Our producer Jessica Cheung on the thinking behind having a longtime Border Patrol agent on Tuesday’s show:

“Over the past year, ‘The Daily’ has covered the most aggressive immigration crackdown in U.S. history from multiple perspectives: from the eyes of asylum seekers sent back to Mexico, parents separated from their children at the border, an undocumented woman who worked at one of President Trump’s golf clubs and a woman with a deportation order hiding in her home to wait out an ICE raid.

“We wondered, what does this crackdown look like to the Border Patrol agents tasked with carrying out the president’s agenda? Do they agree with policies like family separation? What is it like when your job changes from monitoring the border to being responsible for detained children?

“I started searching for a Border Patrol agent who would talk openly about their experience. My requests to government agencies went unanswered. I asked Times reporters if their sources would go on the record in audio, but without an assurance that their voices would be distorted, most agents were unwilling to speak without the Border Patrol’s permission. (One reporter’s sources declined because an agent had been interviewed for TV with voice distortion, but colleagues still figured out who it was.) For days, I was stuck.

“Then I came across a podcast created by members of the National Border Patrol Council, the sole union that represents Border Patrol agents. One of the hosts was Art Del Cueto, a union spokesman. When I called him up, he told me he was a child of immigrants who’d grown up on the border. Now, as part of his uniform, he wore the cowboy hat that he’d seen on the law enforcement officers he’d looked up to as a kid.

“Some might look at his life story and wonder if he was closing the same doors that his family came through. His was a viewpoint ‘The Daily’ hadn’t heard yet.”