This Week On ICE

Team TWOI
  • 5.0 (3)
  • News Commentary
  • Updated Weekly

A weekly podcast covering the latest developments of the Trump administration’s mass deportation policies, hosted by journalists Kelly Kimball and Matthew Kendrick. thisweekonice.substack.com

  1. 21h ago

    The journalist documenting her uncle's self-deportation

    Welcome back to This Week on ICE. The FBI stops investigating ICE encounters: On Monday, the New York Times reported that the FBI has stopped investigating ICE-related incidents, and all such issues will be handled internally by the Department of Homeland Security. The reported plans signal a grave shift away from accountability for ICE in the wake of two deaths by shooting in less than a week. We broke down what we know so far and what it says about the state of justice and accountability surrounding ICE encounters. “ It’s part of a larger sweep that we’ve seen since the shootings of Joan Sebastian Guerrero and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo —  where this kind of ‘quiet’ approach that DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullen publicly espoused is being just completely done away with. … Independent oversight is falling away.” — Matt Support This Week on ICE Podcast Interview: Kimberly Avalos on documenting her own uncle’s self-deportation to Ecuador This Week on ICE co-host Kelly Kimball (left) speaks with The News Movement’s Kimberly Avalos (right) for Episode 23. The News Movement’s Kimberly Avalos has been reporting on immigration for several years. But she never expected the day would come that her beat would hit so close to home. Earlier this year, her uncle received a notice from ICE requiring him to appear in court for a routine check-in related to his pending asylum application in the United States. But with the flood of news about arrests at immigration courts, Kimberly’s uncle took it as a sign that something had to be done — that it was time to make the difficult decision to return to his home country of Ecuador. “My worlds kind of clashed, and a story that I was covering at work was also something that was happening with my family.” — Kimberly This process has come to be known as “self-deportation.” David’s story reflects a growing reality for many immigrants who face an impossible choice: remain in the United States despite the mounting risk of arrest, death, detention, or third-country deportation, or return to the very country — and the dangers and challenges — they had tried to escape. Kimberly produced a documentary for The News Movement tracking her uncle’s journey from his final days in the United States,  through his flight back to Ecuador, and into the early days of rebuilding his life there. “[My uncle] always thought that if he were ever to go back to Ecuador, his son would be there to greet him at the airport.” — Kimberly David sought asylum in the United States after cartel members kidnapped two of his children for ransom, releasing them only after he surrendered his car as collateral. He hoped that obtaining asylum would eventually allow him to bring his entire family to the United States to live in safety. But a few years into this process, the worst happened. David’s son, Alexis, was working as a taxi driver when cartel members targeted one of his passengers, killing both the passenger and Alexis. David could not return to Ecuador for his son’s funeral, as leaving the United States while his asylum case was pending would have jeopardized his ability to return. He never got to bury his son. “He never saw him again. … [He said] the first thing he would do when he got to Ecuador was go to see him at the cemetery. I could actually kick myself because as I was recording I stopped, and that’s when he started saying things like, ‘This was the price I paid for the U.S. Was it potentially all for nothing?’” — Kimberly On your way out: Follow us on social media  We’re building a community with our brand new, official TWOI Instagram, YouTube and TikTok accounts. Give us a follow if you’d like to get to know other fans of the podcast and receive up-to-the-minute developments on ICE and immigration outside of our weekly episode drops. You can also follow Kelly and Matt on Instagram. That’s it for us this week. Please keep sending us your questions, comments, or tips to thisweekonice@gmail.com. Thanks for listening. Stay safe, look out for your neighbors, and we’ll see you next time. — Kelly and Matt Get full access to This Week On ICE Podcast at thisweekonice.substack.com/subscribe

  2. 5d ago

    A second ICE shooting in less than a week

    Welcome back to This Week on ICE. An ICE killing in Maine: If you received our newsletter last week, this introduction may feel all too familiar. That’s because in less than seven days, ICE agents have killed another person. Joan Sebastian Duran Guerrero, who was shot and killed by ICE in Biddeford, Maine, on Monday, was a 26-year-old Colombian national with a valid U.S. work permit and a Social Security number. He was not the target of the warrant ICE agents say they were attempting to serve. His wife and three-year-old daughter witnessed the killing from their front yard, where Joan had just left for work. ICE alleges that Joan attempted to use his vehicle to ram federal officers — the same claim officials made after ICE officers shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Texas last week and Renee Good in Minnesota in January. In its statement, ICE described Joan as a “threat to public safety” without providing any additional details. The killing prompted a rapid response from the Maine community. Protesters attempted to enter Senator Susan Collins’ office in Biddeford and took to the streets to demand that ICE leave the state. The backlash also led ICE to announce Tuesday that it was halting most of its traffic-related enforcement activities, although President Trump said in a statement Thursday that he encouraged the agency to continue making traffic stops.    “All I have left are the photos and a blanket with the three of us on it that he gave [our daughter] a few weeks before. My soul is broken. He was everything to me.” — Karolina Rojas Alvarez, Joan’s wife, during a press conference Thursday. [Catch up: What we know about Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s killing in Houston.]  The ICE agent who allegedly shot Joan, identified by the Associated Press as Army veteran David Brouillette, has a long history of mental health struggles and violent behavior, according to family members interviewed by the AP. Relatives told the AP that Brouillette had experienced serious mental health issues since childhood and “never should have been given a badge and gun.” They also described a history of domestic violence and accused him of assaulting women over many years. The family shared a voicemail with the AP in which Brouillette allegedly told a woman that he thought “someone should slit her throat.”  “It really goes against what the Department of Homeland Security has said about how it closely vets recruits, how it trains them, and the hiring spree that we have seen since the beginning of Trump 2.0.” — Kelly There’s much more to cover. Let’s get into it. Support This Week on ICE Podcast Exclusive interview: Camilla Forte discusses her months-long investigation of a Chicago street corner, known to be a popular spot for day laborers. Camilla, who reports for Borderless magazine, sat down with us to discuss how ICE's Operation Midway Blitz and immigration raids have deeply impacted both day workers and the contractors that hire them, how immigration enforcement has impacted the local community and economy, and what the grassroots response has been so far. This conversation starts around 9:59. “Because [street corners like this one] are known sites, they were being targeted [by ICE] pretty heavily during the height of Operation Midway Blitz. That created a lot of disruption to the day labor workers. There were violent arrests, there was pepper spray being deployed, all sorts of things. I think that made business owners and people living nearby these corners maybe warier of workers and made the contractors who were going to pick up folks wary of being in these areas because they were not sure what would happen. The situation was very volatile, and it made workers very scared to go and try to seek out work at these corners.” — Camilla [Catch up: We speak with a legal expert on third-country deportation deals, and the leader of a team that leaves water for migrants crossing the southern border.] On your way out: Rachel Schmidtke on documenting third-country deportees stranded in Costa Rica  We're here with Rachel Schmidtke, who is a senior advocate for Latin America at Refugees International. She is currently working in Costa Rica, where she and Refugees International are among the only organizations documenting the new realities of hundreds of third-country deportees from the United States, many of whom have no connection whatsoever to the Central American country. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, BBC, the UK's Channel 4 News, El País, and The Hill, among many other outlets. This conversation begins around 22:22.  “I spoke with one person who didn't even know the name of the country that he was in while we were interviewing him. People arrive here often not knowing that they're coming. So, part of the work that I'm doing is just trying to monitor how they were treated while they were in the United States, [whether] they had applied for asylum, and how they ultimately arrived here to Costa Rica, as well as how they're being treated currently.” — Rachel That’s it for us this week. Please keep sending us your questions, comments, or tips to thisweekonice@gmail.com. Thanks for listening. Stay safe, look out for your neighbors, and we’ll see you next time. — Kelly and Matt Get full access to This Week On ICE Podcast at thisweekonice.substack.com/subscribe

  3. Jul 10

    Lorenzo Salgado Araujo is the latest person killed by ICE. Here's what we know.

    Welcome back to This Week on ICE. An ICE killing in Houston: On Tuesday, armed ICE agents shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo during a traffic stop in Houston, Texas, as he was driving a work crew to a homebuilding site. The killing has sparked an international incident, with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum vowing to pursue “legal measures” beyond mere diplomatic complaints. While fighting back tears during a press briefing on Thursday, Salgado Araujo’s 29-year-old son, Ronaldo Salgado, conveyed the grief and devastation experienced by his family:    “At 6:55, unbeknownst to all of us, my dad had been shot inside his van near the intersection of Wayside and Canal by ICE agents in unmarked cars. … By 8:35 a.m., I arrived in the East End to find Canal Street blocked off. I saw my dad's van, but no sign of him. I frantically called family, friends, loved ones to see if they can find any information. I saw a video posted on Facebook that he had been shot. I recognized him immediately, not from his appearance, but from his voice, crying for help as he lay on the street bleeding out.” — Ronaldo Salgado [Catch up: The investigative team tracking the full story of ICE-linked deaths.] After being shot, Lorenzo died in a nearby hospital, incidentally the same hospital where Ronaldo was born. Locally, the League of United Latin American Citizens is offering a $5,000 reward for information and videos from witnesses to the shooting, and demanding an independent investigation along with other civil rights groups. “We know that a man is dead — a man who was in the process of pursuing U.S. citizenship, who had U.S. citizen children, who had never had a criminal conviction, and was a hardworking person his entire life. This is a guy who put his sons and a grandchild through college by building houses. And it’s an absolute tragedy.” — Matt Lorenzo is at least the eighth person killed by federal agents during enforcement actions since President Trump took office last year. Some news outlets, including The Guardian and L.A. Taco, documented Lorenzo’s killing as the tenth made by ICE officers. There’s much more to cover. Let’s get into it. Also on our radar: ICE just made 10,000 arrests in five days. Here’s what it says about DHS’s new calculus. Leaked ICE records show the agency arrested about 10,000 people between June 26 and June 30, a rate of roughly 2,000 people per day in cities across the United States. That’s nearly double the previously highest known rate of ICE arrests in December of 2025. Kelly brought us up to speed on the new DHS playbook. “[It] speaks to the shift in calculus between former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and the current DHS Secretary, Markwayne Mullin. [He] said himself: ‘My goal in six months is that we’re not in the lead story every single day.’ It indicates these arrests are not going to happen in massive citywide surges like what we saw in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Rather, these arrests are going to happen everywhere, all at once.” — Kelly Meanwhile, quieter policy shifts are unfolding beneath the surface, many of them reflecting an expansive definition of what the government considers a national security threat. In March, the FBI expanded its national security concerns to include anti-capitalist or anti-Christian ideology, extremism related to migration, race, gender, and gender identity, as well as threats against ICE employees. [Catch up: We unpacked the FBI’s $166 million budget request, which hinges on a broader definition of “national security concerns.”] A Wired investigation published this week offers a glimpse into how that broader framework is being applied. The U.S. government’s Office of Professional Responsibility — an agency originally established to investigate internal government misconduct — has opened more than 130 cases involving individuals accused of doxxing or threatening ICE employees. The story leads with the case of Syracuse resident Paigelynne Gonyea, who was investigated after sharing an Instagram post that ICE alleged amounted to doxxing an agent. But her post simply cited a Minnesota Star Tribune article that had already publicly identified ICE agent Jonathan Ross in connection with the fatal shooting of Renee Good, raising questions about where authorities draw the line between the sharing of publicly reported information and conduct they consider an imminent threat. “When I think about DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullins’ promise that ICE will become a quieter organization, have quieter tactics, I think about the ways his department is building the legal and governmental infrastructure against those criticizing ICE. He’s laying the groundwork so that he can enact change in ways that we’re going to see explode in a matter of weeks to months.” — Kelly Support This Week on ICE Podcast Exclusive interview: Reagan Williams on the human rights crisis during Operation Metro Surge Kelly spoke with Reagan Williams,  who is a researcher in the Crisis, Conflict, and Arms  Division of Human Rights Watch. Her team just published a 180-page report that investigates the rash of human rights abuses at the hands of ICE officers deployed to  Minneapolis and St. Paul during Operation Metro  Surge between December 2025 and March. At around 22:19 of the episode, we talked about the most damning findings, and how ordinary citizens are demanding oversight. “People [in Minneapolis and St. Paul] were so terrorized by Operation Metro Surge that they restricted their movements, particularly immigrants and people of color. In some cases, sheltering in their homes for weeks or months. … All of this is leading to human rights abuses on a new scale, and I think, at this moment, requires rapid intervention by Congress to rein it in.” — Reagan [Catch up: Track our reporting of Operation Metro Surge here, here, and here.] On your way out: Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s unexpected wedding guest On July 3, American pop star Taylor Swift and NFL star Travis Kelce were married at Madison Square Garden in New York. Amid the star-studded celebration, however, controversy emerged over one of the reported guests: Steven J. Dimitriou, executive chair of Amentum, the company that operates Camp East Montana, an ICE detention facility located at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas. The facility is the nation’s largest ICE detention center and is situated on the grounds of a former World War II-era Japanese American internment camp. Fans of the couple have since speculated about why Dimitriou was included on the reported 1,000-person guest list. According to online speculation, Dimitriou is the adoptive father of Reggie King, reportedly one of Travis Kelce’s closest childhood friends, which could explain the connection. For now, however, neither Swift nor Kelce has publicly addressed his reported presence at the wedding. “In inviting this man, who runs and operates one of those brutal ICE detention facilities in this country, there is a nod to complicity that is particularly egregious, and one that I do feel is worthy of discussion amid everything else going on right now.” — Kelly That’s it for us this week. Please keep sending us your questions, comments, or tips to thisweekonice@gmail.com. Thanks for listening, stay safe, look out for your neighbors, and we’ll see you next time. — Kelly and Matt Get full access to This Week On ICE Podcast at thisweekonice.substack.com/subscribe

  4. Jul 3

    Birthright citizenship survives — for now. Inside this week's biggest immigration rulings

    Welcome back to This Week on ICE. A devastating earthquake in Venezuela: Last Wednesday, on June 24, the country experienced a magnitude 7.5 earthquake just west of Caracas, the capital. The quake collapsed huge numbers of buildings in highly urbanized areas, leaving at least 2,200 people dead and 50,000 missing. The part that deeply relates to what we cover here on this podcast is that among the missing and dead are those who had recently been deported to Venezuela from the United States just hours before tragedy hit.  “What happened to these deportees speaks to the theme of our show this week — the courts. Whatever the courts decide here in the United States, it changes real lives of immigrants in this country, and immigrants that may be deported out of this country. These decisions are increasingly becoming life or death.” — Kelly [Look back at our reporting on Venezuelan immigrants here and here.] Among the missing is Abelardo Rincón, a 24-year-old Venezuelan immigrant and car technician who lived in Georgia for six years before being deported on Flight 164 from Miami to Caracas among 140 other Venezuelans. Abelardo was recently married, and was expecting the birth of his daughter soon. Hours later, the earthquake hit, and his family still does not know where he is. When asked by the BBC whether the U.S. government was responding to news of the missing deportees, a DHS spokesperson said:  “This flight safely reached Venezuela and all illegal aliens on board were returned home. … When an individual is no longer in ICE custody, ICE is no longer responsible for them.” “I think this is exactly the point: deporting people who may or may not have entered the country illegally is more important to [the U.S. government] than preserving their lives, preserving their safety.” — Matt We have even more to tell you — the good news, and the bad. Let’s get into it. The top line: A major win for the protection of birthright citizenship — for now. This week, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of upholding birthright citizenship in the United States as outlined in the 14th Amendment to the constitution, rejecting an executive order from President Trump that sought to make birthright citizenship illegal. That’s the good news, but dig a little deeper into the ruling and we find some troubling doors left open for the White House to pursue the most radical aspects of its immigration agenda: While the Supreme Court justices ruled in a 6-3 decision to throw out Trump’s executive order itself, the margins on actually banning birthright citizenship were far more narrow. “Justice Brett Kavanaugh did not sign on to the idea that the 14th Amendment explicitly outlines birthright citizenship as enshrined in the Constitution. He instead based his opposition to the President's executive order on the 1952 Immigration and Naturalization Act. He basically said the executive order contradicted established federal statute and opened the door to Congress legislating a new version of an immigration statute that he would then support. … He was joined by Justices Alito, Gorsuch, and Thomas, who all took the government's argument more seriously.” — Matt So, what does this mean about the future of birthright citizenship? Experts suggest that overturning birthright citizenship could become a litmus test for future federal appointments of judges under Republicans, much in the way that Roe v. Wade and overturning abortion protections in the United States was this litmus test in the past. Support This Week on ICE Podcast Also on our radar: The lower courts say mass detentions are a no-go, but fast-track deportations can run full speed ahead. On the same day that the Supreme Court announced its ruling on birthright citizenship, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against President Trump's policy of mandatory detention for migrants. But just a couple of days later, federal judges agreed that Trump can leverage an old policy intended for undocumented migrants near the border to fast-track deportations to undocumented migrants anywhere in the country without a chance for them to appear before a judge. So, what do these seemingly contradictory decisions actually mean moving forward? Let’s focus first on the Court of Appeals ruling on mass detentions: While this is the fourth court to reject ICE’s bid to subject millions of people to detention without bond, not all courts have ruled this way. “This is the next legal fight, one that the judge who ruled on this case has said himself is bound for the Supreme Court once they are back in session in the fall.” — Kelly And, what of the Court of Appeals decision on fast-track deportations? “What this is being applied to are folks who have been in the country for a long time, who do have court dates, who do maybe have some chance of staying in the country… and those folks are being deported before they ever get to see a judge, and sometimes in as little as a week or a few days.” — Matt Support This Week on ICE Podcast On your way out: The class action lawsuit attempting to protect immigrants from mandatory ankle monitors. Kelly spoke with Sarah Decker, senior staff attorney of U.S. Advocacy & Litigation at the Robert & Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center. She has been working on a federal class action lawsuit with the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights and Zuckerman Spaeder challenging ICE’s use of ankle monitors and wrist-worn devices that have subjected nearly 50,000 people to a system of arbitrary electronic surveillance. This is a classic case of ‘follow the money.’ The private company that is supplying ICE with these ankle monitors and GPS-enabled wristwatch devices is the GEO Group, which is a private prison giant in this country. These GPS devices … are causing enormous expense to U.S. taxpayers and enormous harm to the people that are forced to wear these devices. And the only group that is benefiting from these devices is GEO.” — Sarah You can listen to the full exclusive interview with Sarah at around 22:38. That’s it for us this week. Please keep sending us your questions, comments, or tips to thisweekonice@gmail.com. Thanks for listening, stay safe, look out for your neighbors, and we’ll see you next time. — Kelly and Matt Get full access to This Week On ICE Podcast at thisweekonice.substack.com/subscribe

  5. Jun 26

    The Supreme Court ruled on two major immigration cases in Trump's favor. Here's what this means for immigrants.

    Welcome back to This Week on ICE. Breaking news from the U.S. Supreme Court: SCOTUS ruled Thursday that the Trump administration can end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitians and Syrians in a 6-3 decision along party lines, impacting hundreds of thousands of people from two of the world’s most dangerous countries. The ruling also appears to clear the way to end TPS for over a million other people from 11 similarly unstable countries — from El Salvador to Myanmar to Yemen — who have sought refuge in the United States.  “The dominoes are starting to fall. It really was the ruling last year on [revoking] TPS for Venezuelans that set the precedent for what we’re seeing today with Haitians and Syrians. … The Trump administration basically argued that the ruling on Venezuelans should have applied to Haitians and Syrians too — and the Supreme Court agreed. That became the Trump administration’s winning argument.” — Kelly [You can dive into all our reporting on TPS here, here, here and here.] Also on Thursday, SCOTUS ruled that it will allow the Trump administration to end asylum applications from refugees arriving at U.S. borders, in what appears to be a complete victory for the White House’s immigration agenda.  “The Supreme Court has allowed the, the Trump administration to say, ‘Well, actually [asylum-seekers at the southern border] are still in Mexico. So therefore, we don’t even have to consider your case.’ … What effectively this does is reduce the U.S. asylum program to almost nothing.” — Matt We even more to talk about this week. Let’s get into it. The top line: A groundbreaking investigation found ICE overwhelmingly targeted Latinos in the east coast. A new report by City Reporter found that 93 percent of ICE street arrests in the tri-state area involved Latinos — a figure that far exceeds Latinos’ estimated share of the undocumented population. One immigration lawyer described the disparity as “pure racial profiling.” Currently, there is little that courts can do to influence ICE’s actions on the street, but a federal judge in California has just made a ruling that could stop immigration agents from making arrests at courthouses. Matt broke down what the investigation revealed and the state of play between ICE and the judicial branch. “This is deliberate targeting. And why is this targeting allowed? It’s because of another Supreme Court decision that allows these things called Kavanaugh stops. A Kavanaugh stop is basically when an immigration agent believes, within certain reasonable parameters — including someone speaking Spanish or someone appearing, by the judgment of the agent, not to have legal status — that a federal agent can stop that person and ’briefly detain’ them. But as we know, these detentions are rarely brief.” — Matt Support This Week on ICE Podcast Also on our radar: The Delaney Hall strike has ended. But its impact echoes in detention facilities nationwide. This week, detainees at Delaney Hall detention center in New Jersey ended a hunger strike one month after it began — but not because conditions have improved. Allegations of heavy-handed retaliatory tactics by ICE and detention center staff, including a form of solitary confinement and the suspension of family visitation, have forced detainees’ hands. “Strikers ended the strike because it was becoming far too dangerous to keep going,” said Kelly. She talked about what the strikes achieved in spite of these challenges and how other ICE facilities are reacting to nationwide attention. “The message that originated from Delaney Hall did not end. If anything, it has expanded.” — Kelly [You can dive into all our reporting on Delaney Hall here, here, and here.] Before the strike ended, it gained significant national attention and expanded on June 12 when nearly 40 detained women joined and issued their own demands, including the release of all women under 21. The women also alleged that a female guard was sexually assaulting detainees and stated that the guard remained employed at the facility despite those accusations. Meanwhile, at least six other hunger and labor strikes are being conducted in facilities across the country, including at Adelanto ICE Detention Facility in southern California. There, at least 20 men have been on a hunger strike since mid-May, with some participants even meeting with members of Congress, including Rep. Judy Chu, to highlight the severe conditions inside the facility. Here, the echoes of Delaney are readily apparent: strikers have faced retaliation for their actions, including solitary confinement, physical abuse, and deportation. Support This Week on ICE Podcast On your way out: An LA journalist on how immigrant communities make — and break — the city’s history. This Week on ICE co-hosts Matt Kendrick and Kelly Kimball sit down with LA Times journalist Gustavo Arellano (center) for Episode 19 on Thursday, June 25, 2026. Gustavo Arellano is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, where he writes about Southern California and the Western United States. He was a finalist for Pulitzer Prizes in 2025 and 2026, and was part of the team that won a Pulitzer for the LA Times in 2023 for their coverage of leaked audio from the LA City council that included racist disparagement of fellow elected officials. As if that weren’t enough, he is a leading expert on the food of the gods: tacos. His book, Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America, documents the Mexican-American experience through its most iconic food. He joined us to discuss ICE, local politics, and what Mexican-Americans are going through during these uncertain times. “ [The U.S. government is] always gonna be better funded than us. They’re always gonna be more powerful than us. But as the old leftist saying goes, they try to bury us but they don’t realize that we’re seeds. We are not going to stop fighting against tyranny. We are not going to stop standing up for our undocumented brothers and sisters and friends and even strangers.” — Gustavo That’s it for us this week. Please keep sending us your questions, comments, or tips to thisweekonice@gmail.com. Thanks for listening, stay safe, look out for your neighbors, and we’ll see you next time. — Kelly and Matt Get full access to This Week On ICE Podcast at thisweekonice.substack.com/subscribe

  6. Jun 19

    15 Minnesotans charged with conspiracy, DACA under pressure, ICE threats at midterm polls, and two key SCOTUS cases wrapping up

    Welcome back to This Week on ICE. First, the biggest news of the week: On Wednesday, President Trump signed a new bill that gave ICE a $70 billion windfall that will fund the next three years of immigration enforcement activity, putting an end to a months-long stalemate in Congress. It was this stalemate that led to a partial government shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security earlier this year, ICE agents in airports across the country, and 90 percent of Homeland Security’s 260,000 employees working for over a month without pay. The funding from this new bill is in addition to a $75 billion windfall the agency received last year from The One Big Beautiful Bill. “Because [the bill] was passed during a reconciliation process, Democrats will have a really hard time taking any of that money away, even if they win elections in November. It also includes about $23 billion for Customs and Border Protection.” — Matt Plus: This week marks the one-year anniversary of ICE raids conducted across Los Angeles resulting in the arrests of dozens of immigrants and massive, city-wide protests that shook the nation and resulted in the Trump administration deploying thousands of National Guard officers. The event marked a new phase of the Trump administration’s nationwide crackdown on immigrants that would spread across the country - in cities like Chicago, Minneapolis, Charlotte, and beyond. “LA was the beginning of everything. It became a real testing ground for mass demonstrations against ICE. It became a testing ground for volunteer community patrols, for mutual aid centers, for organizing in the name of immigrant defense.” — Kelly We have so much to talk about this week. Let’s get into it. The top line: Trump has called detainees at Delaney Hall “the worst of the worst.” This professor says the data tells a different story. Matt sat down with Austin Kocher of Syracuse University, whose work on the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has become invaluable to journalists, academics, and advocates tracking ICE activities. He revealed key data he managed to dig up on Delaney Hall, where detainees have been holding a hunger strike for two weeks amid appalling conditions. (You can brush up on Delaney Hall in Episode 15 and Episode 16.)  “Not only are most of the people in ICE’s national detention network people who don’t have criminal histories, Delaney Hall is actually unique in [that] a vast majority of people in the system have no criminal conviction whatsoever… Very few people have anything close to a serious criminal conviction of any kind, and this is ICE’s own data.” —Austin Kocher Support This Week on ICE Podcast Austin said as much as 80 percent of detainees in Delaney are categorized within the lowest possible security classification, meaning they do not pose a risk to others. But as the ongoing hunger strike approaches its third week, his concern is that immigration authorities will begin reclassifying strike participants in retaliation, placing them in a “higher-threat” security category that allows for placement in solitary confinement. “That’s something we’ve seen in the past. Certainly, I worry that it might happen here,” said Austin. He writes his own newsletter decoding the U.S. immigration system, which you can subscribe to here. Also on our radar: The investigative team carefully uncovering the full story of ICE-linked deaths. Kelly sat down with Aisha Wallace-Palomares, Memo Torres, and Izzy Ramirez, who work for the LA-based news source LA Taco to learn more about their ongoing investigation that they’ve called “the death tracker.” It documents every single death linked to immigration enforcement across the country since the start of the immigration raids last year. But what began as a means to track the hard numbers became a greater need to get to the bottom of a much larger story: They noticed major differences between what the families of the deceased knew versus what DHS would report. Support This Week on ICE Podcast “So we started noticing… there's more to the story on each person [and] we should probably try to get the information and the real stories for everybody to humanize them and honor them,” said Memo. “The level of tracking went in deep. We went as far as going through Facebook posts and Instagram posts, finding cousins or family members in Mexico or any other country. … A lot of these cases [the families] didn't even have information; we had more information than they did,” he said. Their tracker comes at a critical time, as earlier this week, ICE announced it has rescinded a Biden-era policy that required the agency to report the deaths of detainees that occur within 30 days of their release. To the team at LA Taco, this doesn’t change anything, as they suspect ICE has hardly honored the policy to begin with, or have found accountability loopholes: “We've seen instances where they try to release people … by sending them to the hospital to try to not get the credit on them that they died in ICE detention,” said Memo. “We suspect they are going to try to do a lot more of that.” As of this recording, LA Taco has tracked 66 total deaths of immigrants under ICE custody, including 6 deaths that occurred shortly after release. That’s it for us this week. Keep sending us your questions, comments, or tips to thisweekonice@gmail.com. Thanks for listening, stay safe, look out for your neighbors, and we’ll see you next time. — Kelly and Matt Get full access to This Week On ICE Podcast at thisweekonice.substack.com/subscribe

  7. Jun 12

    A new $70 billion windfall for ICE — and Delaney Hall data that disproves DHS misinformation

    Welcome back to This Week on ICE. First, the biggest news of the week: On Wednesday, President Trump signed a new bill that gave ICE a $70 billion windfall that will fund the next three years of immigration enforcement activity, putting an end to a months-long stalemate in Congress. It was this stalemate that led to a partial government shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security earlier this year, ICE agents in airports across the country, and 90 percent of Homeland Security’s 260,000 employees working for over a month without pay. The funding from this new bill is in addition to a $75 billion windfall the agency received last year from The One Big Beautiful Bill. “Because [the bill] was passed during a reconciliation process, Democrats will have a really hard time taking any of that money away, even if they win elections in November. It also includes about $23 billion for Customs and Border Protection.” — Matt Plus: This week marks the one-year anniversary of ICE raids conducted across Los Angeles resulting in the arrests of dozens of immigrants and massive, city-wide protests that shook the nation and resulted in the Trump administration deploying thousands of National Guard officers. The event marked a new phase of the Trump administration’s nationwide crackdown on immigrants that would spread across the country - in cities like Chicago, Minneapolis, Charlotte, and beyond. “LA was the beginning of everything. It became a real testing ground for mass demonstrations against ICE. It became a testing ground for volunteer community patrols, for mutual aid centers, for organizing in the name of immigrant defense.” — Kelly We have so much to talk about this week. Let’s get into it. The top line: Trump has called detainees at Delaney Hall “the worst of the worst.” This professor says the data tells a different story. Matt sat down with Austin Kocher of Syracuse University, whose work on the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has become invaluable to journalists, academics, and advocates tracking ICE activities. He revealed key data he managed to dig up on Delaney Hall, where detainees have been holding a hunger strike for two weeks amid appalling conditions. (You can brush up on Delaney Hall in Episode 15 and Episode 16.)  “Not only are most of the people in ICE’s national detention network people who don’t have criminal histories, Delaney Hall is actually unique in [that] a vast majority of people in the system have no criminal conviction whatsoever… Very few people have anything close to a serious criminal conviction of any kind, and this is ICE’s own data.” —Austin Kocher Support This Week on ICE Podcast Austin said as much as 80 percent of detainees in Delaney are categorized within the lowest possible security classification, meaning they do not pose a risk to others. But as the ongoing hunger strike approaches its third week, his concern is that immigration authorities will begin reclassifying strike participants in retaliation, placing them in a “higher-threat” security category that allows for placement in solitary confinement. “That’s something we’ve seen in the past. Certainly, I worry that it might happen here,” said Austin. He writes his own newsletter decoding the U.S. immigration system, which you can subscribe to here. Also on our radar: The investigative team carefully uncovering the full story of ICE-linked deaths. Kelly sat down with Aisha Wallace-Palomares, Memo Torres, and Izzy Ramirez, who work for the LA-based news source LA Taco to learn more about their ongoing investigation that they’ve called “the death tracker.” It documents every single death linked to immigration enforcement across the country since the start of the immigration raids last year. But what began as a means to track the hard numbers became a greater need to get to the bottom of a much larger story: They noticed major differences between what the families of the deceased knew versus what DHS would report. Support This Week on ICE Podcast “So we started noticing… there's more to the story on each person [and] we should probably try to get the information and the real stories for everybody to humanize them and honor them,” said Memo. “The level of tracking went in deep. We went as far as going through Facebook posts and Instagram posts, finding cousins or family members in Mexico or any other country. … A lot of these cases [the families] didn't even have information; we had more information than they did,” he said. Their tracker comes at a critical time, as earlier this week, ICE announced it has rescinded a Biden-era policy that required the agency to report the deaths of detainees that occur within 30 days of their release. To the team at LA Taco, this doesn’t change anything, as they suspect ICE has hardly honored the policy to begin with, or have found accountability loopholes: “We've seen instances where they try to release people … by sending them to the hospital to try to not get the credit on them that they died in ICE detention,” said Memo. “We suspect they are going to try to do a lot more of that.” As of this recording, LA Taco has tracked 66 total deaths of immigrants under ICE custody, including 6 deaths that occurred shortly after release. That’s it for us this week. Keep sending us your questions, comments, or tips to thisweekonice@gmail.com. Thanks for listening, stay safe, look out for your neighbors, and we’ll see you next time. — Kelly and Matt Get full access to This Week On ICE Podcast at thisweekonice.substack.com/subscribe

  8. Jun 5

    ICE detention hunger strikes spread, sanctuary cities under pressure, and 1A freedoms put to question outside Delaney Hall

    In this week’s episode, we welcome back OG co-host Matthew Kendrick after a month away. It was such a pleasure bringing in LA-based investigative journalist Ben Camacho into the fold as temporary co-host. Throughout that time, Ben and co-host Kelly Kimball discussed the possibility of ICE’s presence at World Cup matches across the U.S., what historic highs of ICE detention deaths say about the condition of facilities nationwide, the end to fast-track ICE agent trainings, and the re-opening of asylum cases at the U.S. southern border. Ben, you will be missed! We have so much to talk about this week. Let’s get into it. The top line: What transpired outside Delaney Hall, and what it says about the state of first-amendment protections today. Tensions between ICE and demonstrators soared over the weekend as a peaceful demonstration that began in solidarity with a labor and hunger strike led by 300 Delaney Hall detainees quickly evolved into a standoff between protesters and NJ State Troopers after New Jersey governor Mikie Sherrill called troopers in to take control of security in the immediate area surrounding the facility. Support This Week on ICE Podcast  “Once state troopers stepped in [on May 29], First Amendment rights were heavily policed, and this is where protesters and members of the press have said that the access to the First Amendment was really put to question.” —Kelly During this time, state police in riot gear and on horseback pushed protesters away from the facility, creating scenes reminiscent of recent crackdowns in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis. In the same window, Newark’s mayor imposed a curfew (later lifted on Tuesday), the FBI raided a long-standing community triage center that had supported families visiting detained loved ones. This week, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and the New Jersey Attorney General filed suit against the GEO Group, which owns Delaney Hall, calling for the facility to be shut down. We also talked about the strange way state troopers attempted to sort out “credentialed” press from demonstrators, and how that underscores fraught debates in the courts about what makes a journalist and what doesn’t. Support This Week on ICE Podcast Also on our radar: The Trump administration’s new challenge to sanctuary cities could backfire. The Trump administration is threatening to withdraw Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents from major U.S. airports located in “sanctuary” jurisdictions, which are cities, counties or entire states that have policies that limit their cooperation with federal immigration authorities. Should this happen, it would effectively shut down international arrivals at these hubs. In fact, seven out of the ten busiest airports for international travel are located in jurisdictions that could be targeted by DHS, which together accounted for 70 percent of international passengers in 2024 (the latest year for which data is available). “It's difficult to overrate the severeness of this disruption. The air travel system is so interconnected, and there's just no precedent for this kind of action.” — Matt But despite the Trump administration’s attempt to bully local governments through lawsuits and threats, the law protects sanctuary policies. Namely, the Anti-Commandeering Doctrine of the 10th Amendment to the Constitution, which says the federal government can't commandeer state and local officials to carry out their policies.  “But let's be clear, I don't think the administration is filing all of these lawsuits because they have any expectation of winning. This is a political tool. … Even though they know they will not win in the court of law, but they'll win in the court of public opinion. When these lawsuits fail because they're meritless, they'll just blame liberal activists, judges, and Democratic governors in states and cities across the country.” — Matt Share This Week On ICE Podcast And Finally: An interview exclusive with Wali Khan, who is a photojournalist that has tracked the Delaney Hall hunger strikes since day 1. Independent photojournalist Wali Khan (left) and This Week on ICE co-host Kelly Kimball on Wednesday, June 3, 2026. Wali Khan is an independent documentary filmmaker and photojournalist who has been documenting the ongoing protests outside of Delaney Hall since before the start of the hunger and labor strike that began on May 22. He sat down with Kelly to talk about what he has seen on the ground, and how it compares to other flashpoints he’s seen amid Trump’s protracted immigrant detention campaign. “There is a tendency to mythologize the struggle. To say that we are showing up for our neighbors, that this resistance is noble. We have to look at it through a material lens. … Functionally, nothing has changed about the immigration system or the enforcement at Delaney Hall. … As a journalist, I think it's important for me to document all this violence, but … I really worry that Americans could get used to this, and that they will start seeing migrants as a number.” — Wali That’s it for us this week. Keep sending us your questions, comments, or tips to thisweekonice@gmail.com. Thanks for listening, stay safe, look out for your neighbors, and we’ll see you next time. Get full access to This Week On ICE Podcast at thisweekonice.substack.com/subscribe

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About

A weekly podcast covering the latest developments of the Trump administration’s mass deportation policies, hosted by journalists Kelly Kimball and Matthew Kendrick. thisweekonice.substack.com

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  • Creator
    Team TWOI
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    24
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © This Week On ICE
  • Show Website
    This Week On ICE

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