CNN One Thing

This is One Thing, I'm David Rind, and you might have noticed, ICE has been out of the headlines lately. What's behind that, and is it gonna last?

I've covered this for a long time and it can change on a dime, and so I don't know that we're at a place to say that it'll be quiet for the remainder of the year.

When did you first come to the United States?

I've been living here since I was four, so like this year would make it exactly 20 years since I moved here.

'This is Emma. She's a 24-year-old teacher living in Massachusetts. Emma asked we only use her first name because she fears retaliation from the Trump administration. The reason for that fear is because she has temporary protected status, or TPS. TPS protections allow foreigners to work and live in the United States if they would face extreme unrest back in their home country because of violence or natural disasters. Emma is originally from Haiti. Haitians like Emma were granted TPS after a devastating earthquake in 2010, and things have only gotten worse since. Their president was assassinated in 2021, armed gangs basically run the country now, with food and healthcare scarce. Well, as those protections were about to expire earlier this year, the Trump administration moved to terminate them, but then a federal judge stepped in and temporarily blocked the The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that Haiti's TPS was never intended to be a de facto amnesty program and that the earthquake took place over 15 years ago, quote, temporary means temporary. And the final word will not be from activist judges legislating from the bench. Now, I think it's worth stepping back a bit here. President Trump actually tried to end these protections during his first term, but it also got caught up in the courts, and then the Biden administration extended them.

So it was never a fear that T.P. Was within. It was just a, okay, what am I gonna do to eventually become a citizen? So then flash forward to now, the second trope animation. Now it's like, oh, like I'm scared. Like you were planning for months, not years.

Why do you think in your mind the Trump administration wants to end the protections?

Of course, everything is politics, even on the campaign trail, the animosity toward Haitians.

In Springfield they're eating the dogs, the people that came in, they're eating the cats, they are eating the pets of the people that live there. They're eating cats, they're eatng dogs. The people on television say my dog was taken and used for food.

Yeah. How did that make you feel when that was going on?

Oh, that is like, oh, wow. Okay, like, it was unexpected. Like, what was that unexpected? Like, I can't believe you said that, but it was just like, having that level of like national attention on us.

But the people are on television saying their dog was eaten by the people that went there.

Again, the Springfield City Manager says there's no evidence of that. Vice President Harris, I'll let you respond.

Although they did try to get rid of the TPS designation in the first Trump administration, it felt more like a just a, well we're just trying to get it rid of for everybody versus this time it feels more like, oh, we're specifically targeting Haitians.

'We will hear argument first this morning in case 25-1083, Mullen versus Doe, and the consolidated case. General Sauer.

'On Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a major case about these protections. The ruling could impact more than 350,000 Haitians and about 6,000 Syrians who benefit from these protections We should get the final decision in June or July, but the court's conservative justices appeared ready to side with the Trump administration. The court had already allowed the Trump Administration to follow through with its plan to terminate TPS for more than 300,000 Venezuelans through its so-called shadow socket. So things are not looking good for Emma. Do you have a sense of what will happen if the court does side with the Trump administration here?

Honestly, no, it's really one of the things where it's like, what do I do now? Because going back to Haiti really isn't an option. I mean, it is one of those things where I have no choice. I have not choice. There's a current pause on all immigration benefits and unfortunately, Haiti is one those countries. So it'd be one of things where even if I were to apply, I don't know how long it will take for me to get it. For me to apply for something else, I have to currently be in status. So if I were to lose the TPS, it's really not much I could do other than like get married.

Wow, I mean, so the status really is the gateway to any other kind of legal pathways you might be looking at. Yes. And going back to Haiti again, it's just not an option in your mind.

'Not really, like even with me having like on my degree, like I have like an American education, American degree, other normal circumstances, say I'd moved back to Port-au-Prince, I could probably work at one of like the embassy schools, get a job there, no issue. You know, live in like a relative comfort compared to other Haitians. Now it'd be like, I wouldn't even be able to get to work. I wouldn't even want people to know that I have any American ties because then there'll be a target on my back because then they'll be like, Oh, you have money.

I mean, the Supreme Court case, you know, wasn't really even up for debate that the federal government does have the right to terminate these protections if it sees fit. It was more about whether DHS conducted the necessary review of whether it was safe to return to Haiti or whether racial animus played any role in all this. But I mean like the administration says, temporary is right there in the name. Wasn't this always a possibility for you that this would end and you'd have to figure out what's next?

And like I said, it was always a possibility, but once like under Biden and with the security position, okay. I was like, okay, like this is not getting better anytime soon. So like I'd have that safety net for the way I see it. It would just be a matter of fact of, you know, the lane low, like hopefully I don't end up in an ice raid and where they're asking for papers and I don't have any this, like I don't expect them to come knocking at my door to come grab me. Cause I don´t have.

'But like, would you change the way you go about your day-to-day life in that case?

I mean, yes, I, I honestly wouldn't really have a choice as far as working. I wouldn't be able to work anymore because now I don't have any work authorization. So even with me being a teacher that would end right then and there, um, thankfully, I'm currently located in a state where like my license doesn't, um, it's not tied to my immigration status. So like I could still drive.

'It's worth reiterating, the Trump administration has worked to restrict just about every kind of legal immigration pathway, not just temporary protected status. Refugee admissions have been capped. Immigrant visa processing has been paused for 75 countries. Student visa applicants are subject to stricter screening, including a review of social media histories. A lot of that has happened behind the scenes, in the fine print of rules and regulations. But so far, the trump administration's crackdown on illegal immigration during a second administration. Has been much louder and more visible. The border has essentially been closed, which is what the vast majority of Americans wanted. But many Americans have had a visceral reaction to indiscriminate raids without warrants taking place in their cities and towns, which went beyond tracking down criminals in the U.S. Illegally. In fact, a CNN analysis of government data showed only about half of those detained in 2025 had criminal convictions or pending charges outside of immigration violations. And ever since the killing of two American citizens in Minneapolis earlier this year, that enforcement effort has been noticeably quieter and less visible. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement is attempting something of a rebrand, at least on social media. The official White House ex-account that once posted, roses are red, violets are blue, come here illegally and we'll deport you is now calling ICE agents, nice agents. And DHS is highlighting positive interactions with the community. So what's going on here? Is it because of new leadership? Are there political concerns at play? And does a softer tone on social media actually translate to a lighter touch in the streets? When we come back, I'm gonna talk to our immigration expert, CNN's Priscilla Alvarez, about all of that. Stick around. Okay, Priscilla, we're coming up on two months since Kristi Noem was fired as head of DHS. There was a lot of drama that led up to her firing, but you reported how at least part of her exit was because of how she handled the situation in Minneapolis with Alex Pretti and Renee Good and the broader immigration enforcement operation. So as we record this on April 30th, how would you describe how that operation is being run by new secretary Mark Wynne Mullin?

Well, Markwayne Mullin said during his confirmation hearings that he didn't want the Department of Homeland Security to be the lead story every day, as it really had been over recent months.

Uh... We have a different approach i think every leader in my businesses that we ran with my wife uh... For all those years every time you put a new manager a new supervisor in an apartment

And so his approach so far and one that he's articulated in interviews with the media is that he wants to do immigration enforcement in a quote, more quiet way. He actually said this himself in mid April on CNBC.

We're still enforcing immigration laws, we're still deporting illegals that shouldn't be here, we're going after the worst of the worst, but we're doing it in a more quiet way, because my goal in six months is to not have DHS on the lead story every day. We want to make sure people understand we're here working for the people, not against you.

Now, that doesn't mean, he says, that they are not enforcing immigration law or that they're not deporting people who are in the United States and who are undocumented, but rather taking a step back from the splashy approach that the previous Homeland Security Secretary and her senior officials had taken.

Is there a bit of an image rehab going on as well? Because I've seen on social media from some of these official accounts trying to sort of rebrand ICE agents as nice agents. What's going on there?

Well, for now, that's mostly a social media campaign. President Trump endorsed the idea on true social, but so far we haven't seen this take off in any other manner other than it being used, again, on social media by DHS. It's kind of a test of—

It's kind of a test of acknowledgement, though, that the public has this image of ICE as being, you know, aggressive.

Yes. And for legitimate reasons, given what transpired over the last several months. And again, going back to Minneapolis, when those two US citizens were shot. So I think that really captures his mentality and his thinking around how to continue to execute on the president's immigration agenda, but not to do it the way that had been done over the last year, which was those broad immigration sweeps. In cities where you had US Border Patrol really taking the lead along with ICE, but rather having ICE leading this and really using the strategies that they typically did in conducting immigration arrests.

Yeah, that was going to be my question. Are there less detentions happening or are we just seeing less of them?

'We're seeing less of them. Arrests are ongoing and arrests also of people who don't have criminal records. So yes, there are the arrests of those who have criminal histories, but similarly we are covering stories of people who are arrested in these operations who don't have criminal history but have immigration violations like crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally. And that is something that from the get-go, even when Mullen came in, uh... Him and white house boards are tom holman made clear they never close the door to arresting other people in these operations it just looks different than the way it had looked again over the last year so yes arrests are still happening detentions are still having there about a thousand arrests happening on a daily basis that number ebbs and flows and we should also take a beat to note that the acting ice director is leaving the agency at the end. Of May and so currently there is an ongoing search for that next ICE director and then the question will be how do they lead the charge.

I mean, what about the deportations themselves? That is kind of the end goal, right, of this whole thing. Is that still happening at a pace that is kind up to the Trump administration's level?

I don't think anything that happens in immigration happens to the Trump administration's level necessarily. And I say that only because Stephen Miller, who is the architect of the administration's hardline immigration policies, to remind listeners he's the White House Deputy Chief of Staff, he has really high goals. He always wants more. That's what sources tell me. So currently, with deportations... That have been conducted by ICE, they have been just under a million. And one of their goals was to have a million in the course of a year, a million deportations.

You're saying they wanted a million a year, and it's been less than a million up to this point?

'Conducted by immigration and customs enforcement. Yes, and I think the pushback that we often get from the Trump administration when we say this is Okay, but you're not accounting for self deportations and they say there have been millions of those but they have not provided How they're calculating that number we know anecdotally that yes people have self-deported They are nervous about what's happening in the United States and they have decided to go back to their home country But in all the numbers that we have been able to see, so the hard data that we can get our hands on, we have not seen millions of deportations happen up until this point.

What are some of the roadblocks they're still running into?

Well, deportations are historically really hard to do, and there's a few reasons for that. So, for example, the United States has frosty relations with some countries around the world, and it can be hard to reach an agreement to send nationals of that country back. And that's because countries will not accept them. Now, what this administration has tried to do to work around that is strike these agreements. What we call the third country, that they might not have any ties to, but allows the administration to at the very least deport them. But even that, the administration has faced some hurdles because while they struck multiple agreements to make this happen, they're still relying on these countries to actually do the accepting. One of the other challenges for the Trump administration has been detention. So what do we mean by that? Those are facilities around the country. They are generally privately run, but also the federal government will partner with local jails. And that is where after someone is arrested, they are detained before they are deported. So there was a period of time where a lot of these facilities were overcrowded because they were arresting people faster than they were supporting them, which means that they're just holding in detention. So the administration wanted to expand to their facilities. And under former secretary Noem, one of those was the idea of warehouses and buying multiple warehouses across the country and then retrofitting those to serve as detention. Well, that received bipartisan pushback. There were Republicans that called in to DHS and said, can we not do this in my backyard? And then Mark Wayne Mullen came in. And ever since he's come in, these warehouses have sort of been put on pause. So we're still in sort of a wait and see in terms of how that shakes out, but there was certainly a moment of immense pushback, both from Democrats and Republicans, when the department was purchasing these warehouses.

When we talk about detention and where these folks are kind of waiting, I know that children have been kind of caught up in some of this and you've been reporting on that. What is going on there?

'So I want to be clear here that when we talk about children being detained, it can be in two contexts. So one is family detention, which got a lot of attention over recent months. That is a facility in Texas. But the other type of detention, though I will clarify, is that of unaccompanied children. So unaccompanying migrant children are children who cross the U.S.-Mexico border alone. They may have a parent or a guardian in the United States, but. Before they can be released to them, they will be placed in shelters across the country. And it is the Department of Health and Human Services who is charged with taking care of them. The other group of children that this involves is children who have been slipped up in ICE operations. So that has something happen in the interior and say that the parent they were living with was detained. And so this child is then referred to the Health and Human Services Department. So those children, the intent is that they will eventually be released to that US-based, what we call, sponsor. But that, again, can be a parent, a relative, or some other guardian. There have been new restrictions added to that process under the Trump administration. So these kids are spending seven months, on average, in these shelters. While that's happening, they are also going through immigration hearings. And they are, also, trying to. Find and obtain immigration relief. And so they're facing both the staying in the shelters for multiple months, not knowing if they will be released at all, the immigration hearing, so going before an immigration judge. In some cases, I've talked to attorneys and these kids will wet their pants every time they go to immigration court because it's just a scary place. They don't know who the judge is. They don't understand what's going on. And then at the same time, attorneys trying to find relief for these kids, there are some obvious avenues that have been used for years, but all of that's happening at once. And now we know that those hearings, those immigration hearings I was talking about are being moved up. So they're going to immigration court more frequently. The fear is that there won't be enough time to find release and that they could eventually be deported. So I think if we sort of zoom out here, It is a reminder that the immigration system is massive. There are multiple people that are impacted by it. And a lot of what happens in immigration can happen behind the scenes.

And that's not unique to the Trump administration, right? Like it's always been like this.

Well, with the kids, the unaccompanied kids in HHS custody, yes, that has been true for a long time. What is different is how long they're spending in custody because of those new restrictions and also this accelerated timeline for immigration hearings. Those immigration hearings for kids have usually been spread out over months because it takes so long to file paperwork with other parts of the federal government to relief for these children and so The fact that their hearings are happening at least like once a month now is a striking difference from the way things were before.

'I mean, you talk about how a lot of that happens behind the scenes. And I think what people saw in Minneapolis earlier this year was so public, so not behind the scenes, and there was a lot reaction to that. So I mean can we look at all this as an acknowledgement of that and that Mark-Wayne Mullen and the Trump administration at large maybe wants to get a lot more of this behind the scenes as we approach the midterms when those scenes might kind of be in minds as they're going to vote.

I don't know that we're in a place yet to forecast what this is all going to look like a month, two, three from now, but there has certainly been a recoiling of sorts that happened after the situation in Minneapolis. And we really saw that out of the gate. As soon as White House border guard Tom Homan, a veteran federal law enforcement official came into that city, everything got much quieter, even though operations continued. And so that is the state of play now. That is what Mark Wayne Mullen has projected. He wants to be the case moving forward. But I've covered this for a long time and it can change on a dime. And so I don't know that we're at a place to say that it'll be quiet for the remainder of the year in terms of what people see. But certainly what is consistently happening behind the scenes is the Department of Homeland Security, as well as many other departments that touch immigration. Consistently moving the president's agenda forward, and that is a tightening of immigration at large.

Well Priscilla, thank you.

Thanks for having me.

All right, that's all we got today. Thank you so much for listening. Make sure you're following the show. So a new episode will pop in your feed right away and I'll talk to you next time.