The Raid

In this episode of The Raid, John Carlos Frey sits down with Adam Isaacson to unpack the systematic dismantling of oversight and accountability mechanisms within the Department of Homeland Security — and what it means for migrants, Border Patrol agents, ICE officials and American democracy. Isaacson, author of the report The Dismantling of Internal Oversight and Accountability at DHS, walks throug...

Investigative journalist John Carlos Frey has spent 20 years covering ICE and Border Patrol. What he found will shock you. The three highest-ranking officials at the U.S. Border Patrol have all been implicated in sexual misconduct. The current chief bragged about paying for sex abroad — then abolished the agency's anti-fraternization policy. His two deputies left after sexually victimizing female...

Celeste, co-founder of People Over Papers and ICEOUT.org, discusses the organizations' collaborative effort to map ICE enforcement activity across the US. ICEOUT.org is an anonymous, community-powered platform where users can report and view confirmed ICE sightings on an interactive map. The platform was built to give communities real-time, data-backed awareness of enforcement patterns in their ne...

The U.S. government made a promise to half a million people who grew up in in the United States — and it's breaking that promise quietly, deliberately, and one policy at a time. In this episode, investigative journalist John Carlos Frey breaks down the real-time dismantling of DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals). This isn't happening through a single executive order. It's happening throu...

Sara Hernandez — candidate for California State Senate District 26 — joins host John Carlos Frey to talk about what it's like to run for office in a district under siege. A former middle school teacher in South L.A., immigration attorney, and current president of the L.A. Community College District Board of Trustees, Sara brings a ground-level perspective to some of the most pressing issues facing...

For more than twenty years, Meenu Batra sat inside courtrooms and recorded everything — testimony, rulings, the words spoken on the most consequential days of people's lives. She had legal status. She had a career built on institutional trust. She was as embedded in the American legal system as anyone could be. Then ICE apprehended her. In this episode of The Raid, host John Carlos Frey speaks wit...

Since Donald Trump returned to the White House, more than 100 immigration judges have been fired in an unprecedented purge — with a similar number resigning or retiring. In their place, the administration has installed over 140 new judges, many with no immigration law experience and as little as three weeks of training. Investigative journalist John Carlos Frey examines who these new judges are, w...

Izzy Ramirez didn't start as a journalist. He started as someone who refused to look away.  When ICE raids swept through Los Angeles last summer, Izzy was on the streets — phone in hand, posting real-time alerts, telling people where federal agents were, which neighborhoods to avoid, where families were being torn apart. He wasn't working for a newsroom. He was working for his community. And peopl...

At just 18 years old, Cesar Vasquez is already a veteran organizer on California's Central Coast. As a Rapid Response Organizer for 805 Undocufund — a nonprofit providing emergency financial relief and real-time immigration enforcement alerts to undocumented residents across Ventura, Santa Barbara, and San Luis Obispo Counties — Cesar is on the front lines of one of the most vulnerable communities...

Over the past ten months, federal immigration agents and Border Patrol officers have arrested more than three hundred American citizens at immigration protests across the country — charging them with serious federal crimes like assaulting an officer, conspiracy, and interfering with law enforcement. In more than a third of those cases, the charges were dropped, dismissed, or lost at trial. Because...

On this episode of The Raid is Marc Philpart. He is the Executive Director of the Black Freedom Fund, bringing more than a decade of leadership in grassroots organizations to build power for racial justice. Marc serves on several boards and advisory committees, including the California Immigrant Policy Center, Partners for Dignity and Rights, and the University of Southern California’s Equity Rese...

Actress and activist, Diane Guerrero candidly reveals details of the night immigration officials deported her parents, leaving her without her family at age 14. Diane Guerrero is an actress and activist best known for her roles in Orange Is the New Black, Jane the Virgin, Doom Patrol and Encanto — but her most important story has nothing to do with Hollywood. When she was fourteen years old, she c...

Former Border Patrol Agent, Jenn Budd is back on the podcast to offer her new book that dives into the federal law enforcement agencies known as ICE and US Border Patrol as only an insider can. She helps to explain why we are seeing so much violence and lawlessness by these agencies and offers methods to abolish or reform them.  The book is entitled, ICE - What Everyone Needs to Know and available...

On the podcast is Victor Picard. He's the Edwin Baker Professor of media policy and political economy at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for communication, where he co-directs the Media Inequality and Change Center. His research explores the intersections of U.S. and global media, activism and politics, media history, democratic theory, and communications policy. John Carlos Frey...

Tito Rodriguez he is the co-founder of the Local Hearts Foundation. The foundation focuses on helping at-risk families and underserved communities in the greater Los Angeles area. Tito's organization went into overdrive during the ICE Raids in Los Angeles when immigrants were afraid to leave their homes for fear of being taken and deported. They stopped going to work or taking their kids to school...

On January 3rd, 2026, a 55-year-old man named Geraldo Lunas Campos was standing in line at an immigration detention facility in El Paso, Texas, waiting for his asthma medication. He never got it. Instead, he was taken to a solitary confinement cell, held down by guards, and died. He said "I can't breathe" — in Spanish — more than once. The government said he tried to kill himself. The county medic...

Dr. Paul Ong is a Professor Emeritus at UCLA. He has been analyzing the data from across the country pertaining to the ICE raids. Dr. Ong discusses his findings in detail with John Carlos Frey in this illuminating podcast. According to Ong, the current administration is not only reshaping our immigration system with the ongoing mass deportation campaign, but also the demographic make-up of the Uni...

Flock cameras, ring cameras, face recognition technology and license plate readers are just some of the technology ICE is using to surveil people across the country. Technology coupled with shared data with federal agencies and law enforcement create an unprecedented surveillance state and dragnet. It appears this vast system is not just for locating undocumented immigrants.  Wendy Fry is a season...

John Carlos Frey takes a look at the history of the top three officials within the Department of Homeland Security running the mass deportation campaign after the firing of Kristi Noem. Each has a questionable past making confidence in DHS questionable. Frey contends not much will change now that Noem is gone.  https://theraidpodcast.org/  https://www.finance.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/letter_to_dhs...

Over the past year, through a series of executive orders, asylum cases have all but halted. Asylum was a legal method of fleeing persecution and fear of life to find safe harbor in the United States. In the recent past, the process to gain asylum had been lengthy and grueling for most applicants with the vast majority of applicants being rejected but now it appears the doors have closed, altogethe...

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the nation’s leading authority on child health, has repeatedly and unequivocally opposed the detention of children for immigration purposes; in fact, the AAP’s leadership recently reiterated that all children held in immigration detention should be immediately released, and these facilities should be permanently shuttered.” On the podcast is Barbara Rodrig...

John Carlos Frey takes a deep look into the separation of parents from their children during the mass deportation effort. Children are being abandoned against what used to be standard procedure that considered the plight of children during deportation proceedings. The numbers are alarming and worse than any other family separation tactic in the past.  https://theraidpodcast.org/  https://www.ameri...

Alvaro Huerta is the Director of Litigation and Advocacy for Immigrant Defenders Law Center. The organization has recently filed suit against the Adelanto immigrant detention facility in Southern California. The lawsuit alleges, "People have been forced to live in unsanitary conditions and subjected to punitive isolation and neglect, conditions that would be considered abuse in almost any other se...

Back on the podcast is journalist, Nick Schwellenbach. He's a Senior Investigator at Pogo Investigates, the news reporting division of the Project on Government Oversight. John Carlos Frey and Nick discuss a recent article Nick coauthored entitled Ice, Inc. The Top Companies Profiting from Trump's Immigration Crackdown.  They discuss the companies most closely associated with the massive deportati...

In March 2025, a year ago this month, the United States deported 238 Venezuelans to El Salvador, to be immediately and indefinitely imprisoned without trial and without convictions, prison sentences nor release dates. Human Rights Watch considered this practice a violation of national and international laws, and especially human rights violations. In this episode John Carlos Frey summarizes this f...