The Metro team has been noticing a chilling effect as we dig for answers and information: some sources who used to talk to us are not picking up. Community members, advocates, and elected officials are going quiet. But silence is only one side of the story. The other side is a deliberate wall of noise.

Washington Post reporters obtained thousands of internal Department of Homeland Security messages and found a taxpayer-funded media operation embedded in immigration raids. Producers were told to flag “cinematic scenes” for the camera. When someone arrested had no criminal record — and nearly 74% in ICE detention don’t, according to government data — officials were told to find something else “newsworthy.”

At the same time, DHS has sent hundreds of administrative subpoenas to Google, Meta, Reddit, and Discord demanding the identities of people who criticize ICE online. 

Maria Hinojosa has spent decades fighting against the silence and the noise. The Pulitzer Prize-winning host of Latino USA and founder of Futuro Media joined Robyn Vincent to talk about the federal government’s information war on immigration.

Hear the full conversation using the media player above.

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The killing of two American citizens in Minneapolis by federal immigration officers has forced the country to look more closely at Immigration and Customs Enforcement. When applying that closer lens, that scrutiny moves beyond individual agents to the system itself. It’s one built through laws, budgets, and a long-standing decision to treat immigration as a criminal problem.

César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a law professor at Ohio State University, studies the once less known aspects of the U.S. system: where immigration enforcement operates like criminal policing, and detention functions like punishment even when the government calls it “civil.”

His latest book is “Welcome the Wretched: In Defense of the ‘Criminal Alien.'”

García Hernández joined Robyn Vincent on The Metro to discuss what kind of immigration system is actually being built in the name of Americans, and how we got here.

Listen to The Metro weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon ET on 101.9 FM and streaming on demand.

Subscribe to The Metro on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, NPR.org or wherever you get your podcasts.

More stories from The Metro