this country’s history.
We tend to kind of romanticize our history of welcoming immigrants, but I do think America was built by immigrants. I think a lot of the time it was sort of in spite of ourselves, and we’ve often been hostile to immigrants.
But we do have this more modern tradition that is something to be proud of, which is taking in refugees from countries where people are being persecuted, where there have been natural disasters, where there is excessive poverty or gang violence, or a lack of government to sort of enforce people’s rights. And we’ve done this for 50 years now through this program. And this is how the Haitians got here. We invited them here, we welcomed them here. Same with a lot of Venezuelans and people from all over. I’ve been to some of these towns where these people have been resettled, and they’ve revitalized the economies throughout the Rust Belt.
And now we’re just having them removed because they come from countries or are of ethnicities that Trump thinks are bad. And never mind that the communities where these people live and work embrace them. Never mind the fact that Republican officials in these communities say this is wrong. We’re just rounding them up and sending them back.
“There's going to be a really strong temptation—like there was after the torture allegations in the George W. Bush administration—for: ‘We need to heal and move on.’ And we can't. We cannot do that. There has to be a reckoning. I think we need prosecutions of ICE officers who kill people, certainly, but also ICE officers who abuse people.” — Radley Balko
The only refugees we’re now taking into this country are white, middle-class South Africans, a lot of whom are going back because they thought they were going to get a lot more than what they were given once they …
Dalmia: … They thought they were going to come here and collect welfare and get nice homes. And apparently America’s not good enough for them.
Balko: It is so depressing. It makes me really ashamed.
Somebody posted the other day on social media that it is hard to come up with a more explicitly racist policy, just unapologetically racist, than the Trump administration saying the only refugees in the world who deserve a place in the United States are white, middle-class South Africans. If that is not an explicit endorsement of what this administration feels about race and class and ethnicity, I don’t know what it is.
Dalmia: To shift gears a little bit: So what do we do about this? I mean, there are two schools of thought over here. We know there’s a serious lack of accountability. As you pointed out, the Justice Department has, as an official policy, now announced from the rooftops that they are not going to prosecute these agents who have gone rogue. So there’s going to be no criminal penalty.
And as you also pointed out, the Supreme Court has weakened the civil penalty for these violations. And at the same time, you have these masked agents. The masking of agents is meant to diminish that social accountability—because you can’t expose them and make them feel embarrassed and ashamed.
Yet there are two schools of thought on what to do going forward. One that says: “Let’s restore some accountability, let’s force ICE agents to wear body cameras, have ID requirements, they can’t barge into homes without judicial warrants, let’s ban masks.”
And then there is another school of thought that says: “No, ICE should be abolished, it can’t be fixed.”
Where do you stand between these two schools of thought? Do you think ICE can just be reformed?
Balko: No, I don’t. I mean, ICE is [23] years old, right? We had a functioning immigration system before ICE. The idea that we need this group to enforce immigration laws, I think, is mistaken. We should be seeking out and deporting people who represent a threat to the public, people who have committed crimes.
I think the FBI can do that fine. We don’t need to have this agency whose sole job is to find people to deport.
Going forward, I think there are a couple of ways to look at what we need to do once this administration is out of office. One is, what kind of immigration policy do we have going forward? What does that look like? What do we do with the immigration courts? I think they need to be more independent. There are all kinds of policy questions to do with that.
But I do think that there’s going to be a really strong temptation—like there was after the torture allegations, for example, in the Bush administration, the George W. Bush administration, and then with Biden last time too—for: “We need to heal and move on.” And we can’t. We cannot do that. There has to be a reckoning.
I think we need prosecutions of ICE officers who kill people, certainly, but also ICE officers who abuse people. I think there needs to be accountability for policymakers like Stephen Miller, who encouraged blatant violations of the Constitution, who encouraged abuse and violence against people, and for the attorneys who tried to authorize this idea that the Fourth Amendment doesn’t apply if you’re looking for immigrants, so you can just bust into people’s homes without a warrant.
We have this kind of system that keeps passing the buck. Well, the officers aren’t responsible because they were just taking orders from management. Well, the managers aren’t responsible because they were just carrying out the policy from the policymakers. Policymakers can’t be held accountable because we want to give them the freedom to be able to recommend whatever policies the president wants. And they’re just following what the Office of Legal Counsel told them they were eligible to do. And we can’t hold them accountable because they need to be able to give legal advice no matter what.
I think we need a law creating a way to sue law enforcement officers when they violate your constitutional rights. I think we need to be able to sue policymakers for when they explicitly tell law enforcement officers to go out and violate people’s rights and abuse people.
But also, we need to reckon with our own moral failings here as a country. And this is probably going to be an unpopular thing to suggest, and I know everybody thinks immigration is why [Democrats] lost in 2024 and that we need to project moderation. But we need to right the wrongs that were committed by this administration. I think anybody who was wrongly or illegally deported without due process, we need to invite them back. And they need to be given a pathway to citizenship.
What we did to these people, the way that we treated them—the people that we sent to CECOT, the people we have deported to these third countries, the people who we separated from families. This administration is literally sending immigration officers to school bus stops to apprehend parents after they drop their children off for school. When the children come home, they come home to an empty home. I mean, that is diabolical, right?
Dalmia: Well, they have actually apprehended children, toddlers, from schools.
Balko: And then used them as bait.
Dalmia: Liam Conejo Ramos—they apprehended the father and the son and kept them in the Dilley center for a long time. The child fell sick, and there was a huge outrage against that. Finally, they were released from custody.
Balko: When you have a moral failing as grand as what we’ve seen over the last year and a half, it’s difficult. But I’ll tell you, one of the most powerful museums I’ve ever been to in my life was on our honeymoon. My wife and I went to this museum in Cambodia.
Dalmia: You know how to have a good time, don’t you?
Balko: We went to this museum in Cambodia that was [about] the purge of the Khmer Rouge. And I’m not comparing what’s happening now to the Khmer Rouge, obviously, but what was so powerful about it was that this was a museum in Cambodia that was run by the Cambodian government that was admitting to the moral failings of Cambodia.
“I have written about SWAT teams that cover their faces when they do these raids, but most of the time they leave a warrant. They're identifiable; you can sue them later. This idea that now all of a sudden we're OK with secret police in this country? You've got law-and-order Republicans going on Fox and Newsmax saying: ‘No, of course police shouldn't have to identify themselves when they jump out of cars and beat people.’” — Radley Balko
And there’s something that I found very powerful about that. It was this sense—this recognition—that this wrong had been imposed on people and that they needed to get right by history. They needed to document the abuses, and they needed to put it on display for the world to prevent it from happening again.
What we’re seeing with this administration—these are atrocities: the drug boat murders, the assassinations without due process. Over 150 people, I think, now.
We don’t even know how many people have died in ICE custody at this point because they stopped keeping track and they stopped reporting it. We don’t know how many people have died after being sent to these third countries, right, where they don’t know anyone.
There needs to be an accounting, there needs to be a moral reckoning, and I think that we need to do right by the people that we’ve harmed and injured.
Dalmia: You know, one of the surreal things about this political moment is that we have former Republicans like Bill Kristol tweeting every day that ICE needs to be abolished because it’s a rogue agency.
And you have Democrats saying: “No, we got burnt when we embraced, or sort of embraced, ‘defund the police.’ And so let’s just reform ICE, not abolish ICE.” What do you say to that?
Balko: Look, I mean, we are in an extraordinary moment, and it calls for extraordinary measures. I never thought I would be a person who supports expanding the Supreme Court, but we currently have a Supreme Court that says the president is immune from criminal prosecution no matter what he does. And again, that’s why we have what we’re seeing right now. That’s why we have all the corruption, certainly, because Trump thinks he’s basically immortal when it comes to the criminal law. He’s above it.
Or as he said, I guess, in this Washington Post story that came out today, when they were starting to do the ballroom and his architect said, well, that doesn’t fit code, Trump said, “I am the code.” I mean, he thinks he is not just the building code; he thinks he is the law. The law is what he says it is.
Dalmia: It’s funny you should mention court packing, because we just ran a piece in response to a proposal that Andy Craig had made to do a one-time court packing to get some of the rulings from this Court that have given such vast powers to the executive rescinded, and then you can have a constitutional amendment limiting the Court to nine, but also then reforming it to have term limits for justices, as well as giving every president two appointments per term.
Balko: I read Andy’s original plan. I haven’t read the response, but I thought it was a very sensible plan, and something like that—these are the questions we’re going to have to face. Trump violated federal law when he fired vast swaths of the federal workforce and replaced them with all of his loyalists. And we know that what he did was illegal, whether or not the courts agree with him.
So if a Democrat comes into office in 2029, I think that they need to be able to purge these federal agencies of all these Trump loyalists who are going to sabotage everything from the inside. And I still think that the president doesn’t have the power to fire civil servants for political reasons, but the damage has been done and it needs to be undone. And we can talk about how to prevent that in the future after we get those people out.
Dalmia: I mean, arguably we are where we are because we have put in place this legal and physical infrastructure to make these kinds of abuses possible.
I mean, as our former libertarian pals used to say, there is nothing more permanent than a government agency. And when you have an agency which is this roguish and has so much money, you can’t really reform it.
At this stage—I think we need many of the accountability measures that you’ve been writing about, right? We ought to be able to sue Stephen Miller so that he never holds another job again in any government agency, at least.
But as far as I’m concerned, so long as ICE remains in place, it’s a ticking time bomb for the next time that this happens. It’s the one agency that needs to be rooted out from its core. I don’t see how you reform it a little bit on the edges and then think we are safe now and let’s go on with business as usual.
Balko: Not only has Trump filled ICE with his own political appointees, and then basically stuffed it with these people who were recruited on these explicitly appalling kind of messages and PR campaigns—that is who populates these agencies now. That permeates the culture from top to bottom now, and I don’t think you can just pass some new laws or regulations and expect that all that’s going to go away. They’re going to fight it every step of the way.
So yeah, I think you can abolish it. I think it would be very easy to—I mean, I’m sure there are a lot of unemployed FBI agents who would like their jobs back, and we can go back to looking for people who have actually committed violent crimes against other people and deport those people.
An agency whose sole job is just to find people who are undocumented so that they can deport them—I just don’t think we need that agency anymore.
Dalmia: We got along fine for 225 years in this country without a dedicated police state whose job is to go and ferret out peaceful people from their homes and throw them out.
I want to ask you one last question. The converse: What we are seeing with ICE and CBP is these immigration agencies going so bad. What implications does it have for normal policing, law enforcement? Is there a danger of this kind of culture now seeping into these other agencies?
Balko: Yeah, I’m really worried about this. I’ve been writing about the problems with police culture for two decades anyway, and I think there are lots of problems with kind of an us-versus-them mentality and kind of a militaristic mindset and psychological sort of separation from the communities they’re supposed to be serving. But yeah, I do worry.
Trump is signing all these police agencies up as sort of partners with ICE, where the federal government pays them to go out and do their own immigration enforcement. So that sort of racist culture that the administration is operating on is now going to be explicitly imported into these domestic police agencies, state and local police agencies.
Also, the brazen kind of violations of basic norms and principles like masking.
These agencies, as long as they can say that they’re operating on some kind of federal level—whether they’re partnering with ICE or the DEA—they can get around state laws meant to hold police accountable. It makes it harder for local prosecutors to criminally charge officers when they violate people’s rights, when they kill people—for example, as we saw in Minneapolis with the DA there, Mary Moriarty, who has been trying to prosecute ICE officers and has been met with a lot of resistance. So yeah, I definitely worry about this.
The other thing we’re gonna have to figure out how to address and how to handle is, let’s say the best-case scenario, we get a Democratic president in 2029 who understands the problem, understands the threat, and so they abolish ICE or they drastically cut the agency.
Well, now you’ve got thousands of angry young dudes, mostly dudes, who were hired by this agency to go out and basically commit violence against immigrants, who probably joined the agency for all the wrong reasons, who are now unemployed, right? And they’ve been infused in that culture for a couple of years now.
And what’s gonna happen when they’re now running around the country angry and more reactionary than ever, and even more angry because now they’ve had their job …
Dalmia: … their dream job taken away from them. Yeah, I guess they’ll join the Minutemen.
Balko: Well, look, I always point to Minneapolis when I wanna end on a positive note, and the way that regular people have stood up to this administration where institutions have failed.
Dalmia: Thank you so much, Radley. This was a pleasure, though depressing. Thank you for everything you do.
Balko: Always good to talk to you. Take care.
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