Like so many of the people I talk to, she came to policy research and advocacy first from a place of serving clients caught up in the criminal legal and immigration systems and doing deportation defense lawyering. She reminded me that nothing disabuses you of the idea that we have functioning legal systems quite like sitting with the people trying to survive them.

I asked Heidi to start our conversation about the latest funding bill from the basics, because in immigration enforcement the budget is where the story begins. Her basic but crucial point is that the simple availability of money itself—not actual urgency—drives so much of what actually happens to people on the ground.

“What we’ve seen over years now is that the amount of money that ICE has actually drives their policy. So, when Congress gives them X amount of dollars to jail X amount of people, they will always hit that maximum. When the dollars go down, they will detain fewer people.”

As Heidi explained, normally that money moves through annual appropriations, which need 60 votes in the Senate and therefore force a bipartisan compromise. Those compromises are where the guardrails come from, which include the data-reporting requirements and detention rules that get attached to the dollars. But this is not how Congress passed this funding bill. On June 10, President Trump signed S.2, roughly $70 billion that Republicans pushed through budget reconciliation on a party-line vote, a process never meant for routine annual funding, on top of the $170 billion they moved the same way last summer.

By NILC’s own count, the new law sends $38 billion to ICE and $26 billion to CBP and locks the spending in through 2029, leaving the two agencies with about eight times their historical annual budget. It also strips the transparency rules, including the requirement that ICE publish basic data on who it is detaining, which is the foundation of the work I have written about for years and the reason we built Detention Reports. All of this comes in a year when ICE has already recorded its 19th death in custody and detainees at facilities like Delaney Hall are on hunger strike over the conditions they face.

So much of this money continues to flow toward civil immigrant detention. Alongside the usual contracts with county jails and private operators like GEO and CoreCivic, ICE is now buying old warehouses outright to convert into detention centers at an absurd markup at the taxpayer’s expense—and all this at a time when Americans are facing a dire affordability crisis. Researchers at Project Saltbox found the government paid above the most recent market valuation at every site, including a Texas warehouse ICE bought for $123 million that had last been valued at $11 million.

Money is also flowing into military-grade equipment. Senator Schiff’s office found that ICE and CBP spending on weapons, ammunition, and accessories like chemical weapons rose fourfold in a single year, which Heidi reads as a sign that this administration treats the agencies as a personal paramilitary force rather than a civil one.

I asked Heidi where she stands on immigrant detention today—whether there should ever be detention at all—and while she acknowledges the political pressures, her conclusion is one that many of us have drawn after years of examining this system. Simply put, the civil nature of the US immigration system is at the center of Heidi’s larger argument that there is no good reason for an immigration detention system at all. She did not start her career believing this, but years inside these facilities changed her mind.

“[Immigrant detention] should not be thought of as a public safety issue. Anyone who is in immigration detention is there because ICE is alleging that they have, in some way, violated the civil federal immigration law.”

No one in immigration detention is serving a criminal sentence. They are there because ICE alleges a civil violation, whether an overstayed visa or a years-old conviction someone already served their time for and came home from. It’s an expensive and deadly system, and one that we may not even need in the first place.

For anyone who wants to explore this argument more closely, my Ohio State colleague César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández makes it at length in his very readable book Migrating to Prison, which traces how the immigration prison system grew and why locking people up for civil violations is both unjust and a poor use of public money.

When I asked Heidi about the various legislative solutions that have emerged in Congress in recent years, she emphasized maintaining a bright line on the principle of citizenship and not buying into carceral logics:

“We cannot support a bill that creates essentially a second class of people in the United States who will never be a full part of, or be able to be a full part of our citizenry.”

Citizenship, she argues, is the center of where Congress needs to move, because anything less builds a permanent second class of people who work and pay taxes but never fully belong, never reunite with family abroad, and travel in fear of being shut out. After $240 billion committed to enforcement, she says it is time to retire the old bargain that any protection for immigrant communities has to be bought with more enforcement and surveillance.

Running underneath a lot of our conversation was the topic of language and framing. The administration sells its enforcement as targeting the worst of the worst, and the data does not bear that out. The deeper danger, Heidi argues, is repeating the criminalizing frame at all.

“Those people [do not] deserve to be put back into a carceral setting, separated from their loved ones, and subjected to what now are truly life-threatening conditions. So I challenge us to not talk within that frame that the Trump administration has used that is so dehumanizing and criminalizing.”

She made the point with a tax analogy. Imagine you were not sure whether you had cheated on your taxes, and one morning men in camouflage with machine guns arrived at your door to take you to a prison. That might feel outlandish to us, but her question is why it stops feeling bizarre when the civil violation is in the immigration code instead of the tax code.

Heidi provided a vision for what comes next, at least on the funding side. Congress wrote these checks through reconciliation, and Congress can repeal the bills and claw back whatever has not yet been spent.

“Congress can give money, but then Congress can take money back. So there is nothing stopping the House and the Senate from passing a bill that takes back the funds from these two reconciliation bills that have not been obligated.”

Beyond the clawback, she talked about repair and reconstruction, dismantling an enforcement-first system and rebuilding one organized around welcome, rights, and the dignity of every person who arrives, however long that takes. In the meantime, she left everyone with the simplest possible action, which is to call Congress every day with one message.

“Do not give one more dollar to ICE or Border Patrol, and take back the money that’s already been given. You can call, just say that every day.”

What a powerful note to end on! My profound thanks to Heidi for her time and her clarity, and to everyone who joined us live.

Five Things You Can Do Right Now

1. Call Congress every day. Dial the congressional switchboard, ask for your senators’ and representative’s offices, and deliver Heidi’s one-line message: do not give one more dollar to ICE or Border Patrol, and take back the money that has already been given.

2. Take action with NILC. NILC keeps a running set of actions tied to this fight, from contacting members of Congress to supporting communities under enforcement pressure. Learn more at: https://www.nilc.org/action/.

   

3. Read NILC’s analysis of the law. Heidi Altman and Ben D’Avanzo’s What’s in Congress’s New ICE Funding Law? is a clear and compelling breakdown of where the $70 billion goes and what guardrails were stripped.

4. Reporters, reach Heidi directly. Heidi is an on-record expert source on detention and immigration funding. Journalists with questions can email her at media@nilc.org.

5. Share this conversation. Pass this along to anyone interested in learning more about how immigration funding works and why Congress’s blank checks to Stephen Miller need to stop.

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Help Keep These Conversations Going

There are plenty of places to read that Congress spent $70 billion on immigration enforcement, but there aren’t many places where you can hear from experts like Heidi who will patiently break down the details in a nuanced and impassioned way. If you think this kind of access deserves a wider audience, a paid subscription is the best way to make it happen. Thanks to everyone who already supports this work.

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The law also strips out conditions that normally travel with enforcement money. Annual funding bills usually require ICE to report basic data on who it is detaining and set rules for the treatment of vulnerable people in custody, such as pregnant women. Much of that is gone here, which means we won’t even know how many people are in ICE’s massive network of for-profit detention centers. As Heidi Altman put it, the law is “almost like a blank check for those agencies, because there’s no guidance.”

NILC frames this spending against the country’s affordability crisis. Heidi and her colleagues argue that families across the country are struggling to afford health care, food, and housing. Instead of easing that burden, Congress committed the equivalent of eight years of funding, nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars all at once, to deportation and detention, with no meaningful reforms or accountability attached. That contrast is where Heidi and I will definitely spend a lot of our time. President Trump and Congress are ignoring the affordability crisis facing Americans, and yet ICE is flush with cash despite a documented record of abuse. What does say about Congress’s priorities?

At the bottom of all this is a complicated system of budgets, line items, and an appropriations process that few people understand—which is why I cannot think of a better person to help us understand how DHS funding works. Heidi has spent years working at the center of federal advocacy on immigration enforcement, detention, and deportation, and she and her colleagues at the National Immigration Law Center has produced some of the clearest analysis of how DHS money is allocated and spent, and what it leaves out. I am grateful that she has agreed to join me for a public virtual conversation on June 17 at 10:00 AM Eastern. Please join us, and bring your questions.

We’ll talk about:

• Where the $70 billion actually goes, and how it splits between ICE, CBP, and the rest of the Department of Homeland Security

• Why funding the agencies through 2029 changes the politics of oversight

• Which transparency and accountability guardrails were left out, and what that means for anyone trying to track the system

• How the scale of this spending compares to what families are being told the country cannot afford

• How this money connects to detention conditions, deaths in custody, and the expansion of immigration policing into communities

• What advocates, journalists, and ordinary readers can do with this information now

Registration is required and free—but if you value conversations like this, please also consider supporting this work with a paid subscription.

REGISTER TODAY

About Heidi Altman

Heidi Altman is Vice President of Policy at the National Immigration Law Center, where she leads federal advocacy on immigration enforcement, detention, and deportation. She is a frequent on-record expert source and a former congressional witness on abusive immigration detention, and she co-authored NILC’s analysis of the new ICE funding law. Her career has spanned the Capital Area Immigrants’ Rights Coalition, the National Immigrant Justice Center, and now NILC, always at the intersection of policy, litigation, and the lived realities of the enforcement system.

Do you have questions for Heidi? Leave them in the comments below and I’ll do my best to bring them into the conversation.

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Further Reading

• Heidi Altman and Becca D’Avanzo, What’s in Congress’s New ICE Funding Law?, National Immigration Law Center, June 11, 2026.

• National Immigration Law Center, Despite Being Flush in Cash, DHS Wants $70 Billion More in Tax Payer Dollars, May 7, 2026.

• Kaia Hubbard, Trump signs $70 billion immigration bill, capping lengthy fight over ICE funding, CBS News, June 10, 2026.

• Trump signs immigration bill with billions for ICE, NPR, June 9, 2026.

• Washington Office on Latin America, U.S.-Mexico Border Update: Billions more for ICE and CBP, June 12, 2026.

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$70,000,000,000

The amount Congress appropriated to fund ICE and Border Patrol through the end of the Trump administration, now signed into law.

President Trump signed a $70 billion immigration enforcement package into law on June 10, after the House passed it 214-212 and the Senate passed it 52-47—both along party lines. The S.2 reconciliation bill directs about $38 billion to ICE, $26 billion to CBP, and $5 billion to the Department of Homeland Security. A last-minute provision, Section 202(9), sets aside $350 million for ICE operations in cities and states DHS deems non-cooperating, including those that decline 287(g) agreements, which writes the targeting of communities by their local policies directly into the funding. The fight had dragged on since January, when two deadly shootings by federal agents in Minneapolis prompted Democrats to try to rein in the agencies. Because the money moves through reconciliation rather than annual appropriations, it carries none of the usual guardrails, including the transparency measures that require ICE to release basic detention data, and it locks enforcement spending in through the end of the administration where the yearly budget process can no longer check it.

• Altman, H., & D’Avanzo, B. (2026, June 11). What’s in Congress’s New ICE Funding Law?. National Immigration Law Center.

• Hubbard, K. (2026, June 10). Trump signs $70 billion immigration bill, capping lengthy fight over ICE funding. CBS News.

Save the date. This Wednesday, June 17, at 10:00 a.m. Eastern, Heidi Altman from the National Immigration Law Center will join me to break down how DHS actually gets funded and what DHS will do with its latest $70 billion. If you want to understand where the money comes from and what Congress just locked in, don’t miss this conversation. Full event announcement coming tomorrow.

$500,000

The conservative estimate, reported by The Atlantic, of what it costs to hold one person for a year at Alligator Alcatraz.

Eric Schlosser reports in The Atlantic that a conservative estimate of holding a single person for a year at Alligator Alcatraz, the state-built detention camp in the Florida Everglades, runs about $500,000, more than sixteen times the roughly $30,000 Florida spends to house a convicted person in state prison. The facility went up in eight days on a remote airstrip with no water, sewer, or power infrastructure, so the state trucks in about 60,000 gallons of water and burns roughly 21,000 gallons of diesel a day. The portable-toilet contractor alone is projected to collect $480 million over about two years. Florida fronted at least half a billion dollars through a no-bid emergency process that steered contracts to DeSantis donors, and the state’s disaster fund has dwindled to roughly $200 million, which may force the camp to close. The figure is what it costs to run detention as political theater.

• Schlosser, E. (2026, June 4). The Alligator Alcatraz Boondoggle. The Atlantic.

1,954

The number of active 287(g) agreements deputizing state and local police for immigration enforcement, up from 134 at the start of 2025.

As of June 12, ICE listed 1,954 active 287(g) agreements across 39 states and two U.S. territories, according to the tracker Andrew Thrasher maintains from ICE’s own published data. The total breaks down into 1,265 task force agreements, 508 warrant service agreements, and 181 jail enforcement agreements. Because a single agency can hold up to three models at once, the agreement count runs higher than the roughly 1,500 distinct agencies involved. The task force model, which lets local officers question and arrest people on suspected immigration violations during routine policing, was shelved in 2012 over racial profiling findings and revived in 2025, and it now accounts for the large majority of agreements.

• Thrasher, A. (2026). ICE 287(g) Program Tracker. Maxwell Commons.

17

The number of naturalized U.S. citizens the Justice Department moved to strip of citizenship in a single announcement.

On June 8 the Justice Department announced civil denaturalization actions against 17 naturalized citizens it accuses of concealing serious offenses during the naturalization process. Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, citizenship can be revoked when naturalization was illegally procured or obtained by concealment of a material fact or willful misrepresentation, and the department described this round as the largest effort it has undertaken to use that authority. Civil denaturalization carries a lower burden of proof than the criminal version and provides no right to appointed counsel, which is part of why legal scholars watch its expansion closely even when the named defendants have serious records. The development extends the reach of enforcement from noncitizens to people who already hold citizenship, a status long treated as settled rather than provisional.

• U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Public Affairs. (2026, June 8). Justice Department Moves to Strip U.S. Citizenship from 17 Naturalized Sex Offenders, Fraudsters, Drug Dealers, and More. U.S. Department of Justice.

8

The number of fired immigration judges who have sued the administration, arguing their terminations were discriminatory and left unexplained.

At least eight immigration judges fired this year have filed suit, all recent appointees the administration declined to retain at the end of their two-year probationary periods. The judges say they were given no explanation for their firings and were denied recourse through the Justice Department’s equal employment process. Their cases test whether the president can remove immigration judges for any reason at all. The suits sit inside a much larger turnover. The EOIR has fired more than 100 judges since January 2025, about half of them probationary, according to the National Association of Immigration Judges, while the department has hired more than 200 replacements drawn heavily from military backgrounds and former ICE attorney ranks. Because immigration judges are the front-line adjudicators who decide individual deportation cases, replacing a large share of the corps and asserting at-will removal further undermines the integrity and independence of the courts.

• Castronuovo, C., & Crepeau, M. (2026, June 10). Fired Immigration Judges Test Trump’s Executive Power in Suits. Bloomberg Law.

5

The number of days a migrant would have to appeal before automatic removal under a DHS-built deportation system being developed for Panama.

Documents obtained by PunchUp and Migrant Insider describe a Migrant Case Management System, internally titled the Panama Case Management System, that the Department of Homeland Security designed, funded, and would be able to access while Panamanian officials run it on the ground. Under the workflow, an enrolled migrant is served an order of detention, biometrically registered, and checked against U.S. watchlists, after which a five-day window opens. If the person does not formally appeal or claim fear of return within those five days, removal proceeds automatically, the name is added to a deportation manifest, and a flight is scheduled, at a designed scale of up to 6,000 cases a year. DHS told the reporters the system would have “no nexus” with U.S. immigration enforcement, though its own performance work statement says U.S. officials would be able to log in to review case files.

• Latchem, T., Neal, W., & Manríquez, P. (2026, June 9). Trump’s Explosive Secret Plan to Stop Migrants Setting Foot on American Soil. PunchUp / Migrant Insider.

30

The number of pounds a Wisconsin mosque leader and legal permanent resident has lost over two months in ICE detention while denied consistent diabetes care.

Salah Sarsour, president of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee and a Palestinian-born green-card holder, has lost about 30 pounds since ICE detained him in April and is held in an Indiana jail where his blood sugar is not consistently monitored, his attorneys told a federal judge, leaving him at risk of organ failure if his Type 2 diabetes goes untreated. When he asked for food that would help stabilize his blood sugar, staff offered him pork rinds, and his requests for halal meals were denied. His lawyers say he is being held on unsupported claims that he poses a foreign policy threat, and they argue he was targeted for speaking out against Israel. The case fits a broader pattern of medical neglect allegations across ICE facilities, and it shows how detention can turn a manageable chronic condition into a life-threatening one when routine care lapses.

• Boone, R. (2026, June 9). Attorneys urge release of mosque leader, saying he’s been denied diabetes care in ICE custody. The Associated Press.

119

The number of days a Georgian man with no criminal record and no alleged immigration violation spent in ICE detention before he died at Winn Correctional Center.

Mamuka Artmeladze, 43, died in ICE custody at Winn Correctional Center in Louisiana on June 4, the 19th death in ICE detention this year and the second at Winn in under two months. Working from Deportation Data Project records, I found that ICE alleged no criminal history and apparently no immigration violation against him. He had been paroled into the country in 2022, was classified at the lowest risk level, and was picked up as a collateral arrest under ICE Wall FY26, an operation that stops commercial truck drivers with the help of state troopers deputized through 287(g). He had a case pending before an immigration judge and no final removal order, so ICE could not have deported him, and at the national average detention rate of $150 a day the government spent roughly $17,850 holding him.

• Kocher, A. (2026, June 8). ICE Reports 19th Death of 2026: Georgian National Mamuka Artmeladze Dies at Winn Correctional. Austin Kocher.

7,750

The number of calls a St. Louis immigration hotline has fielded since January 2025, now visible on a new public dashboard.

The Ashrei Foundation launched an Immigration Data Dashboard that draws on 7,750 hotline calls handled since the St. Louis Rapid Response Hotline began on January 27, 2025, covering 853 distinct contacts from 54 countries of origin. The dashboard exists because federal agencies release little timely local data on enforcement, so a volunteer hotline became one of the few windows into who is being detained in the region, where they are held, and how they entered ICE custody. Many people who end up in ICE custody around St. Louis first encounter local police, which points back to the role local law enforcement plays in funneling people into detention. The project is a good example of the kind of locally grounded data collection that has to fill the gap as the federal government retreats from transparency.

• Hertel, E. (2026, June 10). Introducing the Ashrei Immigration Data Dashboard. Ashrei Foundation.

106 million

The utterly fabricated number of people Gregory Bovino, Trump’s failed Border Patrol chief, says he wants to deport as “illegals.”

Bovino, who recently signaled interest in a 2028 presidential run, said his priority is removing 106 million people he labels illegal immigrants, a figure that would equal nearly a third of the roughly 341 million people living in the United States. The number has no basis in data and may indicate Bovino’s further slide into mental illness and political irrelevance. The Pew Research Center estimated about 14 million undocumented immigrants in 2023, and the Census counts roughly 50 million immigrants in total, about 15 percent of the population, the large majority of them naturalized citizens, green-card holders, or others living here lawfully. Inflating the count by this order of magnitude is Bovino’s “jump the shark” moment.

• Baio, A. (2026, June). Trump’s former border chief wants to deport one-third of all Americans, claiming they are all migrants. The Independent.

4-1

The final score of the United States’ World Cup opener against Paraguay on June 12.

After a week of enforcement numbers, here is one that is just about a game. The United States opened the 2026 World Cup with a 4-1 win over Paraguay in Los Angeles, on two first-half goals from Folarin Balogun, an own goal, and a late strike from Gio Reyna. If the tournament has you curious about the countries on the field, my Relevant Research co-founder Adam Sawyer built Relevant Football, a site that pairs the results with country-level data on economics, energy, geography, and demographics for all 48 competing nations. I talked with Adam about the project and the politics of hosting in a recent conversation. Follow along at relevant-football.com.

• Relevant Football. Relevant Research.

Send me your data points and data tips!

If you have new research, data, or findings related to immigration enforcement and detention that you’d like to see featured here, please reach out. I’m particularly interested right now in ICE detention numbers specifically. Official data releases have become an unreliable guide to what’s actually happening, and if you work in this space and have information you’re able to share, whether on the record or in confidence, DMs are open.

I’m honored that this Substack continues to drive media reporting, research, and public debate, but it does take effort and expense. If you can pitch in a few bucks a month or year, it would help enormously. Find an option that fits your budget at austinkocher.substack.com/subscribe.

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In a line that I can recite from memory, Phillips grounds his discussion in a practical, simple observation: “It is extraordinary how much pleasure we get from each other’s company.” “Getting pleasure from another person’s company” is one way of describing a core motivation for my life, with academic research, public writing, and community-building as means to that end rather than ends in themselves. I crave interesting conversations—and in a world increasingly dominated by artificial intelligence and the simulacra of critical thought, there has never been a time when we needed to bask in the pleasure of authentic human quirkiness more.

Forgive me for my own human quirkiness, but this is a long way of expressing my deep gratitude for the wonderful array of exhilarating conversations I was lucky to be a part of this week. So while I take shelter from the heat advisory outside (it’s 95F/35C) inside a bar and watch the Canada-Bosnia and Herzegovina match, let me share those conversations with you and invite you to find enjoyment in these, as well.

1. Julia Malleck and I Talk Immigration Data for Documented’s “Early Arrival” Newsletter

Documented (formerly Documented NY) is a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to reporting with and for immigrant communities in New York City. I’ve been a fan of their work since they launched. One of their best offerings is a newsletter written by Julia Malleck called Early Arrival, which features immigration news and analysis from across the country. I was over the moon to be featured in Early Arrival this week, in an in-depth Q&A about how I do my work, why I write so much on Substack, and what gives me hope these days. You can read “Q&A: Austin Kocher on the Power of Immigration Data” over on DocumentedNY.com and sign up for Early Arrival there, or you can get Early Arrival right here on Substack. They launched their Substack newsletter on Monday, which featured the interview, so if you are already loving the Substack ecosystem and want to keep it under one roof, you now have that option, too. Thank you to Julia for the conversation!

Early Arrival

Documented's newsletter featuring a roundup of immigration and policy news from New York, Washington, and nationwide in your inbox 3x per week.

By Documented

2. The New York Times Featured My Delaney Hall Analysis

Last Saturday morning while drinking my morning coffee, I received a text message from a friend and colleague who said, “Congrats on the NYT article!” I had no idea what they meant; I didn’t remember talking to any NYT journalists about a story. So when I checked out the link, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Ed Shanahan and Hamed Aleaziz, two journalists I respect a lot, had written up my analysis of the contested Delaney Hall detention facility in New Jersey, where people inside and outside are protesting poor detention conditions. The article “ICE Says Detainees Are ‘Worst of the Worst.’ Government Data Disagrees” accurately contrasts outlandish claims by the Trump administration with what the data says about who is being held at the facility. Super honored to be featured and grateful that facts still matter.

3. Adam Sawyer Discusses Relevant Football

You might know Adam Sawyer from his highly impactful work at Relevant Research, especially the Detention Reports website. But in our first on-camera conversation together, we focused on a far more positive topic: why the World Cup is an opportunity to celebrate our diversity and promote global solidarity. Adam joined me to announce a new data-driven project called Relevant Football, a website that serves as a home for data about the teams and players of the World Cup and a hub for related data about the countries involved to show that we have more in common than what divides us. Adam has a nuanced and informed perspective on the complexity of this year’s World Cup that rivals anything you’ll hear from mainstream commentators. Thanks for the conversation, Adam!

UPDATE: Since our conversation, Bishal, one of the developers behind Relevant Football, added LIVE information that includes current scores and a countdown timer to the next match! This is the type of creative work Relevant Research does for clients in the immigration space. Reach out to Adam at adam@relevant-research.com for more information or to submit feedback, and follow him on Bluesky for regular sports commentary and lots of immigration data.

4. Core Principles of a Fair and Functional Immigration Enforcement System

I’ve been eager to talk to Nayna Gupta and Aaron Reichlin-Melnick since they first released their latest report “Restoring Credibility and Humanity: A New Framework for Immigration Enforcement.” The report argues that Americans do not need to choose between an all-or-nothing approach to enforcement, but instead need to recover some sanity and figure out how to balance the legitimate goal of public safety and national security with the absurdity of people who are no threat to anyone being deported after living in the United States for literally decades. I encourage you to read the full report, but if you don’t have time, at least listen to our conversation below when you’re driving or around the house (you’ll get all of the basics and much more).

5. UK Journalist Tom Latchem Discusses Trump’s New Panama Plan and More

Daily Beast correspondent Tom Latchem joined me this week to discuss his investigation with /Migrant Insider into a new asylum-denial machine inside Panama and how the program could turn that country into an arm of DHS. Tom is the rare reporter who can describe a slide into authoritarianism and a DHS press flack in the same breath without losing the thread of either. He talked about the official statement DHS sent him for publication, which attack journalists instead of maintain any semblance of professionalism. Tom brings a sense of enthusiasm and levity to a serious topic, and is already making waves in his investigative work. Honestly one of the funnest conversations I’ve had online in a while despite the gravity of it all.

6. “Deported After Serving” on The Raid Podcast

Speaking of the joy of conversation, John Carlos Frey, host of The Raid Podcast, invited me on his show to talk about how our immigration system harms veterans. John reached out after listening to my series of conversations with , , , and about the impacts of the immigration system on active duty military and their families, veterans, and our allies. John was a terrific host and his program regularly features smart conversations with people like , attorney Chris Newman, , and many others. In addition to the podcast and YouTube video below, you can also follow The Raid on Instagram. Catch my conversation with John as well as his impassioned exposure of what ICE is doing to Hmong people who served alongside US troops in Southeast Asia.

7. This Week on ICE Podcast

The Delaney Hall analysis hit home with a lot of people this week. I spoke with for about why it’s so important for the public to understand how the data about who ICE is detaining contradicts the official inflammatory narrative about dangerous criminals and terrorists. You can give that conversation a listen on Substack and Spotify.

This Week On ICE Podcast

A weekly podcast covering the U.S. Donald Trump administration's immigration crackdown and ballooning enforcement apparatus, hosted by journalists Kelly Kimball and Matthew Kendrick.

8. Ashrei Foundation Releases Dashboard on St. Louis Rapid Response Hotline

I joined Sara Ruiz earlier today for the release of a new dashboard created by the Ashrei Foundation and their local partners that provides grassroots insights into immigration enforcement in the St. Louis region. Projects like this are incredibly important because they fill in gaps left in government data, advance the legitimacy of local organizing, and help communities understand what’s actually going on. Sara said it best in her closing remarks:

The dashboard was already featured in an article by Brian Muñoz at St. Louis Public Radio. Take a look at the Ashrei Immigration Data Dashboard and read the blog post announcement to get more context.

9. Forthcoming: Project Censored

It is always an honor to be invited onto Project Censored with . Our conversation will be online soon. In the meantime, you can read Eleanor’s weekly newsletter “The News that Didn’t Make the News” which offers a powerful critical take on what the mainstream news media is ignoring.

Looking back over the week, I keep returning to Phillips's line about how much pleasure we get from each other's company. The match ended in a draw, the heat hasn't broken (thunderstorms are on their way, apparently), and I am even more grateful for the unforbidden joy of being in this difficult work alongside passionate, intelligent, and creative friends and colleagues across the country. My thanks to everyone who talked with me this week, and to you for reading. I hope you find a good conversation of your own this weekend—and don’t forget to join the conversation with a comment or feedback below.

Leave a comment

He trained on the Daily Mirror, did a stint at the News of the World, helped expose the British broadcaster Dan Wootton as a serial catfisher, and now files scoops on DHS from a spare room in the south of England. He is funny, fast, and entirely unbothered by whoever is on the other end of the phone at a government press office.

He told me the immigration beat is where it finally came together. "Finally in my career I'm actually doing some good," he said, although it sounds to me like he’s been doing good for a long time.

His latest, published on PunchUp with Migrant Insider, is the reason I wanted to talk. The investigation is built on a document dump that landed in his lap anonymously, and it shows DHS quietly designing and funding a deportation processing system embedded inside Panama’s own immigration service, with a five-day appeal window that immigration lawyers he spoke to call almost impossible to use.

What Tom found is an off-the-shelf version DHS can plug in elsewhere, plus the small detail that the agency claimed “no nexus” to the system while the documents clearly granted it direct log-in access to the case files. This work was done in partnership with at Migrant Insider and Tom’s protégé also at the Daily Beast.

PunchUp

Trump’s Explosive Secret Plan to Stop Migrants Setting Foot on American Soil

JOIN TOM LATCHEM AND LEADING IMMIGRATION ACADEMIC Austin Kocher FOR A VIDEO DISCUSSION ABOUT THIS INVESTIGATION LIVE ON PUNCHUP ON WEDNESDAY, JUNE 10 AT 1030AM ET…

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9 days ago · 27 likes · Tom Latchem, Will Neal, and Pablo Manríquez

As a political geographer, I recognized the shape of it right away as a textbook case of border externalization, the well-documented practice by which wealthy states push migration enforcement outward onto transit countries to keep arrivals, and the legal obligations they trigger, off their own soil. This is a similar playbook the EU has run for years through countries like Morocco and Turkey, where a wealthier country pays a poorer one to enforce its border out of reach of its own courts.

Tom is the rare reporter who can describe a slide into authoritarianism and a DHS press flack in the same breath without losing the thread of either. He talked about the official statement DHS sent him for publication, which called him a “10 rats in a trench coat excuse for a journalist,” a line he found more mean than funny and which tells you most of what you need to know about the agency’s relationship with the facts.

His larger point is serious. When a press office will deny something printed in black and white in its own documents, he finds himself reporting inside a post-truth environment where the ordinary adult conversation between a journalist and a government no longer happens with any sense of decorum.

I really enjoyed our conversation. Tom brings a sense of enthusiasm and levity to a serious topic, and is already making waves in his investigative work. Listen to our conversation above and punch up with Tom on PunchUp and over at the Daily Beast.

That’s why I was excited to see the American Immigration Council’s new vision for interior enforcement, the part of the enforcement system that has become so dangerously and indiscriminately mobilized under this administration. Nayna Gupta and Aaron Reichlin-Melnick joined me to explain how this new framework provides a different way into the conversation, built around four principles drawn from years of direct legal practice that together describe what an enforcement system would have to deliver to be credible, humane, and broadly defensible.

This conversation continues a series I’ve been working through about what a positive vision for immigration enforcement could actually look like. An earlier conversation with Andrea Flores made the case that targeted, specific alternatives are what this political moment requires. Claire Trickler-McNulty and I talked alternatives to mass detention and traced what we know and don’t know about how non-detention approaches actually function. AIC’s latest framework takes both threads further with a clearly thought-out vision designed to reach beyond the beltway.

Nayna described what the framework set out to do.

“What we’re offering here as a path forward is in fact a vision for an enforcement system... In order to advance a vision that is more humane, more credible, more effective, we have to be able to deliver that in the context of an enforcement system that still works.”

See the original event announcement here.

The Four Principles of a Functioning Immigration Enforcement System

Each principle identifies a specific failure mode in how enforcement currently operates and proposes a concrete standard against which any legislative alternative could be tested.

Compliance

For a government to expect people to follow the rules, those rules have to be followable. Yet for the vast majority of undocumented people in the United States, no legal pathway to status exists. And for people who did enter the country legally or do have legal status, holding onto that status has become a chaotic game of chance. For example, the registry, the closest Congress has come to a rolling pathway for longtime residents, requires arrival before 1972 and has not been updated since 1986. DACA stopped enrolling applicants who arrived after 2007. The question “why didn’t they just get in line?” assumes a line that does not exist for most people.

Aaron described what a compliance-oriented system would look like in practice. When an immigration officer encounters someone with no criminal record who has been in the country long enough to build community ties, the first response should be a structured path toward compliance—not escalating immediately to the most punitive option of immediate deportation. The system currently resembles giving someone a parking ticket with no payment method. We cannot demand compliance if we never provide the means for it. Nayna named the misconception at the root of the problem.

“One of the biggest misconceptions for many Americans is that undocumented immigrants can just find a way to get right with the law when that’s not the case. We’ve never offered that.”

Safety

The safety section takes on the administration’s most persistent justification for mass enforcement. ICE press releases describe the people it arrests as “murderers, rapists, pedophiles, and drug traffickers,” a framing that makes every enforcement action look like a public safety intervention. My analysis of Delaney Hall shows the rhetoric does not match the reality of who is actually being detained. However, as I’ve talked to people inside and outside the immigrant rights movement, public safety remains a legitimate concern. As one family member of an undocumented immigrant told me recently, “we care about public safety, too!” AIC’s framework incorporates public safety—real public safety—as principle of enforcement, and does so in a way that reflects the reality of what the data says about low rates of criminality among immigrants.

Aaron described a case that shows precisely how misplaced fears and propaganda about “illegal criminal aliens” clashes with reality. He cited a case of a Cuban man with a green card had been convicted of marijuana smuggling in the 1980s, served his sentence, and spent the following four decades living and working legally in the United States. After the Trump administration negotiated deportation agreements that enabled Cubans to be sent through Mexico, he was arrested, held in ICE detention, and died in custody. He had not committed any offense in forty years. The administration’s press release described him as a criminal and an alien.

“He had a green card and in the eighties he was a drug smuggler. He brought in marijuana on boats into Florida, he got caught and he served time in jail. And he got his life together. From the nineteen eighties, the nineteen nineties, the two thousands, the twenty tens, he’s living a blameless life. He’s working legally. Yes, he has a final order of removal. His last criminal offense had occurred almost 40 years earlier. His last criminal offense occurred before I was even born.”

Proportionality

One problem with framing immigration (a largely civil matter) through the lens of criminal enforcement is that the public often assumes that the system already functions like a normal legal system. It does not. The criminal legal system is itself deeply unequal and applies its rules with well-documented unfairness. But it does contain structural mechanisms designed for proportionality. Graduated sentencing, statutes of limitations on prosecution, and judicial discretion to weigh individual circumstances are all built into the framework, even when applied inconsistently or unjustly. None of that architecture exists in immigration enforcement. Nayna described what a one-consequence system produces in practice.

“The only consequence that we offer is one that really does deprive most people of their full livelihood and liberty. And that is a medieval system. It is a one size fits all punishment. And now Americans are seeing what that means when they see their nanny, their restaurant owner, their Uber driver, their favorite neighbor being dragged out of their homes and handcuffed and separated from their families.”

The AIC framework proposes a statute of limitations on immigration consequences tied to old offenses, amendments to provisions that treat low-level violations identically to serious ones, and restored discretion for immigration judges to weigh mitigating circumstances before ordering deportation. The criminal legal system already imposes standard statutes of limitations on prosecution for most offenses. The immigration system has none, which is why we are deporting veterans with marijuana convictions from forty years ago.

Accountability

The accountability section addresses what happens when enforcement agencies operate without meaningful oversight. Accountability failures in immigration enforcement predate this administration, let’s be clear about that. But the current administration has made them worse by dismantling what weak oversight systems existed and encouraging ICE officers to mask up, hide their names, and drag people out of houses. As Shawn VanDiver told me recently, “that’s the kind of thing the Taliban does.”

Nayna named the contradiction at the center of any enforcement system that demands compliance while exempting itself from oversight.

“You can’t expect people to follow the rules of a system if the people enforcing them are breaking the rules. And in order to ensure that doesn’t happen, you can’t have weak systems of accountability, which is what we’ve had long before the Trump administration.”

Under the current administration, enforcement has produced masked agents operating without identifying information, deportations of U.S. citizens and legal residents, and detention deaths under inadequate conditions. The framework treats these as structural failures that require structural solutions.

Language and Framing

The terms compliance, safety, proportionality, and accountability are doing important rhetoric work here. Most immigration policy language functions as a signal that either marks the speaker as aligned with a particular side or triggers alarm in the other direction. These four terms have the potential to open up the possibility of nuance and discussion rather than shut it down. Each of these terms name something that most people, regardless of where they stand on immigration, already expect from a functioning government. That gives the vocabulary a political portability and creativity that is sorely lacking.

To illustrate this, near the end of my conversation with Nayna and Aaron, I flagged my own initial reaction to the word “compliance.” The word can carry a draconian undertone, as though it is an instruction directed at immigrants to comply or face the consequences. But this is not how the framework uses that term. A compliance-oriented system places the demand on the system, not just the person. You cannot require compliance with a standard the system has made impossible to reach. That shifts the policy question from “why didn’t they get legal?” to “did we ever give them a path to legal status?”

I think you’ll find the conversation with Nayna and Aaron informative and even hopeful. In addition to discussing the content of the report, I asked them about their professional backgrounds and what knowledge and skills go into their everyday work. It’s important to pull back the curtain on what it takes to do this work, and most of it is, as Nanya and Aaron both said, lots of reading, lots of attention to detail, and lots of real-world experience with these systems.

My thanks to Nayna Gupta and Aaron Reichlin-Melnick for their time, and to everyone who joined us live.

Five Things You Can Do Right Now

1. Read the framework at whatever depth works for you. The full report is at the American Immigration Council. If you want the four principles summarized on a single page you can share with a colleague, start with the one-page overview. If you want the argument and core proposals without wading into policy detail, the executive summary is the right entry point. If you want to know what specific statutory changes the framework recommends and why, read the full pillar-by-pillar breakdown. You can also watch the video below, which features Ashley DeAzevedo from American Families United.

2. Use the language. If you write, teach, speak, or have any platform where you talk about immigration, start using compliance, safety, proportionality, and accountability as your analytical frame. Test it out in a conversation or a piece of writing and pay attention to the reactions you get. I’d be curious to hear what you find. Leave a comment or reply to this post.

3. Follow Nayna and Aaron online. Aaron (@ReichlinMelnick on X, @reichlinmelnick.bsky.social on Bluesky) follows the legal and legislative mechanics of immigration policy day to day and explains them in terms that don’t require a law degree. Nayna (@nayna_gupta) translates policy changes in real time for practitioners and advocates.

4. Sign up for updates from the American Immigration Council. They publish research, analysis, and policy breakdowns continuously. americanimmigrationcouncil.org.

5. Share this post. If this conversation gave you useful language or a frame for thinking about what enforcement could look like, pass it along.

Help Keep These Conversations Going

There are plenty of places to read reporting on immigration enforcement, but there aren’t many places outside of a university where you can join deep conversations with experts and change-makers working on real solutions for our immigration system. If you find that my work offers valuable and original contributions you can’t find elsewhere, support this work for $7 a month or $70 a year, or gift a subscription to someone you know. Learn more about your options at the link below.

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Adam and I have been working together for a few years now, first as colleagues and eventually as co-founders of Relevant Research alongside Riwaj Chalise. In that time, Adam has introduced me to sports in a way I never really experienced growing up. We’ve been to basketball games and hockey games together where he has helped me to see the culture, data, and strategy underneath all the spectacle. What I’ve learned is that Adam thinks about sports as a set of stories and narratives, ones that data can help tell, and as a window into the social and political worlds that produced them.

Adam’s path to this work ran through teaching in Dallas public schools, a stint at the United Nations Migration Research Division in Geneva, and years of data work on immigration enforcement. That combination of classroom experience, international exposure, and research practice shapes how he thinks about what data is actually for. The impulse behind Relevant Football starts with something he noticed about himself during past tournaments. He described it this way:

“I think more about my international siblings and my international neighbors more during the six weeks of a tournament. Whether that be the Olympics, the Women’s World Cup, the World Baseball Classic, whatever it is, it naturally galvanizes my own attention in a way that makes me want to learn about other places. And I think I’m not the only one that experiences this.”

That observation drove the design of relevant-football.com: a platform that pairs tournament data with country-level information on economics, energy, geography, and demographics for all 48 competing nations, so the curiosity the World Cup naturally produces has somewhere to go.

Visit Relevant Football ⚽

The 2026 Men’s World Cup is unmistakably fraught, though. Last week, a Somali referee named Omar Artan was barred from entry to the United States on vague “vetting concerns,” a story that drew immediate attention because it illustrated the tension between hosting an event built on international participation and operating an immigration enforcement regime that treats foreign nationals as threats by default. Immigrant advocacy organizations have sounded alarms about rights violations ahead of the tournament, and Florida immigrant groups have raised specific concerns about ICE presenceat World Cup venues.

This is not a new pattern for FIFA. The tournament has a documented history of being hosted by governments with poor human rights records: Italy under Mussolini in 1934, Argentina under the Videla junta in 1978, Russia in 2018, Qatar in 2022. Adam pointed out that this 2026 edition follows a similar logic, with the added dimension that FIFA is explicitly trying to tap the U.S. consumer market in a way previous tournaments were not. As ProPublica reported in April, FIFA stands to make billions while host cities see relatively little return. As Adam explained, soccer governance is organized into six FIFA conferences, each run by delegates whose financial interests run toward Zurich rather than local youth soccer programs.

Adam’s argument is that FIFA’s financial architecture and the human experience of the tournament operate on separate tracks. The corruption runs upward, toward Zurich. The connections run sideways, between people. You don’t have to resolve that tension to engage meaningfully with one side of it. He drew on a phrase from soccer podcasters Michael Kaley and Mike Goodman—”football always wins”—that captures both the cost and the value of that dynamic.

“In a few days, all of the discussion about ICE and atrocities, it will probably get tossed out the window. People are going to move on to the game. That’s the sad part. The laudatory side is: despite the best efforts of governments, people are going to party and they’re going to celebrate and they’re going to make connections.”

That laudatory side—people making connections across barriers that governments have tried to construct—is something Adam has seen happen up close. He teaches English to adults, and the 2022 World Cup dropped into his classroom in real time. Morocco went on an extraordinary run that year, the first African and Arab nation to reach a World Cup semifinal, beating Portugal and Spain before falling just short against France. Adam described what happened in his classroom during those weeks:

“We were meeting as a class kind of during that run and she was so excited, and guess what—everybody in the class was so excited for her. And it was such a touching moment.”

The classroom was mostly Spanish speakers, rooting for a Moroccan student they barely knew, because Morocco was beating countries whose soccer histories they understood. What Adam witnessed in that classroom is something the polling data confirms at scale. A recent Pew Research poll found that 54% of immigrants in the United States say they are excited or mostly excited about the World Cup, compared to 23% of U.S.-born Americans. For many immigrants, the countries on the field are the countries their families came from, or that define identities a U.S. passport does not fully capture. Nearly one in four rostered players in the 2026 tournament were born in a different country than the one they represent, a fact that emphasizes the connective and collaborative potential of international sports.

Relevant Football was designed to make this connection visible. Adam describes what the comparison tool at the heart of the site is actually trying to do:

“We wanted to show that we’re all kind of facing some similar challenges, like inequality across the world is an issue, both internationally and domestically within each country, like deforestation, environmental issues, energy transition to renewable energy. These are common things that we all are grappling with. Honestly, it’s an international community.”

Adam also shared something more personal about why he wanted to build this. He and the Relevant Research team spend most of their time working with difficult data: detention reports, the pregnancy detention tracker, ICE enforcement dashboards. He was direct about it:

“We work with a lot of grim statistics. I needed, for my mental health, to work on something else. That was a personal mental health motivation.”

Anyone who works with enforcement data understands what Adam is describing. The work is exhausting, and building an outlet for it is something most researchers in this space think about. Years spent close to that data leave a mark on the people who work with it. Building something with genuine joy in it is how researchers like Adam sustain the capacity to stay close to the harder work over the long term.

The conversation closed with a commitment I think is worth keeping in view over the next six weeks. Adam said:

“I can’t control the actions of my government at all times, but at least I can control my disposition to others. No matter what I decide, I want to have a disposition of welcome to the people I interact with who are different than me, especially those who have traveled a long way to get to these games.”

That’s a commitment I share. Whatever else is true about this tournament and this political moment, the World Cup is going to bring fans, players, journalists, and families here from a long way away. The politics surrounding the event will not be resolved in the next six weeks, but how we show up as hosts is something we can decide right now. Extending genuine welcome to people who’ve traveled to be here, treating their presence as an expression of love for the sport and for the countries they represent, is one part of that. Turning that same spirit toward each other is the other part. Being a good host applies to how we treat our visitors and to how we treat the people already around us. I hope this conversation points in that direction.

The full recording is above. Check out relevant-football.com and reach out to Adam at adam@relevant-research.com with comments, feedback, or just shared fan enthusiasm. The team that built Relevant Football includes Riwaj Chalise, Nush Ojha, Bishal Timsina, Rashmi Singh, Sandesh Nilas Khatiwada, and Manashwee Kafley.

Thank you , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with !

Follow Adam Online

• Adam’s website and blog: adamjsawyer.com

• Adam on Bluesky: @adamjst.bsky.social

• Adam on Substack: .

• Detention Reports

• Relevant Football

• Relevant Research

At a time when so much news is bad news, and so much of our national and geopolitical story is about antagonism and division, we believe that the World Cup offers an opportunity for positive stories rooted in peaceful but passionate competition that connect us to our shared global humanity. And we believe data can play a role in achieving this ambitious vision. The Relevant Football platform provides all of the information you need about the World Cup, including historical data about team performance, information about the stadiums and players, and updated information about the results of matches during the tournament. But the site also includes detailed information about the participating countries so you can learn more about topics such as geography, economics, land cover, and energy. We think Relevant Football is a unique tool that you’ll enjoy using and returning to over the next several weeks.

Before we share more about the platform, we want to start by explaining why we built this in the first place. Adam and I are two of the three cofounders of Relevant Research, where the team spends nearly all of their time on immigration data and related development projects. Among our core values is the belief in the advancement of public understanding through the creative application of data science, which is why we produce projects such as Detention Reports, the Detention Pregnancy Tracker, and the “Collateral Damage” report on mixed-status couples. Relevant Football is our first project that incorporates our values and capabilities into a project that is more hopeful and playful than our usual focus on the dire data associated with immigration enforcement. Among the two of us, Adam—the project’s visionary—is the devout sports fan and I enthusiastically tag along to basketball games and hockey games when given the opportunity, eager to learn more about the cultural and regulatory norms of sports like a visitor to a foreign country. In the process, I have learned much about the way that sports provides a unique opportunity for narrative that, for good reason, captures the attention of so many people across the globe—including many immigrants here in the United States. A recent Pew poll found that about a quarter (23%) of all U.S. born people say they will watch the World Cup, but for immigrants, that number is twice as high at 54%.

We admit that the World Cup is certainly fraught. In the minds of many football fans, FIFA’s association with corruption, greed, and backroom politics taints the simplicity and purity of sport and undermines the optimistic spirit of the event. Like the Olympic Games, the World Cup has a long history of cozying up to authoritarian leaders when there’s a profit to be made. The World Cup was controversially hosted by Italy during Mussolini’s reign in 1934, Argentina during the fascist Videla junta in 1978, and, more recently, by Russia in 2018 and Qatar in 2022—both criticized for corruption and human rights violations. For those who know this history, hosting the World Cup in the United States under the Trump administration fits in neatly as just the most recent iteration of FIFA’s preferential option for the despotic. Trump’s promise of a heavy immigration enforcement presence at and near the stadiums introduces needless threats and intimidation and has soured enthusiasm. But even in this, the diversity and commitment of the community is evident in grassroots efforts to provide know-your-rights trainings, legal observers, and on-site support to people in and around the stadiums.

The organizations behind the World Cup may be imperfect and the United States may be an imperfect host—but precisely for these reasons, maybe this is the timeliest edition of the tournament in its history. The World Cup only happens once every four years; so in this way, it is something special, something that fans the world over look forward to. For some fans (like Austin), it might be the only time they watch football with any regularity, making it a great ambassador for the sport.

But it does something more. At a time of deep geopolitical antagonisms, the World Cup is one of the few opportunities we have to remember that people are not their governments, and the cruelty that governments do in the name of their people stands in sharp contrast to the goodness of their people. The demographics of the athletes themselves testify to the international integration of the sport. Nearly one in four of all rostered players in the 2026 World Cup were born in a different country than they represent. Despite attempts to politicize sports (see my colleague Natalie Koch’s work on the geopolitics of sports), the athletes on the field represent their country, but they do not necessarily represent their government. Instead, the World Cup is a celebration of the athleticism of the athletes, the camaraderie of fans who show up to support the teams, an opportunity to witness (hopefully) peaceful competition between players—and for this project, an opportunity to work with numbers that aren’t all negative. It is a chance to learn more about countries participating in the tournament.

On a recent video call, Adam presented the Relevant Football project to a group of colleagues in the immigration policy and advocacy world as an example of how we are using our team’s capabilities to tell uplifting stories using data, bring people together, and raise global awareness. One of the participants said that they appreciated the addition of “joy” to the conversation—and that’s exactly what we are trying to do. Data is often mischaracterized as “abstract,” in contrast to lived experience. But for Adam, me, and the rest of the team, nothing could be further from the truth. We are in this work because of our years of ongoing, relational, on-the-ground experience that helped us to understand how to make sense of data and leverage data in a way that has a real-world impact. As many of you know, that work can be draining and, given the moment we are living through, it can become difficult to remember the beautiful, positive side of immigration that helps us work together toward a better future on our shared planet. As Jerry Brewer wrote for The Athletic earlier today in an article titled Who, exactly, is this World Cup for?, “The World Cup’s enduring value isn’t just that it brings elite football to a country. It briefly opens the world.”

So how does Relevant Football attempt to bring people around the tournament and “open the world?”

The Relevant Football platform is built around 48 country profiles, one for each nation competing in the 2026 tournament. Each profile brings together data from leading international organizations, including the United Nations, the World Bank, the IMF, and FIFA, to offer a picture of each country that goes well beyond the football pitch. Visitors can explore population and demographic data, geographic characteristics, energy transitions, forest cover and environmental indicators, and economic data including GDP per capita and purchasing power parity. The goal is to give fans a reason to learn something real about the countries they are cheering for, or cheering against. The site looks as good—maybe better—on mobile, so you always have it with you.

The platform also includes dedicated pages for tournament standings, fixtures, and the knockout bracket, as well as profiles for every 2026 venue with location, capacity, and host country. One of the site’s more distinctive features is a comparison tool that lets users place any two of the 48 competing nations side by side across economic, environmental, and football statistics, even if those two countries never meet on the field. For football-specific data, the site includes FIFA rankings, ELO ratings, squad-level statistics, and each country’s full World Cup history.

The site will be actively maintained and updated throughout the tournament. To submit feedback or flag a correction, you can reach Adam Sawyer at adam@relevant-research.com. Adam originally soft-launched the site last week to get feedback, another great reason to follow him on Bluesky below.

We invite you to join us tomorrow (Tuesday, June 9) at 2:00 PM on Substack Live for a conversation about the World Cup, the Relevant Football project, and the importance of injecting joy and cultural understanding into our work.

JOIN SUBSTACK LIVE HERE W/ ADAM SAWYER

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ICE’s press release does not say much about what happened to Mamuka. He was reportedly found “unresponsive” by detention facility staff, who administered emergency medical care and transported him to a nearby medical facility. He died less than an hour after he was initially found. As reporting from the San Francisco Chronicle and CNN has found, this version of events is far from complete and does not take into account the litany of ways that DHS’s systematic indifference towards immigrants’ lives in detention mirrors the president’s and his proxies’ dehumanizing language and translates into understaffing and negligence at facilities across the country. As I’ve written about before, this administration’s abdication of moral responsibility extends not only to immigrants, but to citizens, as well, and exacerbates a longer history of politicians in the US and around the world treating immigrant lives as expendable.

Edit on June 7, 2026 at 10:11 PM. I forgot to include one of the most important pieces of new information related to this tragedy. A DHS Inspector General’s report published last week based on an unannounced visit to Winn Correctional found many issues with the facility, from unsafe conditions, unsanitary food storage, lack of required documentation regarding use-of-force, and other concerns. We don’t know for sure if there was a direct causal relationship between this observed issues and the recent death, but these findings do reflect the growing mountain of evidence that ICE and its contractors seem unable to follow the rules despite billions upon billions of dollars from Congress.

Who was Mamuka and why was he in ICE custody in the first place?

Using publicly available data through the Deportation Data Project, we learn several things that are essential to how we understand the real-life consequences of anti-immigrant propaganda and how we conceptualize the preventability of this latest death.

Not only does ICE not allege any criminal history in the press release, ICE doesn’t actually allege any immigration violations. ICE typically includes a paragraph or more of immigration and criminal history in their death announcements. In this press release, Mamuka is described as having been paroled into the United States in September 2022, then taken into custody by ICE in February 2026 after he was found to have “no lawful status to remain in the United States.” It’s not unlawful to be paroled into the country and, as we’ve seen time and again under this administration, “not having a lawful status to remain” has been used to detain an enormous number of people who have, in fact, never broken the law. This could include people who are currently actively pursuing humanitarian protection, including through the asylum process, or people who have temporary protections that have been terminated on a case-by-case basis without any apparent justification other than to crank up deportation numbers. Simply not having lawful status to remain—i.e., not positively having an immigrant or non-immigrant status—is not the same as having broken any laws, criminal or civil. Just ask Mahmoud Khalil. This is one of the most convoluted and contested aspects of immigration law.

Most people in detention centers like Delaney Hall have no criminal history, but Mamuka’s case paints an even starker contrast between rhetoric and reality as someone who would, under normal circumstances, never be detained at taxpayer expense in ICE custody. ICE’s own data confirms that he has no criminal history—but there’s more. Using the new field on “apprehension type” (see my previous explanation) we can see that Mamuka was actually never the target of an ICE arrest in the first place; he is listed as being arrested through the controversial “collateral arrest” method that basically means snatching up anyone who happens to be in the vicinity of a targeted arrest. Thomas Homan has said many times that he doesn’t care whether someone is a collateral arrest or not, but this more expansive view of ICE’s arrest powers raises questions for legal scholars who doubt the legality of many of these arrests. And besides, Americans who are increasingly frustrated with the deportation-mania of this administration are likely to find collateral arrests even less legitimate than targeted arrests.1

Mamuka spent 119 days in detention, about four months, but under normal circumstances, he should have been released. He was arrested on February 5 in Alabama, where he was detained for five days, then moved to Winn where he spent another 114 days before dying in custody. Unless something changed between the middle of March and early June, he did not have a final removal order so ICE couldn’t move him—instead, Mamuka had a case pending before an immigration judge this entire time, and may have still been waiting on a final hearing when he passed. He was classified as the lowest risk level in detention, he had no mandatory detention flag, he was not a known terrorist or a suspected gang member (problematic as those categories are), and he never had a prior detainer, so it’s unlikely that he ever had a run-in with police. All of these factors, combined with the nature of his arrest, support a straightforward conclusion that he should not have been in detention in the first place. Using the national ICE detention average daily rate of $150, the US taxpayer spent $17,850 detaining this single person without any evidence that it served the interests of public safety or national security.

Mamuka Detained Under “ICE Wall” Enforcement Program of Dubious Value

So how was Mamuka arrested in the first place? His arrest took place under an ICE operation called ICE Wall FY26, a joint operation between ICE and state law enforcement agencies across the US South and Midwest to target truck drivers. Mamuka’s press release refers to this when it includes the language “during an operation targeting commercial vehicle drivers who posed public safety risks.” ICE’s complete lack of evidence that Mamuka represented such a “public safety risk” betrays the political and nativist motivation behind this enforcement program that can be traced back to President Trump’s April 2025 executive order titled “Enforcing Commonsense Rules of the Road for America’s Truck Drivers.” Naturally, I believe in keeping our roadways safe. But as is so common, using the category of “immigrant” as a proxy for “dangerous” is a way of overlooking statistically serious risks and concentrating limited resources on ethnic and racial minorities.

The enforcement data shows how indiscriminate the dragnet is. Of the more than 1,350 arrests tagged to “ICE Wall”, roughly seven in ten were of people with no criminal record, the same classification ICE gave Mamuka. Here’s my understanding of how it works. As Clark Kauffman is doing a great job of reporting, state troopers deputized under ICE’s 287(g) program stop trucks that bypass a weigh station and route the drivers to federal officers waiting on site, a process that picks up whoever is behind the wheel. The nationalities swept up bear this out, with Indian, Uzbek, and Russian drivers near the top and Georgians like Mamuka also well represented, a profile that tracks the immigrant long-haul workforce. Those arrests are now drawing federal lawsuits from work-authorized drivers and asylum seekers who say they were detained without due process.

Q. Is ICE Hiding Detention Deaths? A. It Certainly Wants To.

I know many people have expressed concerns that the lack of announcements of ICE deaths means that the agency is hiding deaths rather than reporting. I find that generally unlikely, simply because most detained deaths at this point leak to the public through family and media before they make it into official record. But that’s not to say that ICE is committed to transparency. The same day Mamuka died, acting ICE director David Venturella signed an internal memo ending the agency’s requirement to report and review deaths that occur within 30 days of a person’s release from custody, a safeguard the Biden administration created in 2021 precisely so ICE could not dodge accountability by discharging critically ill detainees just before they died.

DHS confirmed the change and called it “common sense,” insisting the agency is “not responsible when an individual passes away weeks after leaving their custody.” It made that claim only days after announcing that no one had died in ICE custody in May, the first death-free month since November, without mentioning that it was at that very moment narrowing what counts as a reportable death. Dr. Sanjay Basu, an epidemiologist who has reviewed more than 270 ICE deaths, told the Associated Press the policy will “make the mortality statistics appear lower without any actual improvement in care,” because the weeks right after release are when neglected conditions, missed diagnoses, and interrupted medications finally take a life. Mamuka died inside custody, so for now he is still counted—but others might not get counted or investigated. (For more on this issue, read my previous post: Beyond the Official ICE Detention Death Count.)

List of ICE Detained Deaths in 2026

I compiled a list of all ICE custodial deaths from 2026 below with links to ICE announcements. (See Wikipedia list, too.)

1. January 3, 2026. Geraldo Lunas Campos. Camp East Montana TX. Nationality: Cuba. Age: 55. ICE announcement.

2. January 5, 2026. Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres. Joe Corley Processing Center TX. Nationality: Honduras. Age: 42. ICE announcement.

3. January 6, 2026. Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz. Imperial Regional Detention Facility CA. Nationality: Honduras. Age: 68. ICE announcement.

4. January 9, 2026. Parady La. Federal Detention Center Philadelphia PA. Nationality: Cambodia. Age: 46. ICE announcement.

5. January 14, 2026. Heber Sanchaz Domínguez. Robert A. Deyton Detention Center GA. Nationality: Mexico. Age: 34. ICE announcement.

6. January 14, 2026. Victor Manuel Diaz. Camp East Montana TX. Nationality: Nicaragua. Age: 36. ICE announcement.

7. February 16, 2026. Lorth Sim. Miami Correctional Facility IN. Nationality: Cambodia. Age: 59. ICE announcement.

8. February 16, 2026. Jairo Garcia-Hernandez. Larkin Community Hospital Behavioral Health Center FL. Nationality: Guatemala. Age: 27. ICE announcement.

9. February 27, 2026. Alberto Gutierrez-Reyes. Adelanto ICE Processing Center CA. Nationality: Mexico. Age: 48. ICE announcement.

10. March 1, 2026. Pejman Karshenas Najafabadi. Merit Health Hospital Natchez MS. Nationality: Iran. Age: 59. ICE announcement.

11. March 3, 2026. Emmanuel Damas. Florence Correctional Center AZ. Nationality: Haiti. Age: 56. ICE announcement.

12. March 14, 2026. Mohammad Nazeer Paktiawal. Parkland Hospital Dallas TX. Nationality: Afghanistan. Age: 41. ICE announcement.

13. March 16, 2026. Royer Perez-Jimenez. Glades County Detention Center FL. Nationality: Mexico. Age: 19. ICE announcement.

14. March 27, 2026. Jose Guadalupe Ramos-Solano. Adelanto ICE Processing Center CA. Nationality: Mexico. Age: unk. ICE announcement.

15. April 1, 2026. Tuan Van Bui. Miami Correctional Center IN. Nationality: Vietnam. Age: 55. ICE announcement.

16. April 11, 2026. Alejandro Cabrera Clemente. Winn Correctional Center LA. Nationality: Mexico. Age: 49. ICE announcement.

17. April 12, 2026. Aled Damien Carbonell-Betancourt. Federal Detention Center Miami FL. Nationality: Cuba. Age: 27. ICE announcement.

18. April 28, 2026. Denny Adan Gonzalez. Stewart Detention Center GA. Nationality: Cuba. Age: 33. ICE announcement.

19. June 4, 2026. Mamuka Artmeladze. Winn Correctional Center LA. Nationality: Georgia. Age: 43. ICE announcement.

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591

The number of people held at Delaney Hall this week, down from 891 in early April, despite federal claims it holds 'the worst of the worst.'

Internal ICE documents obtained by The New York Times show that 591 people were held this week at Delaney Hall, the GEO Group-run center in Newark, down from 891 in early April. Of those 591, only 76, about 13 percent, have criminal convictions, and 123, about 21 percent, have pending charges. That undercuts the claim by federal officials that ICE is pulling ‘the worst of the worst’ off New Jersey’s streets. The April records told the same story, when one of 891 detainees was rated a high security risk and roughly 90 percent carried no ICE threat level at all. My own analysis of earlier detention data found the same pattern. Of the 99 detainees then held with convictions, none had been found guilty of homicide, sexual assault, or drug trafficking, and about 70 percent of those convictions were misdemeanors. ICE stopped publishing its regular detention figures in early April, so the public sees these numbers only because the NYT was able to report on them.

• Shanahan, E., & Aleaziz, H. (2026, June 6). ICE Says Detainees Are ‘Worst of the Worst.’ Government Data Disagrees.. The New York Times.

A bit more on this number… The New York Times article above heavily references my recent deep-dive into the Deportation Data Project’s data on Delaney Hall from last week. Huge ‘thank you’ to Ed Shanahan and Hamed Aleaziz for ensuring that these facts get a wider audience. With the right analysis, public data like this can provide important context for contentious battles between civil society and this administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement efforts. The Trump administration misrepresented its enforcement efforts as targeting the worst of the worst and smeared people inside Delaney Hall as “murderers, rapists, and pedophiles.” The data does not back this up. When the New York Times confronted the Trump administration with these facts, they didn’t even try to substantiate their propaganda. The NYT article ends with these two paragraphs:

"Asked this week for current data on the detainees and their criminal records, the Department of Homeland Security responded with a statement that did not include the requested information.

“It is a crime to enter the United States illegally,” the statement said. “Everyone being held inside Delaney Hall broke the law. If you come to our country illegally, we will find you and arrest you.”

Yes, the government has broad legal authority to deport people who violate immigration law, and I have said so repeatedly. That authority is not in dispute. What is in dispute is the decision to cast people with minor offenses, or no convictions at all, as the "murderers, rapists, and pedophiles" officials claimed to be removing, and to keep saying it after the government's own records show otherwise. When the data contradicts the talking points, officials retreat to the bare fact that a law was broken, because it is the only claim they have left. Whether the government should be deporting people for minor civil violations in the first place is a separate question, and one I'll take up next week with Nayna Gupta and Aaron Reichlin-Melnick. Register today to join that conversation.

$15,000

The visa bond the Trump administration will require from some World Cup visitors as a condition of entry.

The administration announced a visa bond of up to $15,000 for World Cup visitors from countries outside the Visa Waiver Program and outside the full travel bans, waived only for those who secured tickets or travel plans before April 15, according to Migration Policy Institute analyst Ariel Ruiz Soto. A visa bond is a refundable deposit the government holds to ensure a visitor leaves when their authorized stay ends, so the mechanism itself is not new, but the amount and the World Cup framing are. For a fan from one of the affected countries, a $15,000 deposit works as a wealth test layered on top of the ordinary visa process, and most people who would otherwise travel to a match cannot float that amount of money. Layered on top of the travel bans already in effect for dozens of countries, the bond sorts would-be visitors by passport and by bank balance, which undermines the point of hosting such a global event.

• Ozturk, S. (2026, June 3). ‘Not a World Cup for the World’: Rights Advocates Sound Alarm Ahead of Tournament. American Community Media.

2

The number of times a pregnant Ghanaian woman was hospitalized for pregnancy complications while detained at Dulles Airport, then returned each time to a windowless room.

Annabella Gyasi, who is 38 and pregnant, was held with her four-year-old son for more than a week in a windowless room with a single bed and a toilet at Washington Dulles International Airport, according to her lawyers and reporting on her case. She was hospitalized twice for pregnancy complications, including vaginal bleeding and high blood pressure, and was returned to the detention room after each visit. Gyasi had arrived on a tourist visa for her son’s medical appointment at a children’s hospital, then told officers she feared returning to Ghana, which moved her into expedited removal. The ACLU filed a habeas petition arguing that longstanding policy requires the release of at-risk people such as pregnant women and children, and a federal judge ordered that she be allowed to return home. Federal guidance already directs that pregnant women generally not be detained, so this case turns less on what the rules say than on whether anyone is enforcing them.

• Associated Press. (2026, May). Ghanaian mother and child detained at airport for days after seeking asylum. The Associated Press.

100

The number of deportation cases some immigration courts are now scheduling for a single master calendar hearing, up from the usual 10 to 15.

Immigration attorneys told ABC News that some courts are scheduling 100 or more cases for a single master calendar hearing, the initial appearance where people in deportation proceedings are informed of the charges against them and their rights. Attorneys, who have started calling these sessions “mega masters,” said a typical master calendar hearing involves 10 people, sometimes 15, and that the much larger dockets are appearing with little advance notice. One attorney said a court clerk described a nationwide directive to move up master calendar hearings scheduled for July or later. The master calendar hearing is where people first learn whether they have a viable claim and whether they can find a lawyer, so compressing a hundred of them into one session shortens the window in which due process actually happens. The acceleration is procedural rather than legal, which is part of why it draws less attention than a new rule would, even as it changes how quickly cases move toward removal.

• ABC News. (2026, May 29). Immigration attorneys say some courts are holding over 100 case hearings daily. ABC News.

52-47

The margin by which the Senate passed a roughly $70 billion package to fund ICE and Border Patrol through the end of the Trump administration.

The Senate approved about $70 billion in new funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol in a 52-47 vote on Friday, after a roughly 19-hour “vote-a-rama” of unlimited amendments. The package directs $38.6 billion to ICE, $26 billion to CBP, and another $5 billion to DHS for immigration enforcement at its discretion, with the money available to spend immediately on signing through fiscal year 2029. Republicans moved the bill through budget reconciliation, which let them bypass the 60-vote threshold and pass with a simple majority and no Democratic votes. Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska was the only Republican to vote against it, saying she supports funding the agencies but objects to locking in multiyear mandatory spending that sidesteps the annual appropriations process. The bill now goes to the House.

• Hubbard, K. (2026, June 5). Senate passes bill to fund ICE for 3 years, without ban on DOJ “anti-weaponization” fund. CBS News.

10

The number of people who have died by suicide in ICE detention since January 2025.

At least 10 people have died by suicide in ICE custody since January 2025, against an agency history in which ICE typically recorded one suicide or none in a given year across its 23-year existence. The figure sits inside a larger rise in detention deaths. CNN reported in May that nearly 50 people have died in ICE custody since Trump returned to office, with 2025 the deadliest year for in-custody deaths in at least two decades and 2026 on pace to be worse. Researchers who study confinement link suicide risk to the length of detention, uncertainty about case outcomes, and access to mental health care, all of which have moved in the wrong direction as the detained population has grown and bond hearings have narrowed. A spike of this size, in a system that for two decades rarely recorded any suicides at all, is the kind of signal that reflects actual conditions rather than mere coincidence.

• Lartey, J. (2026, May 30). Bad Food. Poor Care. No Toilets. ICE Detention Misery Pushes Immigrants to ‘Voluntarily’ Depart. The Marshall Project, citing Associated Press reporting.

33

The number of states where ICE detainees allege in federal court that they were denied adequate medical care.

Detainees in at least 33 states allege in federal suits that immigration detention facilities failed to provide adequate medical care. The reporters, who analyzed roughly 33,000 cases filed by detainees between January 20, 2025 and March 2026, identified about 500 that potentially alleged medical neglect, and found more than 300 containing specific sworn allegations of delayed, denied, or deficient care. Detainees described not receiving medications for conditions including high blood pressure, diabetes, epilepsy, Parkinson’s, and HIV, along with cases of untreated cancer and serious infections. Because these allegations come from court filings rather than from any government tracking system, the count reflects what detainees and their lawyers have been able to document through litigation, which makes it a measure of legal activity as much as of underlying conditions.

• KFF Health News and The Associated Press. (2026, May). Festering Infections to Untreated Cancer: ICE Detainees Describe Medical Neglect Across US. KFF Health News.

1,570

The number of iris scanners ICE purchased in May for $25 million, part of a broader expansion of biometric surveillance.

ICE awarded $25 million to BI2 Technologies for 1,570 iris scanners, adding to the 200 the agency purchased in September 2025, according to Project Salt Box. Iris scanning captures the unique pattern of a person’s eye and stores it as a biometric identifier, which expands the government’s capacity to identify and track people through their bodies rather than through documents they carry. The scanners are one piece of a wider build-out. In the same month, USCIS directed roughly half its spending, about $116 million, to a single contractor to continue collecting applicants’ biometric and biographical data. Surveillance infrastructure tends to outlast the administration that builds it, and identity-capture systems acquired for immigration enforcement rarely stay confined to immigration enforcement.

• Knepp, E. (2026, June 3). Follow the Money - May 2026: After April Lull, DHS Spending Surges in May. .

Project Salt Box

Follow the Money - May 2026: After April Lull, DHS Spending Surges in May

Bottom Line Up Front…

Read more

17 days ago · 57 likes · 5 comments · Em Knepp

1st

The first California county to force a private immigrant detention center to open its doors to a local health inspection, after a federal judge ordered access this week.

A federal judge ordered the Otay Mesa Detention Center, a 1,400-bed facility run by CoreCivic near San Diego, to admit San Diego County health inspectors and to complete the inspection no later than June 17. San Diego County sued the Department of Homeland Security in March after two county supervisors and a county health inspector were denied full access to the facility. The county is the first in California to test an inspection authority that a 2024 state law created, which lets local public health officials examine privately run immigrant detention centers. The stakes reach beyond one facility. Otay Mesa is one of eight private detention centers in California now holding around 5,300 people, up from roughly 3,100 when the current crackdown began, and the ruling gives other counties a template for asserting the same oversight. State and local inspection power is one of the few accountability levers that does not depend on the federal government policing itself.

• The San Diego Union-Tribune. (2026, June 3). San Diego judge orders DHS to allow county inspection of Otay Mesa immigrant detention center. The San Diego Union-Tribune.

To learn more about what Congressman is doing to ensure accountability at the Otay Mesa facility, listen to my recent interview with him below.

Send me your data points and data tips!

If you have new research, data, or findings related to immigration enforcement and detention that you’d like to see featured here, please reach out. I’m particularly interested right now in ICE detention numbers specifically. Official data releases have become an unreliable guide to what’s actually happening, and if you work in this space and have information you’re able to share, whether on the record or in confidence, I’d welcome the conversation.

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That’s why, when the American Immigration Council (AIC) released a new report titled Restoring Credibility and Humanity: A New Framework for Immigration Enforcement, I was really interested. A lot of organizations are releasing immigration reform frameworks these days; this isn’t the only one. But it is the only one so far that focuses squarely on interior enforcement, which is what most of my research has focused on over the years.

I want to emphasize why this framework is so distinctive. The term “interior immigration enforcement” is code for enforcement by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in places away from the U.S.-Mexico border, where Border Patrol typically has jurisdiction. As Reece Jones has written, the geographic distinction between ICE and Border Patrol is not strict, which is why Border Patrol officers have been active on the ground during protests in Portland, Oregon, and during ICE enforcement sweeps in Minneapolis, Minnesota. But the distinction between interior and border enforcement still generally holds, and it holds for an important analytical reason: people arrested through interior enforcement differ in significant ways from people arrested through border enforcement. Interior arrests tend to impact people who have been in the United States much longer, often decades, are more likely to be well-established in the community through long-standing employment and deeper local social ties, and are more likely to be married to U.S. citizens or have U.S. citizen children. Although immigration law itself is notoriously inflexible on even the most trivial matters, these demographic factors shape public perception about the legitimacy of deportation as a solution to minor civil infractions. In short, even many militant advocates of border enforcement hesitate at the prospect of deporting someone who has lived here for 30 years, has a U.S. citizen spouse and children, works in the local economy, and poses no public safety threat. Reforming the interior enforcement system truly is its own beast, not disconnected from the rest of the immigration system, of course, but a topic worth grappling with on its own terms.

This report also emerges at a time when public confidence in interior immigration enforcement has collapsed, and for good reason. The past year has been defined by a cascade of images, stories, and data points make it clear that mass enforcement operations, unconstrained by proportionality or accountability, do not make communities safer and go against the basic values of a growing number of Americans. It’s not just liberals that are concerned; the president’s manic hyper-focus on deportations is costing him Republican support, too. The current barrage of chaotic arrests destabilize families, erode trust between immigrant communities and local institutions, and consume enormous resources without making America safer or more prosperous.

For all these reasons, I reached out to the two people who worked on the report, Nayna Gupta and Aaron Reichlin-Melnick from the American Immigration Council, and asked them to join me for a public virtual discussion about how they developed this framework, what it would mean in practice, and how the framework has been received so far. No one—certainly no one I’ve ever talked to in the policy world—thinks that any single proposal is perfect or that any single reform will be sufficient to solve the range of problems endemic to our immigration system. And whatever proposals have existed in the past are almost certainly out of step with where we are now. So as the first proposal to focus squarely on a topic area I'm deeply invested in understanding, this conversation is important to me, and it's something I think you should care about too.

Nanya and Aaron generously agreed to talk with us about their work next Tuesday, June 9, at 1:00 PM Eastern. We’ll talk about the essential building blocks of the report as well as behind-the-scenes question, including:

• what drove the collapse of public confidence in the current enforcement model and why that matters for any path forward

• what “proportionality” and “accountability” actually mean as enforcement principles

• how the framework addresses the intersection of criminal justice and immigration enforcement, one of the most contested and consequential areas of interior policy

• what policymakers, advocates, and local governments can realistically do with a framework like this, and what it would take to implement it

• what the data reveals about who interior enforcement is actually targeting and whether that matches the stated priorities

As always, this will be a substantive conversation. Whether you’re a researcher, journalist, attorney, organizer, or policymaker trying to think seriously about what comes next, you’re welcome to join us and bring your questions.

Event Details

• Date: June 9, 2026

• Time: 1 PM Eastern

• Format: Virtual (Zoom)

• Registration: Free and open to the public

• Recording: The event will be recorded and shared as a podcast post here on Substack.

Registration is free and required.

REGISTER TODAY!

About Our Guests

Nayna Gupta is Policy Director at the American Immigration Council, where she leads the Council’s legislative, administrative, and policy advocacy portfolio. Her work focuses on immigration enforcement, detention, and the intersection of criminal and immigration law, which puts her at the table where reforms like the ones in this framework get developed and argued.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick is a Senior Fellow at the American Immigration Council, where he studies the impact of immigration enforcement at the border and inside the United States. He tracks enforcement statistics, court rulings, and agency actions closely, and reporters and researchers across the field rely on his analysis of how the current administration has used, and in many cases stretched, its legal authority. You can follow his prolific work on Bluesky and X.

Leave If You Can provides the on-the-ground research needed to contextualize what reporters are finding at reception centers in Honduras right now. Caitlin Dickerson reported last month in The Atlantic that parents are arriving in detainee sweatsuits asking aid workers whether they lose their parental rights when they are deported. Research by Zain Lakhani at the Women’s Refugee Commission, which we covered earlier this year, finds that under the current administration, 800 mothers have been detained and 60 percent deported, nearly double the rate under Biden. My conversation with Amelia offers insights from a decade of research that connects the conditions producing displacement in Honduras to the enforcement cycles that perpetuate it.

Amelia’s central argument also reinforces broader patterns that researchers and journalists are documenting across the region. A new analysis from the Migration Policy Institute shows that the recent drop in border crossings does not mean people have stopped moving but that movement has become more fragmented, less linear, and more coercively shaped. A Human Rights Watch report released last month, covered by the Associated Press, documents that the Trump administration has deported nearly 13,000 Cubans and Venezuelans to Mexico, where they face cartel violence in a country unfamiliar to them. My conversation with Amelia offers the long-term research perspective needed to understand why deportation consistently reproduces the conditions for further displacement.

Amelia’s fieldwork challenges the assumption that deportation always registers as a unique rupture, though she is careful to note that this is not a universal finding. In some communities and at earlier moments in Honduras’s history, deportation carried heavy stigma, marking people as criminal or out of step with their society. What she found instead in the urban margins of Honduras, and at this particular moment, is that deportation had become so common that it no longer carried that weight, a shift she describes not as evidence of resilience but as evidence of how thoroughly violence had saturated everyday life.

“I am not saying that [deportation] is not violent. I’m saying that [deportation] is, in fact, quite violent, and violent in its ordinariness. That is. These guys are living with a whole suite of violences around them that are terribly, awfully, horribly ordinary. And deportation is one of them, but it is not a break. It is not a singular event in a life of otherwise stability. It is violent in a way that is familiar. And it is an extension of kinds of violences that they are already always navigating.”

Her reframing of caravans is equally precise, and particularly useful given how thoroughly Trump’s 2018 use of caravans as a political weapon distorted public understanding of what they actually are. What had been a tactical response to hostile terrain used by migrants, activists, and researchers since at least 2011 became, in the hands of the midterm news cycle, evidence of an invasion and a coordinated political movement. Amelia’s reframing offers something the 2018 media coverage rarely provided. She gives a structural explanation for a phenomenon that was treated almost entirely as a symbol.

“The caravan isn’t a thing. It’s a tactic that people employ at certain moments. It’s people coming together who, for the most part, are already in the process of migrating themselves. And I think what the caravan does for us, it is a really visible tip of the iceberg. It’s really legible, it’s easy to access. The idea of it rests on the fact that people are going to pay attention, that journalists and researchers are going to show up and film it and take photos and tell stories about it. But it is just a small, small piece of what is always happening in the margins, in the shadows, far from you, turning the protection that invisibility often is thought to have on its head, instead going for hypervisibility as the way to get across really hostile terrain safely.”

The argument that anchors the entire book is her insistence that migration itself is not what policymakers should be trying to solve. As a geographer who studies borders and enforcement, I think about this in terms of what our data is actually measuring. The detention numbers, court backlogs, and deportation flight counts all measure the enforcement response to human movement. The data tell us what the state is doing, but the data doesn’t tell us about the underlying conditions that produce migration in the first place, which are the things that actually need addressing.

“Migration isn’t a problem to be solved. Migration isn’t a problem. Migration is just a thing that people do when things at home get hard. It’s the thing that all people have done, our whole history of existing on this planet. There are other problems that produce more or less migration. There are policies that make migration deadly and clandestine, but migration itself is not the problem to be solved.”

Amelia brings years of fieldwork and a genuine commitment to getting the details right, and she is, as you can probably tell from this conversation, generous with her knowledge and her time. The book reflects both qualities. I recommend it to anyone who wants to understand what is actually happening in Central America and why U.S. deportation policy keeps reproducing the conditions it claims to address. My thanks to Amelia, and to everyone who joined us live and who is reading now.

Four Things You Can Do Right Now

• Get the book. You can get a copy of Amelia’s book from the University of California Press or on Amazon. Research shows that reading an actual book is approximately one bajillion times better than doomscrolling on socials.

• Leave a review. Your original take on the book is key to driving public conversation. Leaving a review on Goodreads or other book sites and on social media is a small way to have a big impact.

• Invite Amelia to speak. Amelia is available to speak to classes, reading groups, or community organizations who want to engage on this timely topic. Reach out to her through her faculty page.

• Share this post. Combat misinformation and raise the quality of public discussion by sharing this post online and offline. You can also leave a comment below about what you liked—or didn’t like—about this conversation.

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Recommend a Book Talk

If you have a new book coming out on immigration, borders, enforcement, asylum, Central America, crimmigration, or adjacent topics in criminal justice, labor, housing, or public health, I’d love to hear from you. Authors, publicists, and readers recommending someone else’s work are all welcome to reach out. These conversations draw between 100 and 250 registrations and attract a high-quality audience of reporters, academics, policy makers, NGO staffers, lawyers, and current and former government employees who come ready to engage seriously with the work. DM me and tell me about the book and when it’s coming out.

Join My Next Virtual Discussion

Next Tuesday, June 9 at 1:00 PM Eastern, I will be talking with Aaron Reichlin-Melnick and Nayna Gupta from the American Immigration Council about their new report: “Restoring Credibility and Humanity: A New Framework for Immigration Enforcement.” I will share more details about that tomorrow, but you don’t have to wait. You can register below today.

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At a time when immigration is defined more by politics than by evidence, conversations like this one matter. If you believe that public understanding of these issues should be grounded in real research and real human experience, a paid subscription is the best way to keep this work going. Or if you’re afraid of commitment, you can make a one-time contribution to buy me a cup coffee.

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This post examines the basic information about Delaney Hall, including a close look at who is being held inside, how they got there, and where Delaney Hall fits within ICE’s northeast detention network.1 The data for this post comes from the Deportation Data Project and Detention Reports. Although the most recent data is two-to-three months old, it is sufficient for contextualizing what is happening at the facility now. As always, feel free to use the findings and graphs from this post with attribution.

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Delaney Hall: Re-Opening & Inhumane Detention Conditions

Delaney Hall’s history precedes this current administration. GEO Group originally operated Delaney Hall as an ICE facility from 2011 to 2017, but the contract was not renewed and the facility was used for other purposes and eventually sat dormant. Less than a month after Trump took office, GEO Group was awarded possibly the largest-ever single ICE detention contract for Delaney Hall, a $1 billion agreement over 15 years of operation. Don’t be too fast to pin this on the Trump administration or Stephen Miller. The original solicitation for this facility went out during the Biden administration, in the summer of 2024, despite widespread concerns by immigrant rights groups even at the time that predicted precisely the controversies that are driving protests now. During the final year of the Biden administration, ICE was busy laying the logistical foundations for the massive growth in detention realized under the Trump administration—and Delaney Hall was part of that.

The contract was signed on April 2, 2025. You can get a copy of part of the contract between ICE and GEO Group from Detention Reports (DHDFNJ_2025-05-09.pdf).

Since Delaney Hall reopened, it has been the site of ongoing controversy. Given well-documented historical and nationwide concerns about detention conditions in ICE facilities, it will come as no surprise that state and local leaders have sought to inspect the facility to ensure humane conditions and compliance with applicable laws. ICE and GEO Group have been recalcitrant to this. In May of last year, shortly after it reopened, Mayor Ras Baraka was arrested while attempting to inspect the facility. Since then, ICE and GEO Group have denied entry to a long list of both routine inspectors and high-profile visits, including Governor Mikie Sherrill and Representative LaMonica McIver. Senator Andy Kim was recently pepper sprayed amid protests outside the facility.

Concerns about detention conditions are not theoretical. People held inside have sounded the alarm many times over inhumane conditions inside, often forced to resort to coordinated action to raise awareness and advocate for better treatment. Evidence of poor treatment include the death of Jean Wilson Brutus, a Haitian national held there, who died at a nearby hospital in December. A lack of changes and possibly deteriorating conditions prompted a hunger and labor strike protesting detention conditions in May. All of these conditions are entirely predictable result of the privatization of civil detention and have been excruciatingly well documented across years of research and across many of ICE’s detention facilities by my colleagues Deirdre Conlon and Nancy Hiemstra in their book “Immigrant Detention, Inc.”

Delaney Hall: Capacity and Recent Population

When ICE initially awarded GEO Group the contract, GEO’s press release in February 2025 said that the facility had a capacity of 1,000 beds. However, earlier court filings from 2024 said the facility “has a permitted use capacity of approximately 1,196 beds.” Not a huge difference, but since reporters are using both numbers (typically without citation), now you know why. I would accept numbers in a court filing over numbers in a press release, so I’ll use 1,196 as the capacity until I have better data. ICE reports that the facility has a guaranteed minimum of 700 people.

Data from Detention Reports shows that Delaney Hall is the largest ICE detention facility on the East coast, with an estimated recent population of about 850 people. Only Moshannon Valley in rural Pennsylvania is larger, with a population of over 1,600, but located far from the coast. All other facilities between Baltimore and Boston hold less than 500 people, and most hold less than 100.

Using detention stint date, we can see that once Delaney Hall opened, it quickly became the primary detention facility in the New York City-Newark region. The detained population reached 694 in the first month and reached a high of 1,047 in December 2025. The most recent population based on detailed data was 844. The other two facilities in the immediate area are Elizabeth, a long-time detention facility, and Brooklyn MDC, another new (but smaller) facility in New York City. Over the same time period, the Elizabeth facility has not grown very much, in part because its capacity appears to be around 300 beds.

Does Delaney Hall hold “murderers, rapists, pedophiles”?

In a press release from Monday (May 25), ICE pushed back on criticisms of detention condition at Delaney Hall, claiming that this was a “political stunt” and that there was “NO hunger strike.” The press release went further to claim that rather than criticizing the ICE facility, local leaders should praise ICE for its enforcement surge.

“These sanctuary politicians should be thanking ICE law enforcement for removing murderers, rapists, pedophiles, and drug traffickers from their communities. We need these sanctuary politicians to stop peddling this garbage and cooperate with us to get these criminals out of their state.” —Acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis

The press release attempted to provide evidence for this claim by including a cherry-picked list of people with serious criminal histories arrested by ICE in the region. The press release did not provide any underlying evidence for its claims, and does not specify whether the criminal violation by people in its list of serious criminals resulted in convictions, charges, or whether these were merely ICE’s own allegations. Of the 16 individuals featured in the press release, ICE emphasized crimes such as homicide, sexual assault and sexual offenses of minors, drug trafficking, robbery, and aggravated assault—all serious allegations, if true. But ICE conveniently did not say that these individuals reflected the population at Delaney Hall, they merely insinuated it as a justification for the facility.

But we don’t have to insinuate. We have data. And for this post, I’m going to add more analysis than usual to address occasional criticism that analysis using ICE’s three criminal history categories (conviction, charges only, immigration violations only) is not sufficiently detailed given the additional data that could be incorporated. In particular, there is concern that the category of people with criminal convictions is often treated as a black box that hides a tremendous amount of internal difference. Let’s start at the beginning and get into the details.

Based on the most recent data available, the vast majority of people at the facility have no conviction (88.3%) and the large majority have no criminal history whatsoever (70.5%). Just 11.7% have convictions (more on that in a minute). This tracks with my own findings about the national trend in recent months, but it’s even more acute in the sense that the proportion of people with criminal histories is much lower than the national average (29%) and the proportion of people with only immigration violations is much higher than the national average (40%). To put it simply, if you were looking for an ICE facility that holds a large number of dangerous criminals, Delaney Hall just isn’t it.

Relatedly, the vast majority of people in the facility are classified at ICE’s lowest security level, Level A—ICE’s own determination that the individuals, including those with non-serious criminal convictions, are not a threat to the population and do not need to be segregated. Thus, even regardless of criminal history, it would seem that ICE does not find the vast majority of people held at Delaney Hall as constituting a threat within the facility, either. (It will be curious to see if these numbers change with the next publication of ICE detention data, whenever that happens. It would be plausible that ICE would reclassify anyone participating in the hunger and labor strike.)

But we can go further. Let’s look more specifically at the compositional data on people with criminal charges as of March using stint data from the Deportation Data Project.

Of the 99 people with criminal convictions,2 the most serious convictions listed are: 39 (39%) are for traffic offenses (DUIs and general traffic offenses), 11 for illegal entry, 7 for larceny, 6 for public order, 6 for shoplifting, 2 for assault, 2 weapons charges, and 5 drug convictions, and smaller numbers of other convictions. Not a single conviction for homicide, sexual assault, or drug trafficking was present. Most of these convictions (69%) were misdemeanors, just 9 were felonies, and another 17 were left unclassified.

Only one person was flagged with an aggravated felony, and that appears to be connected to an identity theft conviction. Margaret Stock mentioned aggravated felonies in our conversation the other day in response to my question about what Congress should fix. She explained that aggravated felonies (aka, “agg fells”) are unique to immigration law and are very often neither aggravated nor felonies, but rather a bucket of things that the courts have thrown into it over time.

The analysis above is limited to the population in mid-March, which reflects our most current understanding about the facility. But what about everyone that has passed through Delaney Hall? I went back and looked at all of the cases of people who have come through the facility since it re-opened last year to produce a more complete analysis of Delaney Hall’s characteristics over a longer period.

Over the entire population of 10,311 people who have passed through Delaney Hall since it re-opened, 1,243 out of 10,311, or 12.1%, had a conviction (fairly close to the most recent population). With respect to ICE’s claims about enforcement in the region, just two (0.02%) were recorded as having a homicide conviction (0.07% if you include all manslaughter), 24 (0.2%) people had a sexual assault conviction (including those against minors), 19 (0.2%) for drug trafficking, 9 (0.09%) for robbery and 12 (0.1%) for aggravated assault. The table below summarizes convictions for crimes that ICE used as emblematic of people in Delaney Hall. Again, even if we take the most generous interpretation of the data from ICE’s perspective, we find that ICE’s narrative fits less than 1% of the people ever held at the facility for any length of time.

ICE says it’s holding “murderers, rapists, pedophiles, and drug traffickers” at Delaney Hall, but the data simply does not support that. So who is ICE actually holding?

To repeat: the vast majority of people ever held have absolutely zero criminal convictions according to ICE’s own data. And those with criminal conviction do not fit ICE’s narrative. The table below shows the top 10 convictions—mostly the types of not-so-exciting crimes that are distributed throughout the population (the percent of DUIs is on par with the general population) and shaped by the inequalities within policing and the criminal legal system.

Make what you will of these convictions, but they hardly reflect Acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis’s claim that they desperately need Delaney Hall to deport “murderers, rapists, pedophiles, and drug traffickers.” If Bis wanted to be consistent with the data, what she should have said is, “the Trump administration believes it’s worth a billion dollars of taxpayer money to hold mostly people with no criminal conviction and a handful of people with low-level offenses that don’t represent a threat to public safety or national security.” That would at least be honest. Instead, the administration continues to treat extreme exceptions as the rule, and gaslight the public about who is actually impacted by mass deportation efforts.

When I write about the criminal histories of people in ICE detention, I usually emphasize the stark contrast between the Trump administration’s rhetoric and the reality of what ICE’s data says. But in the context of civil unrest, we can push this analysis further. Protest against Delaney Hall—like protests and anti-deportation activism in Minneapolis, rural Maryland, and across the country—can be understood as a symptom of ICE’s declining legitimacy for a growing number of Americans who view this type of immigration enforcement as clashing with American ideals of fairness, proportionality, and democracy.

How many people inside Delaney Hall have a final removal order?

ICE claims that it needs immigrant detention to facilitate mass deportation. Yet many of the people in ICE custody across the country still have pending cases in the immigration courts or federal courts. As of mid-March, the vast majority of people held at Delaney Hall—84.2%—did not have a final removal order and therefore were languishing in detention even though ICE could not remove them.3 Again, this may have changed somewhat from mid-March, but probably not dramatically.

Where were people in Delaney Hall arrested?

As I said above, the Delaney Hall facility is located in Newark, New Jersey, not that far from Manhattan, and is the largest ICE facility on the East Coast. But ICE facilities can hold people arrested anywhere in the United States. For those people who are at Delaney Hall now, one question I received was: where were they originally arrested? This is important for understanding which communities, cities, and states have ties to the facility and may have an investment in how people inside are treated.

Using the initial book-in facility and state information, we can see that Delaney Hall is primarily use for people arrested in New Jersey and New York (>95%), with much smaller numbers of people originally arrested in the northeast and across the country. There is an important difference between the recent detained population versus the detained population at Delaney Hall for all time. The most recent population more heavily draws from arrests in New Jersey (81.5%) while the data for all time draws more heavily on New York State (34.5%). Thus, the vast majority of people held in Delaney Hall now and over the past year draw almost exclusively from residents in New Jersey and New York.

For the recently-detained population only, I wanted to drill into the specific initial book-in facility just to understand the pathway that people took to get to Delaney Hall. Based on this, the largest share of people were arrested straight into Delaney Hall and did not go to another facility first. But many also came from ICE hold rooms first, either in New Jersey or in Manhattan. about 80% of the people held in Delaney Hall in mid-March were arrested in New Jersey, mostly in the Newark area, and another 15% were arrested in the NYC area. Note that there are a very small number of cross-state arrests (e.g., Newark DCO arresting in New York State).

Delaney Hall Wrap-Up

I hope the data in the report is useful to reporters, researchers, policymakers, elected leaders, and the broad public. Feel free to use any of these tables and graphs with attribution. If you see any issues in the analysis above, please let me know. I would have liked to do much more analysis here, but I’m trying not to let the good be the enemy of the perfect. Comments welcome below.

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One of the first professors I got to know outside of my own studies was Dr. John Troyer. I met John not through the Ohio State University, where he was a visiting professor at the time, but through cycling. In those days, my main extracurricular activity was finding creative ways to promote active transportation, and John was a fellow avid cyclist. John is also a leading researcher on dead bodies. Over cups of coffee that year, he explained the cultural, political, and legal controversies surrounding dead bodies: is a dead body a person or a thing? when is a body “dead”? who owns a dead body? what can you (or can’t you) legally do with a dead body?1 I said that John studies death; but what he really studies is life after death, the perplexing and unexpected lives that bodies live after they are no longer living.2

I thought of John last week for the first time in years, when , president of Repatriate Our Patriots, told me that the only way many deported veterans can return to the United States is in a coffin. As we talked about the growing number of military veterans who are deported, many to countries they have never truly known, Danitza explained that veterans who are forbidden from returning to America alive (presumably because of bars to reentry) are nevertheless able to return once they die. Many of them are even buried with military honors. This is what happened to Corporal Enrique Salas, Marine Corps veteran of the Persian Gulf War, who was honorably discharged after four years of service but later deported for a drug conviction. Salas—him or his body? do we call dead bodies by their living name?— was later repatriated and buried in California with military honors. Danitza said she knows of at least 45 veterans who have died abroad. Some, like Salas, are brought back; others leave clear instructions not to be buried on American soil.3

Memorial Day is a day of remembering those who died in military service. My evolving views on military service, my own and military service writ large, have not insulated me from recognizing and honoring the sacredness of this day. One need not endorse every aspect of American foreign policy nor lazily buy into militarism to feel a sense of solidarity with those who died in uniform and compassion for their families. At the same time, the sacred can also be a story we tell others, and tell ourselves, to mask the profane—in this case, to mask the ways in which the memorialization of death does not unfold entirely independent from systems of social hierarchy. Inequalities in life often become inequalities in death, although a dead body may occasionally be free in ways its former resident never dreamed of. Thus, if we learn anything from John and Danitza about Memorial Day, the lesson might be that to honor the dead and to memorialize the dead are not always the same thing.

My conversations with John about the cultural lives of dead bodies combined with my grounded research on the legal geographies of immigration enforcement in the Obama years led to an abiding sensitivity toward, and curiosity about, weirdness at the intersection of law, immigration, and real life. Anyone with hands-on experience with the immigration system knows that it operates with the eerie anti-logic of a dream (or nightmare) sequence. But what really interests me are the manifestations of the immigration system as mundane phenomena in places that should be external—yet are somehow tethered to the system, as if the threshold between inside and outside has eroded. (This, by the way, is my complaint about the overuse of the term Kafkaesque to describe the immigration system. Kafka wasn’t unique in writing about convoluted, nonsensical bureaucracies—lots of people did that; what made Kafka unique was his ability to illuminate the dissolution of the boundary between bureaucracy and everyday life.) You can see evidence of this interest in a previous social media post that turned into a blog post that turned into a Mother Jones article about immigrants who die while facing removal proceedings.

I’ll give you an example. I used to live on the Hilltop in Columbus, Ohio, near the largest Latino community in the area, while I was finishing my dissertation and working with friends to stand up the Central Ohio Worker Center. At the end of one day, several of us went to a nearby taco truck to eat and debrief. While we were ordering, I noticed a tin canister sitting on the stainless steel ledge collecting money to support the repatriation back to Mexico of a young man who had died suddenly. A pixelated picture of his face and a short message in Spanish to please give were held to the tin can with two rubber bands and packing tape. It was the first time it had occurred to me that although we mostly talk about migration north, there must be corresponding migration south, not only of returning migration (which has always been the less talked-about trend) but also the southward migration of some number of migrants who die not in the desert but simply as a part of routine life in the United States—traffic accidents, heart attacks, old age. I wondered: what does it cost to transport—migrate?—their bodies back to Mexico or beyond? can a dead body be “illegal”? would filing a death certificate for a child put a parent at risk of deportation? whose death gets memorialized?

Danitza’s comment about the afterlife repatriation of veterans and posthumous citizenship prompted me to read more about this topic. Section 329/A of the Immigration and Nationality Act provides the possibility for citizenship for immigrants who die in service. Kendell Frederick, an Army Reservist from Trinidad, was killed by an IED in Iraq while driving to get fingerprinted for his citizenship application. He was granted citizenship posthumously. Staff Sergeant Ayman Taha from Sudan was also killed in Iraq; he gave up pursuing a PhD to join Army Special Forces and was particularly useful to allied forces given his fluency in Arabic. Last Monday I explained that the U.S. military is not monolithic, but full of unexpected diversity. Reporting about Ayman’s death said:

“Taha was a devout Muslim who strongly believed in the message of Islam, which focuses on believing in God and performing good deeds. “He strongly agreed that what they were doing is good and that they were helping people in the Middle East,” Ayman’s father told the Washington Post.

We don’t know exactly how many service members died in uniform, although a previous Migration Policy Institute study puts that number at 300 between 2001 and 2013. And we don’t know exactly how many veterans die abroad or how many of those deaths are due to the fact that it is so much harder to access their veterans’ benefits from outside the country. Danitza said a big part of what she does is try to keep deported veterans alive so that they can bring them back alive.

No specific provision in the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) allows for the repatriation of veterans who die abroad. The INA is only for the living (except when judges rule on cases of people already dead, as this Charlotte immigration judge did last week). Instead, as far as I can tell, anybody—any body—can migrate across a border as long as they are dead and are accompanied with the right paperwork, which seems easier and more perfunctory than getting a visa. We have open borders—just not for the living. Once you cross over, you can cross freely, but not before. And this appears to be true in both directions. Enrique Salas, the veteran above, returned to the United States posthumously, but he did not return as a veteran—he returned simply as a body. His burial reflected his service but his entry into the country did not. I think of this as I also think of that young man from Columbus from years ago, still a son and grandson, still a brother, perhaps, but no longer a migrant. The bodies of men passing each other at the border once again—one going north, one going south—no longer subject to suspicious stares or secondary screenings, but waved through for the first time.

To honor the dead and to memorialize the dead are not always the same thing. There are many ways to do both on Memorial Day. I believe in honoring anyone who paid the ultimate sacrifice, but let’s not use that as a mechanism for obliterating difficult truths. We should remember that the burden of our propensity for war often falls on working families who can’t fake-bone-spur their way out of a draft, Black Americans, who are overrepresented in the armed forces, and smaller numbers of immigrants who, Margaret Stock explained, often arrive better prepared to serve and acclimate to military culture than their US-born counterparts. The military does not always follow through on its promise of citizenship for immigrants who enlist, and this is just one reason why non-citizen veterans can be deported—and appear to be deported in larger numbers right now. We can memorialize the dead in ceremonies, but to honor the dead means to learn lessons from our past failures and fix a dishonorable system that treats immigrants as second-class—even when they serve in our armed forces.

* * *

Learn more about how the immigration system is failing to keep its promise to military families, veterans, and allies by listening to the discussions below.

• "Showing Up is the Love Language of Advocacy." A Conversation with Shawn VanDiver of #AfghanEvac.

• “America is an Aspirational Country’: Chris Purdy on the Overlooked Asset of Veteran Leaders.

• “Without immigration, we’re not a superpower:” Margaret Stock on why immigrants are key to U.S. national security.

• "If a service member is good enough to fight and die for this country, they should be good enough to live in this country:" Danitza James w/ Repatriate Our Patriots.

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Danitza served two tours in Iraq, including as a 50 cal machine gunner. No one asked about her citizenship, she said. “we were all wearing the same uniform. We all had the American flag on our shoulders and nobody cared, right?” Much like Margaret Stock’s story from yesterday, Danitza, who went by the call sign “Dark Angel,” found herself in combat roles normally restricted to men.

Despite the promise of citizenship, when Danitza left the military, she still had not naturalized—the mission came first, she said—and, worse, her green card was expired. “The checklist we all get [when we leave the military] has a box for your canteen cover, that is probably five dollars, that you better turn in. It did not have a box that said, ‘Did you file for your naturalization that we promised when you enlisted?’”

Still, it wasn’t until years later that she realized that under different circumstances, she might have been deported. She is the president of Repatriate Our Patriots, a volunteer-led organization that attempts to interrupt the military-service-to-deportation pipeline. Dee, who is a naturalized citizen, now provides individual support and advocacy for active duty military and their families impacted by the immigration system, including cases of spouses of enlisted members who are snatched up by ICE during routine check-ins, biometric appointments, and citizenship interviews.

Repatriate Our Patriots also provides critical support to veterans who have already been deported and live outside of the United States, many of whom desperately need their VA benefits, but who have a hard time accessing those benefits despite being entitled to them.

This is not a theoretical problem. Mario Arturo Benito Moreno, a Vietnam veteran living in Mexico, across the border from El Paso, had a medical emergency and died from a ruptured appendix after DHS refused to allow him to enter and access his VA benefits.

Danitza explained: “We are trying to keep them alive so that we can bring them back alive. And with Memorial Day right around the corner, we can account for 45 veterans that have died in exile. And it’s so sad when we can bring them back in a coffin just with a DD-214, no questions asked, and bury them at a national cemetery with full military honors, but we can’t bring them back alive.”

Danitza emphasized how the already deeply unequal treatment of immigrants and citizens in our criminal legal system impacts immigrant veterans, too. "We've all made mistakes,” she said. “But the difference between you and me is if we're driving down the highway and there's a joint in the car, you go to jail for a night, I go to jail for a night—but you go home after that to rehabilitate. I don't go home. I go to ICE detention and then get deported. That's the difference."

When a family member asked if Danitza would serve in the military again knowing what she knows now, she responded, "I will do it all over again, but I want the system to do better. I know there's a possibility for them to do better and to deliver on that promise. And this is why I'm fighting." This is the spirit you’ll see in all four of my interlocutors this week, who are able to live in the space of tension between recognizing America’s profound failures and believing in America’s ability to do better when we come together around a common purpose.

When discussing solutions, out of nowhere, Danitza coined the name of new piece of legislation called the Naturalization Accountability Act, designed to make citizenship tracking a required function at the command level throughout the military, and include checkpoints throughout a service member’s enlistment to ensure that the military is following through on its promise. You heard it here first, folks. Let’s make it happen, Congress.

Danitza’s close our conversation with a clear goal is simple enough—and fundamentally American enough—that no politician from either party should be able to avoid addressing.

“I just want to add that something that we've been asking right and we want to be an ally to our military leaders. This is not this is a bipartisan issue right this is not an immigration issue. And this is something that we have continued to say anytime that we meet with a lawmaker, a representative—this should never get to the point where we say 'deported' and 'veteran' in the same sentence. Ever. Because it should have happened when they're in the military. The veteran should leave the military with their naturalization. Period. So what I would ask for anyone who's listening is to call the representatives and ask them to develop or create or make a naturalization accountability program in the military. If the service member is good enough to fight and die for this country, they should be good enough to live in this country."

Do you agree? Tell me more about where you stand on this issue.

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A whole-hearted ‘thank you’ to Dark Angel for spending an hour with us and sharing her story with courage and vulnerability. Thank you also to everyone who tuned in to the live video and who listened and commented afterward. My goal with the conversations this week is to learn about this crucial topic for myself and to bring all of you with me on this journey, regardless of whether we agree politically or ideologically.

What can you do to support impacted veterans and military families?

Here are a few things you can do today to help support veterans who are facing deportation or have been deported, as well as military families who risk being torn apart by our immigration system.

• Share this conversation with a veteran, a military family, or someone who works with veterans. Many people who could be helped by Repatriate Our Patriots don’t know the organization exists. Help get this information to the right people now.

• Reach out to Danitza directly. If you have questions, if you know someone who needs help, if you want to connect, Danitza said to reach out to her directly. You can find her contact information at repatriateourpatriots.org, through her new Substack profile, , and by email at danitza@repatriateourpatriots.org. This includes reporters writing about Memorial Day over the weekend.

• Donate to Repatriate Our Patriots. This volunteer-run organization is powered entirely by the generosity of people like yourself. If this conversation moved you, put a couple bucks behind your convictions. Donate here: repatriateourpatriots.org.

• Follow Repatriate Our Patriots on social media. They are on Instagram, Facebook, X/Twitter, and TikTok.

• Call your member of Congress and ask them to pass legislation that supports our veterans. Ask them specifically where they stand on requiring the military to track and complete naturalization for non-citizen service members before separation and creating a pathway for veterans to come back into this country. Find your representative at house.gov and find your senators at senate.gov.

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145,000

The estimated number of U.S. citizen children who have had at least one parent arrested and detained by ICE since January 2025.

Brookings researchers cross-referenced ICE arrest data from the Detention Data Project with demographic data from the American Community Survey to estimate how many detained individuals had minor children at home who hold U.S. citizenship. Because ICE does not report family composition data for the people it detains, this kind of cross-referencing is the only available method for estimating the scale of family separation caused by interior enforcement. The 145,000 figure represents children who are citizens, not immigration cases. These children may face disrupted schooling, loss of parental income, potential placement in foster care, and in some cases removal to countries where they have no prior ties if a parent is deported. The estimate is imprecise, but the methodology is transparent and the assumptions are conservative, meaning the true number could be higher.

• Cancian, M., Cantu, N., Howard, L., & Watson, T. (2026, May 18). The administration has detained 400,000 immigrants: What do we know about their children?. Brookings Institution.

<60,000

The approximate number of people currently in ICE detention, a figure that is not publicly available.

ICE’s biweekly detention data is now over a month old, which means as of right now, the American public does not know how many people are sitting in ICE detention. In the past week, a few people have told me that the most recent numbers are under 60,000 (possibly around 57,000-58,000), though that figure is not publicly verifiable at the moment. I don’t have a single explanation for the decline, but courts have been ordering bond hearings and releasing individuals detained under the administration’s no-bond policy, ICE appears to be shuffling its enforcement approach, and the DHS partial funding shutdown might have something to do with it. The practical difficulty of tracking the detained population when ICE isn’t releasing data represents an ongoing problem that Congress ultimately needs to fix.

$18,000

The proposed new deportation fine per person under a Trump administration rule, up from $5,130.

DHS published the proposed fee increase in the Federal Register on May 20, 2026, The stated rationale is “cost recovery,” allegedly meant to recoup federal expenditures on arrest, detention, and removal. But is this really about money? The Federal Register notice itself shows DHS has already issued $36 billion in civil fines to approximately 65,000 people since January 20, averaging $553,000 per person. Officials have also acknowledged that most fines are expected to go uncollected. The fine increase fits within a long-standing restrictionist policy framework sometimes called "attrition through enforcement," which holds that making the legal and economic conditions for remaining in the country untenable enough will induce voluntary departure without requiring the government to formally deport everyone. Major institutions routinely screen for federal civil liability, meaning fines of this magnitude can functionally bar people from opening bank accounts, accessing credit, or signing leases, regardless of whether the fines are ever collected or litigated. The public comment period runs through June 22.

• Hughes, T. (2026, May 21). Trump administration to fine migrants $18,000 for deportations. USA Today.

5

The number of suicides in ICE detention facilities so far in 2026, the highest in two decades, with the year not yet half over.

The five suicides recorded in ICE detention so far in 2026 are the highest annual total in at least two decades. Including deaths in 2025, a total of nine people have now died by suicide in ICE custody during Trump’s second term. Researchers who study detention settings have linked suicide risk to length of confinement, uncertainty about case outcomes, access to mental health screening, and quality of care. All of those factors have moved in an adverse direction during the current “mass deportation” operations. ICE’s own compliance inspections have identified 19 instances since January 2025 in which detention facilities failed to meet ICE’s own suicide prevention standards, including failures to conduct required 15-minute checks on detainees under suicide watch. The NBC News report drew on more than 1,000 emergency calls from six facilities over the past year, including 28 involving serious self-harm incidents, which suggests the five completed suicides represent a fraction of a broader pattern of mental health crises in the system.

• Strickler, L. (2026, May 21). Suicides rise in ICE detention; 911 calls detail serious cases of self-harm. NBC News.

288

The number of detainees at Delaney Hall, a Newark ICE facility, who signed a letter this week detailing conditions inside.

The letter describes what the signatories characterize as widespread and systemic problems at the facility, including medical neglect, arbitrary arrests, contagious illness spreading through shared housing, public health risks, and detainees held days past approved release dates without notification to their families. Delaney Hall is a roughly 1,000-bed facility in Newark operated by the GEO Group under an ICE contract. This is the second collective grievance letter from detainees there in three months. Recurring collective action of this kind in a single facility typically signals that conditions have not changed in response to earlier complaints rather than that conditions have worsened sharply in the interval. The complaint about detainees held past approved release dates represents a particularly egregious procedural failure that falls within ICE’s direct contractual and oversight responsibilities, not just the private operator’s. Detained individuals have limited formal grievance channels and congressional oversight visits have recently been subject to new restrictions requiring advance notice before members of Congress can speak with detainees.

• Janoski, S. (2026, May 14). Nearly 300 detainees sign new SOS letter from inside Newark ICE facility. The Jersey Vindicator.

Send me your data points and data tips!

If you have new research, data, or findings related to immigration enforcement and detention that you’d like to see featured here, please reach out. I’m particularly interested right now in ICE detention numbers specifically. Official data releases have become an unreliable guide to what’s actually happening, and if you work in this space and have information you’re able to share, whether on the record or in confidence, I’d welcome the conversation.

If you haven’t taken the leap to become a paid subscriber, please consider supporting this work. I’m honored that this Substack continues to drive media reporting, research, and public debate, but it does take effort and expense. If you can pitch in a few bucks a month or year, it would help enormously. Find an option that fits your budget at austinkocher.substack.com/subscribe.

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The government had “behaved badly” and Margaret was able to save her Polish client from deportation. “I was totally fascinated with the area of law after having actually done a case. I was like, wow, this is such a mess, and the government's trying to do bad things to these people and this isn't right. It's not American.”

Since that first case, Margaret has gone on to become one of the most knowledgeable and influential experts on the intersection of immigration and military law and much more. She regularly testifies before Congress, received a MacArthur Genius grant, taught at West Point, created the Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest (“MAVNI”) Program partially at the prompting of Senator John McCain, and literally wrote the book on the subject titled Immigration Law & the Military, published by the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

Margaret Stock is hiring! If you are willing to move to the beautiful state of Alaska, Margaret is hiring a new attorney to help with her growing caseload. Reach out to Margaret at her firm’s website. Don’t miss this incredible professional development opportunity. Veterans encouraged. Obviously.

As if that’s not enough, when I asked her about her experience in the Army, she talked about the thrill of “jumping out of perfectly good airplanes,” carrying heavy packs, and, due to a paperwork error, getting assigned to lead an infantry unit of 35 men before women were normally permitted to hold those roles.

Like Shawn and Chris from earlier this week, Margaret is motivated by the idea that it’s our responsibility to actualize the foundational, revolutionary ideals of America—not give them up when our country fails to live up to its principles. Margaret’s gut-punch from that first encounter with the immigration system—”it’s not American”—is a reaction I find across the dozens of people I’ve interviewed over the years.

There’s a lot of discussion right now about how to talk about immigration in a way that resonates outside of an echo-chamber of die-hard allies. It has always been my view that the best way to convince someone that our immigration system is broken is simply to expose that person to it. Whether that’s law students participating in a clinic, going to observe immigration court hearings, or helping refugees with the resettlement process, nothing breaks through the rhetoric quite as effectively as seeing how the immigration system works, and doesn’t work, for yourself. And to see the chasm between what America claims as its core values and how the immigration system actually treats people.

Margaret has spent much of her career trying to make the immigration system work better, not just for immigrants (although that’s important), but for America as a country. One way she does this is by explaining why immigrants are not a threat to national security, but vital to it. She cited the long history of immigrants playing decisive roles in the Revolutionary War and wars since then, the need for immigrants to work with the U.S. military and intelligence community after 9/11, and the vital role of immigrants in maintaining military readiness.

Immigrants are typically more motivated to serve in the armed forces, and it sounds like they arrive more physically and mentally ready, have lower attrition rates and higher re-enlistment rates, and thrive in military culture more than their U.S.-born counterparts. Green card holders in particular have already gone through a vetting process to get, and keep, that green card, so they are already ahead of their American-born peers on average. As Margaret said, “To get a green card, you have to qualify for one. To get U.S. citizenship by being born in America, you don’t have to have any particular qualifications.”

Margaret explains why the history is longer and more decisive than most people realize. German Jewish refugees were naturalized at basic training during World War II, sent back to interrogate German POWs on the Western Front, and were responsible for 60% of actionable intelligence there. “You can argue that they won the war for the United States,” Margaret said.

After 9/11, the U.S. already had the intelligence needed to stop the attacks before they happened. It just hadn’t been translated because nobody could read it. That failure is part of what drove Margaret to design the MAVNI program, which recruited noncitizens with critical language and medical skills and put them on an accelerated path to citizenship.

Margaret described how the post-9/11 conflation of immigration and national security compares to today. She argued that both then and now, people are framing the question backwards. National power, she said, is fundamentally about people: how many you have, how young, how educated, how motivated. The U.S. has stopped paying attention to demographics, and it's costing us. "Immigration was always the secret sauce of the United States of America," she said. "Without immigration, we were not a superpower. And that should be obvious to everybody who looks back on our history."

She described how today immigrant recruits scored 20 points higher on the Armed Forces Qualification Test than native-born recruits, had lower dropout rates from basic training, and re-enlisted at higher rates. At the Pentagon, she framed it simply as a good return on investment. It is also worth noting that only about two in ten Americans currently meet basic military enlistment standards, due to what Margaret described as obesity, drug use, and other disqualifying factors.

Just a caveat here to readers who might squirm at talking about immigration as a national security issue. I know a lot of people within the academic and activist worlds don’t want to talk about this because of (justified) concerns about how national security has been weaponized against immigrants. At the same time, I’m increasingly convinced that ceding the entire national security conversation to a small slice of the unhinged far right is not doing anyone any favors—including immigrants and refugees themselves. I’m open to discussion on this, so let me know what you think.

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When I asked her what practicing immigration law is like, she described rampant shoddy legal work coming out of the government right now. "The quality of the practice among DOJ lawyers has dropped into the basement. They're filing briefs that don't make any sense, false documents, false affidavits—stuff that you never would have seen from the Department of Justice ten years ago. And that's happening like every day now."

When I expressed concerns about if we would be able to recover a sense of quality and dignity at these government agencies, she said, “I think it's going to take some kind of Truth and Reconciliation Commission after the administration's over to fix it. And it's going to be a long, long process.”

At the end, I asked Margaret what Congress needs to fix. She didn't hesitate, and I’m quoting her at length because it’s so good:

"My one big ask if I were in Congress right now is I'd fix the aggravated felony definition. It's just a laundry list of random offenses. And a lot of them aren't aggravated and a lot of them aren't felonies. I would repeal the entire definition and replace it with something simple that says it's got to be aggravated and it's got to be a felony, or it's not an aggravated felony. It drives me crazy that it takes lawyers at least an eight-hour CLE to figure out what an aggravated felony is."

If you watch the full conversation, you’ll also learn:

• How noncitizens can enlist and what the path to citizenship through military service actually looks like, including why it breaks down more often than it should

• Why veterans can be deported even after honorable service, and the specific legal trap (the “aggravated felony” definition) that catches people for offenses as minor as a decades-old drug possession charge or a stolen bicycle

• The story of the MAVNI program: how Margaret designed it, why Senator John McCain pushed for it, what happened when it launched (thousands of people showed up to enlist before they’d spent a dollar on advertising), and why the Trump administration killed it for purely political reasons

• The contrast between how national security and immigration intersected after 9/11 (when the government understood it needed more of the right people, not fewer) and how that framing has been inverted today

• What Margaret is seeing in federal court right now: falsified arrest warrants, forged documents, clients shipped across the country to evade scrutiny, and a DOJ that is filing false affidavits as a matter of routine

Huge “thank you” to Margaret Stock for her incredible life of service. Also thank you to for connecting me to Margaret for this series, and to , , , , and many others for tuning into the live video with .

Please join me again tomorrow at 11:00 AM Eastern when Danitza (“Dee”) James, Army veteran and President of Repatriate Our Patriots, joins me to talk about the real-life failures of our immigration system to protect immigrant veterans, and what her team is doing to provide support and advocacy for them.

Note that I’ve had a few issues with the Substack Live links originally scheduled on Monday, so visit the Substack app or check your email to make sure you have the right link tomorrow and Friday.

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Events like this are possible thanks to the support of paid subscribers. If you can pitch in on a monthly or annual basis, it would help enormously. Pick a tier that fits your budget at austinkocher.substack.com/subscribe.

See the full line-up of this week’s speakers here:

Chris is the founder of the Chamberlain Network, a nonprofit that trains veterans to engage in civic life, not as partisans, but as people with a specific skill set and the moral authority to fight for the institutions they once wore a uniform to defend. He is the son of an Irish immigrant from Belfast, a National Guard veteran who deployed to Iraq in 2011, and before he started the Chamberlain Network, he ran Veterans for American Ideals at Human Rights First, where he spent years using the veteran voice in support of immigrants and refugees.

When I asked Chris to help us think about the connection between veterans and immigrants, he said: “I served alongside immigrants. The average veteran has a very similar story.” His own gun truck crew in Iraq included an Ethiopian refugee, an Egyptian-American, a country boy from West Virginia, and the son of an Irish immigrant. “I really saw America captured in the people there.”

While Chris acknowledges the many problems with America, he returns to the idea that “America is an aspirational country.” I understood what he meant. Our ideals as a revolutionary country are not always realized quickly, but the ideals are still there waiting to be actualized by people who are willing to work together for the greater good. Despite my own deep misgivings about U.S. foreign policy and the negative ways in which militarism shapes society (for one critique, see “How the Military Mindset Has Crushed Our Country’s Men”), the underlying principles of public service and personal sacrifice remain core to my beliefs and values. I don’t know if the United States can ultimately be saved. But I know that what’s at stake isn’t just an abstract idea about the soul of a country, but about the damage that will continue to unfold if we do nothing. As I said on Monday:

“I will focus much of the week leading up to Memorial Day discussing the relationship between military service, immigration enforcement, and the often overlooked role of veterans in trying to protect the best parts of American democracy from the worst parts of American tyranny.”

That comment was aspirational when I wrote it on Sunday evening. Now that I’ve talked with Shawn and Chris, I am starting to feel more hope in the resilient, overlooked goodness that is around us if we look for it. This conversation was part interview and part counseling session for me. I am a veteran who has spent the last several years deep inside immigration enforcement research, and I have not always known what to do with that identity in relation to this work. Chris helped me think through it today in ways that were profoundly meaningful. If you’re in the military now or a veteran, I think you’ll get a lot from our conversation, too.

Huge “thank you” to Chris and to everyone at the Chamberlain Network for what they do. Learn how you can get involved below.

Have you or someone you know served and then gotten involved in civic or advocacy work? Leave a comment with names and organizations you think I should learn about.

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How can you get involved?

If you or someone you know is a veteran, take action today or share these opportunities with others who would find them meaningful.

1. Volunteer for the Halo Project. Veterans and civilians are needed at polling places throughout the 2026 election cycle. This is direct, tangible, and exactly the kind of showing up that matters. halovote.org

2. Sign up for a Chamberlain Network convening. Monthly trainings for veterans on civic engagement, with the next full convening in Portland, Maine in August. If you want to channel your service into something, this is the on-ramp. chamberlainnetwork.us

3. Follow the Chamberlain Network’s work on the politicization of the military. They have documented the use of military installations for detention, Guard deployments for civilian law enforcement, and the constitutional questions raised by all of it in real time. chamberlainnetwork.us/tracker-military-politicization-threats

4. Follow @ChamberlainVets on social media. They’re on every major platform (except TikTok).

5. Call your member of Congress about deported veterans and detained military spouses. Ask specifically where they stand on the Repatriate Our Patriots Act and on Sen. Duckworth’s veterans protection package. Find your representative at house.gov and find your senators at senate.gov.

6. Go back and watch yesterday’s conversation with Shawn VanDiver if you haven’t yet. Chris pointed to Shawn’s work on Afghan allies as essential context for everything we discussed.

Please join me again tomorrow at 11:30 AM Eastern when immigration attorney and military law expert Margaret Stock joins me to walk through the legal architecture of why veterans can be deported, why military spouses are being arrested at base visitor centers, and what real legislative fixes would look like.

Note that I’ve had a few issues with the Substack Live links originally scheduled on Monday, so visit the Substack app or check your email to make sure you have the right link tomorrow and Friday.

Subscribe now

Events like this are possible thanks to the support of paid subscribers. If you can pitch in on a monthly or annual basis, it would help enormously. Pick a tier that fits your budget at austinkocher.substack.com/subscribe.

Featured speakers include:

1. Seth Holmes, UC Berkeley — Protect Farmworkers to Strengthen the U.S. Food System

2. Alfredo González, UC Santa Barbara — Strengthening Military Readiness: Grant U.S. National Status to Non-Citizen Service Members

3. Austin Kocher, Syracuse University — Immigration Enforcement Transparency and Public Accountability

At a time when immigration enforcement is separating families, threatening workers, and undermining public trust, we need policy grounded in evidence and in the lived realities of the people most affected.

Grateful to Relevant Research for Co-sponsoring the event.

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The reasonable thing to do is to make sure that those allies are safe. Instead, they’ve been largely displaced, ignored, and abandoned by our government with only a few elected representatives still interested in addressing this issue. But that’s where #AfghanEvac comes in. Shawn and their international network continue to advocate relentlessly both at home and abroad. Through the Battle Buddies program, volunteers attend immigration court hearings and ICE check-ins with Afghans to ensure that they have access to their due process. Shawn amplifies key stories, like the ICE detained death of Afghan ally Nazir Paktiawal, through the media to make sure Americans are aware of these ongoing failures. And through ongoing relationship-building and honest call-outs of people in Congress, #AfghanEvac refuses to let our allies be forgotten.

As Shawn said of elected representatives, especially Republicans right now, who used to speak out about the issue, “they seem to have lost their microphones now. So we're going to help them find their microphones again.”

Shawn said one thing to me that stuck with me as exactly how I feel about so much immigration and refugee advocacy. It’s not just about immigrants and refugees, that framing often misses the broader point. It’s just as much about doing the right thing as a country. Shawn said it best: “AfghanEvac is not about Afghans. AfghanEvac is about American promises.” That’s true for Afghans, and it’s true for so many other groups, too: spouses of U.S. citizens, a group that American Families United fights for; people who came to the country as children who still don’t have a pathway to citizenship; women who are being separated from their children through deportation.

Relatedly, Shawn described #AfghanEvac as much of a civic engagement organization as anything, a way for people to understand how to speak out, leverage their connections, and tell elected officials what we need from them. I didn’t know he would say that, but this is exactly in line with what I wanted this week to be about. Veterans like Shawn continue to serve our country out of uniform and it’s important to me that we recognize this work. To add Shawn’s words, though, it’s not just about whether you wear, or wore, a uniform. Lots of people serve our country through their actions (what we sometimes call “active citizenship”), and it deserves honor and recognition, too.

Do you know about other stories of veterans leading important social change work? If so, leave a comment with a link or a name so I can learn more.

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A huge thanks to Shawn for joining me today. Listen to the whole discussion. Shawn has much more to say than I can capture here. Worth every second, I promise! As long as you don’t mind a few F-bombs—but as Shawn said, Americans are tired of people sugarcoating things, and Shawn is definitely not someone who wastes time getting to the point.

What can you do?

As promised, here is a list of things you can do to support our Afghan allies and the work of #AfghanEvac. Do one of these today!

1. Sign up to be a Battle Buddy. If you are a veteran, a frontline civilian, or simply someone willing to show up, this is the most direct action available to you right now. As Shawn puts it, “showing up is the love language of advocacy.” afghanevac.org/battle-buddies

2. Subscribe to Afghan Evac’s Substack. Shawn’s emails are some of the most substantive and direct advocacy communications I receive. No fluff, just lots of great actionable information. afghanevac.substack.com

3. Follow Afghan Evac on Instagram. Their social content is genuinely some of the best in the advocacy space: clear, urgent, and made for people who don’t have time to read long reports. @afghan_evac

4. Call your member of Congress. Ask them what legislation they are personally supporting to protect Afghan wartime allies. Find your representative at house.gov and find your senators at senate.gov.

5. Donate to Afghan Evac. This work does not happen without sustained financial support, and Afghan Evac is doing some of the most consequential advocacy on this issue with a lean team. afghanevac.org/donate

6. Check in with the Afghan community in your area. Go to a resettlement agency, a mosque, an Afghan restaurant. Put on one of the #AfghanEvac shirts and see who comes up to you. Community presence matters more than most people realize.

I did what I promised on the call: I bought an #AfghanEvac T-shirt right after our call and I look forward to joining Shawn and their network next time they're in DC.

Thank you , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with .

Subscribe now

Events like this are possible thanks to the support of paid subscribers. If you can pitch in on a monthly or annual basis, it would help enormously. Pick a tier that fits your budget at austinkocher.substack.com/subscribe.