This is transcript of WUWM's Status Pending podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.
Jimmy Gutierrez: Maybe you’ve heard the story of Ramon Morales Reyes from Milwaukee. If you haven’t, well, get ready.
Ramon is 56. He’s a husband and father of three. And he’s been living undocumented in the U.S. for the last four decades. No problems, just raising his family — until last May.
News Clip: Ramon Morales Reyes has been in ICE custody ever since federal agents first picked him up in Milwaukee a couple weeks ago, believing he wrote a letter plotting to kill the president. Turns out he was framed, and the immigrant has since been cleared of those allegations.
JG: The person who framed Ramon? A man who robbed and stabbed him, and was trying to get him deported
Cain Oulahan: And what we found out happened was, this individual who wanted to find out a way out of these criminal charges against him for robbery, came up with a plan…
JG: This is Cain Oulahan, Ramon’s attorney. And this plan…is the letter. I remember reading it for the first time and can’t really explain how ridiculous it was. So I wanted to share some of it here.
The letter starts out, “We are tired of the president messing with us Mexicans. We have done more for this country than you white people."
This goes on a few more lines — each getting more and more absurd, before getting to the threat. There are a few reasons why Ramon couldn’t have written this letter, besides not having a motive. Most importantly, he couldn’t read or write in English.
CO: DHS went ahead knowing he hadn't written the letter and published an accusation with his photo on their websites and social media saying that he had threatened to kill the president. And he was, you know, an illegal criminal alien and all these awful things.
JG: DHS publishes the full letter, with Ramon’s full name — and a mugshot. And soon this spreads to social media
CO: And [that] caused a lot of problems and a lot of harm, a lot of worry, fear, for Ramon and his family.
JG: This letter, which Oulahan says DHS and ICE knew was a fake, is still online. There’s a small retraction at the bottom of the page, under the letter and picture of Ramon.
Today, Ramon is no longer being investigated for threats against the president. But his life in the U.S. is still in jeopardy. He’s awaiting a hearing in immigration court to decide if he’ll be allowed to stay in the country with his family. Or forced to deport.
I think this story tells us a few things. One, DHS and ICE tactics for detention and removal are shifting, blurring the lines of what is and isn’t legal. And people like immigration attorney, Cain Oulahan, think ICE has made a turn — from operating as a government agency, to something else.
He’s been working in immigration law for almost 20 years. That's almost as long as ICE and DHS have been around. And he says, today, it’s harder than ever to get in touch with the agency. The one responsible for housing his clients, who’s now moving them across state lines, without any communication, making it impossible to do his job.
CO: Just not being able to get through to anyone, not getting calls returned, having numbers that you call that never pick up and never have a voicemail you can even leave. There seems to be, in my opinion, in my experience, almost a concerted effort to avoid communicating with anyone, attorneys, the public — which is concerning and disturbing, quite frankly. I mean they are our government, and part of their job is to communicate what's going on with their enforcement activities, and my client specifically.
JG: This isn’t how things have always been. So what’s changed?
Today, and over the coming weeks on Status Pending, we’re looking into ICE, the enforcement arm of DHS, the agency that arrested Ramon while he was dropping off one of his kids at school — knowing this letter was fake.
We’re going to find out how ICE came to be, how it’s changed over the years and how, some experts say, it went rogue.
To start, I wanted to talk to someone who’s been covering the history of immigration enforcement in the U.S. from the beginning, and knows how things changed with ICE.
Adam Goodman is a professor of Latin American and Latino studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. He’s also the author of "The Deportation Machine," which breaks down just how we went from 9/11 to ICE, and so much more.
Interview with Adam Goodman, author of "The Deportation Machine"
Adam Goodman: There's an important shift that happens after Sept. 11, 2001, which touches upon a long-standing tension in immigration policy and its implementation. That [tension is] between protecting national security on the one hand and also protecting civil liberties and individual freedoms and rights on the other hand.
After 9/11, with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), we see an increasing immigration enforcement bureaucracy, which now has received funding on an unparalleled level. And the department is also reorganized. And the rhetorical shift, I think, is an important one for people to understand. It's not as if immigration enforcement and deportations weren't taking place prior to the creation of DHS. But the shift from what used to be the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to the Department of Homeland Security, kind of says it all, in a way.
Traditionally, the immigration bureaucracy has had two sides, one an enforcement side and one a service side. Lately, in the last decade or two, we've seen an increasing shift toward enforcement over services. It's really the intertwining of national security concerns and the threat of terrorism after 9/11 that led to the growth of the Department of Homeland Security. It's a conundrum of sorts for anyone trying to reform or change our immigration policy.
JG: I think the way that you put it perfectly gets to it. If you move from immigration and naturalization services, INS, to the Department of Homeland Security, I mean, language says it all. And then we end up with the integration of customs and enforcement. So tell me, in the early era, how was ICE thought of and kind of what was the mandate that it had?
AG: ICE has been tasked with carrying out immigration enforcement in the interior of the country. And that's a role that existed earlier in the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Immigration investigators would monitor and surveil and apprehend and arrest people in the interior. But there's a real emphasis placed on interior enforcement and kind of the threat, so-called, "from within," from the perspective of the agency. We see an increasing amount of officers who are hired to patrol and surveil communities across the country. And so, the emphasis on interior enforcement and on people who are already in the country isn't entirely new, but it's really escalated to previously unknown levels, especially during the past two years during the second Trump administration.
JG: I want to get into that because it feels like each administration — you were talking about Trump — kind of has its own legacy with ICE. Thinking about George W. Bush, in office for Sept. 11. Obama was nicknamed or dubbed the "deporter-in-chief." So when it comes to ICE and the agency, what is Obama's legacy when it come to ICE? How is he thought of?
AG: What led me to my research for my book "The Deportation Machine: America's Long History of Expelling Immigrants," were the policies and the actions that the Obama administration was taking. I was really wondering: how could it be that someone who entered office preaching hope and change, and then has turned around and overseen the apprehension and deportation of hundreds of thousands of people each year? And what I learned is that a lot of this has to do with the very existence of the agency itself, of the Department of Homeland Security and its predecessor, the Immigration and Naturalization Service. As long as a federal bureaucratic agency exists that's tasked with apprehending, detaining, and deporting people, they're going to try to carry out their work to the best of their ability.
And so, regardless of who's in power, there's some impetus or bureaucratic inertia, [such] that the deportation machine will continue to churn and continue to operate. At the same time, it's not to say that the machine is running autonomously, without any human oversight or control. And the Obama administration, to its credit, from the perspective of immigrants and their advocates and allies, kind of changed their tune over the course of their eight years in power. I think that, on the one hand, the history of harsh punitive immigration enforcement policies is very much bipartisan. Both Democrats and Republicans have overseen millions upon millions of deportations. We need to recognize that. And at the same time, it's not to say that all administrations are the same.
JG: So, speaking of hope and change, Trump ran on a very different kind of rhetoric his first term. It was very nationalist, anti-immigrant, promising mass deportations. You know, we had Jeff Sessions as an attorney general. The zero tolerance rule, that policy was in place. Forced separation was a thing. What did that first term look like when it came to ICE?
AG: In large part, I think the Trump administration, you know, saw ICE agents across the nation as integral actors in carrying out their campaign promises to target immigrants who are in the country, whether with status or without status. And that's an important thing that we saw certainly during the first administration, but it's only increased during the second administration as the targeting of all immigrants. That's something that is certainly new.
But during the first administration, I think that they were taking much more of a trial-and-error approach to seeing how far they could go and seeing what they could get away with and learning in some cases that, as has always been true, the executive branch has had tremendous authority and independence when it comes to implementing immigration policies and laws. One of the things we saw that was without precedent, perhaps, were the level of intensity of the fear campaigns launched by the Trump administration early in the campaign and then after assuming power in 2016, 2017, to encourage immigrants to pick up and leave the country on their own, to self-deport.
JG: What changed? What changed from that first kind of like, "We'll see what we can get away with; we'll see what we can do," from the Trump administration, to this current administration? The way that we're seeing ICE "unleashed." I mean, you know, the language that agents have used is "unleashed." We're talking Minneapolis, Chicago. What has changed with ICE and its mandate under this administration?
AG: One thing that's changed is that the administration has learned a lot from its time in office. When they came to power in 2016, 2017, a lot of people didn't think they were going to win, including many people within the administration itself, perhaps. Perhaps even the president. But now they have four years of experience when they returned to office. And they know a lot more about how the levers of power work, potential areas that they could either push on or exploit. And at the same time, things that wouldn't work, things that would generate pushback. And also having spent the last several years developing and thinking about new policies and new ways to ultimately enforce and successfully implement their campaign promises to do nothing less than remake the nation as we know it. Particularly people like Stephen Miller, who is perhaps the key figure on immigration policy in the administration, has made this his number one issue. And it's become the number one issue for the White House in general, which is somewhat rare.
Immigration has long been an important policy issue, but it's usually not the top one. And I think that there's a reason for that. And in particular, it's because it's a politically effective tool for the Trump administration to both gain power and win elections, but also to distract people, perhaps, from other things that are going on that aren't as popular. And so the scapegoating of immigrants has a long history. Other politicians have turned to that as a tried and true tactic throughout the last century-and-a-half. And Trump has certainly been incredibly successful, I think we can say, in doing so.
JG: Adam really sets up the moment. But I also wanted to talk to someone to really understand what we’re seeing today, and how much of it is actually legal.
Interview with Nayna Gupta, policy director at the American Immigration Council
JG: Nayna Gupta and the team at the American Immigration Council looked into that. They put together an analysis breaking down a bunch of areas we’re seeing ICE’s overreach. The paper is called "How ICE Went Rogue."
NG: This is an agenda that is maximizing arrests, minimizing accountability, just so that ICE agents on the ground can report back up to Stephen Miller and Donald Trump that they hit their 3,000 immigration arrests per day. It is not an agenda that prioritizes those who pose a public safety threat, even though we continue to hear the Trump administration echo that they are going after "the worst of the worst." Everyday Americans are waking up to the fact that they're actually targeting people who pose no safety threat at all, who don't have serious criminal convictions, who are long-standing, contributing members of our communities. And ICE is rounding these people up using aggressive tactics, some of which are allowed under the law and others that are not. In other words, they're both lawless in their agenda and taking our current laws to the extreme to effectuate mass deportation.
JG: So you looked into a bunch of different ways that ICE is kind of going about this —what they would consider maybe expanding their powers, or interpretations of expansions of powers. And there are, I think, six topics that you hit on. We're not going to get into all of those now, but I did want get into some of them that maybe folks are seeing most in their communities, or on their phones over social media.
And if I can start with traffic stops, because something that this report gets into, and it says it right up top: what can immigration agents legally do? And federal agents cannot stop cars for traffic violations, this says. They are allowed to stop vehicles for the purpose of enforcing federal law, both immigration and criminal law. But that's not what we've been seeing or hearing from some of these incidents. I think of, most recently, ICE's killing of Johan Sebastián Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine. So what is ICE actually doing when it comes to traffic stops?
NG: What we've seen in the past several months in places like Maine, or Houston, Texas, with the death of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, is ICE claiming that they believe the person in the car is in violation of civil immigration law. They are claiming that they had a reasonable suspicion that someone in that car was in violation of our civil immigration laws, and that that gives them a legal basis to stop the vehicle. Now, the first question we have to ask is: do they really have that kind of reasonable suspicion that they're claiming? In the incident in Houston, Texas, they had the wrong person, right? The man that they ended up killing in the course of that traffic stop was not the person that they were seeking to target in the first instance.
The second thing is that even when they have a legal basis to make a traffic stop to enforce federal immigration law, there's no legal basis for them to be using the kind of force and disproportionate tactics that they've been using in the course of these traffic stops. It's also worth noting that the law gives everyday ICE agents — who are really supposed to be enforcing mostly civil immigration law — the authority to make traffic stops with not a really high legal standard. And that makes it easy for them to pretend that they have legal justification for stops, when sometimes they don't. In other words, they are taking advantage of relaxed legal standards to effectuate this agenda that is obsessed with arrest numbers for the sake of arrest numbers.
JG: As this report goes on, you also touch on pedestrian stops, which I think people have seen plenty of videos from like the parking lots of Home Depots or Walmarts. And another way that this takes shape that I want get into is entering a home. Because, like law enforcement, immigration agents are allowed to enter someone's home if they're allowed in, if they are invited in, but we have the Fourth Amendment — which basically says that without a judicial warrant, officers are not allowed to into someone's homes. And this is kind of a foundational piece of the "Know Your Rights" trainings, which a lot of immigration advocacy organizations have been pushing since this kind of explosion of aggressive ICE tactics. So this is what should be happening, but what are we seeing ICE actually do, and what is the secret I-205 policy?
NG: Just to be clear, a basic tenet of the Fourth Amendment is that, for any law enforcement officer to forcibly enter someone's home, they have to have a judicial warrant. Now, the Trump administration, during their operations and raids in Minnesota at the beginning of 2026, basically gave agents authority to enter a home by force if they believed that somebody inside the house was a person subject to an immigration arrest. Now, ICE agents can use warrants that they write themselves, administrative warrants, to arrest somebody. But they absolutely cannot use administrative warrants to actually enter into somebody's home. To do that, they need a warrant signed by a judge.
And so this internal agency policy, which again, was not just a few ICE officers violating the constitution. It was an entire secret policy within the agency that basically gave ICE and Border Patrol agents permission to enter homes without that kind of judicial warrant that the Fourth Amendment requires. The existence of the memo that set this policy was not public until January, 2026, when two whistleblowers shared it and leaked it with members of Congress. If that had not happened, we could have seen even more forced entries into people's homes without judicial warrants by ICE and Border Patrol agents.
JG: All of this is pointing to all of these different ways that ICE is expanding their powers in secret, the way that they're carrying out these mandates. They're doing it, but they're also doing it, it seems like, with as much force as possible. I do want to talk about use of force. So, this is another thing that you kind of explore, how this should work from immigration officers and kind of what we're seeing.
And there's a couple jargony terms in here that I just want to make clear. The Supreme Court has held law enforcement officers to a minimal standard of "objective reasonableness," which is basically saying that any person in this situation would react similarly, that that amount of force was necessary. And then, specifically to immigration officers, that they shall use the "minimal non-deadly force necessary" to accomplish the officer's mission. So, when it comes to ICE, ICE's tactics in the street, that doesn't sound like what we're seeing. But how have they kind of changed the rules here when it come to use of force?
NG: What all of this jargon taken together really says to civil immigration enforcement agents in ICE is that it is your job to de-escalate any situation in which you're arresting a person who's in violation of our immigration law. And only when you think there is really immediate danger of death or injury. In other words, this should be an exception, and almost never used in the course of your duties. And as a general matter, the agency at this time is doing the complete opposite. They are leading with escalation and force. They are making traffic stops that are already on shaky legal ground, and they're making those stops as if they have a gun to their head. They're not just ignoring the policy that they're supposed to follow. They are actively taking an opposite stance than what the use of force policy requires.
The other thing that is critical here is that we've seen in the aftermath of the killing of Mr. Guerrero in Maine and Mr. Salgado in Texas agents, in almost a robotic manner, repeat this phrase that the car the person was driving was "being used as a weapon," or that the way the person was driving posed some imminent threat toward ICE agents. And that kind of blatant lie, when Americans can see by video that that's not what happened on the ground, undermines these long-standing legal standards. They are taking "imminent danger of death," which is what they're required to show to use force and applying it to everyday actions by people that are so obviously not a public safety threat.
Things will almost certainly get worse before there is an opening to make things better. And the primary reason for that is because Congress has given the agency essentially a slush fund through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year and another big budget bill this year. We've already seen in the last month, as these arrests increase to unprecedented numbers, them invest in things like shock gloves that law enforcement officers can use when stopping immigrants or alleged immigrants in violation of immigration law.
We are seeing them invest billions of dollars to buy back immigration detention facilities, so that they can work to expand them more quickly. We know they are using this money to expand their surveillance infrastructure and to hire private contractors to expand their reach around the country. The other thing, Jimmy, that is really important to note is that we are likely to see this continue to increase — aggressive indiscriminate enforcement — not only because the Trump administration's agencies violate the laws, but because our laws are outdated. The laws they are enforcing have not been updated since the 1990s.
And under current immigration law, on any given day, a person in violation of immigration law but who has never committed any crime, who's paying federal and state taxes, who's lived here for 15 years, can be arrested, handcuffed, locked up and fully deported and separated from their families. That is what the law permits and allows. And the Trump administration is taking advantage of outdated laws that allow them to target millions of people. And that is a reminder that if we don't want to see this kind of aggressive enforcement in the future, Congress has to not only claw back the billions of dollars they've given to ICE and Border Patrol, they also have to finally reform the laws that opened the door to Trump's mass deportation agenda.
