The Raid

In 2020, a Customs and Border Protection officer boarded a flight in St. Thomas with his badge, his gun and 16 bricks of cocaine in his carry-on bags. He didn’t have to go through security. It took a drug-sniffing dog in Atlanta to catch him. John Carlos Frey goes through an exclusive list of 95 internal investigations into CBP officers and Border Patrol agents, closed by the Homeland Security ins...

César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández has been a U.S. citizen every day of his life. Coming home from a trip abroad, he handed over his U.S. passport at the Atlanta airport and was held in a room whose door opened only from the outside. No one told him why. Host, John Carlos Frey asks the Ohio State law professor a direct question: is the deportation machine operating lawfully? They work through a lis...

Today is Election Day. This is a story about the people who wanted to be in that line — and were never allowed to reach it. They did everything this country asked. They got green cards, waited years, paid the fees, were fingerprinted, background-checked and interviewed, and passed the civics test. All that was left was the oath. Then, moments before their ceremony at Boston's Faneuil Hall — the &q...

The ICE raids are on the ballot this November. But does any of it actually move voters? Political journalist Astead Herndon has spent a decade asking voters what they really believe, and his answers aren’t comfortable. John Carlos Frey talks with Herndon, host of Vox’s America, Actually, former host of The Run-Up at The New York Times and a CNN political analyst. Herndon argues that President Trum...

Days before the midterms, a coalition of Los Angeles business, faith and civic leaders went inside the county’s vote count to answer one question: will your vote be counted? Miguel Santana, CEO of the California Community Foundation, returns to The Raid to talk with John Carlos Frey about "A Count You Can Trust", the nonpartisan coalition he co-chairs with former Los Angeles Mayor Antoni...

A 143-year-old city hall in Limoges, France goes up in flames. Within hours, Vice President J.D. Vance shares the video and tells Americans, “This is the future if congressional Democrats win.” The next morning, President Trump posts, “France is burning,” and blames immigrants. John Carlos Frey treats the claim like a case and follows the evidence. French authorities have not linked immigrants to...

John Carlos Frey sits down with Aaron Parnas, the former public defender turned independent news creator with millions of followers on TikTok and one of Substack’s top newsletters, The Parnas Perspective. Parnas started posting when Russia invaded Ukraine and his six-year-old cousin was sheltering in a bathtub in Kyiv. He had a million followers within a week. Today he talks about why legacy media...

Fear is keeping people from the polls. On this episode of The Raid, investigative journalist John Carlos Frey talks with former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa about A Count You Can Trust, a new nonpartisan coalition he co-chairs to explain how votes are counted and correct false claims with facts. Villaraigosa has been on the ballot 21 times and says he has never seen tension like this. Wi...

John Carlos Frey talks with Nick Miroff, staff writer at The Atlantic, 2026 Pulitzer Prize finalist, and George Polk Award winner, about what’s really happening inside ICE and the Department of Homeland Security. He explains why the White House keeps doubling down on mass deportation, including how a pause on ICE traffic stops was reversed within 24 hours. He also walks through his reporting showi...

John Carlos Frey sits down with Vanessa Cárdenas, Executive Director of America’s Voice, to talk about what mass deportation is doing to immigrant families, U.S. citizens, and the country itself. Cárdenas came to the U.S. from Bolivia at 14. Today she’s having the same conversation with her own U.S.-born kids that Latino families across the country are having: what to do if ICE pulls you over. Her...

In 2018, Jess Morales Rocketto helped put people in the streets of hundreds of cities to stop family separation. Now she says the deportation machine has gotten smarter, and that pushing back still works. John Carlos Frey sits down with the organizer behind Families Belong Together and the co-founder of Maremoto, which builds Latino power through politics, media and culture. Morales Rocketto began...

Weeks before the November 3 midterms, Rep. Judy Chu (D-CA) joins John Carlos Frey to talk about ICE raids in her district, the detention center that refused to let her in, and whether immigration agents could show up at polling places. Chu represents Pasadena, Altadena, and the West San Gabriel Valley, a district hit first by the Eaton Fire and then, five months later, by immigration raids. She de...

ICE agents stopped a work van outside Albany, Georgia. Three men ran. One of them, 28-year-old Edgar Cabrera-Gómez, ended up pinned beneath an ICE agent's Dodge Charger in the grass median of the Liberty Expressway. The Georgia State Patrol says the agent was driving in the median. ICE says Edgar "lost his footing and slid under" the car. His family says he was run down while running awa...

What happens when people who have lived in the U.S. legally for decades are suddenly made undocumented? Host John Carlos Frey sits down with Todd Schulte, president of FWD.us, the policy organization working on immigration and criminal justice reform. Todd explains what he calls the "de-legalizing" of immigrants: the unprecedented revocation of DACA, Temporary Protected Status (TPS), and other pro...

In February 2026, ICE's acting director told the U.S. Senate under oath there was "no reason" for immigration agents to be at polling places. Within months, armed agents made an arrest outside a San Antonio polling site, showed up at a voting location in Simi Valley, and confronted a poll worker in Syracuse, New York, in the middle of her shift. With a federal judge ordering documents about these...

Is ICE coming to the polls? Independent investigative journalist Justin Glawe joins host John Carlos Frey to connect two stories that are rapidly converging: America's deportation machine and the organized effort to undermine the 2026 midterm elections. Glawe, whose reporting has appeared in Rolling Stone, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Daily Beast, Esquire and more, has tracked elec...

Can armed agents be at your polling place? The city of Denver just did something no city has done before: it sued the Trump administration to keep armed ICE agents away from the polls. On Thursday, September 10, 2026, the City and County of Denver, along with LULAC, Common Cause, and Unidos US, filed suit in federal court in Washington, D.C. against the Department of Homeland Security, ICE, and th...

Election Day is weeks away, and the officials who control armed federal law enforcement still won't say a simple word: no. Host John Carlos Frey breaks down the pattern building since February 2026 — FBI Director Kash Patel's refusal, under direct questioning from the Senate Judiciary Committee, to commit that FBI agents will stay away from polling places; DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin's “specifi...

Host John Carlos Frey sits down with immigration attorney and author Robert Coughlon Jr. to discuss his new book, Fixing Immigration in America: A Commonsense Plan for Immigration Reform. Drawing on more than 30 years of experience in family-based immigration and deportation defense — and a personal history that includes his father's career as a Border Patrol agent, INS adjudicator, immigration at...

In the summer of 2026, the Department of Health and Human Services quietly published a federal procurement notice most Americans never saw. The Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) is asking contractors to design, build, and run an "emergency intake facility" — a campus capable of holding up to 3,000 unaccompanied migrant children at a single site. In this episode of The Raid, host John Carlos Fre...

George Pappas spent twenty years as an immigration attorney before becoming an immigration judge in 2023. Two years later, he was fired by email — three sentences, no explanation, the same day as a dozen colleagues around the country. Pappas has advocated for all immigration judges to quit since they are working within a corrupt and broken system. In this episode, we break down Pappas's account, t...

They want you exhausted. That's the strategy. Journalist Memo Torres returns to The Raid to talk about ICE burnout — and why staying engaged might be the most radical thing you can do right now. After more than a year of escalating ICE raids, record detentions, and rising deaths in custody, host John Carlos Frey asks the hard question — how do we stay engaged when the trauma never stops? Torres op...

Before you press play, host John Carlos Frey wants you to know what this episode is. More than a year ago, a source he's worked with for close to 15 years — someone who has never once given him bad information — told him a specific set of things was coming. All five have now happened. But there's a sixth thing the source described — a plan to engineer chaos or violence at the polls this November a...

Veteran journalist Charles Fleming returns to The Raid to tell the story of Maritza, an asylum seeker from Guatemala who survived decades of abuse before finding refuge in the United States. Host John Carlos Frey and Fleming trace Maritza's six-year journey through the U.S. asylum system: her legal border crossing to request protection, the landmark policy that first recognized domestic-violence s...

Tatiana came to the United States from Russia on a legal visa and is married to a U.S. citizen. Five and a half months ago, she was arrested by ICE outside the Santa Monica studio where she worked as a tattoo artist — no warrant, no charges, no explanation. Her husband, Amir Modaraei, joins The Raid to tell the full story: how a 911 call during a rough patch in their relationship put Tatiana on IC...