- As a candidate in 2016 and 2024, Donald Trump promised to crack down on undocumented immigrants.

And after the first year of his second term in office, the President has moved fast.

Today's guest says that the policies and their implementation come with a very high price, for the immigrants and even for US officials.

She's Caitlin Dickerson, this week, on "Story in the Public Square."

(bright music) (bright music continues) (music fading) Hello and welcome to "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University, and my guest this week is Caitlin Dickerson, an award-winning investigative reporter and feature writer for "the Atlantic" magazine.

She won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting among several awards of recognition for her remarkable reporting career.

Caitlin, thank you so much for being with us today.

- Thanks for having me.

It's a pleasure.

- You know, you have been on the biggest story of both Trump administrations, one of the biggest stories of both Trump administrations, the President's focus on immigration and efforts to deport Americans that he says are here, or deport individuals who he says are here illegally.

Let's just start, you know, has immigration always been as contentious an issue as it seems like it's been for the last decade?

- So it ebbs and flows throughout American history.

Certainly the intense backlash that we're experiencing against immigrants right now is nothing new.

Now, I can point to episodes going back to the 19th century, but, I think, in the last decade, we have seen a really significant increase in tension and politicization of this issue, probably the most that we've seen since the 1960s, I'll say.

And, you know, that's for a few different reasons.

Obviously, we have had lots of immigration to the United States since 2014 or so.

That's really when the tide began to turn, when we saw more people crossing the Southwest Border, due to kind of a bad mixture of conditions in Central America, initially, you know, related to the economy there, related to public safety, you know, the government's willingness to, and ability to keep people safe.

And then of course, the numbers have expanded as we've seen other countries experience significant chaos, from Afghanistan to Ukraine based on Russia's war there.

And then of course, Venezuela.

But I think the other reason why we're experiencing so much political consternation now over this issue is because Donald Trump has really taken it up and has seen a lot of support, has gained a lot of traction by focusing his campaigns on immigration.

And so there's kind of a feedback loop where he feels it's a successful issue for him and then he sticks with it.

- Well, and so in his first administration, this was, again, an issue that he campaigned on in 2016.

In that first administration, you've taken a deep, deep look.

You won a Pulitzer Prize in 2023 for your look at essentially what became a family separation policy in that first Trump administration.

Do you wanna walk us through a little bit about what they did in that first term, sort of as a precursor to what's we've seen happen in the last 12 months?

- Absolutely, so when Trump was running for president the first time, he had Stephen Miller, who's now Deputy White House Chief of Staff, writing his speeches, and Stephen Miller was passionate about his anti-immigrant stance going all the way back to the time when he was a high schooler.

Then when he went on to work for Senator Jeff Sessions in Congress, and then he'd taken this job for Donald Trump.

And basically what the Trump campaign noticed is that when he talked about immigration on the campaign trail, he got a really strong response.

People cheered, they were angry, but they agreed with his position and they determined that, you know, if Trump could talk about immigration and kind of put people's frustrations, whether they were about the economy, educational opportunities, just the general conditions in the United States, if they could focus that anger toward immigrants and sort of blame immigrants for those issues, it turned out to be really popular.

And so Trump ended up winning the presidency.

And as a result of that, what I found in my reporting was that Miller's status within his first administration was really elevated because they didn't expect him to win the presidency.

And when he did, people really gave Miller the credit and thought that it was his focus on immigration that had gotten Trump into the White House the first time.

And so it became an obsession.

And, you know, I went back to discover where this family separation policy came from.

One in which thousands of between 4,000 and 5,000 children were taken from their parents at the Southwest Border.

They were shipped to detention facilities across the country with one not knowing where the other was.

Hundreds of parents were deported without their children under this policy because it was so chaotic.

And in trying to figure out how it was that the government came to put this policy into place, I learned just how much the White House and the cabinet agencies were consumed with this issue of immigration because Trump and the people closest to him felt that it was so vital to his maintaining support and maintaining power.

And so the family separation was the pinnacle of his crackdown policies against immigrants.

But of course, there were many others, you know, attempts to seal asylum and prevent people from applying for asylum through a variety of measures: ones that required them to wait in Mexico, where their applications were being processed, or apply in a third country before they reached the United States.

It was really this effort, again, led by Miller, to restrict immigration to the United States as much as possible.

And, you know, it was a campaign that was sort of put on pause during the Biden administration, and that has very much been taken up again since Trump took office for the second time.

- You know, one of the things that I did not know until I went back and reread your piece from 2022, was that the idea of family separation as a policy had been floated, even pitched in the Obama administration to then Secretary of Homeland Security, Jay Johnson.

Why was it rejected under the Obama administration, even if it was gonna later be adopted in some form by the Trump administration?

- So I interviewed Jay Johnson and others from the Obama administration, including Tom Holman, Tom Holman, who's now serving as Trump's border czar, but has been in immigration enforcement for many decades, and told me he came up, with his staff, with this idea to separate families and first pitched it to the Obama administration, and the Obama administration declined to move forward because they felt it was too harsh.

They felt it was inhumane, and that even if it was going to discourage illegal border crossing, it was not something that they were willing to subject children and families to, anticipating that those separations would cause long-term damage to the families, but also that they would be incredibly chaotic.

I mean, when they did come to be, they created massive chaos in federal courts, federal prosecutors who were used to spending their time on drug smuggling and human trafficking cases had to dedicate all of their energy toward prosecuting these low-level misdemeanor crimes that were being pursued simply for the purpose of justifying a separation of the child from the parent who was being prosecuted.

So for all those reasons, the Obama administration declined to move forward, but Holman held onto the idea and then pitched it again when Trump was president.

- And all of those practical things that the Obama administration was worried were not in place if you're gonna have that kind of policy prove to bear out when the policy actually was implemented in the Trump administration.

Was it a case of overreaching?

I mean, it's almost a case study in how not to govern, but was it a case of overreaching by the Trump administration to go that far, that fast when there are even voices in that first administration that thought, "We can't pull this off"?

- I think that the very strong public reaction against family separations across the political spectrum suggests that the public did view it as a case of overreaching.

I mean, I think what I found is that it was a reflection of just this sheer desperation to minimize immigration to the United States through any means necessary.

And that intensity, that fierceness of the degree to which Miller and others in the White House, the first Trump White House were holding onto that goal, it led them to ignore long time border enforcement experts, people who are restrictionists, you know, including people who really want to minimize illegal border crossings, but who were raising red flags.

And I even uncovered in my reporting reports that showed in advance of this policy being implemented nationwide, that the administration was warned in very specific terms of things like permanent populations of new orphans, of parents being deported without children, and of the federal courts being overrun and becoming very chaotic, all of which, of course happened, but they were just, they were so desperate and kind of willing to stop at nothing to prevent people from crossing the border.

- You know, I don't wanna get stuck in that first administration, but I do wanna ask you 4,000 to 5,000 students that were separated, children who were separated from their parents, are families made whole now?

Is there anybody still separated from their children?

- There are still families that have not been brought back together, because, you know, the effort to reunify families didn't begin until more than a year after those first separations took place.

And some had been deported already.

Some parents had already been deported to their home countries.

You know, we're talking about people who were sent to rural communities in Central America who are very hard to find, and some people who came to the United States because they were fleeing dangerous situations.

And so had, kind of, by necessity, had to make themselves difficult to find.

So part of the court ordered effort to reunify families involved sending an NGO with volunteers literally on motorcycles through the highlands of Guatemala, for example, to try to track these parents down.

Some were found, but there are families that were never reunified.

And then of course, also some of those families were still in the process of trying to obtain legal status when Trump took office for the second time.

And as a result of that, some are facing deportation now after everything that they've been through.

- Does the, you know, the military, they talk about something called moral injury where the folks who are asked to do grievous things suffer social emotional consequences of it years later.

The folks who are on the front lines of that family separation policy, did you get a sense that they had any long-term consequences, emotional, psychological, or otherwise, from being involved in that policy?

- I did, yeah.

The few that were willing to speak to me on the record in the enforcement side, you know, they cried through their interviews in some cases and really struggled with what happened.

There's also a public defender in my story who I interview and, you know, I interviewed her in a dark home and, you know, just this really heavy, heavy air was kind of hanging around us.

She was so intensely impacted, was quite depressed, had to leave her job and really is permanently impacted by what she went through.

I mean, that's true of people kind of on all sides of the issue.

The social workers who took care of children, people who worked in immigration enforcement, the lawyers who were involved in these cases.

There were a lot of really intense emotions in those interviews.

Some people really kind of struggling to understand how they came to be a part of this, because it was a policy that was often described in kind of intentionally misleading and confusing ways.

You know, the administration said, "No, we're just prosecuting people for breaking the law.

That's totally reasonable and normal."

And kind of leaving out a lot of information about what the ultimate consequences of those prosecutions would be.

And so the policy, in a way, crept up on people.

And I think that's part of why so many struggle with the role they played still today.

- It's remarkable reporting.

What compels somebody to become a migrant in the first place?

- So I've spent a lot of time looking at this issue, and it's important to remember that immigration is as old as, you know, humanity itself, right?

It's a very unfortunate circumstance that, you know, we're lucky if it doesn't befall us in our lifetimes.

But all kinds of things.

I mean, I mentioned Venezuela and migration that we've experienced from that country in the last couple of years.

You know, Venezuela is a mess.

You know, the Maduro administration is corrupt.

They've mismanaged the country's economy.

The minimum wage, I believe, fell to something like less than two or three US dollars per month in Venezuela in the last few years.

So people have really been struggling to feed their families and that the administration there is also very aggressive and harsh with any kind of political opponents.

And so, you know, human rights experts have documented killings, disappearances, torture.

So it's a country that is not free, and where it's very difficult to, if not impossible, to, you know, feed oneself and one's family and live safely.

And so that's exactly the type of circumstance that leads someone to flee from their home and migrate.

And one of the things that strikes me most when I'm talking to people who've left circumstances like that, is how much they prefer to stay in their home country, right?

Lots of people would rather live near their family, be able to speak their language, be able to benefit from the work they put into building a career or getting an education.

Because a lot of times, that counts for nothing when you move to a new country.

You know, there's, of course, war, which is why we've seen so many Ukrainians move to the United States; climate change, there are lots of factors that force migration.

And there is, of course, the economic opportunity side of things too, right?

The fact that in the United States, we tend to employ people within days of their arrival in this country, you know?

So while our laws may tell one story that we wanna mitigate migration, our behaviors as consumers really tell another, because there is opportunity to be had here.

And it's that mix of two things that I think is the main driver for the migration we've seen in recent decades.

- You know, one of the things that I so admire about your reporting, Caitlin, is that you literally have walked a mile in these shoes.

In 2024, you had some tremendous reporting in "the Atlantic" about the journey that individuals make from South America into Panama and up into the United States.

Can you give us just a taste of what that trek actually is for those who are taking it?

It's not without substantial risk.

- So in 2023 and 2024, I walked this 70 mile or so stretch of land that goes from Columbia into Panama.

And it's a jungle called the Darien Gap, the only way to get toward the United States, if you're in South America and you're trying to move on foot.

So it's incredibly treacherous.

In the Darien Gap, you've got threats that include snakes that can kill you with one bite, you know, deadly spiders, and other insects, jungle cats, hills that are incredibly steep, grueling to climb and that have even caused people to have heart attacks and die just because of the strenuousness that they involve.

This region rains almost every day there.

And so you've got rivers that crisscross the route that you take on foot and you're crossing water, you know, more than a dozen times a day.

And those rivers are prone to flash floods.

So even people who are healthy, young, strong swimmers have been known to be swept away and die.

There's so many, and there are also bandits who live in the Darien Gap, because prior to it becoming a migration route, really the only people crossing it were doing so to move drugs and weapons, you know, illicitly.

And so it's not a place that was a popular migration route for obvious reasons.

But what I found in my reporting was that as the United States was sort of struggling to figure out how to address the large numbers of people crossing the Southwest Border, we have pressured governments in Mexico and in Central America to restrict access to visas for people who might like to get on a plane, go to those countries, and then take an easier trek on foot, up north to the United States.

The thinking was that restricting those visas would discourage people from making this trip at all.

But what it actually did was it just shifted the route that people were taking, such that hundreds of thousands of people were crossing this stretch of land by the time that I started to report on it in 2023.

And I just really felt I needed to see it for myself to understand what people were risking to get to the United States and how it was affecting them, how it was affecting all the countries along the way, along that journey, and of course, us, when they ultimately reached us here.

- And these are not just all individuals from the western hemisphere, they were literally from all over the globe.

- It's true, there are people in my story from Africa, people from China, people from all over the, really all over the Caribbean and Asia and Africa, as well as Central and South America.

I mean, just about everywhere.

And it speaks to the way that migration policies have evolved.

Again, you know, through diplomatic efforts, the United States has tried to block people from getting to the United States, but what happens then is that cartels, you know, organizations that are professionals at moving illicit drugs and weapons across the globe, they see an opportunity and say, "Why don't we just start moving people too?"

Really kind of seizing on the desperation that people have and their willingness to resort to just about anything to get their families to safety.

- So, as a candidate again in 2024, former President Trump said he was gonna make the security at the Southern Border and removing undocumented immigrants from the United States, a top priority of his next administration.

He's been in office now for about a year.

What has he done?

- So whereas the first Trump administration focused more intently on blocking people from trying to enter the United States through the Southwest Border, this Trump administration has really been focused on deporting people within the interior of the country, really, really aggressively going after that goal.

And, you know, I think some of the things that I've observed, one is that the administration had promised initially to go after who they called "the worst of the worst."

You know, people with very serious criminal records who represented a public safety threat.

Really, you know, the Biden administration was going after and deporting people who fell into that category, as had Trump during his first presidency.

And the Obama administration, they've always been a priority of immigration and customs enforcement officials.

So what really has changed under the current Trump administration is that they're arresting far more people who don't fall into that category.

People who've lived in the United States for very long periods of time, who have no criminal record, even arresting and deporting people who came into the United States legally.

So when I crossed the Darien Gap, for example, the Biden administration had in place a parole program that allowed people to apply and come in for an official interview with border enforcement officials.

If they passed that interview, they would be provisionally allowed into the United States as their immigration case proceeded.

Trump got rid of that program and canceled those provisional statuses.

Hundreds of thousands of people lost status overnight.

And so even those folks who came into the United States legally are being pursued for deportation.

The other thing that's happening is that these removals and the administration is touting more than 600,000.

It includes a mix of people they've turned away from the border, as well as people they've deported from within the interior of the country.

They're moving incredibly quickly.

And what I think a lot of people don't realize is that the immigration justice system is different from the criminal justice system.

So what we might expect to have in terms of due process, like the right to a lawyer, if you can't afford one or the right to a jury of your peers or rules about what evidence a prosecutor can bring against you, none of those things exist in immigration court, which is part of why the administration has been able to carry these deportations out in such high numbers, so quickly.

- Is there, I mean, some of the cases that we've heard about in the news in the last year have been sort of eye-catching.

The graduate student up in Boston who was, you know, basically abducted on the streets and when the whole thing was filmed.

But you've challenged folks to look beyond sort of those high profile cases and to look at what's happening in those courtrooms and hear the stories of people who are separated from family, separated from contact.

What are you seeing when you actually look at those stories?

- I became interested in the way that we're absorbing this mass deportation campaign because it's largely happening through viral videos because of the nature of our relationship to technology and how it's evolved, right?

So as you pointed out, there are a handful of cases that have really become household names: high school students, you know, mothers, daycare teachers, servers, beloved servers at local restaurants.

These cases have gone viral after a community uproar because of someone who was beloved, was arrested and was deported.

And I think one of the reasons why they're going viral is because they seem like they're uniquely harsh.

You know, they often deal with people who don't have a criminal record at all, or who've been in the United States for a very long time, who have a sympathetic story and a loving community around them.

But what struck me about that is that I often notice in the comments and the way that these stories are shared, people think that these are extreme cases, that they're exceptionally harsh, and the data just does not bear that out.

As I said, majority of people, more than 70% that have been arrested under this administration have no prior interaction with law enforcement at all, whatsoever.

So not even a very minor charge or conviction.

Not to mention folks who are being arrested, like one in my story, a man who'd been in the United States for more than 50 years on a green card had one conviction for marijuana possession that was 30 years old.

And, you know, he had a US citizen child who was an adult.

He was married to a US citizen his entire adult life, she's now deceased, and he was still being pursued for deportation.

That's kind of how desperate this administration is to get to the high numbers.

And so I also spent a day observing immigration court, a Virginia immigration court, just to watch what it was like.

And I saw just again and again, the types of stories that we've been seeing go viral.

And what I wanted to do there was write about how, though we're focusing on a handful of cases, we're missing really hundreds of thousands of others.

- You know, Caitlin, we've got about 90 seconds left here, and I feel like we've just scratched the surface, but we are taping this a day after the President of the United States described Somali immigrants as "garbage," and his Secretary of Homeland Security referred to immigrants, quote as "killers, leeches and entitlement junkies," end of quote.

What happens when senior government officials, including the President of the United States, characterize any community in such a way?

- I think what happens is that politicization gets worse.

You know, they're fanning the flames of xenophobia and anger, really capitalizing on a couple of legitimate, terrible things that have happened.

You know, the shooting of two National Guard troops in Washington DC, one of whom has died, and also scandal in Minnesota involving, you know, really important taxpayer dollars that were meant for needy families and that were being exploited by people who, you know, some of whom weren't born in the United States.

But when you describe any group like that in broad strokes, you know, sweeping millions of people into a story they're not associated with, you really just divide the country even more.

And I think, you know, we're gonna see the consequences of that in immigration policy and how it's carried out, but it's also felt in American communities, you know, the tensions rising, sort of fights breaking out, alienating people from one another.

So it really seems like the administration is taking this opportunity to exploit something bad that happened and to make it much bigger and much worse, frankly.

- Caitlin Dickerson, your reporting is important.

Folks can find it in "the Atlantic."

Thank you for spending some time with us today.

That is all the time we have this week.

But if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on social media or visit us at salve.edu/pellcenter where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join me again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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