Secret Santa: Predicting the future

Unpacking federal policies without forgetting our neighbors.

If you’re keeping track, it’s day two of our “break,” which mostly means we’re working on projects pretending this downtime is restful.

Part of the year-end ritual is reviewing our work — figuring out what we did well, what we can do better, and which stories deserve a little extra love.

Yesterday, Curt kicked things off by sharing his favorite story Joe wrote. Today, we’re flipping the script.

It’s his turn to talk about the story of Curt’s that stuck with him this year (with, naturally, a few honorable mentions we had to mention).

Every time Curt writes about immigration in the Tucson Agenda, his stories stick with me — not just for a day or two, but for weeks. They settle in, and then they keep resurfacing.

If you live in Tucson, the white-and-green Border Patrol trucks are basically part of the landscape. You can forget to see them. But whenever I spot one now, it shakes loose the memory of Curt’s last immigration piece — a story that reminded readers exactly what those trucks represent, and what federal policy can look like when the feds take action in our backyard.

Writing about immigration is hard in a way that’s easy to underestimate. The policies are dense, the stakes are enormous and the human stories can easily be drowned out by jargon.

Reporters have to balance speed with precision and emotion with restraint. And they have to do it in a way that doesn’t forget the people caught in the middle.

That’s the craft I admire in Curt’s story.

He has lived on the border and covered it for years. And it shows in the way he can connect the dots on federal immigration actions in Boston to Arizona.

Five weeks ago, he warned that the Trump administration’s mass-deportation machinery was about to get a reboot — one that would swap in Border Patrol officials who had overseen aggressive crackdowns in Los Angeles. And because of that, things are about to get harrier in Arizona, he warned.

“Remember the Border Patrol agents in tactical gear jumping out of the back of a Penske truck a few months ago to chase people around a parking lot in Los Angeles? Get ready for a lot of that in Arizona. Along with a lot of tear gas on residential streets,” Curt wrote.

Curt was right, almost prescient, considering federal agents pepper-sprayed Democratic U.S. Rep. Adelita Grijalva in Tucson on Friday.

It was the kind of insight that comes from reading deeply, connecting dots and understanding the recent history of federal immigration actions in other parts of the country.

That’s why his stories linger long after you’ve read them — because he’s thinking two steps ahead.

With that, I’ll let you get to the story itself.

This is just one of hundreds of great stories we write every year, all of which are made possible by our paid subscribers.

Mass deportations 2.0

ICE wasn’t tough enough.

Curt Prendergast, Oct 30, 2025

Apparently, the mass deportation program that has terrorized immigrants for the past nine months wasn’t moving fast enough.

To speed it up, the Trump administration is removing the top ICE official in Phoenix and several other major cities. In their place, the White House is installing Border Patrol officials, some of whom will be hand-picked by the guy running the crackdowns in Los Angeles and Chicago.

The logic here, according to anonymous officials who spoke to the D.C.-based news outlets chasing the story, is that ICE officials were too focused on arresting individuals, instead of trying to meet President Donald Trump’s goal of deporting 1 million people by the end of the year.

While ICE goes after immigrants with criminal records and those who have a “final order of removal,” the Border Patrol is scooping up anybody they see who might be in the country without papers.

“We’re arresting criminals, while they are going to Home Depots and car washes,” one U.S. official told CBS News, referring to Border Patrol agents.

Remember the Border Patrol agents in tactical gear jumping out of the back of a Penske truck a few months ago to chase people around a parking lot in Los Angeles?

Get ready for a lot of that in Arizona. Along with a lot of tear gas on residential streets.

The Trump administration is on pace to deport about 600,000 people this year, far below their goal. And they can’t turn to the border to beef up their statistics. Too few people are crossing anymore.

So they turned to the big cities, which Trump officials (some of whom are too scared of city life to even ride the subway) are doing their best to make look like crime-ridden, Democratic-run hellholes that are overrun by dangerous foreigners.

In Monday’s Arizona Agenda, we explained the Trump administration’s crackdown on cities like Chicago and Portland, with an eye on local officials who pushed back by declaring “ICE-free zones” or suggesting federal agents could be arrested under state law.

The guy in charge of those big-city operations, Greg Bovino, reportedly will help decide who takes over the ICE office in Phoenix, along with the offices in Denver, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and San Diego.

Greg Bovino at CNN’s bureau in Chicago.

Bovino is a hard-charging Border Patrol official from the El Centro Sector in California, right next to the Yuma Sector, who likes to add militaristic swagger to immigration enforcement.

His agents rappelled from a Black Hawk helicopter onto a roof of an apartment building in Chicago last month, and they rode horses through MacArthur Park as a show of force in Los Angeles this summer.

They also broke up a children’s Halloween parade in Chicago last weekend. When residents intervened, Border Patrol agents threw tear gas canisters at them. The agents also dragged a 67-year-old man (who is a U.S. citizen) from his car and pinned him to the ground near the parade. The agents broke six of his ribs.

Bovino’s record of brutality is so extensive that he now has to meet with a federal judge in Chicago every day at 6 p.m. to review each day’s use-of-force incidents, and he has to wear a body camera at all times.

Last week, the judge told Bovino to bring her every one of those use-of-force reports since September 2, but Bovino said the “sheer amount” of reports was too much for him to deliver by the Tuesday deadline the judge set.

That doesn’t bode well for Arizona as we enter a new stage of the mass deportation program.

Hardliners who are closely aligned with Trump are taking over and they’re in a hurry to deport as many people as possible.

Thanks to the federal spending bill, they can draw on tens of billions of dollars for more agents, more detention centers, and whatever else they need.

And U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh gave federal agents the green light to consider race when making arrests, what are becoming known as “Kavanaugh stops.”

Who knows? A year from now, after Bovino and his Border Patrol crew run roughshod through Phoenix and Tucson, followed by widespread protests in the streets and a stack of lawsuits, ICE might come out looking like the “good guys.”