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Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” which passed earlier this month, shoveled $170 billion toward immigration enforcement and border security, transforming ICE into the largest law enforcement agency in the history of the federal government. Even before that money is spent, the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has been its signature policy, even as polls show it to be wildly unpopular. On this week’s episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick spoke with Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow and former policy director at the American Immigration Council, a pro-immigrant nonprofit, about the ways in which the Trump immigration dragnet—the raids, detentions, and deportations—has been manifesting on the ground as it is simultaneously being dealt with in the courts and long before it is funded at its hoped-for scale. Their conversation, which appears below, has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Dahlia Lithwick: What has changed about immigration enforcement in the past six months? 

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick: The biggest changes have been in the use of personnel from other law enforcement agencies, the change in underlying tactics, and the goal of what internal immigration enforcement looks like. We’ve had thousands of federal agents, from the FBI, the DEA, the ATF, the Marshals Service, the Postal Inspection Service, and even the IRS’s financial crimes investigators, reassigned to bolster the manpower of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, easily doubling the number of people they have to go out and do immigration enforcement in the field.

The other big shift has been who they’re targeting and how. When you and I talked back in January, I said most of what ICE does is targeted enforcement: Officers have lists of names, they go out into the community, and they arrest specific people. Under the second Trump administration, they started expanding the use of so-called collateral arrests, where they would not just arrest the one person they had on their target list, but if that person was near anyone else, they would just question those people about their statuses and arrest anyone they found who was undocumented. But those were still fundamentally the same kind of targeted arrests that ICE has been doing for decades.

But in May, unhappy with the pace of deportations, Stephen Miller called together all 25 field office directors of ICE enforcement and removal operations, and all 25 field office directors of ICE Homeland Security Investigations (the two main components of the agency). Miller gathered in a room in Washington with those officers, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and lobbyist Corey Lewandowski, and reportedly screamed at the ICE officers, telling them they were not hitting the numbers he wanted them to be hitting, the numbers Trump had pledged to hit on the campaign trail. From now on, it was about quantity over quality.

Within days of that meeting, things started looking very different. The raids in Los Angeles began a week........

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