Transcript: The Problem Is Bigger Than ICE

There’s long been an issue about how ICE—like, when it comes to collateral arrest with other things—I think there’s a lot of that dance about: Is it racial profiling? Is it not racial profiling?

Because there were rules that said: Oh, you can’t just drive up to a house and arrest everyone who looks Latino or who speaks Spanish or something like that.

It seemed like there was some—because if you asked, they would say: Oh, it’s like multifactor. But the factors were language. I mean, they were always like, what language people speak, what do they like, their job … I don’t know it kind of sounds like racial profiling to me.

But nevertheless, they were not supposed to be driving around and pulling over people in their car.

Bacon: So this has changed a lot. I guess the other thing is: It appears the shooting on Saturday was done by someone in Border Patrol, technically.

That is unusual, in that I thought the idea was that ICE does immigration inside the country, and Border Patrol—Minnesota, I guess, is kind of on the border…. They were in Chicago, which is definitely not on the [border]. So is Border Patrol taking an unusual role? Is that something new as well, or is this not entirely new?

Pishko: This is totally new. Yes, that’s right. The intent was to be—ICE was policing the bad guys on the inside. And again, you could see the relationship to 9/11, because the complaint people had about 9/11 was that some of the people involved had come legally. That they were legally here.

And so ICE was formed in part because they were like: Uh-oh. We let these people come legally and now they’re in our community legally. That was always what ICE was.

Now, Border Patrol was supposed to be, as you rightly point out, at the border—both the U.S.-Mexico and U.S.-Canada border. Honestly, they’re more like a roving militia. That’s their style.

If you talk to people who have seen Border Patrol—I have not seen them on the U.S.-Canada border, but I’ve seen them on the U.S.-Mexico border, and it’s a desert. So they drive their trucks. They also crash their trucks.

They have been sued many times for aggressive policing. There was a huge lawsuit because some Border Patrol agents shot a teenager on the Mexico side through the fence, because he was throwing rocks at them. Their job is like a roving militia.

There are other people who do the paperwork. If you drive home from Mexico and you go through a little checkpoint, sometimes there’s some Border Patrol, especially if they think you’re in trouble. But most of the time the people checking your passport … sometimes they’re just private security that are hired, and sometimes they’re just administrative agents.

Border Patrol is really more the police. Now, Border Patrol is not supposed to be, as you point out, used in the interior. On the flip—it’s a little confusing, because the zone has confused people.

So the issue with the zone is that Border Patrol can do more. And everyone—citizens and not citizens—have basically fewer rights in the border zone.… That is to say, Border Patrol can pull you over if they think you are harboring someone in your car.

This has actually happened to me. I was driving and they pulled me over because they thought that I was picking up—because people will walk and then a car will come and pick them up. So they thought: Oh, you picked up migrants.

Bacon: What state were you in at the time?

Pishko: I was in Arizona.

Bacon: OK. You were in a state that was on the border.

Pishko: Yes. And I was lost and I was driving suspiciously, so they pulled me over to look to see if I had basically migrants in my car. And they can do that…. You have slightly less rights.

And if you are a noncitizen, Border Patrol could pretty much just take you into custody if they think you’re a migrant who walked across the border or whatever.

And then the second thing they do is they focus on “got-aways,” as they call them—people who run and stuff like that. So you have different rights at the border now.

Border Patrol, as a result, is not used to working in the interior, where people—citizens and noncitizens—have more rights. You can’t, in theory, stop a car just to check out who’s in the car…. You’re not supposed to racially profile drivers. You’re not supposed to stop people on the street for no reason. We know that from police. You can’t just stop anyone on the street and say: Who are you and what are you doing here?

You have to have some sort of suspicion that they’re doing something or other. If anyone remembers New York’s stop-and-frisk policies, that was the kind of stuff that’s not supposed to happen.

Bacon: Was Border Patrol in Minneapolis ostensibly because that’s close to Canada? Why are they in Minneapolis, and then why are they in Chicago?

Pishko: Honestly, it has nothing to do with the border. Basically what they seem to have done is, they made Greg Bovino … he has a new job that’s like commander of ops. What I think they did is created this—they haven’t been totally transparent, that’s why people are confused—they created basically, a roving Border Patrol unit that they are sending to different places. Some people might remember a raid in Kern County, California, before Trump took office. There was a huge raid of farm workers in Kern County at the end of 2024. They went in and arrested dozens of people, dozens of farm workers, and it was very unusual.

It was a highly unusual thing for people to do. It was in the Central Valley. There was no good reason to do it. That was Greg Bovino, and it was Greg Bovino testing out what he was going to do in Chicago and Minneapolis: driving in, arresting a bunch of people, sweeping them away, and then driving out.

And that is what his mission seems to be in Minneapolis. They drive in, they sweep up all the people, and they—the other thing about Border Patrol is they have a lot of equipment. They do. They dress military. They dress in desert fatigues. They have the helmet with the camera. They have the gear and the vest and they wear that outfit.

Bacon: So what’s happening is they are doing these sweeps, and then in Minneapolis people are protesting essentially, and that’s creating these incidents, and that creates Saturday. What we’re seeing is—they’re over-policing. There’s protests of the policing, and then these clashes. Is that what’s going on?

Pishko: Yes. And then that’s where people are pointing out things like, for example, Border Patrol should not be policing a protest. And you’ll see right now, like, I see the administration today, the noise they’re making is like: ICE is different from Border Patrol.

Someone said Border Patrol was like … a gorilla. It is true: they’re not trained to handle protests. They’re not supposed to be in a city. In theory, they don’t know all the legal rights. They’re not trained to do that kind of work.

And so that’s why the local police chief said people are really aggravated. Plus, they’re really aggressive. Their demeanor’s super aggressive. They seem to be doing—

Bacon: The distinction I’m drawing between the Border Patrol and ICE is something the Trump administration is drawing too. I’m not thrilled to hear that, but that it does feel like the Border Patrol person killing someone does seem slightly legally distinct. Or operationally distinct.

Pishko: That’s what I think they’re trying [to argue]. That it’s operationally distinct: That was Border Patrol, because Border Patrol does bad policing.

It’s true. They’re rough. They’re not used to this kind of stuff. And everyone knows if you’ve been in protests, police don’t like protests. Policing a protest … can be very overly aggressive. This is a known issue.

After 2020, a lot of agencies tried to train on how to police protests. Again, I’ll add, not necessarily that I agree with how they trained to do it, but they did train people to do it. CBP is not trained to do that stuff. That’s just not what they do.

Bacon: I didn’t read all your writings about local police, but let’s assume what they say based off of—you and I are skeptical of local police, skeptical of sheriff’s departments—but I think it’s worth putting that aside for a second and talking about ICE specifically as an agency and what it does.

When we talk about abolishing ICE, what does that entail, in theory?

Pishko: One of the things I do think people are doing—and I don’t really think it’s bad—is they’re putting all immigration police under ICE. So they’re [including] ICE, and any federal agents doing immigration policing, and Border Patrol.

I think when people say “get ICE out,” they mean all the immigration police. “Abolish ICE,” lots of people have pointed out, would, in theory, not be that difficult. They made it, and so they can unmake it. And I’ve heard some people talk about going back to the INS system.

Now, I want to say … it’s the same people. It’s not as if they didn’t do basically the same thing. It’s the same people doing the same thing…. I can’t speak to what people mean.

I think the hazard of “abolish ICE,” the thing people should think about, is if it’s dissolved and reformed, like we did with DHS. DHS was … they dissolved INS and they reformed it. Now, even when they reform it, the truth of the matter is most of those same people are going to work there. It is just a fact. A lot of the people are still going to work there.

They’re going to have the same manual. They might edit the pay … they’ll edit the heading to say something else. Maybe they’ll do some change-up in hierarchy or whatever, but it’s going to be the same people doing pretty much the same stuff. I would say the bigger problem is the way that this country has brought together policing. So the criminal system and the immigration system.

And that started happening in the ’90s. This is like a drug war thing. The way this country decides who ought to be deported, as I said, is your conduct upon arrival in the U.S.

You could see a world where you look at an individual before and you say: OK, what were you doing before? And et cetera. We do that [with] asylum seekers and such, especially from overseas, they sort of vet that.

But when people come and are rendered deportable because they maybe committed a crime in the U.S., that becomes where we see this union—and this is where the racial profiling is hard to root out. You’re more likely to be profiled and arrested for crimes, then you’re more likely to be charged with crimes and then deported. It is like this system all the way down, where the country decided to put those two things together.

Bacon: So you’re saying that getting rid of one agency called ICE and putting those people in different agencies, without a thing they go to work at called ICE, is not a solution, because they’re going to be doing the same things under a different name.

So is there a legal change?… If we want to see fewer immigrants grabbed in ways we don’t enjoy, and fewer people killed for protesting, what would that sort of change look like?

Pishko: It’s difficult for me to answer because my overall answer is going to be a lot more systemic.

Bacon: So give the systemic answer. That’s what I’m asking for.

Pishko: So my genuine answer is: We need to move away from looking at policing as a solution to solve problems. So the first thing, right away, is—quite frankly—it’s a defund strategy…. Immigration detention, quite frankly, just shouldn’t be a thing. We don’t need to detain people because we think they may be deportable. That’s perfectly ridiculous.

They shouldn’t be allowed to buy these GEO Group facilities and house—and they’re terrible. They’re terrible facilities, and that’s how people give up and just end up going back. They’ll go to another country because they don’t like being in jail, for obvious reasons.

So we need to de-police—but, in particular, for immigration’s sake—to detach this … idea that people who are immigrants are basically—it’s like you’re a criminal until proven otherwise.

Border Patrol—I see some politicians saying, Oh, put Border Patrol back on the border. But what we see is what they do on the border. The way they act is like every single person walking across the border is a bad guy—an enemy—whether they’re a woman, a kid, or a family. They’re bad guys.

We act like every single person who is here is coming here are these bad people, and we don’t want them here. I do think it [raises] the question: What are we policing the border from? If we’re so aggressively policing the U.S.–Mexico border, what is the thing that we think we’re preventing?

Bacon: I might agree with open borders. Let’s come back a little bit—that’s where we’re going here—but can we have a policy that says we want to restrict people at the border, but once people are already in the country, we’re not trying to punish them with this special agency?

Is it logically coherent to have border control, a Border Patrol … that keeps people from coming in, but doesn’t really focus on people already in the country, which is what ICE does? Is it logical to have Border Patrol but not ICE, in a certain sense, or not? Or you wouldn’t necessarily want to condone that?

Pishko: I feel like people have different opinions on this…. In my opinion, no. Because all we’re doing is criminalizing immigrants either way, and so we’re not—the system just serves to make people’s lives miserable enough that they decide not to come, or they go away, or they go into hiding, or they’re deported.

The other way the system works, quite frankly, is just—it’s really brutal [for] people who have experienced the immigration system. The other thing is the immigration system is: it’s wildly … unorganized and really hard to understand.

If you have worked with people—I used to do work helping—I don’t know what they’re doing with that now, but it used to be, if you were an abused spouse, you could apply for a special kind of asylum. You could prove that you were being abused and that you needed legal residency. This is if you’re a victim of a crime—you could apply for legal residency. It’s really, really hard to do that. It is not easy.

One of the things they could do is, honestly, have more judges, because the timeline to wait for people to go before a judge and argue their case is so long—like, ten years. It’s crazy … you have people waiting in limbo for a decade.

But what are they supposed to do? They go to work. They raise kids. You’re going to live your life. You have lots of people who live their lives in limbo because it takes so long, and because we don’t have enough judges to process things and move them along.

Bacon: So let me ask the question—I guess I’ve been building to it for half an hour, but I’ll ask it now. So you’re not a politician, you’re not a pollster, you’re not a strategist. I get all that…. So Congressman X, probably a Democrat, comes up to you and says: If I say “abolish,” that sounds radical. I can’t say that. But I don’t like what I’m seeing in Minneapolis, or what I saw in Chicago.

And this person says: I’ve done the reading, I’ve watched more training and body cameras … and I’ve done enough reading to say that the reforms on policing we’ve called for were pointless and stupid and haven’t really done anything.

Is there an agenda of ICE reforms, or changes to ICE, that actually would reduce the amount of incidents like what’s happened in Minneapolis and Chicago—something we can do that is short of “abolish” but is actually not counterproductive and/or totally useless?

Pishko: The thing that I think wouldn’t be obvious to people, honestly, is to get rid of detention—to get rid of immigration detention. A lot of the reason why ICE and CBP feel motivated to go and arrest all these people is partially—one, I would say roll back the Laken Riley Act.

Congress earlier this year passed the Laken Riley Act, which expands the number of people subject to mandatory detention. So one of the reasons why they feel like they could just arrest all these people is because a lot of these people are now subject to mandatory detention.

Bacon: Yes.

Pishko: We should not have mandatory detention. I don’t think we should be detaining any of these people at all.

One of the things that is happening is that when these people are seeing a judge, a lot of judges are granting them bond. They’re telling them: OK, go home and come back. They’re just like: You don’t need to be in jail.

And then people are in jail. Like, it’s some jail in Texas. You don’t have your stuff, you don’t have your phone, you don’t have a ride to the airport—all these nonprofits are helping people get plane tickets and whatnot. I just think if you got rid of detention, that would get rid of the incentives. And then honestly, the other thing is—

Bacon: But if you’re not detaining them, you’re not—OK. You’re not detained. You can still have the rest of the policy that is not the detained part. Because the detained part creates all the violence. Is that what you’re getting at?

Pishko: It would immediately disincentivize so many arrests.

Bacon: Oh, I see. Right.

Pishko: You can’t detain them. So they would be like: Why… what’s the point of arresting those people? The other thing, quite frankly, is you just have to cut back staff. The thing that no one ever wants to hear is the real way to reduce presence is you just have to have fewer people.

Bacon: This is the whole thing we’ve been talking about. In some ways, the policing conversation and the immigration conversation are related in your mind. The same conversation, probably.

Pishko: I would say they’re very much the same conversation. Honestly, you just have to fire people. We didn’t get into it, but we could talk about local collaboration, which is its own problem.

But I would say also because what we see in Florida, which is a lot of local collaboration…. Between mandatory detention, local collaboration, and basically being as harsh as possible, we see lots and lots of people getting detained. We don’t even know where they are. We don’t even know who’s in these places. We don’t know where people are going. That to me is … ridiculous. Someone ends up on a plane to CECOT because, why?

Bacon: There’s a lot of stuff out there: training and body cameras. Are those actively bad or just not helpful?

Pishko: I don’t think they’re helpful…. The real practical point about training is everybody has training. You probably had training when you started at The New Republic. You have sexual harassment training, you have DEI … everyone has training.

But when you do the training and then go work, does anybody follow that training they got? No. So when people are trained—one, there’s a question about the quality of the training—but two, when those guys go out in the field—let’s say I’m Border Patrol. I’m going to do what gets me advanced. I’m going to do what’s gonna make me a better Patrol [agent] and I want to rise in my career. I want to go up and be a lieutenant.

So I’m going to do what my boss says to do, and I’m going to act like my boss acts because that’s how I’m going to get promoted. This is true with all police. You could tell them, like: No, you’re not supposed to do this. But if your boss is like: This is what we do…. You see in the TV show where they’re like: This isn’t like what they tell you in training. This is the real world.…

So I’m like: training, it’s fine, but that doesn’t change how they act. I do think one thing you could just do is … just fire people who are either committing crimes or who shoot people or who are—if you have someone that you knew committed a crime, they should just get fired. I don’t know why—

Bacon: So you should definitely make sure … the shootings we’ve seen are investigated and most people … are out of ICE. The people who’ve done the shooting should certainly be not walking around every day without any kind of prosecution. Obviously, that would be—

Pishko: You should fire them. If you know someone—some of these people with known—we know, for example, that they’re harassing women detained. Just fire them. If you were at your job and you were known for doing bad stuff, they would fire you. If they were like: Oh man, told him not to do it, but he’s doing it again—you wouldn’t have your job. That’s how normal people’s jobs work. You can’t mess up and keep your job.

Bacon: All right, so let’s stop there. Any closing thoughts about—because I know you’ve written about sheriffs and I didn’t get into that as much, but we were in a sort of a law enforcement crisis and I feel … that’s why I wanted to talk to you about this. Any final thoughts?

Pishko: I do think … that the goal here seems to be to create a national police, which is not really something like we have had in this country. We don’t have a national police, but … one of the goals appears to be to ensure that every state and local agency complies with federal rules. They want everyone to do what the federal agencies are doing.

Bacon: They have a national police, and then the local police act as agents of the national police.

Pishko: That’s what I think Stephen Miller envisions in his head.

Bacon: Yes.

Pishko: A giant police for everyone. And for a long time we’ve let police— honestly, we’ve let police do whatever they want. They get to do what they want, they get the money they want. And—we don’t want to be ruled by police.

People should not be afraid to go outside. They shouldn’t be afraid to participate in a protest. People shouldn’t be beaten up. We all agree we shouldn’t have that, and we shouldn’t have a policing system where they think that’s OK. It’s not OK.

Law enforcement—they’re not better than other people…. They should be obliged to have similar rules and consequences as everybody else and every other job.

Bacon: So in some ways, that’s interesting you said it that way. Because … people can oppose a national police force. Although the trick is, the things that they’re doing, a lot of times their local police does.

Pishko: Yes.

Bacon: I guess it is bad that—we don’t want to have a national police. Ideologically, people [oppose] this version of it. But it does get this contradiction about it. The national police is just doing an extreme version of what the local police does.… I saw a senator say something like: We want to divert funds from ICE to local police. And I have trouble getting on board with that.

Pishko: I don’t think people should. Again, we don’t want police to be a super class. They’re not the boss of everybody. Police aren’t supposed to rule us all. And that is the world that … I mean, it’s mostly Stephen Miller, but that’s the world that some of these people are envisioning.

But also a lot of the Fraternal Order of Police and these groups that have supported Trump—that is what he promised them. That is a thing that I don’t think people want. I don’t think people want a police state. People don’t want that. They want to be safe. They want to feel like they can go outside and their kids can play outside and their kids can walk to school and you can drive to work. People want to feel safe in their neighborhood. They don’t want a police state. That’s not a thing that people like.

They don’t want … you can’t get pulled out of your car and then your kid is left in the car, waiting for you to come back. I don’t think that’s what people want. So I think it’s a good opportunity for everybody to rethink the community’s relationship to police, and that that’s not what we want. We don’t want to be ruled by fear of the police.

Bacon: It’s a great place to end on, Jessica. Thanks for your time. I appreciate it.

Pishko: Yeah, thank you.