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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.”
David Noriega is an award-winning journalist and national correspondent for MS NOW. He has reported from all across the United States and more than a dozen countries on five continents, covering migration, politics, armed conflict, organized crime, labor, the environment, and more. Noriega is the recipient of an Edward R. Murrow Award for his reporting from Mexico, as well as awards from the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, the New York Press Club, the Los Angeles Press Club, and the French American Foundation; his work also has been nominated three times for the News and Documentary Emmy Awards. He previously worked for VICE News and BuzzFeed News, and has a master’s degree in investigative journalism from Columbia University. Noriega is Colombian-American and has devoted much of his career to covering the Americas, from extensive travel across the continent to more than a decade of in-depth reporting on the ever evolving Latino diaspora in the United States. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.
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