January 12, 2026

Hi readers, Cameron Peters here.

It’s been a busy weekend: On Sunday night, we learned that federal prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation into Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, which Powell described as an attempt by the Trump administration to pressure him into complying with Donald Trump’s demands to lower interest rates. It’s a major escalation in Trump’s long battle against the Fed, and one that could reshape the US economy for the worse.

Also in the newsletter this morning, we're taking a step back to look at the ICE and Border Patrol presence in Minneapolis, where last week an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good at close range as she attempted to drive away. Good’s killing has added new fuel to a conversation about overreach and brutality by armed, masked immigration agents under President Donald Trump.

But while militarized immigration operations have become a regular feature in the second Trump administration, historically, it's not at all how ICE is used to operating. My colleague Christian Paz talks with David Hausman, an assistant professor at Berkeley Law School, about how that changed: 

⮕ Start here

The violent "randomness" of ICE

Christian Paz

How does domestic immigration enforcement now compare to how it used to work before Trump?

David Hausman

Before this current administration and going back to at least the first Obama administration, ICE was really an agency that didn't conduct many arrests. The vast majority of arrests that ICE used to conduct were really transfers of custody from a state or local authority to the federal government. And as a result, ICE arrests out in the community were very, very rare. I think it's fair to say that ICE didn't have that much arrest capacity, and that's part of the reason that, now that it's under so much pressure to create arrests, it's going about it so indiscriminately.

Christian Paz

How did it evolve in the Trump administration?

David Hausman

I think the difference between the first and second Trump administrations in ICE arrests is the sense that this administration is just not acting subject to constraints. An additional difference is that Congress recently allocated a huge amount of money for building additional detention centers, which gives ICE more capacity to imprison people after arrests now. And then one last difference is that arrests at the border are very low now, whereas they were relatively high, especially towards the end of the first Trump administration. And that also means there's more detention capacity for people who've been arrested inside the United States.

I think the easiest way to see the lack of constraint is the obvious one: We just see ICE and CBP randomly arresting people, often openly, or almost openly, on the basis of race. The scale of that phenomenon is new with this administration.

Christian Paz

It's to fulfill the Trump administration's mass deportation promises, right?

David Hausman

That's right. ICE is under tremendous pressure from the administration to increase arrest numbers. And there just aren't enough people who are non-citizens in jails and prisons for them to meet those numbers, which is related to the more general point that there just aren't that many non-citizens who've been convicted of crimes. And that's why, under the new administration, such a small proportion of people they're arresting have any criminal convictions.

Christian Paz

What effect does that have on neighborhoods, on people's perceptions of ICE and their communities? What is this doing to our understanding of public spaces if ICE is suddenly monitoring those spaces?

David Hausman

Anecdotally, we're hearing about people being afraid to go out, afraid to do normal things. There's research from the Obama era actually showing that the intensity of immigration enforcement back then had all sorts of bad effects in communities, including unemployment and health outcomes. So there's every reason to think that those effects would be even larger now.

It's important to recognize that a lot of what's happening is not about immigration. We can see that most directly in the many arrests of citizens or people with lawful immigration status in these raids. But having masked men roving the street, seemingly randomly arresting people, obviously has implications well beyond immigration.

Christian Paz

Some of these viral videos that we've been seeing over the last few months depict not just protesters, but bystanders or observers being treated much more harshly. In many cases, these are citizens who are being manhandled and pepper-sprayed — all of these ways that ICE agents have moved beyond immigration enforcement to use of violence against citizens.

David Hausman

What I'd say is that there's a way in which interior or domestic ICE enforcement hasn't been that much about immigration before Trump either.

And what I mean by that is that because almost all arrests were in jails or prisons, interior immigration enforcement was really much more about assigning an additional penalty for criminal convictions for non-citizens than about controlling immigration. And these new arrests in their randomness just reach much farther into communities.

I think that the decrease in enforcement at the border as a result of fewer border crossings, which is a trend that started under the previous administration, is part of what has made this domestic campaign possible.

Border arrests going down and interior arrests going up are both evidence of more enforcement because fewer border arrests are evidence of fewer border crossings, and more ICE arrests in the United States are evidence of more ICE activity.

The Vox Membership program is getting even better with access to Vox’s Patreon, where members can unlock exclusive videos, livestreams, and chats with our newsroom.

Become a Vox Member to get access to it all.

Today’s edition was produced and edited by me, staff editor Cameron Peters. Thanks for reading!