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In June, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) made a record forty-three thousand arrests—surpassing the previous high, which had been set in December during Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis. In July, in the span of two weeks, ICE agents killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a fifty-two-year-old Mexican man, in Houston, and Joan Sebastian Durán Guerrero, a twenty-five-year-old Colombian immigrant, in Biddeford, Maine. The shootings have pushed ICE back into the national spotlight. But local reporters have been covering the impact on their communities all along. This week offers two powerful examples.
On September 25, 2025, Delvin Francisco Rodriguez, an undocumented immigrant from Nicaragua, was arrested by ICE in Colorado while he was on his way to work. Just weeks later, he agreed to self-deport. But he never got the chance. Instead, he spent months being shuttled through ICE’s vast detention network, flown from Las Vegas to Phoenix to Louisiana before ultimately arriving at one of the country’s largest ICE detention facilities, the Adams County Correctional Center in Mississippi. By December, according to ICE, he was dead by suicide.
Rodriguez’s story is told in an impressive and ambitious new documentary about ICE Air, the sprawling aviation network that ICE uses to move thousands of detainees around the country, from investigative journalists Chris Vanderveen and Chris Hansen of 9News/KUSA-TV in Denver, out this week.
The report is the culmination of a seven-month investigation in which the pair searched millions of flight records, examined hundreds of court filings, reviewed federal detention data, and spoke to numerous people connected with the system. Hansen verified the flights on the ground at airports around the country—either by traveling to see them landing or taking off or by relying on assistance from colleagues at local stations. Hansen told me that he started tracking the flight data in December after the Denver City Council rejected a charter airline’s lease expansion request amid controversy over the company’s role in immigration operations. “There wasn’t much public discourse around where they were flying or how often they were flying,” Hansen said. “This all started just with a pretty simple question: Where are these planes flying? And sometimes it just takes looking at something like that to get a start.”
In some cases, detainees were transferred thirteen times. One person was moved twelve times in a single month. A man arrested in South Florida was repeatedly transferred between Miami, Denver, and Florence, Arizona, without explanation. Immigration attorneys told Vanderveen and Hansen that these so-called shuffle flights can leave detainees hundreds or even thousands of miles from their community support networks and attorneys, derailing their legal representation. The frequent moves have led to a jump in the number of habeas corpus petitions filed across the country, as lawyers race to challenge the legality of the detentions before their clients are relocated again.
In February, a district judge appointed by President Trump said that ICE’s rapid transfers from Minnesota “all but extinguish a detainee’s access to counsel” and make it “difficult, if not impossible,” for lawyers to advocate for their clients. “Due process is not a game of keepaway,” she wrote in a later order in the case.
“I don’t care what your thoughts are about deportation. Thousands of Americans have made up their own minds as to whether this is a good or a bad thing, and our goal was never meant to sway anyone’s opinion,” Vanderveen told me. “There’s lots of people in this country that don’t think people who are living here from other countries are entitled to due process, but the Supreme Court is really clear that they are. And so, when people are deprived of due process, that’s a problem.”
A twelve-year-old girl held for 505 days. A fifteen-year-old boy held for 355 days. A five-year-old child held for 118 days. Over the past year, there have been roughly two thousand unaccompanied minors in federal custody in the United States every day. The time immigrant children spend in federal custody has sharply increased to an average of more than six months nationwide, more than three times longer than the average ten years ago.
In a set of heartbreaking new stories for CT Insider, Jacqueline Rabe Thomas and Joshua Eaton examine what is driving the extended ICE custody of children. Over three months, the reporters looked at dozens of cases in which “court records show many had parents or close family ready to take them in.” Rabe Thomas and Eaton found that longer detention times are the result of new policies from the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which is “piling on unnecessary requirements and re-running vetting it had already finished.”
The ORR’s regulations require it to review a parent’s application to have their child released within ten days, “but that clock starts only once ORR deems an application complete—and the agency can keep adding requirements before it does,” Rabe Thomas and Eaton found. Since December, at least six families have had to sue the government over those delays before their children were released—even when they had already provided birth certificates and DNA tests and submitted to home studies and background checks. Yet the government continued adding requirements as their children languished in ICE detention centers.
That is what happened in the case of Camila, the five-year-old held for 118 days, according to court filings from her attorneys. Camila was taken into custody by US Customs and Border Protection near the border in Arizona in November and designated an “unaccompanied child,” as her mother desperately searched for her.
Eventually, Camila was allowed to call her mother, but they were permitted to see each other only for an hour a week. Camila spent nights in a foster home and days at a converted office building in New Haven just miles from her mother’s apartment, where a pink-and-purple bedroom waited for her. She began to have nightmares and anxiety, crying during her mother’s visits, begging her to stay, and asking when she would be allowed to leave, her mother said in an interview with CT Insider and in court records. “Don’t go. Don’t go,” her mother recalled her saying through tears.
Camila was finally able to leave with her mother after almost four months. On their first night at home, she and her mother slept together, holding each other close after so many days apart.
Last Friday, Axel Springer—the media company that owns Politico, Business Insider, and many other outlets—announced that Peter Thiel will receive the 2026 Axel Springer Award, which “honors individuals who stand out for their entrepreneurial spirit, innovative energy, and societal impact.” But is Thiel’s “societal impact” really worth celebrating? By a media company?
Thiel, a MAGA-affiliated billionaire who cofounded PayPal and Palantir and was an early investor in Facebook, is better known in journalism circles as the man who bankrolled the demise of Gawker as payback for an article that outed him. In 2016, Ryan Mac and Matt Drange revealed in Forbes that Thiel had secretly funded wrestler Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker for publishing a sex tape in which he was featured, which led to a hundred-and-forty-million-dollar judgment that ultimately drove Gawker into bankruptcy. Mac responded to news of the award on X: “Hens dedicate award to fox.”
That case has come up again recently. In January, Thiel’s name surfaced in the Epstein files. “I would have gladly share your expenses for the gawker suit [sic],” Epstein wrote to Thiel the day after the Forbes story was published. Thiel responded with a smiley-face emoticon. In the spring, Thiel started Objection, an AI “tribunal” to adjudicate claims made by aggrieved subjects against journalists, with the same lawyer who orchestrated the Gawker campaign. It has since rebranded as The Primary, an AI-based scoring system for reporters. (Thiel is generally known for strange, unfounded views: this month, at the Aspen Ideas Festival, he reportedly accused Pope Leo XIV of “working for the Chinese Communists.”)
When Andrew Curry profiled Axel Springer for CJR, several years ago, he wrote that Mathias Döpfner, the company’s CEO, started the award in 2016 to gain proximity to the tech-world elite, “luring Mark Zuckerberg; Jeff Bezos; and Tim Berners-Lee, known as the ‘founder of the World Wide Web,’ to the company’s headquarters, in Berlin, for onstage interviews and coronations.” Ben Smith, of Semafor, later described Axel Springer as occupying “a similar place in German media culture to Fox News’s in the Anglosphere”—but unlike Fox, the company’s US newsrooms do not have a political slant. Shortly after Axel Springer bought Politico, Döpfner told the Washington Post, “We want to prove that being nonpartisan is actually the more successful positioning.”
“It never felt like Fox News or a place with an agenda in that way,” a former Business Insider editor told me. Of the award, the editor added, “The reason this is strange is because they are pretty great about allowing journalism to proceed and go where it goes.” Honoring Thiel, the editor suggested, could give reporters a sense that this commitment is changing.
Thiel will receive his award in September. Bari Weiss, the editor in chief of CBS News, will deliver a tribute to him at the ceremony.
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