Why a Drug Enforcement Administration truck was spotted at a Tucson immigration raid

LAUREN GILGER: They may not always be in the headlines these days, but immigration raids are still taking place here and all over the country.

And, in photos taken outside a recent raid in a Tucson neighborhood, our next guest spotted something a little out of the ordinary: A truck with the letters DEA on the side.

That’s the Drug Enforcement Administration — an agency that isn’t traditionally involved in immigration enforcement.

Yana Kunichoff is a reporter with Arizona Luminaria in Tucson, and she’s on the line now to tell us more.

Full conversation

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning, Yana.

YANA KUNICHOFF: Good morning. Thanks for having me.

LAUREN GILGER: Thanks for coming on. So, DEA was spotted at this Tucson raid. Why did this stand out to you?

YANA KUNICHOFF: Yeah, I think that what we have seen is a shift under the Trump administration, we’ve seen a shift in the agencies that have been involved in immigration enforcement. And we’ve also seen a lot of unmarked vehicles, officers who are not wearing tags saying what agency they’re connected to involved in immigration enforcement at the ground level. So this really stark sign of a federal agency that doesn’t usually do this work really caught my eye.

LAUREN GILGER: What does the Drug Enforcement Administration normally do? I mean, obviously drug enforcement, right? Different kind of work.

YANA KUNICHOFF: Yeah, so the DEA is usually looking at, are there cartel operations? Are there drug trafficking operations? It’s part of the effort to get fentanyl pills off of the streets. There’s kind of this bigger international or national view of tracking criminal organizations, and that is really, really different to arresting folks for civil immigration purposes.

LAUREN GILGER: Right, right. OK, so this is not the traditional role of the DEA. But it does seem like this could be kind of the new normal, as you’re getting at there. Tell us about what Attorney General Kris Mayes has had to say about this. She mentioned this in a different interview, right?

YANA KUNICHOFF: Yeah, and so some of this came up about a year ago when the Trump administration deployed officers from a number of different agencies, including the IRS, including FEMA, which is emergency management, to immigration enforcement, and the move with the DEA was part of that.

So we’re seeing this big growth in the immigration enforcement agenda, and then some of these other more traditional other enforcement work, there’s just less of that happening.

And Kris Mayes a year ago wrote a letter to the federal government saying, "Hey, this is actually impacting my ability to fight crime at the border. This is impacting my ability to fight cartels at the border. I need more agents." And at the time, she said there were 60 agents who had been deployed out of Arizona to other places.

LAUREN GILGER: Right, there was also a Cato Institute report showing almost half of DEA agents had been shifted to immigration enforcement last year. And as you say, we’ve seen this similar pattern play out from the Trump administration when it comes to other agencies that are not normally charged with immigration, like FEMA.

There was a recent report from House Democrats and Representative Greg Stanton from here in Arizona that shed light on how the Trump administration had shifted workers at FEMA to immigration enforcement as well, and the House Democrats there said that was an illegal move.

YANA KUNICHOFF: Yeah, I think what we’re seeing is really what has been the impact of this now essentially over the last year. So that GAO report, there were two things that really stood out to me.

One was the Texas floods last year when 137 people died in July, that there was a lapsed contract for call centers, so when people were making calls to look for support, no one was answering those calls because of some of those FEMA cuts, which included moving staff to work in detention centers or help hire officers, jobs that are just outside of their usual position as FEMA employees.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. Did ICE or the DEA here have anything to say to you about this particular story?

YANA KUNICHOFF: ICE sent me to the DEA, and the DEA did not give me an on-the-record comment. So I don’t have anything to share that can help us understand this better, besides what we’ve kind of seen in this shift in there’s been some reporting around, OK, so white-collar criminal investigations are going down. There’s sort of numbers about the impact of this in other spaces, but otherwise, no.

LAUREN GILGER: OK. Back up for a moment, Yana, and tell us what this issue looks like on the ground right now. Like, you’re in Tucson, you’re near the border, but this is happening, as I said, all over the country. Are you seeing more immigration raids still happening in Tucson, even though they don’t always make headlines?

YANA KUNICHOFF: Oh, absolutely. And I think what I’m hearing, there’s a pretty broad network of rapid response volunteers on the ground here who try to go out to whenever there’s an alleged raid, they try to be there on the ground, and I’m hearing that those are happening pretty regularly. They’re also happening very early in the morning.

The raid that I wrote about two weeks ago, there was actually a volunteer who saw people going to what they believed was another raid while they were on their way to the first one, so that just tells me that the density of these occurring are high.

But it’s also really hard to get information about it when I’ve asked immigration or when I’ve asked ICE for comment, if I don’t have the full name and the A-number or the date of birth of a person arrested in that, they won’t comment on it, so there’s not a lot of ability to get official information.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, and difficult to track on any kind of mass level. What are you watching for on this front going forward, Yana, in terms of this major shift in law enforcement priorities and what agencies are doing the work, but also just the work that’s going kind of unnoticed?

YANA KUNICHOFF: Yeah, I mean, I think there’s always a trickle down in communities from this. I’m wondering what this looks like in schools. I’m wondering what this means for how people interact with local law enforcement, sort of what it means for the fabric of our communities here in Tucson to have this level of enforcement.

And I think also that people are seeing something happen in their communities, but is that reflected in media coverage or are they able to get information about what happens? I think that just impacts public trust in a broad way.

LAUREN GILGER: Raises lots of questions there. Yana Kunichoff is a reporter with Arizona Luminaria joining us from Tucson. Yana, thanks for coming on the show. Appreciate it.

YANA KUNICHOFF: Yeah, thank you for having me.