A young woman clings to a tree as masked men try to peel her off. The men wrench one of the woman’s arms behind her back, then stuff her into the back of an unmarked SUV as bystanders film and shout. She was selling food outside a Home Depot in West Los Angeles when federal agents chased her down and arrested her.

Videos of aggressive immigration raids like this have become commonplace as the Trump administration pursues its goal of deporting millions of people over the next four years.

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement is arresting people in front of their kids during school dropoffs, on the way to church, and at routine check-ins at immigration offices. Communities are pushing back, leading to clashes with police and protests. These raids are remaking the country.

“Being forced apart like this is tearing through the heart of our home and community,” says Cecelia Lizotte, the sister of a Nigerian man in ICE detention.

This week on Reveal, producers Katie Mingle and Steven Rascón and reporter Julia Lurie tell stories about the people swept up in President Donald Trump’s mass deportations and the families that are left behind.

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More To The Story: Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Trymaine Lee was in the middle of writing his first book when the unthinkable happened. At 38, a massive heart attack nearly took his life. That near-death experience altered his life and forced him to reckon with the years he’s spent chronicling gun violence involving Black men in America, as well as his own family history marred by slavery, lynching, and even murder. On this week’s episode of More To The Story, Lee sits down with host Al Letson for part 1 of a very personal conversation about the moment Lee thought he might be dying, the many challenges of being a Black journalist in America, and how his brush with death redirected his new book, A Thousand Ways to Die: The True Cost of Violence on Black Life in America.

Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Copy editor: Nikki Frick | Deputy executive producer: Taki Telonidis | Executive producer: Brett Myers | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson

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Listen:40 Acres and a Lie (Reveal)

Read: What It’s Like to Celebrate Black History in a State Where It’s Banned (Mother Jones)

Read: A Thousand Ways to Die: The True Cost of Violence on Black Life in America (St. Martin’s Press)

Note: If you buy a book using our Bookshop link, a small share of the proceeds supports our journalism.

From layoffs to billion-dollar budget cuts and ideological battles over history itself, the National Park Service is facing one of the most turbulent moments in its 109-year history.

Reporter Heath Druzin hikes deep into Yellowstone National Park’s backcountry with biologist Doug Smith, who helped reintroduce wolves to the park 30 years ago. The program transformed the ecosystem but could be at risk in future rounds of budget cuts.

Also particularly at risk: biologists and other scientists whose conservation work happens behind the scenes. Reveal’s Nadia Hamdan talks to Andria Townsend, a carnivore biologist at Yosemite National Park who tracks endangered fishers and Sierra Nevada red foxes.

“I would say myself and every other federal employee has not felt safe in their position,” Townsend says. “It makes it challenging to feel that same passion and drive that you maybe had for your work before.”

Meanwhile in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, reporter Najib Aminy attends a Civil War reenactment. He meets hobbyists and historians grappling with a new executive order from the Trump administration that directs the National Park Service to strip away what it calls “partisan ideology” from monuments and signage.

This week on Reveal: what’s really at stake in the battle over America’s parks.

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More To The Story: The opioid crisis has been a quiet, deadly presence in America for a quarter-century now. Since 1999, it’s killed more than 800,000 people in the US. But in the background, another crisis has been simmering: the often-lawless patchwork of treatment centers and programs that make up America’s drug rehab industry. Many of the roughly 50 million Americans who battle substance abuse rely on this underregulated for-profit industry that too often exploits patients, fails to properly treat them, or even worse. On this week’s More To The Story, journalist Shoshana Walter sits down with host Al Letson to talk about the lingering opioid crisis, the many theories about why overdose deaths have started falling in the US, and the stark racial disparity in how lawmakers have approached the opioid crisis compared with the crack epidemic in the 1980s.

Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | additional help from Artis Curiskis | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Copy editor: Nikki Frick | Deputy executive producer: Taki Telonidis | Executive producer: Brett Myers | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson

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Read: Choose Your Child or Choose Recovery: The Impossible Decision Facing Addicted Mothers (Mother Jones)

Read: Rehab: An American Scandal (Simon & Schuster) Note: If you buy a book using our Bookshop link, a small share of the proceeds supports our journalism.

Listen: How Trump Exploits Working-Class Pain (More To The Story)

In 2017, David Leavitt drove to the Northern Cheyenne reservation in Montana to adopt a baby girl. A few years later, during an interview with a documentary filmmaker, Leavitt, a wealthy Utah politician, told a startling story about how he went about getting physical custody of that child.

He describes going to the tribe’s president and offering to use his connections to broker an international sale of the tribe’s buffalo. At the same time, he was asking the president for his blessing to adopt the child.

That video eventually leaked to a local TV station, and the adoption became the subject of a federal investigation into bribery. To others, the adoption story seemed to run afoul of a federal law meant to protect Native children from being removed from their tribes’ care in favor of non-Native families.

This week on Reveal, reporters Andrew Becker and Bernice Yeung dig into the story of this complicated and controversial adoption, how it circumvented the mission of the Indian Child Welfare Act, and why some of the baby’s Native family and tribe were left feeling that a child was taken from them.

This episode was produced in collaboration with the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.

This is an update of an episode that originally aired in August 2024.

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More To The Story: The Voting Rights Act turned 60 years old this month. The landmark piece of legislation is considered one of the most effective laws protecting the right to vote for racial minorities around the country. But the conservative movement has successfully hollowed out much of the law, thanks to Supreme Court decisions over the last decade. On this week’s episode, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie sits down with host Al Letson to talk about how the Voting Rights Act has been defanged by the Supreme Court, why the Democratic Party is made up of “a bunch of weenies,” and why he believes the country is now in a constitutional emergency.

Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Copy editor: Nikki Frick | Deputy executive producer: Taki Telonidis | Executive producer: Brett Myers | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson

Donate today at Revealnews.org/more

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• Listen: How Trump Exploits Working-Class Pain (More To The Story)
• Read: Republican Gerrymandering Schemes Target Minority Voters and Their Representatives (Mother Jones)
• Listen: Not All Votes Are Created Equal (Reveal)
• Read: The Nation’s Landmark Voting Rights Law Just Turned 60. It May Not Survive Trump. (Mother Jones)

Kansas City police Officer Matt Masters first used a Taser in the early 2000s. He said it worked well for taking people down; it was safe and effective.

“At the end of the day, if you have to put your hands on somebody, you got to scuffle with somebody, why risk that?” he said. “You can just shoot them with a Taser.”

Masters believed in that until his son Bryce was pulled over by an officer and shocked for more than 20 seconds. The 17-year-old went into cardiac arrest, which doctors later attributed to the Taser. Masters’ training had led him to believe something like that could never happen.

This week on Reveal, we partner with Lava for Good’s podcast Absolute: Taser Incorporated and its host, Nick Berardini, to learn what the company that makes the Taser knew about the dangers of its weapon and didn’t say.

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Earlier this week, President Donald Trump announced that his administration is removing homeless encampments from around Washington, DC. The announcement illustrated how the federal government’s approach to homelessness is dramatically changing. It follows an executive order issued last month that makes it easier for cities and states to involuntarily commit unhoused people and eliminate encampments. It also prioritizes treatment over housing for people struggling with mental health issues or substance abuse. The policies represent a 180-degree turn away from an approach the federal government has used for years called Housing First, an evidence-based program that prioritizes the opposite: housing before treatment. It was first developed by clinical psychologist Sam Tsemberis almost 30 years ago. On this week’s More To The Story, Tsemberis sits down with host Al Letson to examine the potential effects of Trump’s executive order.

Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Digital producer: Nikki Frick | Deputy executive producer: Taki Telonidis | Executive producer: Brett Myers | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson

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Listen: The Churn (Reveal)

Read: Trump’s Plan to Eliminate Homelessness Is Just Cruel. Here’s Another Option. (Mother Jones)

Learn more: Pathways Housing First Institute