Ep. 61: Teaching South Carolina's Real History

As always, you can find links with sources and more information in the show notes.

This week, we'll survey the reaction from Texas observers to President Donald Trump's so-called midterm convention in Dallas.

We'll look at the impact across the South of the cuts to food stamps enacted last year.

And to start us off, the ongoing trauma of aggressive immigration enforcement.

We haven't talked as much about ICE this year as we did in the first year of the second Trump administration, when some of its largest efforts were focused in the South, from Florida to Charlotte, North Carolina, to New Orleans.

Early in twenty twenty-six, the national and global focus turned to Minnesota with what amounted to an armed invasion of Minneapolis, resulting in weeks of protests, arrests, and multiple killings and assaults by masked federal agents.

The fallout from that operation led to shifts in leadership at the federal level and what seems to be an effort to keep the mass arrest and deportation project out of the headlines.

But that project continues at high intensity.

According to the Deportation Data Project, which uses publicly available data, there were forty-nine thousand five hundred and seventy-one arrests by federal immigration agencies in July of this year, the highest number yet during Trump's second term.

Of those, nearly forty-two thousand resulted in people being held in detention.

According to TRAC Reports, another organization that uses public records, more than sixty-five thousand immigrants total were being held in federal detention facilities in July.

That was down somewhat from more than seventy thousand in January, which was the highest number in history.

And as we've talked about here before, many of those facilities are in the South.

Texas and Louisiana remain the two states with the highest numbers of detained immigrants, with Georgia and Florida ranking fourth and fifth.

California is third.

Between federal detention centers in those four southern states, they held thirty-two thousand six hundred and twenty immigrants, nearly half of the nationwide total.

As has been true across both the Trump and Biden administrations, the majority of those detainees, seventy-one percent in July, have no criminal convictions.

Thirty-one percent of the unconvicted do have pending criminal charges, but those can be as minor as traffic violations.

And as the number of detainees has grown, so has the number of detainee deaths.

Last year, ICE reported thirty-three immigrant deaths in custody, the highest number in more than two decades, and more than during the entirety of the Biden administration, which recorded twenty-six over four years.

This year's number might be even higher, with twenty-six deaths reported through the end of August.

Not surprisingly, given the concentration of detainees here, sixteen of those have been in the South, six in Texas detention centers, four in Georgia, and three each in Florida and Louisiana.

One of them was Prisciliano Trejo, a twenty-nine-year-old who had lived with his family in North Carolina since they came to the United States when he was three.

After graduating from high school, he had worked in construction.

Trejo was arrested in June on charges of driving while intoxicated after watching a World Cup match with friends at a Mexican restaurant.

As always, you can find links with sources and more information in the show notes.

This week, we'll survey the reaction from Texas observers to President Donald Trump's so-called midterm convention in Dallas.

We'll look at the impact across the South of the cuts to food stamps enacted last year.

And to start us off, the ongoing trauma of aggressive immigration enforcement.

We haven't talked as much about ICE this year as we did in the first year of the second Trump administration, when some of its largest efforts were focused in the South, from Florida to Charlotte, North Carolina, to New Orleans.

Early in twenty twenty-six, the national and global focus turned to Minnesota with what amounted to an armed invasion of Minneapolis, resulting in weeks of protests, arrests, and multiple killings and assaults by masked federal agents.

The fallout from that operation led to shifts in leadership at the federal level and what seems to be an effort to keep the mass arrest and deportation project out of the headlines.

But that project continues at high intensity.

According to the Deportation Data Project, which uses publicly available data, there were forty-nine thousand five hundred and seventy-one arrests by federal immigration agencies in July of this year, the highest number yet during Trump's second term.

Of those, nearly forty-two thousand resulted in people being held in detention.

According to TRAC Reports, another organization that uses public records, more than sixty-five thousand immigrants total were being held in federal detention facilities in July.

That was down somewhat from more than seventy thousand in January, which was the highest number in history.

And as we've talked about here before, many of those facilities are in the South.

Texas and Louisiana remain the two states with the highest numbers of detained immigrants, with Georgia and Florida ranking fourth and fifth.

California is third.

Between federal detention centers in those four southern states, they held thirty-two thousand six hundred and twenty immigrants, nearly half of the nationwide total.

As has been true across both the Trump and Biden administrations, the majority of those detainees, seventy-one percent in July, have no criminal convictions.

Thirty-one percent of the unconvicted do have pending criminal charges, but those can be as minor as traffic violations.

And as the number of detainees has grown, so has the number of detainee deaths.

Last year, ICE reported thirty-three immigrant deaths in custody, the highest number in more than two decades, and more than during the entirety of the Biden administration, which recorded twenty-six over four years.

This year's number might be even higher, with twenty-six deaths reported through the end of August.

Not surprisingly, given the concentration of detainees here, sixteen of those have been in the South, six in Texas detention centers, four in Georgia, and three each in Florida and Louisiana.

One of them was Prisciliano Trejo, a twenty-nine-year-old who had lived with his family in North Carolina since they came to the United States when he was three.

After graduating from high school, he had worked in construction.

Trejo was arrested in June on charges of driving while intoxicated after watching a World Cup match with friends at a Mexican restaurant.