Halfway through President Trump’s first term, as construction crews were busy installing hundreds of miles of barriers along the southern border, a puzzling edict came down from America’s aesthete in chief. Trump wanted the border wall painted black.
The president had already lost an argument about what his “big, beautiful wall” should look like. Trump envisioned a solid-concrete structure, like the one Israel has built through the West Bank. But U.S.
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In mid-January, while Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and agents were battling protesters on the icy streets of Minneapolis, ICE Deputy Director Madison Sheahan abruptly quit. This was a week after an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good; another protester, Alex Pretti, was slain nine days later. Sheahan, then 28, had been on the job for less than a year, but she did not resign in protest. She left to run for Congress in Ohio.
During the 14 months of Kristi Noem’s tenure at the Department of Homeland Security, I regularly heard from staffers—career law-enforcement officers and political appointees alike—who were desperate for a return to institutional normalcy. Their concerns weren’t ideological. They felt, instead, that Noem was running the department and its law-enforcement agencies as an attention-grabbing spectacle, undermining their mission.
Consider Noem’s appearance at a Salvadoran megaprison.
Kristi Noem played “Hot Mama” as the walk-up song for her formal introduction at the Department of Homeland Security headquarters in January 2025. President Trump had put her in charge of his signature campaign promise—the largest mass-deportation campaign in U.S. history—and Noem took a fast, flashy approach to the job. She dressed as a Border Patrol agent and an ICE officer, and rode horseback at Mount Rushmore in ads.
Since Alex Pretti’s killing three weeks ago, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has been trying to distance herself from Minneapolis—politically and geographically. Last week, Noem went to southern Arizona to give a speech about border-wall construction. Yesterday, she was at a warehouse along the border in California, straining to tout the Trump administration’s drug-seizure data above the clamor of protesters outside.
Gregory Bovino has been removed from his role as Border Patrol “commander at large” and will return to his former job in El Centro, California, where he is expected to retire soon, according to a DHS official and two people with knowledge of the change.
Bovino’s sudden demotion is the clearest sign yet that the Trump administration is reconsidering its most aggressive tactics after the killing Saturday of 37-year-old Alex Pretti by Border Patrol agents under Bovino’s command.
In the second Trump administration, immigration policy is made with big round numbers. There’s a formula: First the White House sets an ambitious goal—1 million deportations a year, 3,000 immigration arrests a day. Then it presses the federal workforce to meet the target. Last year, Trump officials pledged to double staffing at ICE by adding 10,000 new deportation officers by January 2026.
Donald Trump has sent waves of federal agents to Democratic-run “sanctuary cities” over the past eight months, depicting the operations like episodes in a roving MAGA reality show. The places targeted by the president tend to become temporary sites of protest—and produce fodder for his meme-driven administration’s social-media channels. The relentless pressure on ICE to ramp up deportations has left officers on edge. The neighborhoods they’re targeting are on edge too.
Aidan Perzana woke up to honking vehicles and looked out his window just as ICE officers surrounded an SUV. The 31-year-old data engineer told me he saw the officers moving to the side of the vehicle as the driver attempted to pull away. “There was not a thought in my mind that she was going to hit one of them,” he said. “I was surprised to hear the gunshots.”
Videos circulating on social media showed more of the confrontation.
President Donald Trump’s plan to double the size of the ICE workforce has met a foe more powerful than any activist group. It is decimating new recruits at the agency’s training academy in Georgia. It is the ICE personal-fitness test.
More than a third have failed so far, four officials told me, impeding the agency’s plan to hire, train, and deploy 10,000 deportation officers by January. To pass, recruits must do 15 push-ups and 32 sit-ups, and run 1.5 miles in 14 minutes.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement held a hiring expo this week outside Dallas at a place called the Esports Stadium. Set between the Texas Rangers ballpark and the roller coasters of Six Flags, the arena was built for video-game competitions, and a wall of bright-blue screens welcomed job candidates at the entrance. “With honor and integrity, we will safeguard the American people, our homeland and our values,” one message read.
The Trump administration’s long, belabored campaign to prove that Kilmar Abrego Garcia is a gang leader, a terrorist, and an all-around bad guy—not a wrongfully deported Maryland man—has produced some extraordinary legal maneuvers.
Photographs by Robert LeBlanc
During a lull in the chanting outside the federal building targeted by protesters in downtown Los Angeles this week, I walked up behind a hooded young man wearing a mask and carrying a can of spray paint. He began to deface the marble facade in big black letters. WHEN TYRANNY BECOMES LAW, REBELLION BECOMES DUTY—THOMAS JEFFERSON, he wrote, adding his tag, SMO, in smaller font.
After insisting again and again that they would not bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia back to the United States, Trump-administration officials flew the 29-year-old Maryland man back from El Salvador today to face a grand-jury criminal indictment in Tennessee.
Abrego Garcia’s return doesn’t mean he can go free.
The Trump administration has acknowledged a new error in a case challenging its attempts to send deportees to any country that will take them. Another immigrant who had earned protected status was rushed out of the country and put in danger—and U.S. officials have offered little more than a shrug.
This time, the immigrant is a gay man from Guatemala who fled death threats and twice tried to seek refuge in the United States. First, he was denied and deported home.
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Updated at 6:35 p.m. ET on May 13, 2025.
When the welcome ceremony was over, and the Trump officials drove off in their black SUVs, a dozen or so newly arrived South African refugees stepped out into the parking lot of a private terminal at Washington Dulles International Airport yesterday afternoon, still carrying little paper flags they’d been handed. Now it was time for a smoke.
The long-running television show Cops became a propaganda boon to American law enforcement soon after its debut in 1989. The morality of the show is not complicated: The heroes are guys in uniforms braving danger to restore order. They face off against shirtless, drunken louts yelling in the street or barreling down the highway at 100 miles per hour.
Immigration enforcement in service of President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation campaign has been the aesthetic opposite of a Cops episode.
Jeff Joseph, a 53-year-old immigration attorney in Colorado, has recently started taking precautions while traveling abroad that, at another time, he would have considered a little paranoid. He leaves his phone at home. Instead, he carries a “burner’’—a device scrubbed of his contact list and communications—in case U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers send him to secondary inspection or seize his electronics when he returns home.
At each stage in the political and legal fight over Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s wrongful deportation, the Trump administration has pushed back harder and dug in deeper.
The administration first called Abrego Garcia’s deportation an “administrative error,” then a “clerical error.” The words trivialized the decision to send a man to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador without legal proceedings and in direct violation of a judge’s protective order.
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The Trump administration is working hard to convince the public that its mass-deportation campaign is fully under way. Over the past several weeks, federal agents have seized foreign students off the streets, raided worksites, and shipped detainees to a supermax prison in El Salvador using wartime powers adopted under the John Adams administration.
The Trump administration acknowledged in a court filing Monday that it had grabbed a Maryland father with protected legal status and mistakenly deported him to El Salvador, but said that U.S. courts lack jurisdiction to order his return from the megaprison where he’s now locked up.
The Trump administration’s plan to dust off the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 was in the works long before March 15. But the precise timing was hazy. Immigration attorneys went to federal court that morning to try to block the government from using the extraordinary wartime authority, which allows deportations without due process. There were few signs that the White House was about to use the law to send planeloads of Venezuelans to a prison complex in El Salvador.
During the first Trump administration, when Stephen Miller’s immigration policy proposals hit obstacles in federal court, rumors would circulate about his plans to dust off arcane presidential powers. Government lawyers were wary of overreach; officials in the West Wing and at the Department of Homeland Security would sometimes snicker.
LOL Stephen, they’d say, amused by his creative zealotry.
No one is laughing now.
As the details of Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest by U.S. immigration agents first emerged this week, attorneys I spoke with were so astonished that they wondered if the government had made a mistake. President Donald Trump and other administration officials had been threatening to punish protesters by taking away student visas, but Khalil was a legal permanent resident with a U.S.-citizen spouse. The Palestinian activist and former Columbia University student hadn’t been charged with a crime.
The opening salvo of President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation campaign has made immigrants across the United States fear that simply going to work, school, or the supermarket might result in a life-altering arrest.
Sightings of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, real and imagined, are everywhere on social media. Teachers say students are panicked that ICE will take their parents while they’re in class.