Hello, and welcome to the Texas Tribune trib Cast for March twenty fourth. I'm Eleanor Klibanoff, just back from a week long vacation, thrilled to be here, starting back with a tribe cast, as I always dreamed would be the case. I am not joined by Matthew Watkins this week. He is at a board meeting, or like a board meeting, probably, which is a joke that's better in writing, I'm realizing as I say it out loud. But that's all right.
We're trying our best here. I am joined in studio by my colleague on the politics team, Alejandro Serrano.
Howdy, what did I miss.
While I was gone?
Nothing?
Absolutely nothing, quiet week in Texas News, and joined on zoom by the Tribune Star Investigative reporter Lomi Kreole.
Thanks for being here.
Star Wow. Eleanor.
Thanks.
I'll try to live up to it.
Yes, I'm promoting you up to Star investigative reporter. Today we are going to be talking about an issue that has really dominated the headlines in recent weeks here in Texas, I mean nationally, but especially in Texas, which is the state and status of ice detentions as of last month, almost twenty thousand people were detained in ICE facilities here
in Texas, more than in any other state. We have the largest ice detention center, Camp East Montana, a sprawling tent city on the edge of Fort Bliss in El Paso, which is being seen as a model for the Trump administration's broader immigration detention plans. We've also seen a really staggering number of deaths in ice custody here in Texas
and nationally. Last year, in twenty twenty five, there were thirty two people who died in ice custody, surpassing the previous high from two thousand and five of twenty According to federal data, nearly a quarter of last year's deaths occurred in Texas, and federal data shows that most current ICE attainees are not accused of crimes beyond civil immigration offenses. This is something let me, you have been reporting on extensively,
certainly not a new area of reporting for you. You were deeply involved in reporting on immigration enforcement during the first Trump administration as well as during the Biden administration and allhandro you as well have been covering this lo I mean, maybe you can just sort of start and give us sort of the lay of the land in terms of you know, why we're seeing this huge surge in you know, this push to detain so many undocumented immigrants.
Yeah, So, I mean it's not as surprise, right, Like, this is what President Trump and pained on. That was one of his main platforms, and his administration sees it as a mandate.
Right.
His top advisor, Stephen Miller, has pushed to arrest three.
Thousand undocumented immigrants a day.
And I think it's important to understand that this is actually much harder than it sounds. You know, typically in the past administrations which sort of arrest immigrants when they cross pass with the criminal justice system. But in order to reach that three thousand number, you really have to go much broader than that, which is why we're seeing some of these efforts like sharing text information from immigrants with ICE, right. And so, I mean that's what the administration has.
Seen as its mandate.
And I think now after some of these actions, particularly in Minneapolis, it seems like there might be some doubt about are they going too far?
And I mean you mentioned sort of sharing tax information. We're also seeing I mean we're recording this on Monday, so this news was breaking this morning. By the time this air is on Tuesday, it may have evolved beyond this. But you know, we're seeing ICE agents at airports. We're seeing ICE agents showing up at places where previously maybe they were not. I mean I started this by saying that, you know, most current detainees are not accused of crimes
beyond civil immigration offenses. Can you sort of explain how much of a departure that is from before when it was maybe more like if you're facing additional criminal charges, will make efforts to detain and deport you.
Yeah, I mean that Bomber administration actually deported more people than the first ROUNP administration.
I mean, you know, I think in general.
What previously happened is that when there was any interaction with the criminal justice system, you would you know, be targeted for deportation or if you had already a removal order.
But what we're seeing.
Right now is the Trump administration is, for example, reevaluating whether refugees who are legally vetted and have a status in the United States whether they should be deported. So it is very much a departure from both Republican and democratic administrations.
What the expanse of it.
In order to reach that number that Stephen Miller has been pushing, you cannot just do sort of the typical going after criminal immigrants.
You know, you know way in here, I think when one thing that kind of I guess Didlumi's point. It's like it just seems like now more than certainly pass administrations, like immigration enforcement has gotten really random, and there's like this certain element to it that, like any cop can really.
Just help bikes, like shoes to help them.
And obviously there's some departments in Texas that are more eager to do that. And I think that's kind of like the outsized role of Texas has played for years now because our leader state leaders are politically marching in lockstep with Trump, so we end up helping the administration a lot more.
And I mean a big reason I think, in at least in our sort of collective imaginations, that Texas plays such a huge role in all of this is that we have the longest stretch of border in the country. But all hundred things have really changed at the border right in recent Yeah.
No, it's totally quiet. I mean, I think perhaps changed too much. I was just working on a story a couple of weeks ago and interviewing people down in the valley, the Rio Grande Valley and congressional candidate by Pulito and Dejano. Star's telling me that, you know, he keeps hearing from people that like bridge traffic is down because Mexican tourists don't want to come. That's like really common in border communities, you know, the cross traffic like I'm going to go to Walmart and like.
Americans go have lunch or whatever.
He said, people are not crossing as much in that effects city budgets because they collect tolls from that also retail, he said, it's down, And I think that is also like it's almost like goding, like too quiet, because when in legal immigration has tanked, but now it's also like everything else is tanking.
And I think that's what we're hearing.
And also obviously like the enforcement element effects communities right, like we're hearing from you know, business owners who are not seeing their employee show up because they're scared, or projects are not getting done.
What have you.
Yeah, let's talk more about the let me do something dad.
Yeah, I just want to say, you know, Jacob Monty is actually a huge immigration lawyer in Houston. He was on the Trump administration's first like border security Council.
He posted something.
The other day that you know, they do kind of these free legal clinics, and people were not showing up to these free it's like free legal advice from this guy who was, you know, on Trump's.
Advisory council in the first administration.
And people are not coming because they are so fearful that any interaction that aligns them with like possibly being undocumented will result in enforcement. So, just to Alejandra's point, this is having sort of really dramatic consequences beyond what we've seen before.
I think it's also interesting in Texas because it hasn't happened with a lot of the backlash and fanfare is a poor word for that, but kind of like Chicago, like Los Angeles, like Minnesota. But it's like ice is really active here all the same.
Yeah, absolutely, I think that it's we have not seen that same backlash in Texas. But at the same time, as you both have reported on, I mean, this really is the epicenter and sort of the blueprint in a lot of ways for a lot of what's going to happen in the rest of the country and as love one of your sources hed in one of your stories. Like in many for many people, it's like the beginning, middle,
and end of their immigration journeys. You know, maybe they originally crossed in Texas, went on somewhere else, started a life, lived maybe here for a long time, and now we're ending up back in the detention center in Texas. Let me, let's talk about these detention camps or you know, these
sort of detention facilities. I mean, we can start by talking about the ElGamal family, which is a mother and five children who have been stuck at the Dilly detention facility outside San Antonio for about nine months, which advocates and lawyers believe is longer than any other family.
Tell us a little bit about who.
They are, how they ended up there, and what their experience has been.
Yeah, so, I guess I first just quickly wanted to step back. Like so, family detention is long controversial, right, and it actually started just north of Austin in Hodow, which was the first family detentions are in.
The country, and it was shut down in two.
Thousand and nine after multiple problems, and then the Obama administration opened Dilly in twenty fourteen with the intention that it would be more humane, but it's also been plagued with legal problems, and the Biden administration shut it and then the Trump administration opened it again. So this is you know, the concept of family detention is really controversial, and medical experts say.
That this is not good for kids.
Right, So the Algamol family has been detained there for nine months. There the father was accused of an anti Semitic attack in Colorado, but the family has maintained that they had no knowledge of that. They have not importantly been charged with any crimes, but they've been detained at Dilly ever since. And that includes the youngest kids, who
are five year old twins. So what they have described in kind of pretty heartbreaking letters and drawings is just I mean, there are you know, essentially in a prison. The lights are on at all hours, the food is you know, lacking. One of the kids described losing about twenty pounds. There's almost no schooling. And this is a little bit of a departure because the eldest girl in this family actually was recognized as one of the best
and brightest students in the state of Colorado. She wanted to go to Harvard Medical School, and you know, the medical care is lacking. The mom has a history of cancer, she's not been able to see a doctor. One of the kids has these has not been able.
To see a dentist.
But overwhelmingly, what they just describe is being detained with no end.
And I think what stood out.
Me from the conversation with the lawyer and from seeing kind of their their notes and their their pictures is the lawyer said, every day I worry that I'm going to get a call that one of these kids has has self harmed, because in fact, that did happen to one of their friends who tried to you know, tried to kill herself, but then she was deported. So I think, you know, this is these are diary straits here for for these kids.
And what is sort of like the end game for I'm saying, like the Trump administration's goal in many cases is to get people to deport, like self deport or agree to leave the country. You know, why aren't they doing that? And what sort of is what is what does an alternative resolution look like?
Yeah, I mean it's not actually despite what we all I think maybe want to think, it's not that easy to just support people right there, there's you have to coordinate.
With countries that have to accept people back.
People also have legal rights to seek asylum to undergo their deportation proceedings. So in this case, you know, the families from Egypt, they have an active asylum claim. The Trump administration cannot simply deport them while they're undergoing those proceedings, and so what they're doing is detaining them. They could release them on a bond. In this case, the family has a very strong support system in Colorado Springs that has raised money for them, that have argued that they
would vouch for them. So you know that is the alternative, but the Trump administration is choosing not.
To do that, right. I mean, I think this is I mean the photos.
I really recommend people checking out Lem's story online because you obtained these like drawings that the children and letters that the children are writing, and I think it's very like you said, family detention is not sort of our like typical protocol necessarily across the board.
And seeing this.
The family, these children who are sort of just stuck there waiting for this to resolve itself, or waiting for their legal process to resolve.
Is pretty shocking.
Like, these are sort of the cases I think that have stood out of you know, these high profile moments, particularly involving children, where sort of national attention centers on them. So Dilly sort of came into the national consciousness, I think most recently after photographs of five year old Liam Conheo Ramos.
Sort of went viral. This like little five.
Year old kid who was detained in Minneapolis and sent to Dilly. There was like a lot of public outcry around that, a lot of attention. But there's a lot of cases that never get that attention, right, they're just families in Dilly that don't you know, sort of capture
our national imagination. Can you tell us a little bit more about like what are some of the cases you've heard about, both like I think the concerning medical concerns things like that, but also just sort of the standard like what life is like in Dillian.
Who's there?
Yeah, well, you know, I think what's really different this time around is that because they're all of no people can cross the border.
Now.
These are generally families that have been detained from the interior of the country, and many of them have lived here.
For a long time.
So that is in and of itself a significant difference from any previous administration because because typically Dailly was used to how you know, people who were recent border crossers, So that is a huge change.
And then what we're also seeing is just this ramping.
Up of detention that is overwhelming capacity. In the case of Dalli, that has meant, you know, there was a child with leukemia, for example, who was only released after help from Columbia Law School and multiple habeas petitions, So you know, there are people and children there with severe medical conditions that are not they say, getting the care
that they need. The Courcivic, which is a private prison company, maintains that they're doing, you know, everything possible and giving the best healthcare, but that is not what we're here from the families there.
Yeah, I would mention another case been reported on publicly where a two month old boy was detained for three weeks. He had bronchitis, he was unresponsive, he'd been hospitalized in the past couple of days. And then you know, even as Congressman Joaquin Castro from San Antonio was sort of took up his case and was pushing it, raised a lot of awareness about it. The young boy and his
family were suddenly deported. I mean, these cases are resolving or sometimes are like moving faster even than the public attention can grab them.
It seems like, Yeah, I mean I.
Think and I think that you're going to go to al Hondro to speak about another.
Case here shortly.
But I mean I think that the cases that are getting publicity are so few and far between, right like the majority. For example, this Colombian thirteen year old girl who try to harm herself at daily was deported back to Colombia. She had grown up here her entire life. So yeah, I mean a lot most of these cases are not getting public attention.
Yeah.
One other thing that has sort of been reported on is like the challenges that detainees are facing and just getting their basic medical care. Especially many are now dealing with new medical issues sort of stemming from their detention. Can you just talk a little bit lower me about what that, what those challenges are and some of these issues around like are we paying government, are we paying our medical providers?
What's going on there?
Yeah? So, I mean, look, I don't think he is a secret.
Medical care and ice, just like medical care and jails and prisons, has never been great. The difference now is both like the number of people that are being detained, which is overwhelming capacity. In addition, there is a bureaucratic change that the Trump administration made in terms of how they pay specialty medical providers that is taking some time to institute and means that basically since October, a lot
of the specialty medical providers have not been paid. In addition, we have seen reports of a lot of ICE healthcore or medical providers who work with ICE are really concerned reportedly that they may be violating their hypocritic oath and are actually leaving the agency intros and because they feel that maybe they can't give the best medical care under these circumstances.
And then, I mean sort of it sounds like through a combination of factors, some of which is sort of the mental health issues you talked about, others sort of the inadequate training of ICE officials inside these facilities, and then also the inadequate medical care, we have seen this unprecedented surge in deaths within these ICE attention facilities all hundred. Maybe you can talk about the of Mohammad Nazir Paktiawal who died in ICE custody here in Texas.
Yeah, he was an Afghan man, forty one year old man who had helped the American military in Afghanistan starting two thousand and five, and then when the US withdrew in twenty twenty one, he came with like a special program that the Biden administration had started. So he comes to Texas, relocates, and a couple of weeks ago, he was taking his kids to school and got pulled over by unmarked agents and they detayed him and told him he was in the country illegally, presumably, and within a
day he died. And it's not clear what happened. He called his brother late at night and said he wasn't feeling well, and then ICE called the family and said that they were taking him to a hospital, and then within hours he was dead. His family is obviously pretty pretty devastated, but also confused, and a group that helps a lot of these veterans called AFGHANIVAC, it's really trying to raise awareness to get answers, but so far there
have been very little information from DHS or ICE. They accused him of not having any provided his military background.
Afghanivak hause his certificate.
And the medical examiner has not yet ruled on his matter of death, so it's not clear yet, but that is going to be an important I guess the termination once it's done.
And we've seen this on a couple of other cases right where there's sort of this disagreement maybe between the initial reports and then what the medical examiner ultimately concludes.
I know, let me.
You wrote about the case of Haraldo Luna's compos who died at Camp East, Montana. He was originally his death was originally attributed to medical distress, but the medical examiner ruled it a homicide, saying he was suffocated and became unresponsive while being physically restricted by law enforcement.
I mean, what is sort.
Of the I mean, the the system in under which these deaths are being scrutinized are are being looked at.
Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I know there's some oversight, but I think it kind of seems like medical examiners are playing an increasingly more important role when there is a suspicious death. I think the case you just highlighted that Lowemi wrote about is like just like underscorees to the point of why forensic pathology is important. Like across the board, right, Like, it's just it's kind of like a factual establishment of facts, right, you look at a body,
you determine what happened. As far as like internal investigations, I don't think we've seen any internal repercussions in DHS or ICE for any of the uses of force. We haven't even talked about the Americans who have been killed as part of this crackdown.
Yeah, well, I mean, what's your sense of sort of how these deaths are being scrutinized and being you know, looked at as a sign of whether anything needs to change.
Yeah, I mean, I think what Alejandro said is right that you know, there's doesn't seem to me a lot of at least publicly, right, we don't know what is going on here, and DHS has really not been very transparent.
So in that case of Compass, as you mentioned, I just want to.
Underscore that it is pretty shocking and experts said that to us repeatedly. To have staff accused of a homicide in the case of a detainee, that is I don't want to say unprecedented, but you know, maybe so what happened in that case is we didn't learn the truth until days or weeks later, and there's another case at that same facility in Camp East Montana and Alpaso, where we have not been able to get the autopsy because they're sending it to the they're deferring to the military
since it's occurring on Fort Bliss. So you know, I think that there are many questions around the circumstances of these deaths and what if anything DHS and ICE is doing to hold people accountable.
And also aggressive pushback to accountability, right, like we see this with the masking, like officers don't want their identities revealed.
And then another I guess element of oversight is Congress, and we've seen members of Congress turned away from detention facilities not really get answers when they have simple lines of inquiry into these major like I don't know if we call them catastrophic events, but obviously there's been a bunch of these like one off incidents that really capture the national tension, and even then it's hard to get information.
Yeah, I think that that's like, I mean, just as journalists, I think our personal like bone to pick right is like what is available to the public and when and sort of how accessible is that?
Let me.
I want to talk a little bit more about Camp East Montana, which is where three of these deaths were recorded in a very short period of time. The camp has it's sort of, as I said at the beginning, this model in some ways of what the Trump administration wants to do. Build these like huge deportation or these
huge detention facilities. This one is on the edge of Fort Bliss, was built in two months with a one point two billion dollar contract and just has faced so many issues since it started, medical neglect, spoiled insufficient food, unsanitary conditions, and advocacy groups on a letter from more than forty five people detaining alleged abuse and serious injuries, and ICE's own inspectors found at least sixty violations at
the facility shortly after it opened. We should say that DHS has said the Tribune that any claimed that there are inhumane conditions at ICED attention centers.
Are categorically false.
But it does seem like, you know, you talked to some experts who said, like, we were struggling with far fewer detainees to provide adequate care, adequate medical Like what are we seeing in terms of the feasibility of building and maintaining these sort of mass detention facilities.
Yeah.
I think that's exactly the problem and encapsulated by Camp East Montana, And in fact, the Trump administration just recently ended that contract with the previous contractor and is giving it to someone else that Camp Beat Montana because of all of the problems. I mean, the issue at Camp East Montana was that there were you know, these were like sixty seventy people held in sort of a ton
camp in a pod. It seemed that the people that were working there had very according to Representative of Roan Kascobar, who's the congressional resentative from Alpasa, you know, these are people working there who had very little training. There's been multiple measles and tuberculosis outbreaks there, and people have not been able to get not only basic medical care, but
even basic access to their attorneys. And part of the problem is, as you say that, this is just this like ramping up when you have so many people, and when you perhaps have contractors who, in this case Acquisition Logistics, had no record of detention capacity of business, so you know you are going to run into problems.
Yeah, it is just I mean, this is like a sort of an aside. Like I remember this when during COVID, when like we were looking at I was not here in Texas yet, but looking at like, oh, we're going.
To build these sort of field hospitals.
We're going to staff up, but it's hugely logistically complicated. Like it's out great to be like we're turning the fairgrounds into a hospital, and then it's like, oh, this is hard to do. And that's for a really limited set of like responsibilities versus like maintaining people's you know, like keeping people alive for indeterminate amounts of time.
Yeah.
Also, like when you think of these like highly contagious disease like measles, like what like two people get it and you're all confined in this tent, you know it secluded from it's a community like it.
Yeah, it is high risk for we're all involved.
Yeah, and like that does not stay necessarily limited to the migrants who are in the camp. I mean we're starting to see this spread to the communities around that inevitably. Right, people go to work and come home and bring and bring things like measles or other diseases. So yeah, really sort of the ripple effects. I think we're starting to see. We talked a little bit about sort of the way that these cases get national attention, and we can see sort of some individual case reversals.
I want to talk about the games Quaar family.
They were you know, this sort of got It was such an interesting story because they are award the children were award winning high school Mariachi students. They were invited to the White House, they were really lauded by Congresswoman Monica de la Cruz, a Republican from Edinburgh, and then they ended up in one of these detention facilities because they were you know, going They were detained as part of a routine check in with immigration officials.
Got huge national attention.
We should say that Representive de la Cruz is in the middle of a very contentious re election campaign and she ended up intervening. Antonio Gamez Quaar was detained at the elval Y, a detention center in Raymondville, and then the rest of the family were detained at Dilly, including a fourteen year old and a.
Twelve year old son.
You know, Representive de la Cruz took steps to secure his, you know, the whole family's release. Lem Me, what do you make of these sort of one off interventions from lawmakers, particularly Republicans who are maybe you know, sort of part of the party that is supporting this crackdown generally, but then intervening on these individual cases.
Yeah, I think this.
Case was really interesting because we actually haven't seen Republicans generally get that involved, right, And as you mentioned, the congresswoman is in a in a contested.
Re election campaign. Uh.
I think, you know, it's unfortunate because there are, like we said, just like some like this family was was a very compelling family. I mean, in part of the fact that the congresswoman sort of highlighted them was because she had invited them to the White House to play Mariacci and like they had gone security clearance, right, and and then they were being placed in deportation proceedings. So so I mean, I guess in some ways it would have been difficult for her.
Not to intervene there. But you know, they are the minority.
The vast majority of people are not getting this attention.
I mean, yeah, our colleague Baronice was like outside the facility when they were being released and talking to other people who were like, you know, well, like my loved one is inside my fiancees inside my you know, family members inside, and they're not getting sort of the same attention. So I do think those one off cases are really really interesting.
Do you have anything to add to that?
No, it just sent me as an observer.
It just seems like like the golden ticket to the Willy Wonka factory, like to make a I guess silly reference, but yeah, it's just and it's also interesting the case is that get attention, but nothing happens right, Like there have been numerous like just chroniclings of going on around the country that captivate people's ten and then like still nothing happens, right, And if I.
Can jump in, like for example, like you know, Liam, the little five year old from in Yeapolis, his family, he and his father were just ordered support it. So despite that national attention, that still happened. And then you know, in the case of the Alcamal family that you know we wrote about, it's been really interesting in it and
I think there's multiple dynamics going on here. But it seems that Congress is hustan to get involved because the father is accused of these anti Semitic crimes, even though the family isn't explicitly not so, you know, I think it starts to become a little bit of like, you know, a favoritism system, which.
Is really sad.
Yeah, I think it's always kind of been like that. Now it's just what we see seeing witnessing is how much the politics have changed. Like well, I mean I have a shared friend who used to cover immigration for many, many years, and then she left because she just couldn't take anywhere. She was like you'd literally right about the most devastating things and often nothing changes. But now I think it's interesting to see how Democrats are changing there.
They're tune and talking about like you know, securing the border, look enforcing the law humanly because of how much overwhelming support Trump court it that it just feels like the needle has moved so much that they're not letting up the throttle at all. Like I mean, like Liam's Family or Killer Market, We're going to see one of the first big prominent cases, like they're still trying to deport
him now. It's like it's becoming an ears long effort, expensive, arduous process to remove this one man.
And it's just yeah, it just seems like a lot has changed in recent years.
Yeah, sort of the Overton window shifted pretty sharply. I mean, do you want to talk about story of the political response, Alejandro. You have written about sort of we saw in twenty twenty four Republicans swing very sharply, especially in border communities for Republicans. And now we've just had a recent election. You know, what are the tea leaves saying about what Latino voters are are going to do this election? And then we can talk about what that says about all of this.
Yeah, I mean it's hard to make swooping statements, right Like, I think we have a bunch of individual data points that Democrats are finding hope in and the midterms is another example of that. In the Valley in particular, the four counties that make up the Valley, they saw turnout
surge massively. Yeah, Democratic Party did, but so the Republicans and Republicans have been making gains there for years and part of that is an investment that they have treated Latinos like swing voters they think, longer than Democrats have. But what it means, I don't know. It means to be seen. I think it also depends who's at the
top of the ticket. I think the hope for Democrats is that they could win back Latino support and even just a little bit like ten fifteen percent in some of these counties could flip seats like and that's kind of what they're banking on here. And other data points include like the like the Senate District Texas Senate District nine special election we had, which was like, I know, one off the end of January on a Saturday, after
a freeze. But again they saw like Democrat, the Democrat Center Taylor Remont who won, saw a lot of turnout in the Hispanic precincts and felt that that helped propel him to victory, paired with his message of you know, kitchen table issues.
Do we have any sense.
Of how these you know, immigration enforcement actions are playing with Latino voters and whether that's going to influence.
Yeah, polling is mixed.
I mean, I think there's like there's disapproval among Latinos written large, but I think Latino Republicans are it's like a little murkier And I don't know. I subscribe to the school of anyone who says they know exactly what's gonna happen, is it?
Yeah, I mean, it'll be interesting to see again, like you're never gonna be able to like parse out exactly what led to what. But I do think certainly, if you know, Democrats managed to hold some of those seats or regain some of that lost ground with Latinos, particularly in the Valley, I think they at least will be reading the tea leaves to say like this is an indictment of President Trump's immigration.
Totally, totally.
But I think it's also it's going to be interesting to see how that affects us at the in Texas and at the state House as we had into twenty twenty seven, because Republicans here are not letting any pressure off the throttle either. I mean, just let me brought up Stephen Miller at the beginning of the conversation. He talked to a cohort of state lawmakers Friday AND's grilling them about what we haven't done.
And this is the state that has done the most.
We had our own immigration crackdown for years that people don't even like talk about now. And you know, they're talking about like overturning like legal precedent that grants undocumented kids access to school, like talking about like ways to ensure that people who crue, medical debt, or cost the state. Anything can get deported, and just like really doubling down on immigration crackdown.
Yeah, I mean, let me.
I guess that's sort of my final question to you, which is in terms of we are certainly we hear backlash to this really you know, increased ramp up of immigration enforcement. We hear a lot of backlash to the reports of these poor conditions of detainees and the deaths and some of these families that are being sort of
separated or families that are being detained. What is your sense of how much that affects the policy of the federal government going forward, whether there is there sort of a tipping point in which they say, like there's too much backlash, we have to back off from this, or do you think this is kind of what we're going to be looking at for the next couple of years the Trump administration.
I think it's fluid, right, And what we've seen is, you know, the Department of Homeland Security Secretary Christinome was fired or left, depending on your perspective. So that was seen in any case as some sort of indictment of the very extreme tactics that was used in Minneapolis in particular, but you know, followed Chicago and Los Angeles and the kind of border of twelve person in charge of some of this is also was sort of moved and is
also leaving. And then there have been reports that Republicans are sort of internally saying, like, look, this isn't polling well, we need to like dial down the rhetoric a little bit.
You know.
I don't know.
It's a bit of an internal battle, I think because on the one hand, you have Stephen Miller, who is very influential in pushing this, and then you have kind of, you know, maybe some more moderate Republicans who are saying, look like for example, Congressmen Dela Cruz like perhaps saying like this is not working.
For me in my district or reelection.
So I don't know exactly right, Like, I don't I think we've seen it kind of dial down a little bit because we've not seen another Minneapolis, right and there's been there's high level departures.
There's also been they've been.
Releasing more families from Dilley, for example, on Pond. But I don't think that they're backing down entirely because this is partly their mandate, So I think it remains to be.
Seen exactly how they straddle what is a difficult line.
Now we also only talk about like the most I guess we often focus on unenforcemently, you know, like the resting someone, putting them in a car and taking them away to deport them. But they'll changing, like so many like the administration is changing so many aspects of migrating to America, and like even coming here legally has gotten more difficult, and also like most of the staff has been directed to the deportation efforts.
Yeah, and I mean we're hearing political candidates in Texas saying like we should be looking at legal immigrants too, we should be looking at legal immigration, and like do we need all of these citizenship and excistionenship I mean, like basically blocking the H one B visa program. I mean, all sorts of things are changing, like you said, but certainly sort of. I think the the human conditions in
these detention facilities getting a lot of that attention. Well, as let me said, it's a very fluid situation, and as Alejandro said, anyone who says they know where this is going is deeply untrustworthy.
So we will continue to cover this.
You know at the Texas Tribune, monitor the situation, monitoring the situation. We've got a lot of great reporters on this, obviously Low I mean Alejandro, also Colleen de Goes Mon and Bernice Garcia in the Valley and many others putting their heads on this, so stay tuned to that coverage. Are That is it for the Trip cast this week. Our producers are Rob and Chris. You can get us anywhere you get your podcasts, and we will see you next week.