The New Yorker:

A former D.H.S. oversight official on what, legally, the agency can and can’t do—and the accountability mechanisms that have been “gutted beyond recognition.”

By Isaac Chotiner

Last week, Renee Nicole Good, a thirty-seven-year-old woman in Minneapolis, was killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in a shooting that has now been seen by people around the world and led to protests across the country. Some senior Trump Administration officials have labelled Good a “domestic terrorist” and claimed that she was trying to run over the ice agent with her car. At a press conference, Vice-President J. D. Vance defended the agent, claiming that federal law-enforcement officials are protected by “absolute immunity.” Footage of Good’s death was only the latest in a string of viral videos of ice personnel engaging in violent behavior toward citizens and noncitizens alike. (The Atlantic reported last year that, as part of the Administration’s efforts to swell its roster of ice agents, training for new agents was cut by nearly two-thirds to just forty-seven days, a number chosen because Donald Trump is the forty-seventh President.)

I recently spoke on the phone with Deborah Fleischaker, who, during the Biden Administration, served as the acting chief of staff of ice, which is housed within the Department of Homeland Security, and who, before that, was a civil servant in the D.H.S. Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how ice has and has not changed during the Trump Administration, the procedures and regulations that ice is supposed to follow, and the dangers of an out-of-control law-enforcement agency.

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