News Brief: Media Helps Sell ICE Raids with Zero Dark Thirty Ride-Along Schlock
Citations Needed | October 22, 2025 | Transcript
[Music]
Nima Shirazi: Welcome to a Citations Needed News Brief. I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam Johnson: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: We do these News Briefs in between our regularly scheduled episodes of Citations Needed. And of course, you can follow the show on Twitter and Bluesky @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated, as we are 100% listener-funded.
Adam, we are joined today for this News Brief by guest Matthew Cunningham-Cook, a writer, researcher, and reporter. His work can be found everywhere from the American Prospect to Rolling Stone to The Nation, to The Intercept. He is currently an investigative journalist covering DHS and ICE and other such terror organizations at the Center for Media and Democracy. He is speaking with us today from Costa Rica, and Matthew, the last time we had you on was about two-and-a-half years ago. So welcome back to Citations Needed.
Matthew Cunningham-Cook: Thanks for having me on again, guys.
Adam: Yeah, thank you so much for coming on. I want to talk about this issue. We orient it as a terror campaign in the traditional sense of the word. Obviously, ‘terrorism’ is very loaded. It’s not a term we use a lot for obvious reasons. But I’m sort of reaching for a better word and failing to come up with one, because quite explicitly, by their own admission, the White House and the Department of Homeland Security and their various border czars are framing their strategy as one of, they don’t put it in those terms, but as sowing terror so people a) self-deport, but also, of course, just as a matter of ideological rigor, they’re pandering to their kind of Nazi base.
And so media is central to disseminating this campaign, and I know that here in Chicago, just to talk personally, in my neighborhood, all throughout Chicago, really, Albany Park, Rogers Park, various suburbs where working-class families live, a lot of immigrant families live. Now they’re in Millennium Park, sort of downtown, trying to go down Michigan Avenue to look really tough.
Nima: Yeah, they’re like, trolling the river.
Adam: Yeah, looking for people selling churros. This is really, like, terrifying a lot of people in this community. I think some people listening who aren’t subject to these ICE raids and jumping out of unmarked vans and literally just kidnapping people, people not knowing where their families are, people I’ve talked to, Sarah Lazare, who’s my partner, does reporting on ICE and has been doing it more acutely for the last few months, the word we keep hearing over and over again is ‘terror.’ So I want to sort of, we’re going to frame it that way, not to be provocative or to be ironical, but only because we really can’t think of a better phrasing.
So if everybody will indulge that premise, I want to talk about the media’s role in that. Because this is, again, to disseminate that terror in and of itself, requires a kind of mass distribution of the basic frameworks, which is that, We’re going to come anywhere, anytime, in an unmarked car and take you or your loved ones and separate your families and completely upend your life. And of course, dozens of people have died in ICE custody as well.
And I want to start by talking about this ridealong genre, which you write about and criticize, as being, and it’s one we’ve talked about on the show before, as being inherently propagandistic. It kind of originated with Geraldo Rivera and Cops and this kind of tabloid ’80s, where this oftentimes credulous journalist puts on a flak jacket and gets in a police car or an ICE vehicle and kind of rides along with them and asks a bunch of dopey, sycophantic questions. I want you to talk about your impression of the overall coverage of these so-called ICE raids that you’ve seen, and what compelled you to write this piece detailing the use of ridealong to help promote again, what we sort of argue is a terror campaign.
Matthew Cunningham-Cook: Yeah, I mean, my editor flagged for me the Trojan Horse raid. So in Los Angeles, where they rented a Penske truck against company policy and then recruited a bunch of workers to come for a potential job, and then jumped out of the Penske truck and arrested a bunch of people, and Fox was inside the truck. And so we were like, Wow, even kind of by Fox standards, this is really aggressively propagandistic, that they would be kind of inside of a truck when ICE is not just doing a raid, but breaking company policy, probably breaking laws, and as you say, engaging in a terror campaign against vulnerable, marginalized communities in Los Angeles that also are the backbone of the region’s economy.
So then I just started looking around more, and I was just shocked to find that it wasn’t just a Fox problem. It was all over the mainstream press. Even the New York Times, The Daily podcast did a ridealong, where it’s a classic New York Times format, where they’re, of course, their coverage, their ridealong, of course, is the best of kind of the mainstream press, but also, in some ways the worst, because you have the Gray Lady reifying that this is actually a legitimate journalistic tool, that you would actually kind of trade access in exchange for toning down your questioning.
The only way that this could be acceptable is if you’re like, Oh, are you breaking this law? Are you breaking that law? Where are the people you’re targeting’s attorneys? You know, blah, blah, blah. Instead, it’s classic New York Times format about being like, Oh, well, you know, what does this mean about Trump’s crackdown on immigration more broadly? And then, most importantly, not fact-checking basic claims, so is the person that they are arresting or targeting, the actual person that they say they are, 1)? And 2), have they actually been arrested by local law enforcement or prosecuted by local law enforcement for the crime that ICE says they are?
Adam: One thing that ICE did really early on was they phrased it, and we talked about this, we did a News Brief when Trump first came into office, they phrased it as how these things always work, right? You can’t start off by saying, We’re going to go after people selling elotes on the street and going after daycare workers and construction workers, because that sounds evil. Again, these are people people know. So they did the typical, We’re going after the worst, the worst rapists, child rapists, they would oftentimes throw in to kind of make it extra evil sounding. And then they, of course, didn’t do that. And, you know, maybe they did some high-profile examples here and there of kind of alleged really bad crimes or gang members or whatever. But anyone who, again, I can tell you from personal experience living in Chicago that looking at the people they’re going after, targeting, arresting, the neighborhoods they’re going after, they’re going after the lowest-hanging fruit in the most racist way possible.
And the media did, to a large extent, push that narrative. They pushed the narrative of, again, even as you discussed, NBC, ABC, CBS, did this, of going after these kind of MS-13, these kind of ISIS-esque bad guys. And people believe that, people I’ve just spoken to casually, they’re like, Oh, I don’t understand. Why would they go after construction workers? I thought they were going after the worst of the worst. I mean, people bought that. So if you could sort of talk about this idea of framing it as going after these hardcore gang members and rapists and traffickers, and then again, they’re, I mean, manifestly, just looking at arrest records, investigations from people, various journalists, obviously they’re going after people who are the easiest to pick off, the weakest, most vulnerable, least likely to have lawyers, representation, etc.
Matthew Cunningham-Cook: Yeah, I think what you’re outlining underscores kind of the principal problem with the ridealong format, is that it even if you’re doing what they’re not doing, which is fact-checking them as they’re going along, they’re not doing that. Even if they were doing that, it would present a totally blinkered picture of what ICE is actually doing, which is, yeah, it’s a campaign of terror targeted at communities that’s, in my view, is kind of more than anything else, related to a geopolitical kind of battle of prepping the American public, and Trump voters in particular, for kind of a full-scale US invasion of Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Mexico. And that’s kind of what, the political economy of this only makes sense if you see what they’re doing in the context of, Oh, this is kind of 2002-type situation where they’re trying to prep the American public for a massive increase in foreign intervention. The home builders are mostly Republicans. The whole edifice of this small, medium, large business that are the backbone of Trumpism is dependent on undocumented labor.
Adam: And to be clear, they almost never, as the Washington Post reported, they almost never actually criminally charge the people hiring undocumented people.
Matthew Cunningham-Cook: Exactly.
Adam: They’re in Trump’s class and the donor base of the Republican Party. That virtually never happens. I mean, I think there’s one or two cases, and there was a slap on the wrist, and they were very, very small businesses that were like themselves, immigrant-owned.
Matthew Cunningham-Cook: Yeah, yeah. And it’s like 2002, Holy Land 5, Ali al-Tamimi. You know, situations like that, where it’s, there’s a full-scale crackdown on a particular ethnicity that’s about prepping the ground for aggressive foreign intervention. Yeah.
Nima: Well, I actually want to talk about what is happening as we would understand it, maybe in foreign policy, is also the groundwork is always laid, or it’s always then enhanced and normalized through domestic policy. And so in this way, Matthew, I’d actually like to talk a bit about the threat to and attacks on journalists covering ICE raids, covering DHS action, and how that relates to also the kind of silencing of all witnesses in, say, Gaza, that there is a full-scale attack on the reporting of what these oppressive and violent actions are taking. And so basically, to ensure that the coverage is what, say, the Trump administration wants, or, you know, in the case of Palestine, ensuring that it is what the Israeli government wants. And so we’ve already talked a bit about how that normalization is really laundered through legacy media like NBC, ABC, CBS, New York Times. It’s not just your NewsMaxes, your Fox Newses, your Sinclairs. Can you talk a bit about the threat that reporters are actually facing in the United States, specifically now when they are reporting on ICE, ICE raids, ICE showing up to court, snatching people away from their families, and how that is also coupled with the inversion of who is subject to violence? Because we keep hearing that just the mere act of filming an ICE agent assaulting someone or kidnapping someone is itself violence against ICE, right? Is itself, doxing these poor agents who are just trying to do their jobs. Can you talk a bit about the threat to the journalists, but also this weaponization of a victim narrative?
Matthew Cunningham-Cook: Yeah, this is kind of coming from Kristi Noem. She, first in July said, Oh, videotaping ICE agents is violence. And then they kind of have these shifting numbers of 700% increase in events against ICE agents, 800% increase in violence against ICE agents, 1,000%, lind of all these different numbers thrown around. And then when you ask the very lovely spokesperson for DHS, this person, Tricia McLaughlin, who’s easily the most difficult [unintelligible] flack I’ve interacted with. You know?
Nima: A true believer.
Matthew Cunningham-Cook: Yeah, yeah. It’s like examples being like, somebody put a sign on an ICE agent’s lawn that said, F this person. You know, and they did name them, but it’s like, how this is violence is just–
Nima: It’s a stretch to say the least, but obviously it has its purposes, right? I mean, what have you seen in terms of how that is then turned around to really threaten, if not worse, the reporters that are actually trying to cover this, witness this, share what is actually happening with the American people?
Matthew Cunningham-Cook: Yeah. I mean, in LA, I interviewed this British American photojournalist, Nick Stern. He’s like, I’ve reported from all over the world, and basically the most violent kind of situations I’ve experienced is this most recent one is number one, and then George Floyd was number two, and no other situation kind of even comes close to this. So I think again, it kind of underscores, I think, how this overall authoritarian turn, where it’s becoming progressively more dangerous for journalists to do their job. Yeah, we’ve just seen in the last few days, journalists assaulted in New York and in Chicago as well. So it’s kind of escalating and cascading, and I think it’s about the administration.
Adam: I think that’s an important point, because, again, I don’t do the reporting because I sit by a microphone.
Nima: But you are wearing a flak jacket when you do it, Adam, I just want people to know.
Adam: That’s true. I’m the real, I’m braver than the Marines. Everybody knows that. But again, I can speak from hearsay, with respect to Sarah, when she comes home, because she reports from Broadview every Friday, they just willy-nilly teargas people. And Sarah has been to, obviously, a lot of protests. So this is anecdotal. You can take it or leave it. But she says she’s obviously seen them use tear gas dozens of times. But she says the way in which they’re doing it appears to be, no one’s starting anything, which is, again, typical of these things, the cops will be the ones that start it, sometimes because they just want to go home, sometimes because they’re just, again rightwingers, and they’re ideologically committed to beating up lefties and Black people. But in this case, they are literally just going out there. And these are people, a lot of them are gathering to look for their loved ones, and they’re just teargassing people willy-nilly.
There is absolutely zero accountability with ICE. This is obviously one of the main, to make a kind of liberal criticism, if you will. Unlike even some other law enforcement, who basically have like 5% accountability, they have zero. They’re accountable to no one, because what, are they going to be disciplined by the Trump administration? By the, you know what I mean? They’re openly calling for violence against migrants. They publish memes on Twitter that are joking about separating families and joking about kidnapping people. There is an extra layer, again, one wants to be careful not to say this is completely original or somehow not something that Democrats, in key ways, did as well. But there is an extra layer of sadism, an extra layer of malice, an extra layer of basically saying, We’re not going to be accountable to anybody, that is unique. And I think that’s one thing that maybe, again, people who haven’t had these raids and occupations within their cities don’t really appreciate. That there is a level of like, Oh, we can’t do anything about this. Like, even lawsuits won’t matter. Nothing will matter. There is a total dominance, and that’s what Trump said he wants, right? I mean, that’s why they’re walking down Michigan Avenue in Chicago. They want to piss on liberal trees, assert their dominance, and then kind of spiral out from there to go harass these communities. And I think that’s one thing. I think maybe a lot of people don’t appreciate, that this is a meaningful escalation.
Matthew Cunningham-Cook: Yeah, you know, and it all flows from the top. I was just reading Fred Trump’s Wikipedia page the other day, and I found this incident that I had not remembered at all, which was that there was conditions in this apartment building that Fred Trump owned in Norfolk, Virginia that were so bad that the law enforcement lured Fred Trump to come to Norfolk, Virginia and then arrested him on the spot. And I think a lot of what you can see is, Trump’s entire approach to immigration and law enforcement more broadly, is this revenge fantasy where it’s like, My father, this upstanding rich white guy, was arrested, and I’m going to take much more than a pound of flesh over all of this.
You know, Steve Bannon has recommended Camp of the Saints multiple times. Camp of the Saints is a book from the ’70s by this European neo-Nazi that’s like, Oh, Europe is about to be taken over by this brown and black kind of mass, really nasty kind of book. But yeah, I think this is about this administration’s goal of just turning back this kind of traumatic event for Trump and his family against anybody he sees as against him personally, and we’re just living with it.
Adam: I do want to talk about the liberal media’s role in kind of setting the stage here, and Democrats in general, starting in spring of 2023, there was this. We’re all so clever, we’re so savvy, we’re going to go right on immigration. Democrats attacked Republicans for being soft on immigration. Tried to get a bill passed that they themselves claimed was a Republican bill to try to paint Trump as soft on immigration. Now, obviously some people have said, critics have said, we’ve said, that this has a ratcheting effect. By accepting all these premises, so-called “border crisis” and this kind of apocalyptic language, Democrats need to get serious, right? Everyone has this kind of patronizing, you know, We need to be realistic, accept the truth. And then, of course, once Trump’s in office, it’s, oh, there’s not really a vector of criticism, because you can’t say the problem’s not, quote-unquote, “real,” or that we don’t–
Nima: Because you’ve already accepted and kind of are operating within the narrative framework that helps Trump do this.
Adam: And so we went from, I think, the, you know, to make the Simpsons reference, which was, No kids in cages to protect asylum? No, kids in cages! And this was the pivot that was made. And then we saw this reflected in reporting, so I want you to talk about it. There was one pretty vulgar NBC ridealong. You wrote about one instance on NBC News in December of 2024, so this is after the election, Trump’s about to come into office. NBC News reporter Gabe Gutierrez rides along with now-acting ICE Director Todd Lyons, and you wrote, quote,
“The report voluntarily blurred ICE agents’ faces, and granted anonymity to two ICE officials who claimed that the agency was facing a $230 million shortfall…”
They’re always having shortfalls. Like the Pentagon. They’re always looking around the couch questions for change.
“…an amount that NBC did not appear to independently verify. Gutierrez did not challenge or ask follow-up questions when Lyons claimed that sanctuary states and cities put ICE agents at risk.”
Unquote. I want to talk about the ways in which this idea that Democrats needed to get realistic or whatever. Because, again, these Republican governors were sending Venezuelan, Guatemalan immigrants to, they were bussing them in the cities, Chicago, New York. That was creating this, you know, was putting a resource strain, because these cities, they weren’t part of some flow of care that had pre-existed. Talk about the ways in which, the basic premises of this crackdown. So then Republicans get in office and ask for $40 bajillion. ICE is the 13th-largest military in the world now, according to one analysis. Talk about the ways in which that became bipartisan consensus very quickly, and there wasn’t this effort of, Oh, we’re going to actually protect people who are migrants. Because God forbid, God forbid you stood up for people who were undocumented.
Matthew Cunningham-Cook: Yeah. I mean, I think the Democratic Party is again, connecting this back to foreign policy, deeply kind of invested in the foreign policy approach that creates migration, right? So whether it’s on the less outwardly violent end of a tax code that strongly incentivizes outsourcing and agricultural subsidies that incentivize food dumping, that puts poor subsistence farmers out of business and sends them here, to the global War on Drugs, to sanctions on Venezuela, sanctions, the embargo on Cuba, sanctions on Nicaragua, the Democratic Party is totally, with very few exceptions, completely on board with that approach that creates migration. And so there was no way out of it for them. Besides, they could say, Oh, we like immigration and we want people here, but they’re not going to say that either. So kind of–
Nima: I don’t think that’s coming. [Laughs]
Matthew Cunningham-Cook: Yeah. So the only, the only other option for them was to kind of engage in this border crackdown. And I just saw these ads from Sherrod Brown the other day. Sherrod Brown, who’s spent his entire career, being like, Oh, you know, it’s bad to have trade policies and tax policies that send US jobs overseas, that punish American union workers. And instead of talking about what has allowed him to be in elected office in Ohio for 50 years, he’s talking about cracking down on the border. And it’s like, this shows, you know, even for people who have by Democratic Party standards, pretty sophisticated instincts, the blob just completely caused severe brain rot in being able to analyze what was actually going on. And again I think, yeah, this is kind of a discursive environment created by the corporate media that it’s like, Oh yeah, like you’re seeing little women selling fruit on the side of the highway now. This is a major crisis. When it’s like, really, what Americans are concerned about is the cost of living, the cost of rent, shitty jobs and escalating homelessness.
Adam: Well, they blame all that on immigrants.
Matthew Cunningham-Cook: Yeah.
Adam: That’s the thing with immigration. It’s a fascist skeleton key.
Matthew Cunningham-Cook: Yeah, exactly.
Adam: You say, Oh, long wait times at the ER? It’s not because we’re cutting public healthcare. It’s because of immigrants. You can’t afford a house? Too many immigrants taking your house. I mean, we could do this. You can do it for anything. Your wife left you for a Chili’s waiter? You know, he was probably an immigrant. I mean, we can do this all day, right?
Matthew Cunningham-Cook: And I mean, to be clear, the discursive conditions go back a long time, you know? I mean, I remember working at a leftwing Quaker summer camp, 2006, where Malcolm X’s kids used to go to, and one of the other counselors was a public-school teacher in Los Angeles, and he’s like, The only way to solve the problems we’re facing–he’s a gay guy, gay white guy, too. And he was just like, The only way is mass deportations. Yeah, this is, you know, I think that it’s a real testament to just kind of the absence of a real labor movement or labor party in the US just leads Americans to have just completely wrong ideas about what is actually happening around them.
Nima: Well, right, because of who is blamed and kind of where to go is already established within the framework of these very powerful, dominant narratives that are just reinforced, again, not just by rightwing media, but by kind of center, corporate, legacy media and others, so that again, as we keep saying, the basic premise of say, mass deportation is already accepted before liberal handwringing starts, right? And so there’s actually kind of no foundational value proposition to stand on, because you’ve already acquiesced to the overall narrative of, These people are to blame, “these people,” you know, quote-unquote. And therefore the only inevitable thing to do is dot, dot, dot, right? And so, you know, you kind of get that all wrapped up so then even the opposition is not opposition. It is still playing in the same framework as those committing this severe oppression, severe violence against people.
Adam: Yeah. To me, there’s this element that I think liberals sort of embraced. We have to be serious on immigration. There was kind of this very savvy like, oh, just, you know, telling the kids to eat their vegetables, We need to get serious, whatever. But then there was an argument I think some tried to make on the so-called Left, where they’re like, Oh, well, somehow immigrant crackdowns can be good for American workers. And what we’re seeing very clearly is the ways in which employers are literally working with ICE to discipline labor. Again, I’m now plagiarizing again Sarah’s work here, but she’s reported on this for American Prospect, and In These Times, a few times now for Workday magazine, that they are using it to migrants that try to push for better working conditions and even push for unionizations. Because, you know, undocumented immigrants are allowed to unionize. They have the same rights as everybody else. That they’re basically calling ICE on their own workers. They’re using ICE to terrorize their own workers to put them into place. They are literally working with ICE. And this idea that somehow. I want you to comment for. if you could, for those who listening to this, who think that there’s somehow a leftwing version of cracking down on immigrants, which is in, you know, the kind of Compact magazines that tries to make this argument, comment on that if you could, because I think that some people may believe that, and I think what we’ve seen is that obviously that’s not going to be the case, especially under Trump.
Matthew Cunningham-Cook: Yeah. First, I have to say, though, you know just about kind of how venal the Democratic Party’s approach to this issue has been historically, is that this, I believe, was the largest raid in history, up until that time, was in 2007, this raid on a meatpacking plant in Iowa where there was, I believe, an active union organizing drive, and Tom Harkin, who’s kind of, supposedly a progressive, pro-labor guy, who was the chairman of the Agriculture Committee at the time, didn’t even hold hearings on this raid that was very explicitly kind of directed to stop organizing from happening. With the Compact magazine set, you know, I think it’s just a real testament that there’s no understanding of kind of how the tax code in the US actually works, that this is an extremely powerful tool, and it’s set up at this point to both incentivize exploiting workers in the US as much as possible, and also outsourcing as much work away from the US to foreign, you know, low-wage countries as much as possible. And so again, it’s just kind of writing without understanding any of the core aspects of political economy that structure life in the US.
Adam: Yeah, I mean, you read any old literature from, you know, people like to glorify the kind of heyday of the American Left in the 1910s and ’20s. And if you read any literature from, whether it’s the CIO or the IWW or whatever it was, your kind of favorite labor, they don’t go around saying, We need more deportations. You know. They don’t go around saying, We need to reduce the labor pool by–they recruit immigrants. They draw from immigrants. They’re led by immigrants. They were mostly immigrants. And this idea that you can have a Left that’s anti-immigration is a contradiction in terms. It doesn’t make sense, because, again, no war but class war. It’s not war with random Venezuelans so you can fight for the same low-wage job. I mean, again, when JD Vance gets up there and says, Your wait times are long because of immigrants. Your schools are bad because of immigrants. I’m like, Wow, that’s really convenient for someone who manages a hedge fund in some obscure office in midtown Manhattan. That’s very, it’s a very convenient narrative for them, which is why they dumped millions of dollars into JD Vance. And it’s like, it is just a classic example of warped, fake class war. And just how much, again, this kind of lizard-brain racism and this, again, they tweet these AI images of this white, kind of Hallmark, they’re playing to this idea that you can have normalcy and community and safety if we just get rid of those bad people.
Nima: Yeah, exactly and exactly, you know, kind of where they train their spotlight, right, and what is kept in the dark. So, Adam, as you said, they’re not doing that to the executives in the office buildings who are causing, you know, prices to rise, who are causing, you know, drop in services, who are making millions and billions of dollars, right, or firing you because they are bosses. The spotlight is trained on immigrant communities with kind of everything else purposefully left in the dark. And as we’ve said, you know, the media is just totally aiding and abetting this.
But, Matthew, before we let you go, this is unlike us, but I’m going to ask how things might be getting better, or where you see, rather, some maybe positive news coming. And I, and I’m talking about, you know, obviously we’re looking for scraps here. But what have you seen, in terms of, say, how even judges and grand juries have been responding to some of these violent acts of abduction and, you know, attempted deportation by ICE, where do you see, maybe, there are some slivers of positive news?
Matthew Cunningham-Cook: Yeah, I mean, I think you’ve seen a greater willingness by judges to crack down on some of the most egregious behavior. That’s one. And then I think kind of even more exciting is, yeah, grand juries not handing down indictments. I mean, historically, it’s the narrative that I’m sure you are very familiar with, is that grand juries can indict a ham sandwich. So that a grand jury is refusing to pass down these indictments in California, DC, is a huge step forward. And I think you know, if that’s, if kind of greater awareness of jury nullification is one of the silver linings here, that’s going to be a huge step forward for kind of how we how we stop, kind of not just the authoritarianism we’re facing now, but kind of some of the root causes of it.
Nima: Well, that, I think, is a great place to leave it. Maybe, you know, ways that regular people can push back on this. Obviously, we’re also seeing this, not just in courtrooms here and there, but on the streets every day. And so thank you again, Matthew Cunningham-Cook, for joining us today and for your ongoing very, very crucial reporting on this issue. As I said, Matthew Cunningham-Cook is a writer, researcher, and reporter. His work can be found everywhere from the American Prospect to Rolling Stone to The Nation to The Intercept. He’s currently an investigative journalist covering DHS and ICE at the Center for Media and Democracy. Matthew, thank you so much, especially for calling in from Costa Rica today. It’s been great to have you on Citations Needed.
Matthew Cunningham-Cook: Thanks so much, guys. Appreciate it.
Adam: Yeah, I think a lot of people are at home watching these abductions, and I know people who live in the cities kind of internalize the terror they entail. Because they are seemingly random, very early in the morning, people’s homes, going into people’s apartment complexes, going into people’s place of work. And they’re just kidnapping people, and disappearing them to places where you don’t even know where they are for days, weeks at a time. And, of course, they’re taking away the breadwinners of a lot of families, not just here, but abroad. And so these things are massively disrupting people’s lives, and so I know there are those listening wondering how they can help. There’s obviously a lot of organizations doing a lot of good work. I’m going to be somewhat of a Chicago nativist here and recommend that people check out the Organized Communities Against Deportations, the OCAD, it’s an undocumented-led group that organizes against deportations, detentions, criminalization, and incarceration of Black and brown and immigrant communities in Chicago. They do really, really good work locally here. I know I focused on Chicago because, obviously, I live here.
If you know of organizations that are in desperate need of people supporting, by all means, let us know. We will put them on social media, put them on our social media. If there’s a hub anyone has of organizations and GoFundMes and such, please share that with us. That way we can promote that as well. I know it seems a little bit feeble, but I know there are people listening who are wondering how they can help. I think a lot of these immigrant-led initiatives of mutual support, of legal support and other forms of community have done a lot to push back against ICE. ICE doesn’t like them. They routinely go on Fox News and criticize them, so that means they’re doing something right. So if you can support a version of this, again, I’m not here saying, give to the Organized Communities Against Deportations if you can, but obviously, your own communities have other initiatives. So please find those out, and please support those if you can.
Nima: That will do it for this Citations Needed News Brief. Of course, you can follow the show on Twitter and Bluesky @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. We are 100% listener-funded, so all your support is so incredibly appreciated and helps the show keep going. We will be back very soon with more full-length episodes in our ninth season now of Citations Needed, so stay tuned for that, but until then, thank you all for listening. I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: Citations Needed’s senior producer is Florence Barrau-Adams. Our producer is Julianne Tveten. Production assistant is Trendel Lightburn. The newsletter is by Marco Cartolano. The music is by Grandaddy. Thanks again, everyone. We’ll catch you next time.
[Music]
This Citations Needed News Brief was released on Wednesday, October 22, 2025.
