Melissa Hirsch | Vox

How Trump transformed ICE, in two charts

2026-01-29T12:51:48-05:00

Federal law enforcement agents detain a demonstrator during a raid in south Minneapolis, Minnesota, on January 13, 2026. | Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Just a year into his second term, Donald Trump’s new, militarized immigration force is on full display.

Agents in masks and plate carriers are seemingly everywhere, first in Chicago last year and now in Minneapolis, where they have killed two US citizens and terrorized uncounted more.

Some of that is because of a change in how Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) does its work; as my colleague Christian Paz has reported, under the second Trump administration, the agency has shifted from conducting relatively few direct arrests to trying to arrest as many people as possible, as fast as possible.

And some of it is due to the fact that there are simply many more agents now: The Trump administration has prioritized hiring for both ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which includes Border Patrol. Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy and de facto immigration czar, has reportedly demanded daily updates on ICE’s recruitment numbers.

This hiring blitz has been facilitated by a huge influx of new money from last year’s Trump-backed reconciliation package (what he branded as his One Big Beautiful Bill).

Here’s what that funding infusion looks like, in billions of dollars.

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ICE and CBP are both part of the Department of Homeland Security, but for context, the annual budget of the US Department of Justice, which houses many other federal law enforcement agencies, is also included. (The DOJ includes not only the FBI, but also the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. Collectively, they receive far less funding annually than either ICE or CBP did via the reconciliation package.)

In part, that money has gone toward a $100 million recruitment campaign to bring in new ICE officers, which the agency has described internally as “wartime recruitment,” according to the Washington Post.

It has also meant new benefits for current and prospective ICE and CPB employees: Up to $50,000 in bonuses for new ICE agents and $60,000 for CBP, as well as possible student loan forgiveness.

ICE’s spending is working, seemingly. The agency has added thousands of new employees in the past year, pushing its workforce to almost 27,000 people as of November 2025, according to data from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).

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ICE’s true workforce may be even larger, however, though there are caveats. While we don’t have more recent OPM numbers, DHS said in an early January press release that it had successfully hired “10,000 new officers and agents,” after receiving more than 220,000 applications. (Those numbers should be taken with a grain of salt until backed up by OPM, given DHS’s serial dishonesty around ICE and its operations.)

As the Atlantic’s Nick Miroff reported this week, it may take time for all of those new hires to reach the field, as many are still in training. But in the drive for raw numbers, training and recruiting standards have reportedly also fallen precipitously: The training course for new ICE recruits is now only 42 days, down from five months, and the agency is all but pulling people off the street.

One journalist, Laura Jedeed, pursued a potential job with ICE as a reporting project; despite abandoning the process midway through, she writes for Slate that she was marked as having accepted a job offer with the agency without completing any of the requisite paperwork or a background check (she ultimately rejected the job).

Jedeed’s experience is maybe the perfect encapsulation of where ICE now finds itself: Flush with money, it’s rushing to meet lofty hiring goals and draconian deportation quotas.

As the chaos in Minnesota proves, it’s doing both badly.

The law that broke US immigration

2021-08-09T10:39:07-04:00

Immigration looked very different before 1996, when President Bill Clinton signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA). The law was supposed to stop undocumented immigration by increasing enforcement and punishing people for being in the US undocumented. Instead, it did the opposite.

Before 1996, Mexican immigrants who came to the US unlawfully were about 50 percent likely to return to Mexico within a year. But in the years that followed, more people started staying in the US, according to data from the Mexican Migration Project. There were around 5 million undocumented immigrants living in the US before IIRIRA. Today, it’s at least double that.

Laws like IIRIRA shaped the way the US focuses on immigration enforcement as a deterrent. But really it proved that stronger enforcement doesn’t actually stop undocumented immigration.

Check out past Vox reporting by Dara Lind on the law and Nicole Narea’s story on the false promises of immigration enforcement.

You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on YouTube.

How radical gardeners took back New York City

2021-06-08T13:39:40-04:00

In the 1960s and 1970s, New York City faced a sharp economic decline and white flight. Buildings were abandoned or burned down, particularly in the city’s lower-income neighborhoods. Communities faced mass disinvestment — and what was left was urban decay.

It was around this time that Hattie Carthan, a 64-year-old woman living in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, began a grassroots effort to transform that urban decay into green space. What started with four newly planted trees in her neighborhood turned into 1,500.

Along with guerrilla gardening efforts popularized by the “seed bombs” of Lower East Side gardener Liz Christy, Hattie’s urban environmental movement paved the way for the city’s support for community gardens.

Today, around 500 community gardens line streets across New York City. But the history of how we got them — through the radical work of people like Hattie and Liz — is often overlooked. Check out the video above to learn more about their stories and how they ultimately transformed the landscape of New York City.

Today, their legacy lives on through the Hattie Carthan Community Garden and Farmers Market, the Liz Christy Community Garden, the Green Guerillas’ ongoing work, and many other urban gardens — including the South Bronx casitas — that are still thriving today.

This is the fifth and final installment in season two of Missing Chapter, where we revisit underreported and often overlooked moments of the past to give context to the present. Our first season covers stories of racial injustice, identity, and erasure. If you have an idea for a topic we should investigate in the series, send it via this form.

You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on YouTube.

Why the US government murdered Fred Hampton

2021-06-02T12:06:01-04:00

On December 4, 1969, the Black Panther Party’s Illinois chairman Fred Hampton was murdered by police. But his story is about much more than the raid that took his life. The movement Hampton helped create was unique and revolutionary.

In the late 1960s, Fred Hampton helped lead a coalition of activists, working across racial lines, against a corrupt city government that threatened their communities. At the core of their work were social programs, including free breakfasts, health clinics, and legal aid. Hampton named the group the Rainbow Coalition. And because of its impact, it wasn’t long before its members got the attention of the police and the FBI. What followed was an assassination and a cover-up.

Check out the video above for what most people aren’t taught about the work of the Black Panthers as well as Fred Hampton’s life and legacy. If you want to learn more, the documentaries The Murder of Fred Hampton and American Revolution 2 are available to stream in full via the Chicago Film Archives. And for more on the Panthers’ coalition work, there’s the PBS film The First Rainbow Coalition and historian Jakobi Williams’ book From the Bullet to the Ballot.

This is the fourth installment in season two of Missing Chapter, where we revisit underreported and often overlooked moments of the past to give context to the present. Our first season covers stories of racial injustice, identity, and erasure. If you have an idea for a topic we should investigate in the series, send it via this form.

You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on YouTube.

How Native Hawaiians fought the US Navy, and won

2021-05-24T13:03:05-04:00

On January 4, 1976, a fleet of boats headed toward the Hawaiian island of Kaho‘olawe. The goal: take the island back from the US military for the Hawaiian people.

Since World War II, the US military had used the island for bombing practice and had decimated its land. But the story of the taking of this one island was part of a bigger history of the taking of all of Hawaii. The decades-long efforts to reclaim it would help spark a movement to renew the culture and traditions of the islands — and a push for Hawaiian sovereignty.

Watch the video above to hear from some of the people most connected to this history, who went up against the US Navy in a historic fight to protect sacred land.

If you want to learn more about the story, check out the book A Nation Rising, the documentary Kaho‘olawe Aloha ‘Āina, the archives at the Kaho‘olawe Island Reserve Commission’s Living Library, and the film Hawaiian Soul, which was inspired by the legacy of Kaho‘olawe activist George Helm.

This is the third installment in season two of Missing Chapter, where we revisit underreported and often overlooked moments of the past to give context to the present. Our first season covers stories of racial injustice, identity, and erasure. If you have an idea for a topic we should investigate in the series, send it via this form!

You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on YouTube.

Dodger Stadium’s violent origin story

2021-05-17T18:23:21-04:00

Before Los Angeles had Dodger Stadium, it had Palo Verde, La Loma, and Bishop. They were three neighborhoods that made up the thriving, predominantly Mexican American community in what is now known as Chavez Ravine. And it was one of few places, due to redlining and racist land covenants, that Mexican American families could buy property and build wealth in Los Angeles.

But things changed in the late 1940s. The city characterized the area as “blighted,” setting the stage for a decade-long battle by residents to preserve the community against threats of eviction. The majority of residents were forced out so the city could build a public housing project. They were given little to no compensation for their properties — and were also told they could live in the public housing project once it was built. But ultimately, after public housing was deemed “a socialist plot” amid the Red Scare politics of the 1950s, the city’s plans for a public housing project fell through. Instead, the final, violent evictions of the 1950s cleared the way for Dodger Stadium.

The result is a complicated legacy. Through interviews with several former residents of the area, we explore the story of their neighborhoods in the video above. It’s one that’s often missing from the history of Los Angeles and has created a double-edged relationship for some Dodger fans.

If you want to learn more about the story, check out the oral history and archival project, “An Unfinished Story,” Eric Nusbaum’s book, Stealing Home, an NPR article on Chavez Ravine, or listen to 99 Percent Invisible’s episode on Chavez Ravine.

This is the second installment in Missing Chapter’s season two, where we revisit underreported and often overlooked moments of the past to give context to the present. Our first season covers stories of racial injustice, identity, and erasure. If you have an idea for a topic we should investigate in the series, send it via this form!

You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on YouTube.

The surprising reason behind Chinatown’s aesthetic

2021-05-10T11:48:46-04:00

From London to Manila to Melbourne, Chinatowns in cities around the world have similar design elements. That’s on purpose. And their distinctive “Chinatown” style can be traced back to a single event: the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

The earthquake came on the heels of decades of violence and racist laws targeting Chinese communities in the US. It devastated Chinatown. But in the destruction, San Francisco’s Chinese business leaders had an idea for a fresh start: a way to keep their culture alive, by inventing a completely new one.

Watch the video above to see how a unique architectural strategy helped Chinatown carve out a place for itself under the threat of hate and violence. Today, that legacy is staring us in the face.

See more of Vox’s coverage of Asian American identity here. And if you want to learn more about the history of Chinatown, check out the Chinese Historical Society of America, Bonnie Tsui’s American Chinatown, or Philip Choy’s San Francisco Chinatown, or listen to 99 Percent Invisible’s episode on the history of Chinatown.

This is the first installment in Missing Chapter’s season two, where we revisit underreported and often overlooked moments of the past to give context to the present. Our first season covers stories of racial injustice, identity, and erasure. If you have an idea for a topic we should investigate in the series, send it via this form!

You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on YouTube.

The biggest radioactive spill in US history never ended

2020-10-13T13:33:32-04:00

For decades, Navajo Nation was a primary source for the United States’ uranium stockpile during the nuclear arms race. It was home to more than 700 uranium mines, which provided jobs to Navajo residents. But the mining industry came with impending peril. Cases of lung cancer and other diseases began cropping up in a community that had previously had few of them. Land, air, and water was poisoned. And on July 16, 1979, the mining led to the biggest radioactive spill in US history.

Watch the video above to hear from residents in Church Rock, New Mexico, who’ve lived with the effects of the spill. More than 40 years later, the site still hasn’t been properly cleaned up, and residents continue to face illnesses, tainted water, and the loss of livestock. Today, with the Environmental Protection Agency’s new plan for cleanup, they’re worried it could wipe out their entire community.

If you want to learn more about mining in Navajo Nation, check out Doug Brugge, Esther Yazzie-Lewis, and Timothy Benally’s book on the subject. Or the feature documentary The Return of Navajo Boy by Groundswell Educational Films.

This is the eighth installment in Missing Chapter, where we revisit underreported and often overlooked moments of the past to give context to the present. Our first season covers stories of racial injustice, identity, and erasure. If you have an idea for a topic we should investigate in the series, send it via this form!

You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on YouTube. If you’re interested in supporting our video journalism, you can become a member of the Vox Video Lab on YouTube.

How beaches and pools became a battleground for US civil rights

2020-10-01T16:01:05-04:00

When we think of the most iconic moments of the US civil rights movement, we might imagine bus boycotts, lunch counter sit-ins, or the March on Washington. Most of us don’t think of protests at beaches and pools. These were the “wade-ins” of the 1950s and ’60s, in which demonstrators demanded equal access by stepping into whites-only waters. And although it’s overlooked by most history textbooks, one summer of protest in the small coastal city of St. Augustine, Florida, played a crucial role in passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

This fight was about more than just enjoying a public beach — it was about who gets to control where Black bodies can swim, relax, and simply exist. And it followed a long history of recreational spaces becoming flashpoints of racial conflict.

Watch the video above to see how the St. Augustine wade-ins changed the US forever. And for more of an in-depth narrative from the St. Augustine protesters, you can also hear me tell this story on a special episode of Today, Explained wherever you listen to podcasts.

If you want to learn more about wade-ins, check out the work of Clennon King and AugustineMonica Films’ feature-length documentary and discussion program. For information and great archival sources, take a look at the Accord Freedom Trail and the Civil Rights Library of St. Augustine. And for two books on the movement to desegregate public waters, check out Andrew Kahrl’s The Land Was Ours and Free the Beaches.

This is the seventh installment in Missing Chapter, where we revisit underreported and often overlooked moments of the past to give context to the present. Our first season covers stories of racial injustice, identity, and erasure. If you have an idea for a topic we should investigate in the series, send it via this form!

You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on YouTube. If you’re interested in supporting our video journalism, you can become a member of the Vox Video Lab on YouTube.

What long voting lines in the US really mean

2020-09-21T18:36:50-04:00

The process of voting isn’t the same for all Americans. Depending on where you live, you might vote on a screen, a punchcard, or a piece of paper. You might have to show an ID to vote. And you might have to wait a long time — or you might not.

Some of these differences don’t really matter. But some of them make voting harder. And sometimes they can keep people from voting altogether. For decades, the US had a civil rights law that made sure those differences were fair and didn’t disproportionately keep certain people from voting: the 1965 Voting Rights Act. But in 2013, the US Supreme Court gutted that law, allowing states to pass a slew of new voting laws.

Those new laws often had the effect of making it harder for poor people and people of color to vote. The 2020 US election will be shaped in part by those laws. But the same election will also decide the future of those laws.

This video is the second in our series on the 2020 election. We aren’t covering the horse race; instead, we want to explain the stakes of the election through the issues that matter the most to you. To do that, we want to know what you think the US presidential candidates should be talking about. Tell us here: vox.com/ElectionVideos

You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on YouTube. And if you’re interested in supporting our video journalism, you can become a member of the Vox Video Lab on YouTube.