The Raid

Every unaccompanied immigrant child facing deportation is legally entitled to a lawyer — it's the law, not a favor. But the federal contract funding that representation for over 20,000 children expires this month, and instead of an open replacement process, reporting from the Texas Tribune reveals a series of phone calls: the Trump administration quietly asking Texas's Attorney General's office, t...

John Carlos Frey talks with Nicole Locklin — a Miami attorney and first-time candidate now running as the Democratic nominee for Florida's 26th Congressional District against 24-year incumbent Mario Diaz-Balart.  Locklin explains what pushed her into the race. She explains the district's dramatic post-redistricting shift, the role of ICE and Stephen Miller in the current wave of immigration raids,...

John Carlos Frey sits down with Flor Melendrez to talk about the wave of ICE raids that swept through Los Angeles car washes over the past year. Melendez shares her personal path into labor organizing — growing up the child of garment worker parents, negotiating wages for them as a child, and later working with day laborers before helping build the clean car wash campaign into what is now the Clea...

ICE has been targeting labor leaders and organizers along with thousands of workers who are now more afraid than ever to fight for better working conditions.  In this podcast, investigative journalist John Carlos Frey traces how that pattern has grown from a single farm in Albion, New York into a nationwide crisis in 2026 — one that is reshaping labor markets, collapsing organizing campaigns, and...

What if ICE raids aren't just about immigration enforcement — what if they're part of something much bigger?  In this episode, host John Carlos Frey sits down with journalist and activist Lee Stedman, whose on-the-ground reporting during Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis revealed a pattern that goes far beyond deportation.  From the criminalization of rapid response networks to the rise of a co...

On August 28, 2025, three immigrant rights activists followed an unmarked ICE vehicle through Los Angeles and livestreamed what they saw — exactly what rapid responders across Southern California had been doing for months. That afternoon ended with federal charges.  Cynthia Raygoza, Ashleigh Brown, and Sandra Samane became known as the Baldwin Park Three. Their case didn't just put three women on...

The U.S. government wired $70 million to purchase a massive warehouse to house detained immigrants in Surprise, Arizona — without telling the mayor, the city council, or a single one of the 80,000 people who lived there. No announcement. No environmental review. No community input. Just a done deal.  In this episode of The Raid, investigative journalist John Carlos Frey unpacks how the secret purc...

Host John Carlos Frey sits down with Lilian Serrano, Director of the Southern Border Communities Coalition, for a powerful conversation about what's really happening along the U.S.-Mexico border — and what it means for the entire country.  Lillian grew up between Tijuana and San Diego across four generations, and has spent over a decade fighting for human rights and accountability in border enforc...

He was born in the United States. He has a Real ID, a Social Security number and a birth certificate. ICE detained him three times in less than one year.  Leonardo Garcia Venegas is a 26-year-old construction worker from Baldwin County, Alabama. In May 2025, ICE agents raided a private job site, tackled him to the ground, and held him in handcuffs for over an hour — ignoring his proof of citizensh...

John Carlos Frey digs into the extra $70 billon just approved for ICE and Border Patrol. What is that money for and how is it all managed? The details are nothing short of a corrupt system. https://theraidpodcast.org/ https://theraidpodcast.org/ Disclaimer: The statements and opinions expressed by the host or participants on this program are solely their own and do not necessarily represent those...

Host John Carlos Frey talks with Nayna Gupta, Policy Director at the American Immigration Council, to break down the Council's new report: Restoring Credibility and Humanity — a detailed framework proposing a path forward for U.S. immigration enforcement.  Nayna and John explore how decades of overly broad immigration laws have enabled the Trump administration's mass deportation agenda, and why si...

John Carlos Frey speaks with Stephen Sefton — industrial designer, philosopher, and founder of Third Coast Pillows — to explore how one small business owner is fighting back against America's deportation machine with art. When ICE raids intensified across the country — and two people were shot and killed in Minnesota — Stephen used his platform to respond. He designed a politically charged adverti...

ICE has quietly changed how it reports deaths in immigration detention — and the change is designed to make people disappear from the record. Under the new internal policy, a death only counts as an "in-custody death" if it happens inside a detention facility. Deaths that occur after release — even the day after — are no longer reported. In this episode, John Carlos Frey breaks down exactly what t...

Award-winning journalist Jacob Soboroff — author of Separated: Inside an American Tragedy and incoming host of Connect with Jacob Soboroff (premiering June 13 on MSNOW) — sits down with host John Carlos Frey on The Raid to trace his full journey covering U.S. immigration policy.  From his first trip across the border into Tijuana during the Obama era, to the moment he walked into a converted Walma...

Host John Carlos Frey speaks with Austin Kocher, a political and legal geographer and Navy veteran (1999–2003), about the deeply underreported issue of immigrant veterans being detained and deported under the current administration. Kocher explains that while this problem predates the Trump administration, deportations of veterans have accelerated dramatically in recent years.  Kocher argues that...

In the 1960s, the CIA recruited tens of thousands of Hmong farmers and warriors in Laos to fight a secret proxy war on behalf of the United States. They rescued downed American pilots, ran intelligence operations, and died by the thousands — doing work Congress never officially authorized. When the U.S. withdrew in 1975, it left them behind. After surviving massacres, refugee camps, and decades of...

Four powerful Latinas — actress and activist Diane Guerrero, communications strategist Arianna Rosales, immigration attorney Grisel Ruiz, and liberation-psychology therapist Monica de la Cruz Lopez — come together as powerful unified voice, referring to themselves as, "We Ride at Dawn". They join forces at this critical time to confront the human cost of America's mass deportation machine.  In thi...

Investigative journalist René Kladzyk of POGO (Project on Government Oversight) joins host John Carlos Frey to expose the troubling track record of Loyal Source Government Services, a private medical contractor operating inside ICE detention facilities — most notably Camp East Montana at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas.  Kladzyk details how Loyal Source has faced years of documented allegations: medi...

John Carlos Frey looks at the death of Kesley Vial, a 23-year-old Brazilian asylum seeker who died in 2022 at the Torrance County Detention Facility in New Mexico — a privately-run facility operated by CoreCivic. The episode investigates how CoreCivic destroyed footage from 14 surveillance cameras after Vial's suicide attempt, while preserving only 49 still images favorable to their defense — even...

Host John Carlos Frey sits down with Chris Newman, legal director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), to explore the escalating federal crackdown on day laborers across the US. Newman traces his path from law student to frontline advocate. He argues that immigrants defending their Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights are protecting everyone's constitutional rights, not just t...

Host John Carlos Frey speaks with Rachel Jordan, Managing Attorney at Safe Passage Project, a New York City-based nonprofit organization providing free legal representation to immigrant and refugee children facing deportation. The conversation covers who unaccompanied minors are, why they come to the U.S., and the legal protections that were designed to shield them — protections now being systemat...

The Trump administration has detained 400,000 immigrants from interior arrests since January 2025. But how many children did it leave behind?  In this episode of The RAID Podcast, John Carlos Frey breaks down a landmark May 2026 study from the Brookings Institution and Georgetown University — the most detailed estimate yet of how many children in America have been separated from their parents by I...

The Raid host, John Carlos Frey speaks with Professor David Martinez — director of the Institute for Transborder Indigenous Nations at Arizona State University and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Community — about the recent bulldozing by border wall construction of Las Playas, a thousand-year-old geoglyph sacred to the Hia-Ced O'odham people of the Sonoran Desert. Professor Martinez e...

In this deeply personal and investigative episode of The Raid, host John Carlos Frey sits down with former Border Patrol agent and whistleblower Jenn Budd to expose what she describes as a systemic culture of sexual misconduct within U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Border Patrol, and ICE. Budd, who joined the Border Patrol in 1995, opens by recounting her own sexual trauma during trainin...

A Tucson Sector Border Patrol agent has been indicted on 29 felony charges including ten counts of child sex trafficking. But the case of Bart Conrad Yager isn't just about one agent. It's about a federal agency that had warning signs more than a decade ago and looked away. In this episode, John Carlos Frey breaks down the Yager indictment, the 2014 rape allegation CBP never investigated, and a mo...