Political Gabfest How Many Divisions Has the Pope?
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Apr 16, 2026 
Anne Applebaum, historian and Atlantic columnist, explains why Viktor Orbán’s defeat matters for Europe and NATO. She describes how grassroots unity toppled an entrenched illiberal regime. Conversation also ranges from the Pope’s rebuke of war to U.S. blockades, DHS upheavals, and the ripple effects for international institutions.
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How DHS Was Reoriented Toward Interior Enforcement
- DHS under Trump was remade around immigration enforcement, pulling Customs and Border Protection and HSI into interior enforcement roles.
- Emily Bazelon described difficulty sourcing interviews and that ICE/HSI agents spoke about increased interior arrests and pressure for quotas.
Quota Politics Reshaped Immigration Enforcement
- Stephen Miller set aggressive numeric targets (3,000 arrests/day, 1M deportations/year) that drove operations and incentivized racial profiling and interior sweeps.
- Bazelon said ICE agents admitted quotas pushed them into arrests of many without criminal records, creating large rises in detentions.
Detention Doubled And Mostly Hit Noncriminals
- Detention numbers roughly doubled from under 40,000 under Biden to over 75,000, with most of the increase being non-criminal detainees.
- Bazelon highlighted this as a concrete way to see the scale of policy change beyond percentage statistics.
