Now, while the world is focused on the widening regional war in the Middle East, in America, Donald Trump's immigration crackdown goes on, from expanding ISIS' ability to detain legal refugees to sowing fear in schools and communities.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Caitlin Dickerson has been speaking to people across the country who no longer feel safe or welcome.

And after years of reporting on policies like family separation, she says she recognizes all too well that look of fear on Liam Ramos' face, the five-year-old boy who was detained by ICE agents back in January.

She joins Michel Martin to explain how all of this reshapes the lives of immigrant families across the country.

- Thanks, Christiane.

Caitlin Dickerson, thanks so much for talking with us once again.

- Thanks for having me.

- And the last time you spoke with us was just after you had won the Pulitzer Prize.

It was for your reporting into the Trump administration's family separation policy.

Your latest pieces look at a new phase of enforcement under the current administration.

What exactly are you looking at?

- So there's been a real transition from the first into the second Trump administration with a lot more focus on enforcement within the United States.

ICE has been arresting many people who've lived in the United States for years or decades, who have deeply established lives.

And the most recent piece that I published is about one of those families, the Cruz family, who had lived in New York for 20 years.

They had two daughters.

They were homeowners, very deeply established in their community.

And they decided to leave, even though the mother in this family is a U.S.

born American citizen, because they, I think, rightly intuited soon after Trump was elected that this new phase of enforcement was going to focus on people just like the father in this family, and they wanted to leave rather than wait for ICE to come and pick him up.

The family separation policy, one of the things you reported is that the idea was that this would be a deterrent strategy, that people would see how traumatic this was, that it was intended to be traumatic.

And the idea was, well, if people see that, they'll stop coming.

Did that work?

- It didn't work at the time.

And you have to think about the context that we were in in that moment.

I mean, there were so many people who were leaving Central America because of dire circumstances there and felt like they had no other option.

You know, many families who were coming to the United States felt like they were fleeing certain death, and anything looks more appealing than that.

But that deterrence approach, this idea of making border crossing or living in the United States without status as uncomfortable, you know, as risky and as dangerous and disturbing, all the adjectives we can think of to people and to their families, that is very much something that we're still seeing today.

It's part of the deportation campaign that is ongoing right now, and the Trump administration has been open about that.

They want to send a very scary message to discourage people from immigrating to the United States or from staying here once they've arrived.

And again, this is going back to sort of the earlier reporting.

The Biden administration had a different idea.

The Biden administration's idea, looking at all of these new border crossers, especially Venezuelans, was to try to normalize the process in some way to allow them to come in legally.

So they created the CBP1 app, which allowed people to go online and apply for an appointment for an interview at a port of entry.

If they passed that interview, they were then paroled into the United States and allowed to continue with the asylum-seeking process legally.

And that was their way of trying to create some level of order.

But, of course, as soon as Trump took office the second time, he canceled that program, and people who'd entered the country legally lost their status, became subject to ISIS deportation campaign.

So that's why we now see people who had -- they were not sort of normalized into the process.

They hadn't achieved, say, a green card.

They hadn't achieved American citizenship, but who had, in fact, applied under the system.

Now, that's why we see people who are, say, at immigration check-ins being arrested.

Those are some of those folks.

- That's exactly right.

And to be clear, this is not because the immigrants themselves are slow walking their process toward legalization.

It's very typical when you seek asylum in the United States, because the courts are so backlogged, you won't have a final court hearing until three, five, seven years out.

So people were going to these check-ins as part of the process, hoping to ultimately win legal status in court.

One of those families who's most famous, who your viewers probably know well, the story of Liam Ramos, the five-year-old who was from Ecuador.

His family was in exactly this type of process when they were detained.

- And people know him because of his photo in the bunny hat, the little boy in the bunny hat, which went viral.

To remind people of what happened, what exactly happened in that case.

How did this little boy wind up being detained?

- So based on what we know from DHS's official account, as well as eyewitness accounts, and there have been lots of discrepancies on these individual stories that we as journalists have dug into.

So I wanna emphasize this is the best information that we have is that Ice went to Liam's house to arrest his father.

His father was not charged or convicted of any criminal issue.

So it's not clear why he was personally being targeted.

But what it seems happened is that Liam was somehow outside of the house.

The father was inside the house and ICE tried to coax a parent to come outside and pick up Liam, but also at the same time to try to arrest that parent.

And ultimately that's what happened.

Liam's mother stayed inside with her other children.

Liam's father went outside to get him from the ICE officials.

Both of them were detained.

They were ultimately transferred to the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, which is a family detention facility in Texas.

It opened in 2014 and has really been mired in controversy from the very beginning.

The United States is one of the only wealthy countries in the world that even attempts family detention as a deterrent measure because child welfare experts consistently find that there's really no way to humanely do it.

They find that family detention is really damaging to children's mental and physical health.

And you could see that in just the course of a week and a half.

There was a photograph of Liam in his bunny hat outside his house.

He looks sad and scared, but he looks healthy and bright-eyed.

And then a photo of him in the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, which is, he had this look that I've seen so many times in children, including children at the hospital, he was in a dilly, he wasn't eating, he had a fever, he was vomiting.

Kids tend to get very sick there.

They refuse to eat the food because they find it to be disgusting.

You know, the lights are on all night, 24/7, so kids can't sleep.

And it was really no surprise to me how quickly he deteriorated based on where he was being held.

You've been there.

Can you confirm the conditions that have been described?

I've toured it.

I've looked at it closely.

And it's part of this national experiment, frankly, that's been going on in family detention since the early 2000s.

And Dilley is a very expensive facility.

For a time, it was ICE's most expensive detention facility because so many lawsuits found that children in ICE custody were becoming malnourished, they were losing weight, they were becoming gravely ill, that almost in response to that, the Obama administration moved to open Dilley in hopes that it would be more accommodating and more safe for children.

So Dilley is this interesting place because when you take a tour like I have, you see these amenities that the government has introduced.

You know, a hair salon where kids can go and get their hair cut.

They have classrooms with smart boards.

Real efforts or real signs that ICE tried to create something that didn't feel and look like a jail.

But the problem is that the more time that you spend there, you see how those two things are really fundamentally incompatible.

So though I saw these amenities, I saw that the lights were on, as I mentioned, 24/7.

And you can see how exhausted the families look.

And then one of the biggest complaints that families have is that they say that the water is rancid.

And so people don't wanna drink water.

Women don't wanna use the water to create baby formula because they fear that it's not safe.

I went into the cafeteria and I can confirm that I personally wouldn't be able to eat in a place that had that smell.

I had a mother I interviewed at Dilley who told me that her son would throw up every time they even approached the dining hall because the smell was so bad and it's very common for kids to not eat.

So I'll just say that there were 911 calls from inside the facility, captured children with fever, struggling to breathe.

In response this week, the Department of Homeland Security told NBC News that parents and children at Dilley are "housed in facilities that cater to their safety, security, and medical needs," and that some are getting the best health care they've received in their entire lives.

That's from the Department of Homeland Security.

Separately, in your recent reporting on Liam Ramos, you included a statement from Todd Bryan, who is a spokesperson for CoreCivic.

That's the company that operates Dilley.

He said that the company doesn't "cut corners on care, staff or training," and that "emergency medical services are activated immediately when a child's clinical presentation exceeds what can be safely managed on site.

And in recent court filings, ICE describes Dilley as a "model of regulatory compliance and humane care."

And what you're saying is that that just doesn't square.

So what happened to Liam Ramos?

I mean, can you just sort of, what's the status now of that family?

Liam Ramos was lucky in the sense that his case garnered so much attention.

Lawyers were able to file a habeas corpus petition for his detention at Dilley and he was released within two weeks.

He's back at home with his family now recovering and they're continuing with the legal asylum process.

But it's important to point out, you know, this year, the population at Dilley has hovered between 900 and 1400.

That's a lot of people.

This is a facility that can hold up to 2,400 people.

And I think the Trump administration has been very clear that they hope to detain as many as possible.

And so there are hundreds or thousands of kids like Liam who are still detained now are going to be detained at Dilley and won't be released.

These habeas petitions, they have to be filed one at a time.

They're a complicated legal process.

You have to have a lawyer to represent you who's willing to do it.

Even though I've spoken to lawyers who've gotten clients, including Liam, released from Dilley, and they talk about how these habeas petitions, the legal logic behind them applies to many kids in the facility, but they can't file cases for every single one.

So Liam is back at home, but many other children are not.

Another piece you wrote focuses on what you describe as the erosion of oversight inside the Department of Homeland Security, the weakening of civil rights, oversight offices.

Say more about that.

What did those offices do and what has changed now?

So the Trump administration eliminated, or I should say severely shrunk, two important oversight offices within the Department of Homeland Security.

First, the offices were eliminated, and after lawsuits, they were brought back in a very, very small and disempowered way.

One was the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, as you said.

Another was an Ombudsman's Office overseeing detention specifically.

So both of these offices received complaints from the public.

They could be about conditions in a detention facility.

They could be about family separations.

A big issue right now, parents are being arrested in the interior of the country.

ICE is supposed to confirm with parents in advance of their deportation, do they have children in the United States?

And if so, are those children with a legal guardian?

Do they want to be deported with their children or reunited?

We're hearing as journalists that ICE isn't consistently doing that.

So these two oversight offices are the type of place where people would go to lodge a complaint.

And you would have people who could get involved, who would research the situation, try to rectify the situation, but also look at ICE policy and training and see if changes needed to be made to head off these types of issues in the future.

As I mentioned, those offices have been significantly disempowered.

Essentially, all the veteran employees in them are gone, and you have a few new government contractors who don't have experience with the issues.

We're not hearing about meaningful work being done in either place.

And I think perhaps the even bigger story around oversight is the one big beautiful bill act, the bill that Trump used, leading Republicans in Congress to give $175 billion to this effort of mass deportation.

That's a budget that's larger than the military of every country in the world, except for the United States and China.

It's an eye popping number.

It's the largest funding increase in the department's history.

It's absolutely, by far, the biggest budget increase the agency has ever received.

There's really no historical comparison to even be made.

And what really stuck out to me in this appropriations bill is that normally when Congress gives a federal agency money, they include in the legal language, lots of requirements for how that money can be used and often requirements around training, around health and safety, around ensuring that whatever mission the money is funding is carried out under the law.

And there was no such language in this massive, massive appropriation of funds.

The bill goes as far as to say that conditions inside detention facilities shall be determined at the discretion of the Secretary.

And that's at the same time that we're seeing deaths inside ICE detention facilities rise.

I think at this point, at least 38 people have died in ICE custody under this administration.

So at the same time that ICE and DHS are getting so much more money for immigration enforcement, the overstate really seems to be falling away.

And when you've talked to people in the administration, as I know you do, about why they are employing these tactics, what does the department say about the way they're conducting these deportations, these raids, going into people's homes, etc.?

Two things, primarily, I would say.

The first is that they're under unprecedented pressure.

You know, Stephen Miller wants 3,000 arrests per day, a number that ICE has never come close to.

And it's been made very clear to people who work in immigration enforcement that if they can't show that they are doing as much as they possibly can to make as many arrests and deportations happen on a daily basis, then their job is at risk.

And so people are facing pressure to make arrests regardless of who it is that they're going after, regardless of what sorts of story, the background story that they might have, you know, concerns within the community, ties to the community, pushback that's going to come from local elected officials or local leaders, that, those things are all going by the wayside because there's just so much pressure coming straight from the White House to make as many arrests as possible.

The second thing that I'm hearing from people who work in the administration is that a lot of what we're seeing relates to the fact that we've just seen so much turnover within ICE and at DHS that lots of veteran deportation officers I know people who've worked at higher ranks within ICE and DHS have left the agency.

So as we are speaking, the person who had headed the Department of Homeland Security since the beginning of this Trump administration, the second Trump administration, Kristi Noem, former South Dakota governor, was fired by the president.

But now the president has nominated, has said he's going to nominate the current senator from Oklahoma, Mark Wayne Mullen, to this post, who has no law enforcement experience, I do want to point out.

Does it suggest anything to you about the direction of the administration's enforcement strategies?

I don't think that we're going to see a significant change or a scaling back of the deportation campaign in any way.

I think that the Trump administration realized after Minnesota, after the deaths in particular of Renee Good and Alex Pretty, who were U.S.

citizen protesters, the public was very upset about their deaths, as well as, frankly, the deaths of immigrants who were being pursued by ICE and ended up fatally shot or injured as well, that the public was not okay with the kind of aggressive street enforcement and escalation that they were seeing on the news.

However, while as I mentioned, those tactics were new and novel, ICE arrests and deportations are not.

And historically, they've really tried to go about their work in a way that's as discreet as possible.

And so I think we'll see ICE under Senator Mullen, if he's confirmed, go back to being less visible, but no less effective.

The administration and Senator Mullen have been very clear.

They wanna continue Trump's campaign of enforcement.

They wanna get as many deportations done as possible.

I think that Kristi Noem's departure as Homeland Security Secretary had to do both with personal differences with the president, as well as the need or the thinking that perhaps a turnover in leadership might calm the public down, frankly, the backlash that ICE was facing down.

But the administration has been very clear.

They are undeterred.

They plan to continue this enforcement campaign as aggressively as possible.

- Caitlin Dickerson, thanks so much for sharing this reporting with us.

Thank you so much for having me, Michel.