Trump’s Mass Deportations Are Decades in the Making

03/12/25 • 30 min

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This past weekend marked a major escalation in the Trump administration's mass deportation efforts, with the dramatic detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist who played a prominent role in the protests against Israel on Columbia University’s campus last year. Khalil, a Columbia graduate student, is a permanent legal resident in the US. The Trump administration says it detained Khalil for what it described, without evidence, as his support for Hamas, and President Donald Trump promised “this is the first arrest of many to come” in a Truth Social post. In the meantime, a federal court in New York prevented the federal government from deporting Khalil while it hears his case. He’s currently being held at an immigration detention facility in Louisiana.

Khalil’s arrest—and the Trump administration’s reimagining of immigration writ large—are in many ways a product of decades of dysfunction within the US immigration system itself. On this week’s episode of More To The Story, Reveal’s new weekly interview show, host Al Letson talks with The New Yorker staff writer Jonathan Blitzer about the 50-year history of the country’s inability to deal with migrants at the southern border and why the Trump administration’s approach to immigration is much more targeted—and extreme—than it was eight years ago.

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Dig Deeper/Related Stories:

Did the US Cause Its Own Border Crisis? (Reveal)

https://revealnews.org/podcast/did-the-us-cause-its-own-border-crisis/

Immigrants on the Line (Reveal)

https://revealnews.org/podcast/immigrants-on-the-line/

The Forgotten Origins of a Migration Crisis (Mother Jones)

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/02/jonathan-blitzer-migration-crisis-everyone-who-is-gone-is-here-interview/

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Support our journalism at Revealnews.org/donatenow
Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to get the scoop on new episodes at Revealnews.org/weekly
Instagram

Dig Deeper/Related Stories:

Did the US Cause Its Own Border Crisis? (Reveal)

https://revealnews.org/podcast/did-the-us-cause-its-own-border-crisis/

Immigrants on the Line (Reveal)

https://revealnews.org/podcast/immigrants-on-the-line/

The Forgotten Origins of a Migration Crisis (Mother Jones)

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/02/jonathan-blitzer-migration-crisis-everyone-who-is-gone-is-here-interview/

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Previous Episode

An Atrocity of War Goes Unpunished

In November 2005, a group of US Marines killed 24 civilians in Haditha, Iraq. The case against them became one of the most high-profile war crimes prosecutions in US history—but then it fell apart. Only one Marine went to trial for the killings, and all he received was a slap on the wrist. Even his own defense attorney found the outcome shocking.

“It's meaningless," said attorney Haytham Faraj. “The government decided not to hold anybody accountable. I mean, I don't know, I don't know how else to put it.”

The Haditha massacre, as it came to be known, is the subject of the current season of The New Yorker ’s In the Dark podcast and this week’s episode of Reveal. Reporter Madeleine Baran and her team spent four years looking into what happened at Haditha and why no one was held accountable. They also uncovered a previously unreported killing that happened that same day, a 25th victim whose story had never before been told.

Photos from this story, as well as a searchable database of military war crimes, can be found at newyorker.com/season-3.

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Next Episode

The Plague in the Shadows

Decades before Covid-19, the AIDS epidemic tore through communities in the US and around the world. It has killed some 40 million people and continues to take lives today.

But early on, research and public policy focused on AIDS as a gay men’s disease, overlooking other vulnerable groups—including communities of color and women.

“We literally had to convince the federal government that there were women getting HIV,” says activist Maxine Wolfe. “We actually had to develop treatment and research agendas that were about women.”

This week on Reveal, reporters Kai Wright and Lizzy Ratner from the podcast Blindspot: The Plague in the Shadows take us back to the first years of the HIV epidemic in New York City.

One of the most influential activists for women with AIDS was Katrina Haslip, a prisoner at a maximum-security prison in upstate New York. In the 1980s, Haslip and other incarcerated women started a support group to educate each other about HIV and AIDS.

Haslip took her activism beyond prison walls after her release in 1990, even meeting with leaders of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. One of the main goals was to change the definition of AIDS, which at the time excluded many symptoms that appeared in HIV-positive women. This meant that women with AIDS often did not qualify for government benefits such as Medicaid and disability insurance.

The podcast series Blindspot: The Plague in the Shadows is a co-production of The History Channel and WNYC Studios.

This is an update of an episode that originally aired in February 2024.