Reagan Williams and Brian Root of Human Rights Watch joined me to talk about two new reports, one on the federal enforcement surge in Minneapolis and one on rising deaths in ICE detention nationwide. Root has been the data scientist behind Human Rights Watch’s research for 14 years, the only person in the role, responsible for the quantitative work across the organization’s investigations worldwide. He came to it through a PhD in international development at a moment when almost no one was pairing statistical methods with human rights documentation, and the field has spent the years since catching up to that pairing. Williams worked in human rights philanthropy first, then became a lawyer “to do this work from a different angle.” She trained at Columbia Law School and is now a researcher in HRW’s Crisis and Conflict Division, where her legal training goes into interviews, records, and advocacy rather than client representation.
The Minneapolis report began while the harm it documents was still unfolding. Williams and a colleague were on a call with a Minneapolis lawyer on January 7, listening to her describe how the operation was ramping up. An hour after they hung up, the lawyer texted to say Renee Good had been killed. Human Rights Watch documented that killing, then the killing of Alex Pretti a couple of weeks later, and then sent Williams in to record everything else the operation was doing to the Twin Cities. She expected to focus on street-level violence. What she found was so pervasive that the report grew to 180 pages. Everyone she spoke to had a story, she told me, and the stress was audible in how people told them, not only immigrants who were detained but the doctors, educators, and union organizers watching roughly 4,000 federal agents reshape daily life.
Their skill sets are built to converge. Williams builds the record one interview at a time, more than 130 of them for the Minnesota report. Root works from the other end, pulling arrest and detention records into what he calls a wide angle view of how the system functions in aggregate. On the detention-deaths report, Dr. Katie Peeler of Physicians for Human Rights added a third discipline, reading the medical evidence with a physician’s judgment. When the testimony, the numbers, and the medical review arrive at the same finding independently, the finding holds.
“A Manufactured Crisis: Minnesota Communities Terrorized by the Federal Government”: what roughly 4,000 additional federal agents did in the Twin Cities between December 2025 and March 2026.
“Dying in Detention: Rising Deaths in an Expanding US Immigration Detention System”: how many people are dying in ICE custody, measured with Physicians for Human Rights as a daily death rate rather than a single annual figure.
“A Manufactured Crisis” reconstructs the operation behind the headlines, including the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and the fear that settled over daily life around them. A survey by the U.S. Immigration Policy Center found that 28 percent of Minneapolis respondents had interacted with a federal agent during the operation, close to one in three people encountering agents, as Williams said, “just by existing in their city.” Root’s analysis shows why the operation reached so far beyond its stated targets. In most months of this administration, the share of ICE arrestees who already had a final order of removal ran in the low forties. During the surge it plummeted to 19 percent, and 64 percent of those arrested had no conviction or even a pending charge. Root reads that drop as evidence of profiling, of agents driving around and picking people up rather than arresting people the government had already ordered removed. “This was a planned operation,” he said of what followed. Within days, most of those arrested were transferred to Fort Bliss in Texas, and within a few weeks nearly half had been deported.
The speed of those transfers is where my own questions went, because it collides with how the courts work. ICE operates with nationwide jurisdiction, while the federal judges who hear habeas petitions have geographic jurisdiction. A detained person in Minneapolis lucky enough to have a lawyer can be 2,000 miles away before a petition reaches a judge, and then needs a new lawyer, barred in Texas, to start over. Attorneys told Williams they had hours to file once they reached a client. She called it a compounding problem. It is also how an enforcement agency leverages geography to escape oversight, the same logic by which ICE, in choosing where to build detention centers, effectively chooses which circuit courts will review its conduct.
“Dying in Detention” documents how little information leaves the system when someone dies inside it. ICE’s own policy requires a public notice within 48 hours and a fuller report within 30 days. Williams found those reports regularly delayed and sometimes only a couple of paragraphs long, so thin that Dr. Peeler could not tell whether a notation like elevated blood pressure described a minor reading or a medical emergency demanding immediate intervention. The scarcity reaches the families. Williams interviewed the mother of Lorenzo, a man who died in custody last year, a woman grieving her son and still “really desperate to know more about what had happened to him.” The family’s lawyer filed a FOIA request for his records, received nothing, and has now filed a lawsuit.
Root’s half of that report borrows its method from epidemiology. Earlier analyses divided one annual death count by one average population number and produced a single rate per fiscal year, a unit that means little when you want to compare administrations or crises. Root computed daily death rates instead, system-wide and facility by facility, and the comparisons became possible. The detention population has grown 77 percent under this administration. The death rate has grown 140 percent, faster than the population driving it, and worse than the first year of the COVID pandemic. The chart on page two of the report shows the full curve. I said it live and I will repeat it here. Download the report, screenshot that chart, and share it, especially if you teach.
Williams traces the Minneapolis operation and the rising death toll back to the same reading of the Immigration and Nationality Act. The administration is applying mandatory detention to people who have lived in the country for years, treating anyone who entered without inspection as an applicant for admission who must be held while their case proceeds. Williams argues that reading is what is filling facilities fast enough to produce both the profiling pattern in Minneapolis and the rising death rate nationwide. It has split the federal appeals courts, a dispute she expects the Supreme Court to settle. Her answer gave this post its title. However the courts rule, Congress needs to end mandatory detention, because these people should not be detained in the first place.
Human Rights Watch is publishing a full report next week on Camp East Montana, the Fort Bliss facility where most of the people arrested in Minneapolis were sent. If I had to pick one facility in the country to put this team’s combined skill sets on, it would be that one. Root’s team also built a free browser tool that automates checks against ICE’s online detainee locator system on a set schedule and archives what it finds, designed for lawyers and law clinics tracking people who may be moved with little notice.
I spent the better part of 15 years in and around universities, and I keep telling people that universities hold no exclusive claim on rigorous research. These two reports are the kind of evidence I have in mind. Williams brings a legal researcher’s discipline to tracing a policy from statute to facility. Root brings the same discipline to the numbers, refusing to let a single annual average or a government talking point stand in for a defensible rate. My thanks to Reagan and Brian for their hour, and to everyone who joined us live.
Watch the full conversation above. We get into a lot of questions, including the following (with timestamps for ease of navigation):
00:00 — Welcome and introductions
02:22 — How Brian Root got into human rights data work
06:41 — How Reagan Williams got into human rights law, and turning legal training toward research
10:48 — Overview of the two new reports
12:28 — What motivated the investigation into Minneapolis and St. Paul
18:54 — What data analysis adds to interview-based human rights research
23:38 — What the arrest data shows about racial profiling and Fort Bliss transfers
27:54 — Habeas corpus, jurisdiction, and the barrier to counsel
30:56 — Why detention center locations double as venue selection, and why ICE has stopped publishing data
39:21 — Turning to the detention deaths report and the scarcity of information
44:05 — Anomalies in ICE’s reporting and a human rights framing for detention deaths
48:34 — Measuring a death rate that means something
52:42 — The report’s key chart, and closing reflections
55:45 — Closing thoughts and what’s next for HRW
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