The Raid

A 143-year-old city hall in Limoges, France goes up in flames. Within hours, Vice President J.D. Vance shares the video and tells Americans, “This is the future if congressional Democrats win.” The next morning, President Trump posts, “France is burning,” and blames immigrants.

John Carlos Frey treats the claim like a case and follows the evidence. French authorities have not linked immigrants to the rioting. He lays out why the claim is false, why it’s scapegoating, and how it follows the same playbook used during the 2025 ICE protests in Los Angeles, now aimed at American voters weeks befo...

John Carlos Frey sits down with Aaron Parnas, the former public defender turned independent news creator with millions of followers on TikTok and one of Substack’s top newsletters, The Parnas Perspective.

Parnas started posting when Russia invaded Ukraine and his six-year-old cousin was sheltering in a bathtub in Kyiv. He had a million followers within a week. Today he talks about why legacy media “sane-washes” this administration, and he breaks down the raid on Rep. Ilhan Omar’s home three weeks before an election she’s on the ballot for. He also lays out his “Jurassic Park” theory: a Whit...

Fear is keeping people from the polls. On this episode of The Raid, investigative journalist John Carlos Frey talks with former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa about A Count You Can Trust, a new nonpartisan coalition he co-chairs to explain how votes are counted and correct false claims with facts.

Villaraigosa has been on the ballot 21 times and says he has never seen tension like this. With talk of ICE agents at voting centers, an immigration enforcement surge in Los Angeles, and claims from Washington that California’s elections are rigged, he explains why so many voters, Democrats an...

John Carlos Frey talks with Nick Miroff, staff writer at The Atlantic, 2026 Pulitzer Prize finalist, and George Polk Award winner, about what’s really happening inside ICE and the Department of Homeland Security.

He explains why the White House keeps doubling down on mass deportation, including how a pause on ICE traffic stops was reversed within 24 hours. He also walks through his reporting showing that violent crime is falling fastest in the same sanctuary cities the administration is targeting.

A candid conversation with two top journalists about the mass deportation machine.

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John Carlos Frey sits down with Vanessa Cárdenas, Executive Director of America’s Voice, to talk about what mass deportation is doing to immigrant families, U.S. citizens, and the country itself.

Cárdenas came to the U.S. from Bolivia at 14. Today she’s having the same conversation with her own U.S.-born kids that Latino families across the country are having: what to do if ICE pulls you over. Her cousin now carries a copy of her U.S.-citizen daughter’s passport, just in case. Relatives with legal status ask whether carrying their papers i...

In 2018, Jess Morales Rocketto helped put people in the streets of hundreds of cities to stop family separation. Now she says the deportation machine has gotten smarter, and that pushing back still works.

John Carlos Frey sits down with the organizer behind Families Belong Together and the co-founder of Maremoto, which builds Latino power through politics, media and culture. Morales Rocketto began her career in anti-genocide activism. She explains why she believes the United States is at stage four or five of the ten recognized stages of genocide, what has changed since 2018, and why public resistance in Minneapolis...

Weeks before the November 3 midterms, Rep. Judy Chu (D-CA) joins John Carlos Frey to talk about ICE raids in her district, the detention center that refused to let her in, and whether immigration agents could show up at polling places.

Chu represents Pasadena, Altadena, and the West San Gabriel Valley, a district hit first by the Eaton Fire and then, five months later, by immigration raids. She describes constituents who carry their passports everywhere, people arrested at the very appointments meant to legalize their status, and masked agents detaining day laborers at a Pasadena bus stop.

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ICE agents stopped a work van outside Albany, Georgia. Three men ran. One of them, 28-year-old Edgar Cabrera-Gómez, ended up pinned beneath an ICE agent's Dodge Charger in the grass median of the Liberty Expressway.

The Georgia State Patrol says the agent was driving in the median. ICE says Edgar "lost his footing and slid under" the car. His family says he was run down while running away, and that the first story they were told was that he jumped out of the van and hurt himself.

John Carlos Frey investigates what happened on that m...

What happens when people who have lived in the U.S. legally for decades are suddenly made undocumented? Host John Carlos Frey sits down with Todd Schulte, president of FWD.us, the policy organization working on immigration and criminal justice reform. Todd explains what he calls the "de-legalizing" of immigrants: the unprecedented revocation of DACA, Temporary Protected Status (TPS), and other protections that could leave an estimated 3.5 million previously lawful residents without status by 2028.

Todd also lays out what advocates should demand from 2028 presidential candidates on day one, the role of faith and community in the pushback, and...

In February 2026, ICE's acting director told the U.S. Senate under oath there was "no reason" for immigration agents to be at polling places. Within months, armed agents made an arrest outside a San Antonio polling site, showed up at a voting location in Simi Valley, and confronted a poll worker in Syracuse, New York, in the middle of her shift.

With a federal judge ordering documents about these incidents be released before Election Day, more than 8,000 pages are still scheduled to stay hidden until after the votes are counted. John Carlos Frey goes through the details.

Is ICE coming to the polls? Independent investigative journalist Justin Glawe joins host John Carlos Frey to connect two stories that are rapidly converging: America's deportation machine and the organized effort to undermine the 2026 midterm elections.

Glawe, whose reporting has appeared in Rolling Stone, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Daily Beast, Esquire and more, has tracked election deniers who hold elected and appointed positions on county election boards in key swing districts. He lays out why he believes federal ballot seizures are the next move, how the unprecedented FBI raid on the Fulton County elections...

Can armed agents be at your polling place? The city of Denver just did something no city has done before: it sued the Trump administration to keep armed ICE agents away from the polls.

On Thursday, September 10, 2026, the City and County of Denver, along with LULAC, Common Cause, and Unidos US, filed suit in federal court in Washington, D.C. against the Department of Homeland Security, ICE, and their leadership. The plaintiffs allege an unwritten "polling place policy" that could put armed agents at voting sites, drop boxes, and curbside voting locations during the midterm elections. DHS says...

Election Day is weeks away, and the officials who control armed federal law enforcement still won't say a simple word: no. Host John Carlos Frey breaks down the pattern building since February 2026 — FBI Director Kash Patel's refusal, under direct questioning from the Senate Judiciary Committee, to commit that FBI agents will stay away from polling places; DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin's “specific threat” exception for ICE deployment at voting sites; a bipartisan warning letter from a dozen senators that went effectively unanswered; and the one clean, written denial in this entire story — from Gen. Dan Caine — that came with a glaring as...

Host John Carlos Frey sits down with immigration attorney and author Robert Coughlon Jr. to discuss his new book, Fixing Immigration in America: A Commonsense Plan for Immigration Reform.

Drawing on more than 30 years of experience in family-based immigration and deportation defense — and a personal history that includes his father's career as a Border Patrol agent, INS adjudicator, immigration attorney, and eventually immigration judge — Coughlon lays out a middle-ground approach to one of the most polarizing issues in American politics.

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In the summer of 2026, the Department of Health and Human Services quietly published a federal procurement notice most Americans never saw. The Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) is asking contractors to design, build, and run an "emergency intake facility" — a campus capable of holding up to 3,000 unaccompanied migrant children at a single site.

In this episode of The Raid, host John Carlos Frey investigates the government's case for a mega-facility — surge capacity, efficiency, and faster case processing — and weighs it against the history of similar facilities in Homestead, Florida and Tornillo, Texas, which held thousands of children before closin...

George Pappas spent twenty years as an immigration attorney before becoming an immigration judge in 2023. Two years later, he was fired by email — three sentences, no explanation, the same day as a dozen colleagues around the country. Pappas has advocated for all immigration judges to quit since they are working within a corrupt and broken system.

In this episode, we break down Pappas's account, the data behind the wave of judicial firings and resignations, why immigration courts sit inside the Department of Justice rather than the independent judiciary, and the argument for — and against — mass resignation as a form...

They want you exhausted. That's the strategy. Journalist Memo Torres returns to The Raid to talk about ICE burnout — and why staying engaged might be the most radical thing you can do right now. After more than a year of escalating ICE raids, record detentions, and rising deaths in custody, host John Carlos Frey asks the hard question — how do we stay engaged when the trauma never stops?

Torres opens up about the toll of covering immigration enforcement every day, the friends and rapid-response volunteers who've had to step back, and why he believes disengagement is actually part...

Before you press play, host John Carlos Frey wants you to know what this episode is. More than a year ago, a source he's worked with for close to 15 years — someone who has never once given him bad information — told him a specific set of things was coming. All five have now happened.

But there's a sixth thing the source described — a plan to engineer chaos or violence at the polls this November and pin it on the political left, potentially opening the door to the Insurrection Act, ICE deployments at polling places, or seized ballots. That part...

Veteran journalist Charles Fleming returns to The Raid to tell the story of Maritza, an asylum seeker from Guatemala who survived decades of abuse before finding refuge in the United States.

Host John Carlos Frey and Fleming trace Maritza's six-year journey through the U.S. asylum system: her legal border crossing to request protection, the landmark policy that first recognized domestic-violence survivors from Central America as a protected class, and the grueling process of proving her trauma to skeptical judges. Along the way, they confront the myths surrounding asylum seekers — that they're "freeloaders" gaming the system — and lay...

Tatiana came to the United States from Russia on a legal visa and is married to a U.S. citizen. Five and a half months ago, she was arrested by ICE outside the Santa Monica studio where she worked as a tattoo artist — no warrant, no charges, no explanation. Her husband, Amir Modaraei, joins The Raid to tell the full story: how a 911 call during a rough patch in their relationship put Tatiana on ICE's radar, how an agent allegedly surveilled and harassed the couple for nine months before her arrest, and the habeas corpus fight Amir has waged ev...

On January 7th, a 37-year-old mother of three named Renee Goode was shot and killed by an ICE agent on a residential street in south Minneapolis — two blocks from an elementary school. The federal government says she tried to run the agent over with her car and called it an act of domestic terrorism. Her family, eyewitnesses, and an independent autopsy tell a very different story.

Six to seven months later, the state of Minnesota still hasn't been given full access to the evidence that could settle which version is true. In this episode, host John Carlos Fr...

Armed CBP agents and contractors entered Tohono O'odham land before dawn, blocked tribal police from enforcing their own law, and brought in a SWAT team to protect the work. Before sunrise on August 25, roughly twenty masked, armed CBP agents crossed onto the Tohono O'odham Nation alongside border wall contractors — Tribal police were blocked from making arrests. A CBP tactical unit, a surveillance balloon, and coordination with Mexican police followed. 

John Carlos Frey breaks down what the Tohono O'odham Nation's own statement documents, what the evidence actually shows about whether a wall is real border security. 

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John Carlos Frey sits down with Carlos Garcia — former executive director of the human rights organization Puente Human Rights Movement, former Vice Mayor of Phoenix, and longtime immigrant rights organizer. 

In this conversation, Garcia and Frey trace the roots of today's ICE raids back to Arizona's Sheriff Arpaio era and the state laws — SB 1070, the 287(g) program, English-only policies, and more — that turned local law enforcement into de facto immigration agents. 

This is a candid, wide-ranging conversation about race, power, and resistance from someone who has spent more than two decades on the front lines of the i...

A local officer runs the plates on a Ford Explorer parked outside a town hall — and the story the driver gives him falls apart within minutes. In this episode of The Raid, host John Carlos Frey breaks down what happened outside Congresswoman Ilhan Omar's August 6th town hall in Richfield, Minnesota, when a woman claiming to be private security turned out to be a federal Homeland Security Investigations agent. 

This episode looks past the single parking-lot encounter to ask a bigger question: what does it mean for a community that already believes it is being watched? Is thi...

A father in New Mexico thought he was going to an interview to reunite with his kids. Instead, ICE put him in chains. On this episode of The Raid, 

John Carlos Frey traces how the Trump administration is using migrant children in federal custody as leverage to locate and detain their parents and relatives — and how that's just one piece of a much bigger strategy to dismantle long standing protections for migrant children and to fast track their deportation. This is a story assembled from public reporting, court filings, and a sitting U.S. senator's letter to HHS...

Host John Carlos Frey investigates the killing of Isaias Sanchez Barbosa, a 31-year-old man shot three times by a Border Patrol agent on a private ranch in Starr County, Texas, on December 11th. 

Frey lays out how this case fits a long-running pattern: agency self-investigation, a fast public statement built on the same handful of justifying phrases, records that surface only when a reporter or a lawsuit forces them out, and grand juries that almost never indict. He also makes the case for why a border shooting like this one belongs on the same list as the i...

For over a year, LA Taco staff reporter Izzy Ramirez has been on the ground documenting ICE and Border Patrol raids across Southern California — logging arrests, archiving footage, and standing between agents and the communities they're targeting. In this deeply personal follow-up conversation, host John Carlos Frey asks the question most interviews skip: what has doing this work actually done to you? Izzy opens up about the drinking, the public "crash outs" on social media, the nights he can't stop scrolling, and the death of a teenager whose story hit painfully close to home. He and Frey talk honestly ab...

Host John Carlos Frey sits down with longtime civil rights organizer Eric Ward — Executive Vice President of Race Forward and a Senior Fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center — to unpack the argument at the center of his recent Colorlines essay, "The Latest ICE Surge Is Political Violence." 

Drawing on nearly four decades of organizing work, Ward lays out why he believes the current wave of ICE enforcement is not simply aggressive immigration policy, but a deliberate campaign of political intimidation — one aimed at all Americans, not only immigrants and refugees. He traces the throughline from the three c...

ICE has become a national deportation policing force — and according to a bombshell new ACLU report, it's operating with a level of violence and impunity America has never seen before. 

In this episode of The Raid, host John Carlos Frey sits down with Naureen Shah, Director of Government Affairs for the Equality Division at the American Civil Liberties Union and a longtime human rights lawyer, researcher, and advocate. Naureen leads the ACLU's immigration policy and advocacy work and previously served as Senior Director of Campaigns at Amnesty International USA and Acting Director of Columbia Law School's Human Rig...

Host John Carlos Frey sits down with Sennett Devermont — known online as Mr. Checkpoint — the Southern California activist who built a nationwide alert network for DUI checkpoints, ICE operations, and police activity. Sennett traces his journey from a 2011 San Diego State student warning classmates about unconstitutional, unpublicized checkpoints to becoming one of the most recognizable "film the police" advocates in the country. 

The two also confront the sharper edges of the moment: the lack of accountability inside police departments, the retaliation faced by officers who report misconduct, and how ICE operates with even less transparency and oversight than...

For months, The Raid has covered America's deportation machine through the eyes of journalists, experts, and activists — but the voices most missing from the conversation have been the immigrants living it. In this episode, host John Carlos Frey sits down with veteran journalist Charles Fleming, a 40-year newsroom journalist and former Los Angeles Times editor, who came out of retirement to find and tell the personal stories that mainstream media can't — often under strict anonymity, because the people he interviews have too much to lose. 

Fleming shares the story of Javier, who paints and sells his work under...

At just 27, Sasha Renée Pérez became the youngest female mayor in San Gabriel Valley history. Now she's the youngest member of the California State Senate — and she's using that seat to take on ICE. Host, John Carlos Frey sits down with Senator Pérez to talk about her journey from Alhambra City Council to Sacramento, and the wave of legislation she's championing to protect immigrant communities across California. 

Pérez talks candidly about the online threats she receives, why she believes conversation (not conflict) is the path to bridging political divides, and what she thinks everyda...

A federal guard pleads guilty to nine separate counts involving women held in the same detention facility. The government's own records show over 1,310 abuse complaints filed against ICE detention staff in a single three-year window — and outside researchers have found over a thousand more. On this episode of The Raid, host John Carlos Frey traces how a system built with almost no independent oversight lets this happen again and again. 

This is not one bad guard. This is a pattern, documented in the government's own paperwork — and the story of what happens when the people holding all the k...

An ICE check-in used to be paperwork. Now it can be a trap — and that shift is doing the work that raids and deportation flights can't. John Carlos Frey talks with Kimberly Avalos, a multimedia journalist and supervising producer at The News Movement, whose documentary "American Dreamers: Self-Deporting from the United States" was an Online News Association finalist for Excellence in Social Justice Reporting. Her latest film follows a subject she never expected to report on: her own uncle. 

Avalos and Frey get into the reporting decisions behind the film and the machinery it documents: 

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The federal government owes nearly $1 million to Estrella del Paso, the largest provider of free legal services to unaccompanied migrant children in West Texas and New Mexico — and it isn't paying up. 

On this episode of The Raid, host John Carlos Frey sits down with Executive Director Melissa Lopez to break down how the administration tried to terminate a 20-year-old, congressionally mandated legal aid program, lost in federal court, and is now allegedly conditioning payment on providers handing over confidential client information about the children they represent. 

With reimbursements frozen since November 2025 and a contract dead...

What does it actually take for a detention system to qualify as a "concentration camp" — historically, not emotionally? 

In this episode of The Raid, host John Carlos Frey sets aside the online shouting match and applies the definition historians actually use: mass detention of civilians, without due process or trial, based on identity rather than conduct — a framework traced back to camps in 1890s Cuba and South Africa, and used by researchers like journalist Andrea Pitzer. 

This isn't about winning an argument online. It's about being precise with a word that carries real historical weight — and deci...

Before this year's midterms, ICE told a federal judge it had no records on any plans to send agents to polling places. That wasn't true. 

In this episode of The Raid, John Carlos Frey traces what actually happened when two Homeland Security agents walked into an active polling site in Syracuse, NY, to pressure a poll worker over a months-old social media post — and how that incident became the evidence that forced ICE to admit it's sitting on more than 11,000 pages it had denied existed. 

We go inside the Syracuse confrontation, the earlier enforcement actions in T...

In this urgent, unfiltered conversation, host John Carlos Frey sits down with Congresswoman Delia Ramirez (IL-03) — the first Latina elected to Congress from Illinois and the Midwest — to confront the escalating violence of America's immigration enforcement system. 

Rep. Ramirez, a member of the Homeland Security Committee and the only member of Congress in a mixed-status family, doesn't hold back. She and Frey discuss the recent deaths linked to ICE and Border Patrol operations, the $70 billion appropriation given to DHS after the government shutdown, and why she believes promises of "reform" — including body cameras — are hollow gestures from an agency...

John Carlos Frey tells the story of Gabriel Cariaco's arrest in Bellevue, Nebraska — a legal asylum seeker who fled Venezuela, accused of being a member of the gang Tren de Aragua, and charged with attempted murder of a federal agent. Frey traces how the government's account changed within 24 hours of the arrest, how a tattoo meant to honor his son's birthday became "evidence" of gang membership, and how bystander video ultimately contradicted the sworn federal complaint filed against him. 

A year later, a federal judge called the original report "at worst a misrepresentation and at best complete neg...

Three men are dead in fourteen days — Houston, Biddeford, St. Augustine — all in encounters with ICE. In the same week, border czar Tom Homan told Fox News that ICE agents are "well-trained in vehicle stops," then said he'd personally requested the agency's training curriculum to review it. Both things can't be true even though the president vetoed the review. 

John Carlos Frey goes on the record about ICE's budget, its oversight, and its body count — and why an agency now funded at nearly seven times its historic budget, with more money than the FBI, DOJ, and Bureau of Pris...