The Raid

On January 7th, a 37-year-old mother of three named Renee Goode was shot and killed by an ICE agent on a residential street in south Minneapolis — two blocks from an elementary school. The federal government says she tried to run the agent over with her car and called it an act of domestic terrorism. Her family, eyewitnesses, and an independent autopsy tell a very different story. Six to seven mon...

Armed CBP agents and contractors entered Tohono O'odham land before dawn, blocked tribal police from enforcing their own law, and brought in a SWAT team to protect the work. Before sunrise on August 25, roughly twenty masked, armed CBP agents crossed onto the Tohono O'odham Nation alongside border wall contractors — Tribal police were blocked from making arrests. A CBP tactical unit, a surveillanc...

John Carlos Frey sits down with Carlos Garcia — former executive director of the human rights organization Puente Human Rights Movement, former Vice Mayor of Phoenix, and longtime immigrant rights organizer.  In this conversation, Garcia and Frey trace the roots of today's ICE raids back to Arizona's Sheriff Arpaio era and the state laws — SB 1070, the 287(g) program, English-only policies, and mo...

A local officer runs the plates on a Ford Explorer parked outside a town hall — and the story the driver gives him falls apart within minutes. In this episode of The Raid, host John Carlos Frey breaks down what happened outside Congresswoman Ilhan Omar's August 6th town hall in Richfield, Minnesota, when a woman claiming to be private security turned out to be a federal Homeland Security Investiga...

A father in New Mexico thought he was going to an interview to reunite with his kids. Instead, ICE put him in chains. On this episode of The Raid,  John Carlos Frey traces how the Trump administration is using migrant children in federal custody as leverage to locate and detain their parents and relatives — and how that's just one piece of a much bigger strategy to dismantle long standing protecti...

Host John Carlos Frey investigates the killing of Isaias Sanchez Barbosa, a 31-year-old man shot three times by a Border Patrol agent on a private ranch in Starr County, Texas, on December 11th.  Frey lays out how this case fits a long-running pattern: agency self-investigation, a fast public statement built on the same handful of justifying phrases, records that surface only when a reporter or a...

For over a year, LA Taco staff reporter Izzy Ramirez has been on the ground documenting ICE and Border Patrol raids across Southern California — logging arrests, archiving footage, and standing between agents and the communities they're targeting. In this deeply personal follow-up conversation, host John Carlos Frey asks the question most interviews skip: what has doing this work actually done to...

Host John Carlos Frey sits down with longtime civil rights organizer Eric Ward — Executive Vice President of Race Forward and a Senior Fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center — to unpack the argument at the center of his recent Colorlines essay, "The Latest ICE Surge Is Political Violence."  Drawing on nearly four decades of organizing work, Ward lays out why he believes the current wave of ICE...

ICE has become a national deportation policing force — and according to a bombshell new ACLU report, it's operating with a level of violence and impunity America has never seen before.  In this episode of The Raid, host John Carlos Frey sits down with Naureen Shah, Director of Government Affairs for the Equality Division at the American Civil Liberties Union and a longtime human rights lawyer, res...

Host John Carlos Frey sits down with Sennett Devermont — known online as Mr. Checkpoint — the Southern California activist who built a nationwide alert network for DUI checkpoints, ICE operations, and police activity. Sennett traces his journey from a 2011 San Diego State student warning classmates about unconstitutional, unpublicized checkpoints to becoming one of the most recognizable "film the...

For months, The Raid has covered America's deportation machine through the eyes of journalists, experts, and activists — but the voices most missing from the conversation have been the immigrants living it. In this episode, host John Carlos Frey sits down with veteran journalist Charles Fleming, a 40-year newsroom journalist and former Los Angeles Times editor, who came out of retirement to find a...

At just 27, Sasha Renée Pérez became the youngest female mayor in San Gabriel Valley history. Now she's the youngest member of the California State Senate — and she's using that seat to take on ICE. Host, John Carlos Frey sits down with Senator Pérez to talk about her journey from Alhambra City Council to Sacramento, and the wave of legislation she's championing to protect immigrant communities ac...

A federal guard pleads guilty to nine separate counts involving women held in the same detention facility. The government's own records show over 1,310 abuse complaints filed against ICE detention staff in a single three-year window — and outside researchers have found over a thousand more. On this episode of The Raid, host John Carlos Frey traces how a system built with almost no independent over...

An ICE check-in used to be paperwork. Now it can be a trap — and that shift is doing the work that raids and deportation flights can't. John Carlos Frey talks with Kimberly Avalos, a multimedia journalist and supervising producer at The News Movement, whose documentary "American Dreamers: Self-Deporting from the United States" was an Online News Association finalist for Excellence in Social Justic...

The federal government owes nearly $1 million to Estrella del Paso, the largest provider of free legal services to unaccompanied migrant children in West Texas and New Mexico — and it isn't paying up.  On this episode of The Raid, host John Carlos Frey sits down with Executive Director Melissa Lopez to break down how the administration tried to terminate a 20-year-old, congressionally mandated leg...

What does it actually take for a detention system to qualify as a "concentration camp" — historically, not emotionally?  In this episode of The Raid, host John Carlos Frey sets aside the online shouting match and applies the definition historians actually use: mass detention of civilians, without due process or trial, based on identity rather than conduct — a framework traced back to camps in 1890...

Before this year's midterms, ICE told a federal judge it had no records on any plans to send agents to polling places. That wasn't true.  In this episode of The Raid, John Carlos Frey traces what actually happened when two Homeland Security agents walked into an active polling site in Syracuse, NY, to pressure a poll worker over a months-old social media post — and how that incident became the evi...

In this urgent, unfiltered conversation, host John Carlos Frey sits down with Congresswoman Delia Ramirez (IL-03) — the first Latina elected to Congress from Illinois and the Midwest — to confront the escalating violence of America's immigration enforcement system.  Rep. Ramirez, a member of the Homeland Security Committee and the only member of Congress in a mixed-status family, doesn't hold back...

John Carlos Frey tells the story of Gabriel Cariaco's arrest in Bellevue, Nebraska — a legal asylum seeker who fled Venezuela, accused of being a member of the gang Tren de Aragua, and charged with attempted murder of a federal agent. Frey traces how the government's account changed within 24 hours of the arrest, how a tattoo meant to honor his son's birthday became "evidence" of gang membership,...

Three men are dead in fourteen days — Houston, Biddeford, St. Augustine — all in encounters with ICE. In the same week, border czar Tom Homan told Fox News that ICE agents are "well-trained in vehicle stops," then said he'd personally requested the agency's training curriculum to review it. Both things can't be true even though the president vetoed the review.  John Carlos Frey goes on the record...

John Carlos Frey sits down with Jennifer Huerta, a sixth-grade language teacher in Bakersfield, California, and a recipient of DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals). Brought to the U.S. from Michoacán, Mexico at just two years old, Jennifer grew up not fully understanding what it meant to be undocumented — until college applications and financial aid forms made the distinction painfully cl...

Ten people. Ten families still waiting for someone in the U.S. government to be held responsible for their deaths. In this episode, John Carlos Frey goes case by case through ten people killed by ICE and Border Patrol this year, including the most recent ICE relating killings. Frey relies on his original reporting about the Border Patrol's "Critical Incident Teams," internal units whose own stated...

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...