What’s Actually Happening With Immigration Right Now
It's quietly gotten way worse
My guest this week is Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, founder of Lincoln-Goldfinch Law here in Austin, and a seasoned immigration attorney who, at this particular moment, has had a front row seat to some of the immigration enforcement stories making national news right now.
After Renee Good and Alex Pretti were killed by federal immigration agents, there was enormous national attention on immigration enforcement, on ICE operations, the tactics being used, who was being detained, all of it.
The attention seems to have died down while the enforcement has not. July was ICE's biggest arrest month of Trump's second term, with nearly 50,000 arrests. And yet unless there's a particularly dramatic arrest, or we hear about someone dying in detention, it feels like we're hearing so much less about what's actually happening day to day.
So that's where I started. Has immigration enforcement actually changed since Minneapolis, or has it just become less visible?
How has immigration changed?
"It has changed in that it has gotten way, way worse," Kate told me. July was the highest month. August was even higher than that. And this is all by design, she said, so that most people are able to look away.
When Alex Pretti and Renee Good were killed and DHS leadership switched hands, the new approach was to complete quotas on a daily basis on a much quieter basis. The way that happens is through 287(g) agreements, cooperative agreements the Department of Homeland Security signs with local law enforcement, DPS troopers, sheriffs, police departments here in Texas. There's a version called the task force model, the most cooperative agreement, and it sends officers from those agencies out on the streets pulling people over.
There are no raids on job sites anymore. No helicopters landing on apartment buildings. No flash grenades or riot gear. Instead, local police are using racial profiling through pretextual traffic stops, and, as Kate put it, they're just disappearing people on the side of the road. Sometimes the kids go with them. Sometimes the kids get left in the car. Sometimes they're left back at the house. The only way most of us find out is if a video breaks through, or we happen to know someone it's happened to.
“It’s insidious and it’s invisible. By design.”
The "Worst of the Worst" Claim Doesn't Hold Up
Tom Homan, the administration's border czar, has said the prioritization of ICE arrests is going to be criminal aliens, public safety threats, and national security threats, but that if you're in the country illegally, you're never off the table. So I asked Kate what that actually looks like on the ground.
Her answer was blunt. "It's just an outright bald faced lie," she said, and that's both anecdotal and statistical. Multiple reports, including from our own government agencies, show the vast majority of people being detained and deported have no criminal history whatsoever, more than 70 percent of them. Fewer than 3 percent of the people deported had a violent crime in their history.
What we're actually talking about, Kate said, are people who are living and working in the United States, who've been here a long time. That's a critical distinction from Trump's first term, which was almost entirely border focused: asylum seekers, border crossers, family separations at the border. This time they reset the border on day one and turned their sights on the interior.
Kate told me about a client from just last week. A five year old named Liam was detained the day before kindergarten started, on his way to a soccer game with his dad. He rode in the police car next to his father, whose hands were cuffed behind his back. Liam was freaked out and crying, and his dad couldn't put an arm around him.
Texas Is All In, and There's Money Behind It
I asked Kate to walk me through the partnerships between ICE and local law enforcement, because I'd heard there's a financial reward involved. Texas leadership, she said, is rabid, frothing at the mouth to cooperate with DHS. Greg Abbott signed a 287(g) task force agreement with DPS state troopers in 2025, and now troopers are patrolling the streets and, in her words, definitely racially profiling people.
The pretexts Kate hears about on a daily basis:
Window tint that's too dark
A couple miles over the speed limit
A license plate hung askew
A seatbelt that wasn't on right
Sometimes, no pretext at all
In the last legislative session, the Texas legislature ordered every county in the state to sign a cooperative agreement by the end of 2026, which means every sheriff's department is now enforcing immigration policy, often in small, rural counties with shoestring budgets that are suddenly getting an infusion of federal cash, paying salaries and bounties for going out and getting immigrants.
Her bigger worry isn't just that this is happening, it's the dependence these small agencies are going to build on the federal money, and what happens to actual public safety enforcement once the money and the agreements eventually dry up.
And there's a piece of this I hadn't thought about before. All of these detentions happen in private prison detention centers run by the Geo Group and CoreCivic, whose shareholders profit directly off the number of people detained. Together those two corporations earned more than a billion and a half dollars in the last quarter alone. And a billion and a half dollar quarter buys a lot of lobbyists.
"Why Don't They Just Do It Legally?"
This is the question Kate says she hears constantly. I asked her to explain how someone can be here for years, raise a family here for decades, and still not be able to become legal.
This administration is also going after legal immigration and legal immigrants. Let's not accept the premise that everyone they're going after is undocumented because they can't get legal status.
Birthright citizenship, targeted on day one
Green card holders engaged in pro-Palestinian protests
Every student visa, cancelled
Visa processing blocked from more than 75 countries
DACA recipients
Every asylum seeker, especially Venezuelans
People here under family reunification parole
TPS holders, especially the Haitian population right now
As for the broken system itself, Kate traced it back to before Ronald Reagan. We had amnesty in 1986 because the system was already broken, and the deal was supposed to include going after employers of undocumented workers too. That part never happened. The business community was never touched, and the problem just kept growing, because the United States needs immigrant labor in every sector of the economy, construction, hospitality, health care, landscaping, innovation, and tech included.
Brooke's Tip: if someone tells you undocumented immigrants "just need to get in line," ask them which line. For most of Kate's clients, there isn't one.
If Kate Ran the Show
I asked her, if I made you immigration czar for a day, what are the first three things you'd do?
Create a real pathway to legal status for the undocumented population already here. Let people come out of the shadows, pay a fine, take a civics test, and get work authorization.
Build an actual system for people to come and fill the jobs that are open, including a guest worker program that allows circular migration, so people can come, work, go home, and come back.
Restore humanitarian immigration that reflects who we are as a people. Real asylum for people fleeing persecution. Real protection for domestic violence survivors, crime victims, and trafficking victims.
Who Are We as Americans?
This whole topic is really two separate conversations getting blended into one.
The first is immigration policy itself, and reasonable people can disagree about who should be allowed to come, who should be allowed to stay, and what they have to do to stay.
The second is how people should be treated while those laws are being enforced. Because regardless of someone's immigration status, our constitution applies to anyone on American soil. Due process, basic dignity, these aren't things you forfeit.
“That’s not who we are, and we don’t live under an authoritarian regime.”
This isn't Germany in World War Two. It isn't Turkey, Russia, Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina, or Chile in the seventies. This playbook has been run before, more than once, within the last hundred years of human history, and it never ends well.
What can you do?
If immigration is weighing on you heading into the midterms, take your own action:
October 5th is the deadline to register to vote in Texas
Early voting starts October 19th
Election day is November 3rd
Check your own voter registration and the people in your circle. 1.2 million Texans were deregistered without notification.
If you're looking for somewhere to put your energy or your dollars, Kate pointed me to Casey Rivkin's nonprofit, Each Step Home, which pays commissary accounts for people in detention, flights home for people who've been deported, and puts money directly into the accounts of separated families.
How does Kate hold up doing this difficult work every day?
She's been doing this for 20 years. She's been through hard seasons before. Nothing quite like this one, she said, but it will get better. It will improve.
“What am I gonna do when it’s like all good news? I guess I’ll start dancing.”
The Bottom Line
We don't get to look away just because the headlines have moved on. Enforcement hasn't slowed down, it's just gotten quieter, and quieter is exactly how it's designed to work. Whatever you believe about immigration policy itself, the question of how people are treated while those laws are enforced belongs to all of us.
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This post is for educational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Laws vary by state and situation. For advice specific to your circumstances, consult a licensed attorney in your area.
