Over the last few years, there’s been a flood of kids from Central America who’ve arrived in the United States by themselves. With no adults.

Ira talks to our Senior Producer Brian Reed about a fight that’s been brewing in the remote town of Homer, Alaska over a resolution that states that Homer welcomes immigrants. Which is odd.

A Border Patrol agent takes us deep inside his experience patrolling the U.S.-Mexico border.

The Department of Homeland Security’s new policies on deportation have sown fear and confusion among undocumented immigrants. Ira Glass and Lilly Sullivan go to Chicago and meet a family trying to navigate the situation.

Producer Zoe Chace hung out with some immigration lawyers who are getting calls from their nervous clients.

One way to understand the split inside the Republican party is to look at immigration. It’s this urgent, emotional issue for so much of the party these days.

Ira's quest continues. He calls his Uncle Lenny, who gets his news from Fox and the Wall Street Journal, and lives with an entirely different set of facts, and Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration expert at the CATO Institute, who explains that the central issue in Donald Trump’s candidacy is based on something that isn’t true.

It turns out winning the lottery is only the first step in trying to come to America. More than half of the people who win each year never make it.

James Spring tells the story of the "Caminata Nocturna" — a simulated illegal border crossing run by a small town in Mexico. The event was recently criticized by conservative media as a training camp for illegal immigration.

Ira tells the story of Meron Estefanos, a freelance journalist who in 2011 got a troubling tip: A group of Eritrean hostages was being tortured and held for ransom in the Sinai desert. Along with the tip was a phone number.

Emily Bonderer Cruz is American. Her husband is Mexican.

To get a sense of what may be broken about our process for bringing these Iraqis into the US, the ones who worked with US forces and who believe their lives are now in danger because of that, Kirk Johnson tells Nancy Updike about one guy. Almost a year of his emails were forwarded to Kirk, who printed them out and started to realize that he was looking at a dead man’s attempt to immigrate to the U.S.

Ira plays audio from a YouTube video made by Jonathan Perez. In it, 24 year old Jonathan, an undocumented immigrant, walks straight into a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement office, tells an officer he doesn’t have papers, and gets himself arrested.

Ira tells the story of how Oscar Ramirez, a Guatemalan immigrant living near Boston, got a phone call with some very strange news about his past. A public prosecutor from Guatemala told Oscar that when he was three years old, he may have been abducted from a massacre at a village called Dos Erres.

Last Summer, Alabama passed HB56, the most sweeping immigration bill in the country. It's an example of a strategy called "attrition through enforcement" or, more colloquially, "self-deportation"--making life so hard on undocumented immigrants that they choose to leave the country.

Foreigners arrive in the United States believing all kinds of misinformation about us...misinformation that turns out to be true. Mary Wiltenburg tells the story.

Reporter Mary Wiltenburg tells the story of a little boy stymied by the question "Where do you come from?" (8 minutes)

This American Life contributor Jack Hitt uncovers a strange practice within the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service.

Host Ira Glass talks to reporter John Bowe about the story of John Nash Pickle, who ran a company in Tulsa, Oklahoma that made steel tanks used in the oil industry. According to 52 Indian men whom Pickle hired and brought to America, Pickle was trying to compete with foreign companies, doing something most companies never try.