Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
At a press briefing on Thursday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt repeatedly lost her temper with reporters. It’s no accident that what triggered Leavitt were perfectly legitimate questions about ICE’s extraordinary abuses of late. Tellingly, White House officials aren’t even trying to reassure anyone that they recognize that things are less than perfect. This comes as a new report suggests ICE is violating its own protocols pretty seriously and as polling is diving again for Trump on immigration.
Which all raises a question. Where does Trumpworld see all this going? With ICE recruitment set to explode, do they see ICE waging an ever-growing forever war against Americans? Today we’re talking about the long view with Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, which has a great new report on Trump’s ballooning migrant detention system. Aaron, good to have you on, man.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick: Thanks for having me back.
Sargent: Let’s just start with White House Press Secretary Karoline Levitt. A reporter notes here that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had previously said that ICE is doing everything correctly. Then he asks Levitt to square ICE’s record with that. Listen.
Reporter (voiceover): Thirty-two people died in ICE custody last year. One hundred and seventy US citizens were detained by ICE and Rene Good was shot in the head and killed by an ICE agent. How does that equate to them doing everything correctly?
Karoline Leavitt (voiceover): Why was Renee Goode unfortunately and tragically killed?
Reporter (voiceover): Are you asking me my opinion? Because an ICE agent acted recklessly and killed her unjustifiably.
Karoline Leavitt (voiceover): Oh, okay. So you’re a biased reporter with a left-wing opinion.
Reporter (voiceover): What do you want me to do?
Karoline Leavitt (voiceover): Yeah, because you’re a left-wing hack. You’re not a reporter. You’re posing in this room as a journalist. And it’s so clear by the premise of your question. And you and the people in the media who have such biases but fake, like you’re a journalist, you shouldn’t even be sitting in that seat. But you’re pretending like you’re a journalist, but you’re a left-wing activist. And the question that you just raised and your answer proves your bias. You should be reporting on the facts. You should be reporting on the cases. Do you have the numbers of how many American citizens were killed at the hands of illegal aliens who ICE is trying to remove from this country?
Sargent: So I believe that reporter is Niall Stanage, who’s not a liberal flamethrower by any stretch. Aaron, what’s your reaction to all that?
Reichlin-Melnick: Well, I think his question really goes to the fact that a lot of Americans have seen this video and they don’t like what they see.
And in fact, polling so far suggests that a majority of Americans think that the shooting was not justified. And it’s really crucially important to understand, of course, that there is a difference between legally justified within the very narrow line of whether or not a police officer used their force lawfully and the sort of more basic question of should the officer have shot Ms. Good rather than simply stepping aside.
And so that is why the American public are asking this question and trying to figure out whether there’s going to be any accountability at all.
Sargent: Right, and Leavitt is just really frustrated because these questions aren’t, you know, going away. I want to bear down on one point about this exchange, though. Note that the reporter asked about the following things: deaths in ICE custody, arrests of U.S. citizens, and the killing of this woman by an officer whose life was not remotely in danger.
Now, as you say, everybody’s seen the video. We all know that the killing of a woman was, you know, entirely unjustified. But the other things are real problems as well. We’re talking about deaths in ICE custody, which are soaring, and we’re talking about arrests of U.S. citizens, which are also soaring. Can it really be the White House’s position that asking about those things is illegitimate?
Reichlin-Melnick: Right, of course it’s not. And deaths in ICE custody are worse than ever. 2025 was the deadliest year for ICE detention, driven by a massive expansion of the detention system as we tracked in our new report, as well as the shoddy standards that people were put through in brand-new detention centers being brought online. And 2026 is looking no better. It’s January 15, 2026, and already four people have died in custody this year. So that suggests 2026 is going to be the deadliest year yet.
Sargent: It sure looks that way. I want to get into the polling a bit because the public is just roundly rejecting all this stuff. We’ve got a bunch of new data. A new AP poll taken entirely after the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis has disapproval of Trump on immigration up to 61 percent. Extraordinary. With 38 percent—only 38 percent—approving of his handling of immigration, his “best issue.”
A CNN poll finds that 56 percent of Americans say the shooting was an “inappropriate use of force,” and a majority, 51 percent, say ICE actions are making cities less safe, while only 31 percent, less than a third, say ICE is making cities safer. Aaron, if you listen to Stephen Miller and other administration officials, all you hear is that ICE agents are heroically facing criminals, gang members, all sorts of scourges. But nobody believes anything they’re saying. Fewer than a third in this country think this is making anyone safer. I find that extraordinary.
Reichlin-Melnick: Yeah, and that’s basically what was always going to happen when you did any kind of mass deportation like this. And you actually had me on more than a year ago when we put out a big report estimating the economic and fiscal costs of mass deportation. We estimated at the time it was going to cost over $800 billion. And the other thing that we looked at is what that would actually look like on the ground. What does mass deportation look like? And it looks like militarized law enforcement invading communities, thousands of new officers fanning out across the country doing things that no administration has ever done before.
And we predicted at the time that this was going to be unpopular, and lo and behold, the administration got $75 billion from Congress to actually start carrying out mass deportations. And it looks exactly like what we said it was going to look like, increasingly police-state tactics, because you cannot round up 4 percent of the U.S. population without fundamentally transforming the relationship Americans have with their law enforcement.
Sargent: If you kind of look down the road, they want to deport one million people a year. They’re well short of that in 2025. Can you just quickly give us the numbers on that? How many do you think they removed in the real world in 2025? And how far are they going to get? They want to get to at least four million total. What’s your reading of it?
Reichlin-Melnick: Yeah, we don’t have exact numbers, but from what we see, some very limited public data is put out by the administration on this. And from that data, it suggests about 350,000 to 360,000 people were deported by ICE last year. An unknown number of additional people were apprehended at the border and rapidly deported without ever going into ICE custody.
So excluding those, really focusing on the population of people who were arrested and detained by ICE and then deported, we’re looking about 350,000, 360,000. And in the last few months, they are on track to average about 450,000 a year.
So at that rate, if they don’t manage to increase it at all, it would still take over 30 years of this to actually deport 14 million people. But even presuming they do significantly increase those numbers, we’re still talking about years and years and years of this.
This is not something that they’re going to have done in a few weeks and then everybody can go back to normal. They’re saying, We want cities to look like this for the foreseeable future.
Sargent: Absolutely. And so basically right now they’re under half their target. Right. And I think you told me the other day for a piece that we ran at TNR.com about Stephen Miller. You told me that you didn’t think they would be able to get to even half of the amount that they’d like to remove in Trump’s full term, right?
Reichlin-Melnick: Yeah, I mean, if we say that they wanted to have a million deportations a year in year one, well, they’re not even halfway there. As I said, I think they were sub-400,000 in their first year. If they managed to hit 500,000 or 600,000, they might get to a million deportations total by the end of the second year. And then they still would have to then average very high numbers to get anywhere near it.
That said, when I first did this analysis over a year ago, we didn’t know what Congress was going to give them, how much money they were ultimately going to get. And they have bullied and bulldozed their way through a lot of the barriers to carrying out these deportations that we had initially thought that they would have more trouble surmounting.
And they’ve done that really by breaking the law in a lot of cases, by purging the civil service of people who could oppose them. And by doing that, they have been able to get up these deportation numbers higher than expected, but the long-term costs of that are really just starting to be felt.
Sargent: Right. And I think at the end of the day, no matter what happens, there are still going to be millions and millions and millions of undocumented immigrants in this country come 2029.
Reichlin-Melnick: That’s right. I think after four years, the idea that he will have deported everybody is a fairy tale. There will still be multiple millions of people here. And I will say, especially the people who have been here for many years already. As of 2022, nearly nine million people had been in the country for more than 15 years.
So we’re looking at a population of long-term residents, many of them married to U.S. citizens, many of them who have U.S. citizen children or U.S. citizen parents, many of them who are working jobs and have been working them for many years, who have very deep ties to the community, and while they are terrified, in many cases they’re not going to give up the United States and the lives they’ve built here because a lot of them feel that they can still survive in this.
Sargent: Yeah, and I think everybody knows at this point already that it’s just not worth the cost, and it’s really not going to be worth the cost when we just have years of civil conflict and violence and ICE killings and so forth.
I just want to get to a New York Times report on ICE protocol, which was very interesting. Instructions to agents, according to The New York Times, a document they obtained, say that in dangerous encounters they’re supposed to use “minimal force” when trying to pull people out of cars and deliver commands in “professional” tones.
Here’s a quote directly from the document: “First step in arresting an occupant of a vehicle is not to reach in and grab him unless there are specific circumstances requiring that action.” Now, I don’t know, it sure sounds to me like they’re violating these directives on a regular basis. Is that right?
Reichlin-Melnick: It certainly seems like it. And I think that thing The New York Times obtained is a sign that there are still professionals inside the agency who are trying to impose some form of discipline.
You know, it’s very easy to say, of course, these are untrained officers, but at the start, the administration already had thousands of officers who had been on the job for a long time. They have standards and use-of-force policies. There are conscientious people inside the agency who are trying to get their officers to follow the rules.
The problem now is that you have political leadership that is essentially encouraging officers on the ground to ignore what their supervisors are telling them or what the trainers have told them to do.
Sargent: Well, I think that’s 100 percent true. You’ve got Stephen Miller out there essentially saying officers have immunity, which is a really dodgy and misleading thing of him to say because in reality they don’t have absolute immunity and that’s the implication. You guys had this great report that really sort of explained the detention system.
I want to highlight two numbers and then ask you to just talk about what you found. One of them is that we’re essentially hitting 70,000 immigrants in detention right now, which is the highest ever. And the other is that over time, with the funding that they’ve now got, they will be able to get those numbers up to 135,000. That is an immigrant carceral state, a ballooning immigrant carceral state. Can you talk about what your report found along those lines?
Reichlin-Melnick: Yeah, that’s right. So when we think about the scale of ICE detention, you know, it’s important when we say 70,000 people, it’s not like the prison system where that 70,000 people is pretty static—though, of course, within prisons, there’s always some people leaving and some people going, but people generally stay in prison for a long time.
With immigration detention, the goal of the administration is to shuffle people through the system as quickly as possible, or if they do stay in there to pressure them into giving up their case so they just choose to accept deportation. So the bigger the system is, the more people they can cycle through it with the goal of getting them to be deported, because if there’s no beds, they may have to eventually release some people and let them attend their hearings outside of detention.
So right now, Congress gave ICE $45 billion and ICE’s annual detention budget before that was $3.4 billion. So when you take the money that they have from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and you look at it over the four years this money is in effect, because this money has to be spent by the end of fiscal year 2029—on October 1, 2029, any money they didn’t spend by then disappears. So we looked at that money and we say, how much is this actually going to fund? And if you average it out, it’s $15 billion a year. By comparison, the entire federal prison system, their budget is less than $9 billion a year. So we could be looking at an ICE detention system as large or potentially even larger than the entire federal prison system.
Sargent: That’s just incredible. And so just to return to this concept of a forever war against Americans, That’s basically what this is becoming. Trump ran against forever wars, but I guess he only meant foreign ones. He wants a domestic forever war. That’s the funny thing.
And so when you watch Karoline Levitt in that situation, snapping at a reporter for asking legitimate questions about major ICE failings, you realize that they have no intention whatsoever of changing course. This is only going to get worse. Where do you see it going in as visceral terms and as human terms as possible? How bad is this going to get?
Reichlin-Melnick: It’s going to get bigger. It’s going to get crueler and it’s going to get less accountable, at least for now. Right now there is very little pushback from anyone who has power. We’ve seen the GOP and Congress more interested in holding hearings into things that happened years ago. We see the Trump administration—as we chronicled in our report—actually slashed internal oversight bodies.
The DHS Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties cut 85 percent; the DHS Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, a specific office created by Congress to oversee the ICE detention system, has been slashed by 90 percent of their staff. So that means that there are fewer eyes into the detention system and fewer people inside the government who can say, Hang on, there are rules, you have to follow them, due process still matters.
That might change, though, because if the House changes hands next year, and theoretically if the Senate changes hands as well, you might get some pushback. And the example I’ve been giving on this here to say this money can be taken back is the Inflation Reduction Act and that money for the 87,000 IRS agents. That became a huge issue on the right.
And as part of an annual appropriations fight, Congress actually cut tens of billions of dollars of that funding and clawed it back. Well, Congress can do that again, and so I’m going to be keeping a very close eye on the budget fights that we see should there be a change in hands of Congress coming up in 2027.
Sargent: That is such an interesting point, Aaron. I just want to remind people we had representatives Dan Goldman and Eric Swalwell on the show the other day. They both said Democrats have to strike a really hard line in the upcoming funding fights, and especially when Democrats control the House.
One last question on this, though. A Democratic House can also bring some serious oversight to ICE in a way that is just gone now. You were talking about the detention system and how oversight is just being completely gutted. It’s also nonexistent over ICE itself, both within the agency and from Congress. But Democrats can change that. Can you talk about that problem?
Reichlin-Melnick: Yeah, this is where the power of Congress really shines. Right now, the power to subpoena the federal government is in the hands of the Republican Party. And they are using that authority, but they’re not using it to really investigate the Trump administration’s actions.
So should the control of Congress shift hands, I do think, I think you would see the power of the subpoena, the congressional subpoena being used by Democrats to look at a wide variety of things that the Trump administration is doing, immigration being one of them.
Now, whether that means Kristi Noem is going to be hauled in front of Congress, I don’t know, but the biggest thing there is the ability to get information into the system, to claw out information, claw out data on how many people they’re arresting, how many U.S. citizens have been picked up, what they’re doing with this data, and also to potentially...if they can pass any legislation over a potential presidential veto. That’s obviously the biggest challenge here in a must-pass bill, potentially actually putting teeth into the oversight process.
Sargent: Well, I’ll tell you, Aaron, that’s going to get very interesting, and we’re going to have to absolutely demand that Democrats mount some major opposition to this horror that’s developing.
Folks, if you enjoyed this conversation, make sure to check out the American Immigration Council’s new report on the detention system. It’s a great piece of work. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, always great to talk to you, man. Thanks so much for coming on.
Reichlin-Melnick: Thanks for having me back.