Trial Run

From the acclaimed national correspondent for MS NOW, an explosive investigation into the growing wave of abductions, internments, and enforced disappearances by the US government, showing how we are marching into a dark future where the state decides who is seen and who is erased.

Almost as soon as Donald Trump returned to power in early 2025, his administration began to exercise a power that categorically distinguishes authoritarian states from democratic ones: disappearing people summarily, arbitrarily, and with impunity. Among the first targets were three planeloads of Venezuelan migrants, who were illegally sent to El Salvador in March 2025 against a judge's orders and on the thinnest of pretenses. But history teaches us that when a government targets a marginalized group in this way, it is only the beginning, and that's exactly what we've seen in the intervening months: Masked men in unmarked cars picking fruit vendors and carwash workers off the streets, leaving their families wondering about their whereabouts for days, weeks, or even indefinitely. ICE agents descending upon cities across the country, detaining civilians—including citizens and green card holders, adults and children alike—without cause, and murdering others in cold blood. Internment camps springing up on American soil and overseas—most notoriously CECOT, the terrorist prison in El Salvador where those roughly 250 Venezuelan migrants found themselves in the spring of 2025. 

As award-winning journalist David Noriega explains in Trial Run, enforced disappearances have happened before in the United States, but the second Trump administration has taken them to terrifying new heights. The gripping, untold story of its first victims, Trial Run is also a bracing investigation of how this practice is being used against the American people at large—and how much worse it might get. In the words of one young activist: “Don’t think that you’re safe, and don’t think that you’re not next.”