Radley Balko’s beat is abuse of power. Being independent helps him report the full story.

Radley Balko spent years covering abuses of power from local police departments, and other factions of law enforcement, for The Washington Post until 2022, and later for his independent Substack newsletter, The Watch. Now, the beat he’s been honing for years has shifted, aligning with the focus of President Trump’s second term, and centers on the militarization of the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

That’s not quite as drastic as switching from covering healthcare to covering the stock market. It’s a similar beat, but Balko still says it required him to do extensive research and interview some of the country’s top experts to figure out what he needed to know about ICE, Border Patrol, and how they were wielding power under an anti-immigration administration.

What are normal immigration enforcement tactics? How are deportations supposed to work? What are the legal limits surrounding how ICE is allowed to behave? These are the kinds of questions Balko had to look into.

“I’d written a little bit about the history of abuse and misconduct inside of Border Patrol. But I didn’t really cover immigration very much at all,” Balko says. “A lot of it, as I’ve learned, is extremely complicated.”

Of course, police departments also frequently work with ICE in deportation efforts, so that was another space where Balko could apply his expertise.

In this edition of Depth Perception, we talk to Balko about covering ICE, how he identified the areas of overlap with what he already knew about ICE and what he had to learn, and his concerns about the journalism industry. —Thor Benson

I know you worked at The Washington Post, but you’ve done a lot of different kinds of things. What was it like at The Post and then going independent?

So I was originally hired at The Post by Fred Hiatt on the opinion side. The idea was to cover criminal justice and civil liberties, but as an opinion journalist. So I had a blog for The Post for a while. I was also hired to do two or three [or] four long-form reported pieces every year — sort of magazine-style writing.

That went really well for a while. When Fred died, the opinion section — they weren’t really ever staffed or equipped to do long-form journalism. They wanted more short, tight pieces. I found it was more and more difficult to get the longer stuff published. I actually left before Jeff Bezos revamped the op-ed page. I was basically let go.

Fred had moved me to get way into the deep weeds. Basically, the people who wanted to take over the opinion page didn’t really like the long-form reported stuff. They didn’t really have much interest in the issues I was covering.

I launched the Substack after I left [in 2022]. I was very pleasantly surprised and flattered that I got enough subscribers to continue to kind of make a living at journalism. Since then, it’s been kind of up and down. There’s a lot of churn, which is a word I learned after starting the newsletter. I lose probably 10 to 15% of my subscribers every year when the yearly renewals come up.

I basically spend most of the year trying to build up enough new subscribers to kind of get where I was the year before, before the churn kicks in. That part’s been a little frustrating. Freelancing in general is a really unreliable way to make a living. I mean, on the one hand, I’m very grateful to my subscribers who have allowed me to continue to do the work that I do, which is really fulfilling, but it’s a tough world out there for journalists right now.

When you were at The Post, your writing was kind of classic civil libertarian stuff — civil liberties, police conduct, drug policy. In the second Trump era, obviously ICE is the big focus in that realm. Did you find it easy to transition into that kind of work?

Yeah, I definitely pivoted, but I had written sort of tangentially about ICE and Border Patrol. Trump had used them to break up the George Floyd protests. He’d used these Border Patrol units. I’d written about that.

I’d written a little bit about the history of abuse and misconduct inside of Border Patrol. But I didn’t really cover immigration very much at all. A lot of it, as I’ve learned, is extremely complicated: how deportations work and how the system’s supposed to work, how the immigration courts work.

It took about a year. I really started kind of leaning into it during the 2024 campaign, specifically because Trump promised mass deportations. I guess the first big piece I wrote was that I just started interviewing people with expertise in that area and asked what it would take to deport the number of people that they wanted to deport.

It was pretty horrifying to hear what kind of infrastructure it would require — transportation to holding facilities, the kind of army of enforcers that they would need. That was kind of a foot in the door.

My first book was about the force with which [law enforcement] was apprehending people, the complete lack of accountability, the deployment of military units in the cities. I mean, that’s all stuff that I covered pretty regularly. So, yeah, it took a little bit of catching up and educating myself. But on the same token, once everything was up and running in this administration, it kind of merged with a lot of beats that I’d already been covering for a long time.

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Something that strikes me, as someone who has also covered civil liberties for years, is that it feels like a lot of that stuff didn’t get much attention for a long time. The warnings are kind of coming to fruition now. How do you feel about that?

The route to where we are now runs through the drug war. Constitutional lawyers have long talked about the drug war exception to the Fourth Amendment. That’s where the federal courts, the Supreme Court, basically said that illicit drugs are such a threat to U.S. security and public safety that they’re going to create these balancing tests. They’re going to figure out ways basically to carve these holes into the Fourth Amendment because this is such an existential threat.

All it really took was another president to come along and say, “Well, this other thing is also an existential threat.” In this case, immigration and “being invaded.” They’re lying about almost all of that. But the courts have also basically said that they’re going to be extremely deferential to the executive … when it comes to determining what is and isn’t an existential threat or a national security threat. So, we got here through basically a generation of really bad anti-civil libertarian drug war policy.

Trump has just swapped immigration in. There’s also a lot of overlap. There are claims that migrants have been smuggling fentanyl and other drugs into the country, and this goes hand in hand with the drug boat assassinations.

The War on Terror is also obviously relevant here. Trump is calling everything a national security threat.

Yeah, there’s a lot of overlap. After September 11, the other issue that caused the courts to start carving holes in the Bill of Rights was terrorism. If you could couch anything in terrorism, you’re going to be able to use a lot of these emergency loopholes in congressional and case law restraints on executive power.

Right after September 11, the Bush administration made [an effort] to tie recreational drug use, even pot use, to support for terrorism. During the Super Bowl after September 11, they ran these ads… where they would interview these actors playing recreational pot smokers. They would say, “I helped bomb a courthouse in Bogota,” or “I helped assassinate a judge in Mexico City.” The idea was if you’re smoking pot, you’re just as bad as the 9/11 terrorists [because drug money might go to funding terrorism].

At the beginning of this year, we had ICE in the news all the time. It’s not as much in the news now, and people seem less worried. But the reporting I’ve read seems to indicate that a lot of similar stuff is happening, but just less loudly, less noticeably. What are you witnessing as a reporter, in terms of ICE tactics and what they’re doing?

It’s as bad as it’s ever been. I think they’re actually detaining more people than ever, on a daily basis. They’re still shooting people. There was a case in Illinois where they beat the hell out of a U.S. citizen who they “mistakenly” thought was an undocumented person. They just left him in the street. They didn’t give the guy any medical care.

I think they’ve decided to stop celebrating the violence and reveling in it and just continue it on a low-key basis. It’s hard to maintain the outrage over months and years, not to mention the fact that there are so many other outrageous things they’re doing to dilute our attention. I’ll be the first to admit I’m as guilty as anyone.

I’ve covered Renee Good and Alex Pretti closely. I’ve covered the occupations of Chicago and Minneapolis really closely. Over the last few months, I’ve had a book manuscript due, and I’ve been focusing on other issues that I had kind of put off and stories that I’d put off because the other stuff seemed so urgent. We just can’t maintain that kind of focus and outrage over an extended period of time.

How do you feel about covering ICE independently versus what it felt like when you had an institution? Do you find some parts are easier or harder?

It’s about the same. I mean, one of the problems at The Post was it was hard to get approval. I mean, I sometimes paid for my own reporting trips when I was at The Post because you just couldn’t get an answer at all. In that sense, it’s really not all that different.

I did kind of have the freedom to pursue the stories I wanted in the sense that no one’s going to tell me I couldn’t write something or refuse to publish something, or at least not until the end. The platform of The Post is nice. You get a lot of readers. People return your calls when you say you’re calling from The Washington Post.

I knew if somebody tried to sue me, I would have the paper’s backing. By the same token, the bottleneck with legal as an opinion writer — my stuff tended to get pretty low priority. That’s one of the things that made it more difficult to publish the longer pieces: waiting to get approval from legal.

You’ve seen all different sides of this industry. How are you feeling about the future of journalism?

Oh, man. A year ago, I would have said that obviously there are huge problems in journalism, particularly when it comes to daily newspapers, which were losing good people because there just weren’t enough jobs. But I would have said I think that investigative journalism was still doing well. You’re seeing a lot of independent news sites spring up.

I think that I’ve become a little more cynical since then about the latter point, a little less optimistic. I think part of it is because this administration is going after the people who fund that kind of work. They are a lot less willing to do it.

After the George Floyd protests, a lot of very wealthy Silicon Valley types were investing in journalism. I think Meta had a big journalism fund. They’ve all kind of pivoted to Trump and let those foundations just lapse and expire. As I understand it, there’s a lot less money to go around to support good investigative journalism.

I hope after the midterms, if the Democrats do well and then there’s a kind of a voter rebuke of Trump, maybe some of those groups and donors and foundations will start supporting journalism again to the extent they were before. Obviously Meta is never going to, but we’ll see.

How about your own newsletter?

In terms of my newsletter, I would love to be able to hire an editor. I mean, my wife is a terrific editor, but she has her own job and her own career and her own important journalism to do.

Individual subscribers to individual newsletters are definitely not going to save journalism. I think the nonprofit model is probably where things are headed now. I think in some ways that’s good, because I think it insulates us from the demands of traffic and readership and clicks and trying to constantly feed the algorithm. By the same token, it makes you dependent on the donors who support you and creates its own problems.

If there’s somebody out there who has the money and wants to help journalism, they should buy up as many alt-weeklies as they can find. I imagine you could buy up a lot of them these days and then just set up a trust that funds them indefinitely and create some sort of structure where they have independence. Alt-weeklies have always done great journalism. They’ve always broken stories that the main newspapers take credit for.

Further reading from Radley Balko:

• “The framing of Chris Duncan” (The Watch, September 1, 2026)
• “Suing Stephen Miller” (The Watch, July 20, 2026)
• “A guide to racism in the criminal justice system” (The Watch, July 8, 2026)
• “You can’t hide your lying ICE: The shooting of Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis” (The Watch, May 22, 2026)
• Rise of the Warrior Cop (PublicAffairs, 2013)