This past weekend marked a major escalation in the Trump administration's mass deportation efforts, with the dramatic detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist who played a prominent role in the protests against Israel on Columbia University’s campus last year. Khalil, a Columbia graduate student, is a permanent legal resident in the US. The Trump administration says it detained Khalil for what it described, without evidence, as his support for Hamas, and President Donald Trump promised “this is the first arrest of many to come” in a Truth Social post. In the meantime, a federal court in New York prevented the federal government from deporting Khalil while it hears his case. He’s currently being held at an immigration detention facility in Louisiana.

Khalil’s arrest—and the Trump administration’s reimagining of immigration writ large—are in many ways a product of decades of dysfunction within the US immigration system itself. On this week’s episode of More To The Story, Reveal’s new weekly interview show, host Al Letson talks with The New Yorker staff writer Jonathan Blitzer about the 50-year history of the country’s inability to deal with migrants at the southern border and why the Trump administration’s approach to immigration is much more targeted—and extreme—than it was eight years ago.

Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Digital producer: Nikki Frick | Interim executive producers: Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis | Host: Al Letson

Dig Deeper/Related Stories:

Did the US Cause Its Own Border Crisis? (Reveal)

https://revealnews.org/podcast/did-the-us-cause-its-own-border-crisis/

Immigrants on the Line (Reveal)

https://revealnews.org/podcast/immigrants-on-the-line/

The Forgotten Origins of a Migration Crisis (Mother Jones)

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/02/jonathan-blitzer-migration-crisis-everyone-who-is-gone-is-here-interview/