Welcome back to This Week on ICE.

First, the biggest news of the week: On Wednesday, President Trump signed a new bill that gave ICE a $70 billion windfall that will fund the next three years of immigration enforcement activity, putting an end to a months-long stalemate in Congress.

It was this stalemate that led to a partial government shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security earlier this year, ICE agents in airports across the country, and 90 percent of Homeland Security’s 260,000 employees working for over a month without pay. The funding from this new bill is in addition to a $75 billion windfall the agency received last year from The One Big Beautiful Bill.

“Because [the bill] was passed during a reconciliation process, Democrats will have a really hard time taking any of that money away, even if they win elections in November. It also includes about $23 billion for Customs and Border Protection.” — Matt

Plus: This week marks the one-year anniversary of ICE raids conducted across Los Angeles resulting in the arrests of dozens of immigrants and massive, city-wide protests that shook the nation and resulted in the Trump administration deploying thousands of National Guard officers. The event marked a new phase of the Trump administration’s nationwide crackdown on immigrants that would spread across the country - in cities like Chicago, Minneapolis, Charlotte, and beyond.

“LA was the beginning of everything. It became a real testing ground for mass demonstrations against ICE. It became a testing ground for volunteer community patrols, for mutual aid centers, for organizing in the name of immigrant defense.” — Kelly

We have so much to talk about this week. Let’s get into it.

The top line: Trump has called detainees at Delaney Hall “the worst of the worst.” This professor says the data tells a different story.

Matt sat down with Austin Kocher of Syracuse University, whose work on the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has become invaluable to journalists, academics, and advocates tracking ICE activities. He revealed key data he managed to dig up on Delaney Hall, where detainees have been holding a hunger strike for two weeks amid appalling conditions. (You can brush up on Delaney Hall in Episode 15 and Episode 16.)

 “Not only are most of the people in ICE’s national detention network people who don’t have criminal histories, Delaney Hall is actually unique in [that] a vast majority of people in the system have no criminal conviction whatsoever… Very few people have anything close to a serious criminal conviction of any kind, and this is ICE’s own data.” —Austin Kocher

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Austin said as much as 80 percent of detainees in Delaney are categorized within the lowest possible security classification, meaning they do not pose a risk to others. But as the ongoing hunger strike approaches its third week, his concern is that immigration authorities will begin reclassifying strike participants in retaliation, placing them in a “higher-threat” security category that allows for placement in solitary confinement.

“That’s something we’ve seen in the past. Certainly, I worry that it might happen here,” said Austin. He writes his own newsletter decoding the U.S. immigration system, which you can subscribe to here.

Also on our radar: The investigative team carefully uncovering the full story of ICE-linked deaths.

Kelly sat down with Aisha Wallace-Palomares, Memo Torres, and Izzy Ramirez, who work for the LA-based news source LA Taco to learn more about their ongoing investigation that they’ve called “the death tracker.” It documents every single death linked to immigration enforcement across the country since the start of the immigration raids last year.

But what began as a means to track the hard numbers became a greater need to get to the bottom of a much larger story: They noticed major differences between what the families of the deceased knew versus what DHS would report.

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“So we started noticing… there's more to the story on each person [and] we should probably try to get the information and the real stories for everybody to humanize them and honor them,” said Memo.

“The level of tracking went in deep. We went as far as going through Facebook posts and Instagram posts, finding cousins or family members in Mexico or any other country. … A lot of these cases [the families] didn't even have information; we had more information than they did,” he said.

Their tracker comes at a critical time, as earlier this week, ICE announced it has rescinded a Biden-era policy that required the agency to report the deaths of detainees that occur within 30 days of their release. To the team at LA Taco, this doesn’t change anything, as they suspect ICE has hardly honored the policy to begin with, or have found accountability loopholes: “We've seen instances where they try to release people … by sending them to the hospital to try to not get the credit on them that they died in ICE detention,” said Memo. “We suspect they are going to try to do a lot more of that.”

As of this recording, LA Taco has tracked 66 total deaths of immigrants under ICE custody, including 6 deaths that occurred shortly after release.

That’s it for us this week. Keep sending us your questions, comments, or tips to [email protected]. Thanks for listening, stay safe, look out for your neighbors, and we’ll see you next time.

— Kelly and Matt

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