The Metro: The inner workings of ICE and the origins of immigration policing
After the killing of two American citizens in Minneapolis by federal immigration officers, scrutiny of ICE has intensified. Law professor César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández explains how immigration enforcement became tied to criminal policing.
A woman holding a child gets into a federal immigration officer's vehicle on Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2026, in Minneapolis.
The killing of two American citizens in Minneapolis by federal immigration officers has forced the country to look more closely at Immigration and Customs Enforcement. When applying that closer lens, that scrutiny moves beyond individual agents to the system itself. It’s one built through laws, budgets, and a long-standing decision to treat immigration as a criminal problem.
César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a law professor at Ohio State University, studies the once less known aspects of the U.S. system: where immigration enforcement operates like criminal policing, and detention functions like punishment even when the government calls it “civil.”
His latest book is “Welcome the Wretched: In Defense of the ‘Criminal Alien.'”
García Hernández joined Robyn Vincent on The Metro to discuss what kind of immigration system is actually being built in the name of Americans, and how we got here.
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