Air Date: 5-20-2026

Full Show Notes

Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast.

Today we examine how the Trump administration is quietly reshaping its unpopular immigration crackdown by moving enforcement out of public view. Plus, we explain how anti-immigration politics is spreading through the post-colonial world, highlighting how it's reshaping political parties and public debate in the UK, Canada, and Australia.

For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our Top Takes in about 50 minutes today include

Velshi

MS NOW

What Next 

The Brian Lehrer Show

This Is Hell!

and Bold Politics

Then, in the additional, Deeper Dives half of the show, there'll be more in 4 sections;

Section A, THE RESET IS THEATER

Section B, DUE PROCESS DISMANTLED

Section C, THE GLOBAL FAR-RIGHT PLAYBOOK

And Section D, STAKES AND RESISTANCE

And now, on to the show.

Following sustained public outrage and sliding poll numbers over violent deployments by federal immigration officers in cities like Minneapolis and Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. and Chicago, this administration has signaled a reset. It started in late January. Kristi Noem, then still head of DHS, stepped back a bit.

The border czar, Tom Homan, was brought into Minneapolis with a tacit promise to rein in ICE and CBP after officers killed two American citizens and the administration lied about the circumstances of their deaths. And this week, Trump made clear what the real problem was with that operation because, as the Wall Street Journal reports, quote, "President Trump is seeking to lower the profile of his mass deportation effort," end quote.

The President, the Journal reports, has told advisors that he wants to see more attention on arresting bad guys and less chaos in American cities, according to people familiar with the matter, end quote. The report goes on to note that the change is being driven by Trump's Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles, who believes his immigration team turned one of his marquee issues into a challenge for the midterms, and that the firing of Kristi Noem as DHS Secretary is being seen as the moment for a reset.

Pay attention to what they're saying here. For the White House, the problem is the optics, what it looks like on TV, how it, how it's talked about, what the headlines and the polls say. And crucially, the reporting on the reset talk at the White House is sourced to, quote, "people familiar with the matter," end quote.

The official statement to the Journal from the White House spokesperson, Abigail Jackson, is, quote, "Nobody's changing the administration's immigration enforcement agenda President Trump's highest priority has always been the deportation of illegal alien criminals who endanger American communities, end quote.

Keep that top of mind, who endanger American communities. The United States Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, Trump's pick to replace Kristi Noem, brings to the role all the qualifications that you'd expect from someone who spent the last decade fixing pipes and picking physical fights at Senate committee hearings.

He's described the revamp this way during his Senate confirmation hearing this week. My goal in six months is that we're not in the lead story every single day. Ah, the goal is to not be the lead story every single day. Again, listen to what's being said. This isn't about retreating from a widely unpopular mass deportation effort.

For Trump, the crackdown's become a political liability because we see the violence and the brutality and the cruelty with our own eyes and what reporters show us. Listen to what the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, told my colleague Jacob Soboroff in this exclusive interview in late January, which was essentially confirmed this week by the journal's reporting.

I talked to the White House. I talked to Tom Homan. I talked to numerous people, and not once did they ever say Alex or Renee's name. Not once did they ask how the people of Minnesota were doing. So look, I know who I'm dealing with, and I know the reason that he was calling me was he needed something from us.

The reason he was calling was his poll numbers dropped, and it looked bad on TV. What the White House wants is for these scenes on the streets to stop because it's tanking their approval ratings, and according to the president, it looks bad. As Malcolm Ferguson noted in The New Republic, quote, "Even if Trump has finally realized that masked federal agents kicking down doors and killing people in the street is a bad look for the midterms, Stephen Miller is still in the room."

End quote. Meanwhile, amid this so-called reset, we learned just this week that a 19-year-old who was arrested after being stopped over a minor traffic infraction died while in ICE custody at a facility in South Florida. He's the youngest person to die in ICE detention during this administration. Royer Perez Jimenez died on Monday of a presumed suicide in his cell, according to a statement from ICE.

His official cause of death remains under investigation, but Royer Perez Jimenez is dead after being stopped over a minor traffic infraction. In Minnesota, we saw in a visceral way what enforcement looks like when it was impossible to ignore, particularly after the viral killings of Renee Good and Alex Preddy.

The crackdown became the biggest flashpoint in the debate over Trump's mass deportation agenda. And former Border Patrol commander at large Greg Bovino's ouster came as a new AP-NORC poll found that most US adults say Trump's immigration policies have gone too far. But here's the key Most of the enforcement was never happening in the flashpoints that drew all that public outrage.

New analysis from The New York Times gives us one of the clearest pictures yet of how immigration enforcement is actually unfolding across the country, and it's not what you might think. The bulk of the effort is taking place far more quietly and away from the public view. Here's what the Times found.

ICE arrests are surging nationwide, now averaging more than one thousand one hundred arrests a day in two thousand and six. That's nearly double from about six hundred a day last spring. But enforcement is uneven, and the busiest areas are not actually the ones making headlines. Miami leads the country, more than forty-one thousand arrests since Donald Trump took office, followed by Dallas, Atlanta, San Antonio.

Most enforcement is actually happening away from the cameras. Cooperation with local law enforcement is key. About half of arrests are custodial, meaning they're arrests of people who are already in custody, and those are much more common in Republican-led states where local police are actually willing to collaborate with the Trump administration.

And crucially, many of those arrested have no criminal record, undercutting the claim that this effort is in fact focused on criminals and the worst of the worst. Meanwhile, ICE is operating at a massive scale. More than seven million people are on its non-detained docket, meaning that they're not in custody, but they are considered deportable.

Seven million. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, previous administrations prioritized detaining immigrants with criminal records while releasing most others pending hearings. As of last month, according to Brennan, seventy-four percent of those in ICE detention have no criminal record. ICE air operations has rapid, rapidly expanded, for example, driven in part by the growth of its subcontracted private charter network, according to Human Rights First latest report.

As that report notes, for the month of February, quote, "The findings show a continued escalation of the Trump administration's mass deportation agenda, including one hundred and eighty-three removal flights to thirty-one countries and the continued use of forced third country transfers." In February alone, after the administration's supposed reset, there were three hund-- there were one thousand six hundred and thirty immigration enforcement flights, a hundred and fifty-five percent increase from February of last year.

Private contractors are really doing well, by the way. ICE awarded CoreCivic, which is a private prison company, a no-bid contract to reopen a one thousand and thirty-three bed facility in Kansas, later expanded into a deal expected to bring in about sixty million dollars annually. ICE also signed a one billion dollar fifteen-year contract with GEO Group, another major private prison operator, to run a detention facility in New Jersey.

Fifteen years is an unusually long deal. Trump's shift in strategy is about moving this effort- Out of sight and for the long term. But the mach-machinery has not stopped churning. And as reporting continues to show, enforcement is increasingly reaching into the most vulnerable populations, including pregnant, postpartum, and nursing immigrants.

As of February 16th, one hundred and twenty one people in ICE detention fell into those categories, including nine women who were in their third trimester, despite federal policy stating that such individuals should only be detained in limited circumstances. Between January 2025 and February 16th of 2026, sixteen miscarriages were recorded by people in federal custody.

And as enforcement expands, another deeply troubling development is getting far less attention than it should be: the surveillance of political dissent. There's growing evidence that federal agents are tracking and documenting American protesters, not immigrants, not undocumented immigrants, American citizens who are protesters, filming them, logging their information with the help of tech companies like Palantir, and ultimately relying on that same data system that powers your phone and your texts and your emails.

According to reporting by The Washington Post and The New York Times, and now according to new reporting from NPR, in some cases, it goes further. According to NPR, ICE officers are taking DNA samples from American protesters who they arrest. One protester described being tackled while filming an arrest, detained, and then, without warning, having his DNA swabbed.

Legal experts warn this could amount to what one attorney calls a catalog of political dissidents, a catalog of political dissidents in America. And that changes the stakes for anyone who does not support this administration, which right now is actually a majority of this country and growing.

Hello, folks. Um, my name is John Miller.

I'm a citizen here of Social Circle. Really appreciate you guys taking the time to come out tonight. These aren't longtime activists. Most of them are concerned voters, teachers, nurses, farmers, small business owners, people like John Miller. For months now, he's been organizing these meetings as his town of about 5,000 grapples with something very few people here saw coming.

Immigration policies many of them backed are showing up right here at home. What we're here all to talk about today is the, uh, warehouse at the corner of East Hightower Trail and Social Circle Parkway. That is the proposed detention center. Back in December, Social Circle officials found out that the Department of Homeland Security had quietly purchased a massive warehouse in their tiny town.

The plan: turn it into a detention center for up to 10,000 people, effectively tripling the town's population overnight, and placing new strain on resources that were already stretched thin. We don't have the wastewater capacity for anything close to this size. Now, residents here can't even get a response, let alone a visit, from the very same Republicans this town helped elect.

You know, we're in Georgia and we can't get our attorney general to fight for us. So now we're trying to, we are trying to figure out how we're gonna fight with the little mighty fighting the big federal government, when we should've had our government fight for us. That's right. Right. What about Governor Kemp?

How can he help us, and how can we reach him? I can tell you that there hasn't been a lack of effort to get in touch with Kemp. Um, but there's been very, very little response. And every citizen, I will fight for you, for your family, and your future. Social Circle overwhelmingly supported President Trump by large margins in 2016, 2020, and 2024.

And immigration has not been an abstract issue after the 2024 murder of Laken Riley took place in this district at the hands of an undocumented migrant. But some hope two things can coexist: stronger immigration policies without decisions that strain their resources. One of the comments that I've seen from some people in Georgia is they say, "Well, you know, a lot of people in Social Circle, they supported the president and they support ICE, so they should support the facility.

This is what you- No ... what you asked for." Well- No ... I do support ICE. And I do support the president. And I, I'm, I'm, I've, I've already- But this is not the place to bring those people. Back up. Back up. But under the Trump administration, experts say this is exactly what immigration enforcement looks like. A president calling for the mass deportation of millions of people, including lawful immigrants.

Violent arrest tactics spreading throughout American neighborhoods. And now, a sweeping plan to build eight large-scale detention centers and 16 processing sites across the country, using warehouses not designed for humans, but repurposed to hold them, because once arrested, the masses need to go somewhere.

This is the end of our property and the beginning of the, what will be the ICE detention facility property. So if I take two steps further this way, I'm in the ICE, the ICE detention facility, and you're on my property. This is very literally in your backyard. It's our next-door neighbor. Eric Hutchison served more than two decades in the Air Force and did three tours in the Middle East.

When he retired from the military, he bought this land in Social Circle, searching for peace. He identifies as a conservative and voted for Mike Collins, the Republican congressman representing this district, but he says he didn't vote for this. What would you say to someone who said you voted for this to happen?

I think that's a very narrow view of, of what is happening and what has happened. I do support our legal system. I do think that there needs to be processes in place to handle those who've broken the law. But that's not incompatible with not wanting a, a, a penitentiary in your backyard. These facilities have to go somewhere.

They're gonna be in somebody's backyard. I don't think that's true. I think between here and Augusta, there is wide open spaces. You know, there are penitentiary facilities already that are higher security.

His seven children are homeschooled, so to them, this is home, this is the classroom, their playground, and a science lab. What has all of this meant to your family? Uh, well, this has been our dream home. It looks like a child's dream. It is. It really is. This, this whole space. We used to fish out of here all the time.

We would catch five-pound bass, you know, um, and those are all dead now. Dead because during the warehouse's construction by developer PNK, Eric says sediment and material spilled down onto their land, killing all life in their pond, and shrinking their body of water from six feet deep to three feet. He says PNK agreed to do partial remediation, but when he thought the worst had passed, PNK sold the property to DHS, meaning the real fight just got started.

PNK did not respond to MS Now's request for comment. I know Mike Collins is busy putting in a bid for, for a senatorial race and everything, but when you see signs that say, "Veteran in need, call me," and you call and they don't have any response, then you feel betrayed. Have you personally tried to reach his office?

I have. No response. You've served your country, and now you have the government coming in and potentially damaging the home you were retiring into. How does that feel for you? I served for 21 years, and that wasn't just me. That was my wife. That was my family. We fought... I have fought to provide safety and security for my family from threats overseas, and now we have a threat next door, and we're, we feel like we're alone in this battle.

Helping lead the fight is Newton County Commissioner and real estate broker, Lee-Ann Long. DHS paid almost $130 million for an empty building that had not been able to sell. What's going on there? They paid almost three times the amount for that building. So as a taxpayer, first of all, that's my first thing is, good Lord, you're wasting our tax dollars.

In 2025, Newton County assessed the property's value at $29 million, before construction was completed. This year, officials increased that estimate to 65 million, but DHS paid $128 million, a price tag that didn't even cover the cost of renovations to retrofit it for human habitation. When we asked why, DHS ignored us.

Have you ever seen a deal like that- Never ... in this area? Never. The, the, the owner of that building, he cashed out, boy, big time. A long-time Republican organizer, now she says she can't even get a call back about what's happening in town. All of a sudden, we're calling and nobody cares. Nobody's answering.

Nobody knows. They say they don't know. Um, we're just wondering, how do they not know? So do you have some buyer's remorse right now? I do. I do. I've helped a lot of these candidates in their races, and I can tell you, I won't be helping them now. Really? I won't be helping them. They don't have our back.

They're not calling us. What would you say to them? I would say that, Mike Collins, if you want our vote ever again, you need to help us and come down here and do something. You need to go to President Trump. You do all these videos with him like you're besties, so why don't you go with him and tell him, "Help us."

Let's talk a little bit about USCIS, because I don't think most people who haven't interacted with the immigration system in this country even really understand what it does. What is it? USCIS is one of 22 agencies at the Department of Homeland Security. The agency is a s- comparatively small, kind of low-profile agency.

There are about 20,000 officials there, and they have basically just been in charge of administering the legal immigration system. So, people applying for visas, people applying for green cards, people applying for, refugee and asylum, all of that runs through this agency. And this is an agency whose budget has almost entirely been funded by fees paid by immigrants applying for benefits.

So the very existence of the agency is predicated on people going through the legal pathways to get prescribed benefits that exist in the legal immigration system. And what we're seeing now, really from the start of the second Trump term, we're seeing basically, first of all, the evisceration of the career staff inside the agency.

So the people who are actually, well-versed in the kind of legal minutiae and bureaucratic kind of nuts and bolts of the legal immigration process, those people have been sidelined, intimidated, fired, reassigned, marginalized in all kinds of ways we can talk about. And now, if you look at, for example, job postings that the current administration is advertising for positions inside USCIS, they're now ad- they're calling the jobs "homeland defenders."

This is all in scare quotes. This is what they're calling it. And one of the kind of agenda items, so to say, on this job description is, quote-unquote, "Defend our culture," which is... let's be honest. This is like white supremacist ideology now. This is white nationalist rhetoric, yeah. And, and that, by the way, it has been a, a reality in all communications and messaging from the Department of Homeland Security.

That has been, that kind of white nationalist messaging has just been a fact of how this Department of Homeland Security brands what it's doing. But the idea that it's now affecting this agency in particular, I, I think is a sign of how grave things are, and I think everyone obviously is, is fixated on the enforcement bodies, as they should be.

The abuses committed by ICE and by Border Patrol are staggering. There needs to be accountability. A- all of that stuff is front and center for good reason. But if you want to understand the lasting damage this administration is doing, you have to look at USCIS because what they're doing isn't just turning it into an enforcement body.

They're also trying to dry up existing forms of legal immigration. Well, I want to talk about that because it has never been easy to get visas, green cards. This is a long and complex process. How have the legal immigration pathways changed in this second Trump term? That's a good question. All right. For one thing, green cards for people from a growing list of countries have been indefinitely suspended.

So at the current moment, people from some 75 countries cannot get green cards to come to the United States, and that is specifically for people who have spouses or family members who already live here and are either citizens or green card holders themselves. So, just right out of the gate, we're looking at the indefinite pause in the government's processing of legal immigration, permanent residency applications from people from 75 countries.

Now, what does that mean bureaucratically? Yeah, how does that trickle down? Not only obviously does it just leave families in horrible limbo, but there is a finite number of family-based green cards that the US government issues every year. It's, a little over 200,000. What happens if the US government does not use them in a given fiscal year is they pass from the family-based immigration system to what's called the employment-based immigration system, which means that they then are available not to people who aren't in the United States who are petitioning to come here or to regularize their status as relatives of people who are already here, but rather it goes to people who are mostly already in the United States and are, are living here on some sort of work visa.

Maybe it's an H- it's an H-1B, whatever. There's a whole list. But what this administration is also doing is it's also slow-walking those visas. And so you take something like 225,000 green cards that the US government can issue every year, and the government is basically letting them die on the vine. So you're effectively shutting down a key aspect of the legal immigration system.

So that's just one thing that's happening. What is interesting to me in reading your reporting is that these sort of administration gum-in-the-works moves also seem to have had pretty dramatic consequences within the agency itself. Yes. One of the things that's so, I think, dramatic and striking about what's happening at USCIS is People who work at USCIS have actually found themselves at the center of two ideological crusades at the same time.

One is the general ideological crusade against immigration in all forms. The other is the campaign to terrorize and demoralize the federal workforce. And so, we remember Elon Musk with DOGE and these efforts early on to streamline the federal bureaucracy. There was something like three hundred and fifty thousand federal workers who basically left government in twenty twenty-five, and a significant number of them, about eighteen hundred of them, left USCIS.

This is to say nothing of people who've been reassigned from USCIS to different agencies at DHS or whose jobs have been collapsed into something else. But basically, people who worked in this agency, and specifically who had any sort of dealing with immigration-related benefits, were immediately viewed with suspicion.

They were immediately sidelined. Many of them were threatened. Many of them were polygraphed. Wow. There was a point at which, a half dozen USCIS officials who, as far as I can tell from my reporting, did nothing wrong, were basically identified for polygraphing. And those polygraphs were essentially long exercises in, the way it's been described to me, a kind of punishment.

People were hooked up to polygraph machines for hours on end. This is a blood pressure cuff on your arm. Your fingers are going numb, and you're basically being asked general questions like, "Are you trustworthy? Have you ever lied? Have you ever lied to a superior? Have you ever lied to a loved one?"

And insofar as some of these agency staffers were sworn in at the start of these polygraphs, they're thinking, "Okay, are my answers gonna somehow be used against me? Is this gonna become the basis for some sort of, sustained retributive campaign if I do something they don't like? Are they gonna come back at me and threaten to, legally charge me for perjury?"

This was very clearly an effort to intimidate people who worked at the agency with specific expertise and to try to pressure them to leave.

Kieran, one of the central questions in these two cases before the Supreme Court is whether the Department of Homeland Security sufficiently consulted with the department, the State Department about conditions on the ground.

So let's begin with the conditions on the ground in Haiti. IRC reports that armed gangs control, an estimated 90% of the capital of Haiti, Port-au-Prince, and are expanding to other parts of Haiti as well. For listeners who aren't familiar, what sorts of conditions are these gangs creating for Haitians?

Thanks, Amina. The IRC publishes an annual report called our Emergency Watchlist, and that, that report, details out the countries in the world, 20 countries in the world that are most at risk of humanitarian deterioration, over the course of the year. Haiti this year, was number five on that list, and so it's ranking up there with crises like Sudan and Gaza and places like that in terms of both the levels of humanitarian need on the ground and, the risks of further deterioration.

And, and the drivers of that really come from, as, as you've described it, the, the domination of large parts of the country, in particular the capital part of Port-au-Prince, by armed gangs and the conflict between those gangs and the government. The, the, the, the result of this violence over the last five years since it, since it surged in the wake of, of the assassination of Haiti's, Haiti's president is essentially that the government is not able to fulfill its basic functions of safety and public service provision, across most of the country.

We did an assessment. Our team there, provides services, healthcare and emergency protection services for women and children, and we did a survey, earlier this year in which 73% of households reported feeling unsafe where they sleep, 60% don't send their children to school because of safety concerns, and 75% of people can't afford health services.

There's 12 million people in Haiti. Over six and a half million people are in acute need. 1, 1.4 million have been displaced from their homes. Many have sought safety elsewhere in the region and here in the United States. I- I'll, I'll stop here with one final statistic, Amina, which really stopped me in my tracks when I first read it.

Last year, UNICEF reported that sexual violence against children in Haiti had increased by over 1,000%, and that's just a staggering, glimpse into the kind of dystopian situation that many Haitians face, on a day-to-day basis. Well, Ciarán, to pick up on that last stat, what stood out to me in the IRC report was, Haiti's traditional...

no, transitional presidential council, excuse me, has given power to the US-backed Prime Minister Alex Didier Foucami in February. How has the government been responding to the gang violence? The government is, working to do what they can to provide, social service provision, but they, they just simply don't have the capacity to be able to exert, control over territory, particularly in Port-au-Prince, where it's very difficult even for government officials to be able to move around safely.

They're subject to attack a- and to kidnapping and, and, and so on as they move between different neighborhoods controlled, controlled by gangs. A- and of course, the, the, the challenges in Haiti extend way beyond, the last five years since the assassination of the, the former president. There's a long history of, of violence, and conflict, and of course the, the legacy of the 2010 earthquake continues to cast a shadow over, the efforts of the government to, to exert control.

So the government is really constrained in their ability to fulfill that most basic function of governments to exert a monopoly on the use of force, and, and to be able to provide safety for their, their citizens. And that, is, is really the single biggest driver of the humanitarian need that we've been talking about.

Daniel, before these two cases reached the Supreme Court, a federal judge first ruled that the policy change was motivated at least in part by racial animus, and we are getting a few listeners texting on this. That was brought up again yesterday by the Supreme Court's liberal judges. So let's take a listen to Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson during yesterday's oral arguments.

The statements about Haiti and, eating pets and, the names, that were called with respect to these immigrants, even though they are lawfully in the United States, that, those are pretty recent. So ev- let's separate it out then. What do you say about those kinds of things? Again, by the-- as the court held in Regents, these are statements made in different contexts that are remote in time.

They are unilluminating. Daniel, if-- the legal ana- analysts are saying if the decision by the Trump administration to end TPS was made based on race, it would violate the Equal Protection Clause. So that's on the legal issues. But I wonder if you can weigh in on the national politics of that case.

Yeah, I can't speak to the, the administration's motivations and why they're terminating TPS. And we'll see what the court has to say about that. What I can say is that the Haitian clients that we work with across the country, are vital members of the communities. They are well integrated.

Many of them have been living in the US for, for a long time. If you even just look at the, the plaintiffs in this case, the, the lead plaintiff, Fritz Miott, he is a neuroscientist who brought, was brought to the country as a child, has been living here his whole life. Many of the people we work with are, are working in, in critical, critical w- workforce areas.

There are, I think one in five Haitians in America are working in, in the healthcare industry. They are members of our churches, of our schools, of our, our communities across the country. So, I, we'll, we'll see what the court has to say about the, the motivations for, the termination of, of TPS.

But what we've seen is, both the Haitians and, and many of the other TPS holders that we work with are, really just long-term, and vital community members. To underscore that, we have a listener who texts, "If we helped our southern neighbor countries to prosper economically, we would not have the immigration problems we now have, but then we would not have the cheap labor for the hardest jobs that we now enjoy."

As you said, the plaintiff in the case, I believe, was a surgeon. But adding, just underscoring, I guess, your point, that TPS is legal status to work in the United States. Can you just define that one step further for us? Because I do think that the Trump administration will often lump in its comments about the Haitian community in particular, with its sort of animus towards, illegal immigration.

Yeah, I'm, I'm glad you asked, asked that question. People with TPS status are legal. They are lawfully present in the United States. And if they have, applied for work perm- permits, they are allowed to work. What we know is that Haitian TPS holders each year contribute about $5.9 billion to the US economy.

They pay hundreds of million doll- of dollars in taxes, in state and local and, and federal taxes. They're also job creators. We know that TPS holders, generally are more entrepreneurial than US citizens. About 15% of TPS holders are entrepreneurs, compared to about nine point, 9.3% of US-born workforce. So, those characterizations are really just, just false.

and in my book, If We Tolerate This, the way that I've tried to characterize that, um, is that right-wing populist parties like Reform or the movement behind Donald Trump in the US or, uh, anywhere else you see this kind of politics at the moment, what they're really doing, they're attracting voters by promising some form of national revival.

So the central pole of attraction is nationalism, right-wing nationalism. Um, and what they tend to do is promise a mix of ways in which that revival is to be achieved. So there's an economic component. There's an idea that they're going to, uh, reboot the economy, so to speak. Um, you know, they are going to make a country a s- a certain- Famous politician said, "Great again."

Um, often that will be a kind of hypercapitalist sort of, um, platform. So if, if you think about the Argentinian leader, Javier Milei, when he was running for election, he, he would pose on stage with a chainsaw, which was supposed to signal how he was going to slash away at state spending in Argentina, and that by doing so would revive the economy.

Obviously, the, the Elon Musk-backed DOGE initiative at the beginning of Trump's second term is a, an example of that. So that's part of the, the appeal. Uh, but I think a much more important component, and the one that gives right-wing populism its real sort of emotional drive, um, is a promise to, uh, do battle with or punish, um, a set of national enemies, um, you know, as defined by these, um, parties and movements.

So anti-immigration politics, you know, is a huge part of it in, um, Western Europe and, and North America, for instance, that, um, you will find right-wing populist politicians in, in both those parts of the world, um, make... Not, not, not just, you know, cutting immigration or applying a conventional set of policy tools to the issue, uh, but kind of ostentatious cruelty directed at one or more groups of migrants.

Um, you know, whether that's through immigration raids, detention, uh, severe legal penalties, and so on. Uh, but it's not necessarily immigration that, that kind of fulfills that central role. Um, it might be a promise to re- restore traditional gender roles to make men feel like winners again, for example. Uh, or in India, where you've had a, a right-wing populist government of Hindu nationalists under Narendra Modi for quite some years now, it's all to do with, um, Indian Muslims, uh, being cast as a threat to Indian national identity and an effort to reshape Indian national identity around a more strongly Hindu religious set of, um, uh, principles.

Um, but that idea of the threat to the nation is always there. The idea that there are enemies inside and outside the country that need to be, uh, combated or punished is always there. And I think crucially, it's, it's the, it's the form of punishment that is offered, um, that- Uh, really sums up the appeal of right-wing populism because it's, it's not about, um, dealing with actual threats to the nation.

You know, for example, a country that is under threat of invasion by a, a military power, you can say there's a kind of genuine threat there. Or, I mean, wherever we live on the planet at the moment, um, climate catastrophe threatens us existentially. But the targets that right-wing populists choo- tend to choose are targets where i- uh, the punishment is much more symbolic, and it's about causing misery to another group of people in order to make yourself feel better about your position in the world and prospects for the future and so on.

In your new book, If We Tolerate This: How the British Establishment Made the Far Right Respectable, you write that at the 2010 general election, one party proposed to deport all illegal immigrants, increase voluntary repatriation, end the, uh, asylum swindle, and resist the Islamic colonization of Britain, warning that indigenous British people were set to become a minority.

You add that that was the British National Party, again back in 2010, fascists whose leader boasted a conviction for incitement to racial hatred and who were motivated by white supremacism and anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. Its brief presence on the electoral map shocked Britain's political class, and its ideas were rejected by the vast majority of voters.

In 2010, the BNP, uh, received just 1.9% of the vote. But now it appears the Reform Party, which is leading by a wide margin, was, uh, embraced in the early polling, at least they were, all those policies and will be the new British government, potentially, if it, you know, this continues on, if their popu- political popularity moves forward.

Some are blaming this on the Labour Party and Pr- Prime Minister Keir Starmer, vilifying the left in the form of the Green Party and its leader, Zach Polanski, while giving Reform leader Nigel Farage a relative pass. Is that a fair analysis, Daniel? Was the Labour Party more interested in stopping the left than it was the right?

Because here in the States, it often seems the Democratic Party is far more interested in undermining the left than in opposing the right. Yeah, I mean, there's a, certainly been a degree of that going on. Um, again, a little bit of recent history, um, I think probably your, your listeners w- will be aware of this on some level, but the Labour Party itself over the last decade has gone through some quite turbulent times.

So in 2015, uh, Labour members elected Jeremy Corbyn, who was from the hard left of the party, as Labour leader. There was then a very kind of fractious period where, um, Corbyn was being attacked, um, across almost the entire political spectrum from, uh, you know, by the media. Uh, but also people within the Labour Party hierarchy were very opposed to his leadership.

And, um, when he resigned after a quite, uh, bad election defeat in 2019, Keir Starmer took over with, uh, you know, a kind of mission to make the party electable again. But a huge part of that was to purge, um, not just kind of, uh, sort of, dyed-in-the-wool hard leftists, but really anybody who had the hint of socialism about them.

Um, and so that kind of, um, uh, the, the habit of attacking the left was sort of ingrained into the Starmer leadership from, from the start when he took over Labour in, um, early 2020. Um, what's happened, um, since the Starmer, uh, led party, uh, took power in 2024 is that the, you know, the rise of the Greens is very recent, but what happened within the first year of the, the Labour government was that Reform's popularity started to grow in the polls.

Uh, partly out of this frustration that I was talking about, the kind of lack of, um, uh, lack of apparent change and, you know, the continued problems with, uh, cost of living and public services and so on, but also because we've had quite a few disruptions to the immigration system in Britain in recent years.

So there was a kind of big spike in immigration after the pandemic, uh, which has subsided now quite, um, a bit. And then also there's this ongoing issue with, um, refugees crossing the English Channel from France in small boats, which has been a huge kind of controversial political story here for, for quite a few years now.

Um, and so Reform were, um, picking up votes from people for whom those issues were a particular problem. And Labour's response, I mean, Labour would obviously say they're just as concerned about Reform as they are about challenges from their left. Um, but- The way they deal about, uh, the way they deal with it is quite different.

So Labour's response to the rise in support for Reform, uh, towards the end of 2024 and into 2025, was to kind of chase after what Reform were offering, to try and meet voters attracted by Reform halfway. So Labour itself has now kind of taken a sharp right turn on immigration. Um, it's trying to make it much harder for refugees who reach the UK to, um, stay here long-term.

Um, and it's also trying to make life much harder for migrants who are in the UK legally. So people who the, who Britain has invited to the country to work, to, you know, help our economy grow, to help our society thrive. The current Labour government is trying to ensure that those immigrants live on temporary forms of status for, for many, many years, even though they're here in the UK legally.

And all of this, and lots of kind of, um, uh, tabloid-like rhetoric over how many people Labour are depor- deporting each month and so on, all of that was intended to win back voters attracted by Reform. Uh, but it's, it's had almost the opposite effect. You know, Labour have showed very little ability to, uh, win over people who are already sympathetic to Reform.

Um, rhetorically, they've just helped kind of toxify the political discourse around immigration, um, which is something I didn't think could get much worse, um, after 2024 anyway, but it, but it has done. Um, and then at the same time, they have really, really upset a lot of their liberal and left-leaning, uh, core support, you know?

And I think they did that partly because they had this quite contemptuous attitude to their people that were on their own side, that they're either kind of, uh, crazy left-wingers who need to be suppressed, or they're just weak, uh, you know, sentimental liberals who, who should just shut up and kind of do whatever Labour tells them to.

And this has just backfired spectacularly because now what's happened, with the emergence of the Green Party, um, under the leadership of Zach Polanski, who became leader last year, um, they now have somebody else to vote for. And so Labour, since the start of the year at least, have been pulled apart from, from both sides really.

whenever I'm about to do an interview with a horrible right-wing journalist or any of the various people that we speak to, if it's about immigration, I tend to go on your social media first, 'cause I'm like, "What has Zoe been saying about this?"

'Cause you have been incredible in the way that you go there, you're so clear- Unapologetic about standing up for people who need us to stand up for them, uh, whether that's refugees, people seeking asylum, um, and migrants. I guess that's my first place to start. People are always jumbling these terms. How do you get people to have more clarity about the different groups of people we're talking about?

Basically, 95% of our conversation about immigration in this country focuses on the 5%, roughly, who come in on small boats, and people get very, very confused about the proportion, um, that are made up by each group. I think it, it is quite an effective line to just always remind people every time that I'm being asked about it on TV or, you know...

Ask people, "Why are you talking about boats again when that makes up only 5% of immigration?" You know, "Do you think that it represents 5% of your coverage of immigration? Even if it was 10 times more important, uh, than other types of immigration, does it make up only 50% of your coverage? No, it probably makes up at least 95% of what you're talking about."

So I feel like that message has at least started to bed in with some people who are journalists and so on. They're starting to say that in their interviews, and they need to say it a lot more because we've seen that the public perception is way off on this, and actually most people think that the majority of immigration is coming through irregular means to the UK.

So I guess it's just, you know, the, the right have this megaphone across the media. They repeat their message endlessly. We have to repeat the truth endlessly. Something I'm always trying to balance is when we talk about people seeking asylum, I find that the easiest group to defend often because they're fleeing war and persecution.

And then the kind of twist to it now is people go, "Yeah, but what about people who are just seeking a better life or just seeking to migrate?" Now, in my opinion, I'm pretty sure you share this, is actually anyone who wants to come to this country for a better life and is contributing to our system, et cetera, should be welcomed here.

Is there a problem, though, that we are being divided between people who really need to come here and, and everyone else? Yes, and I think, actually, my per- perspective on this has changed a bit, um, over the years. It is and remains true that there are people who just simply must never be sent back to where they have come from because they may be tortured, they may be locked up, they may be killed, and those people should have a status that protects them in the law that prevents them from ever being sent away.

But at the same time, I think that we have leant too far into this dis- distinction, and it sometimes plays into the idea of the deserving and the undeserving, um, where actually it's always a gray area. It's always a gray area. The fact of the matter is in, in this world that we live in that is governed by a capitalist economic system, you need work to put food on the table for your family, and you need that to survive, to have a house, you know?

So our economic needs are not really any less about survival than, you know, I, I need to be safe from war, or I need to be able to grow crops if, you know, if you're escaping from climate change, and our refugee system doesn't- reflect that reality. And the truth is, I mean, everybody makes a combination of movements for immediate physical safety, and then for a choice of where you can rebuild safety.

Safety is you know, being able to have your feet on the ground, being ab-h-able to have a place you call home, being able to support your family. That's real safety. So our understanding of what is a refugee can be too narrowly defined. Um, and I think we actually need to broaden that out and recognize that, you know, people, people who come here for all sorts of different reasons can then become part of this country and make a massive contribution to it.

But, um, if we're trying to sort of nitpick them out, the system doesn't, um, actually serve us very well, and it ends up wasting more time, wasting more money. I love how you put that. That's brilliant. I'm like, download it into my brain. Um, the thing that I'll always get thrown is, "So do you just want open borders then?

Is everyone allowed, uh, in this country?" Now I have my answer that, that's pre-prepared, but I'm just wondering what your answer is. I won't do my best Nick Ferrari impression, but... Well, I mean, what I fundamentally believe is that you shouldn't lose your rights, whether that's as a human being, as a worker, in any way, um, just because you crossed an international border.

That's what I believe. I don't, I, I think, you know, nations can continue to exist, they can continue to have borders without those borders being spaces of death and of pain and of people losing their rights, and that's what I care about. So I think, I think, yeah, I mean, you know, you can characterize it as open borders because I do believe that migration, uh, fundamentally, if it's managed well, is self-regulating.

You don't have to have a cap on the numbers. So you can allow anybody who is seeking to come to the UK to come here if you do m- have systems to manage that well. Um, and I think that the, the real challenge, um, to an expansive open borders position is that it needs to be done internationally, um, and it needs to be done in cooperation and regionally.

But I mean, I think that there's endless evidence to support the fact that open borders or, or borders that do not prevent people from crossing them work excellently well. In, in the EU, when we were part of the EU free movement zone, a lot of EU people came to live here, and overall that was extremely beneficial to us, I'm sure beneficial to many of them.

Um, but also, you know, out of, what is it, five hundred and eleven million people who could theoretically have just shown up on our doorstep, they actually didn't, and this is the thing that people are terrified of when you talk about really much more, um, radically, um, rights-based migration systems. People are just very, very scared that everybody's gonna show up tomorrow and demand something, and that's not how the world really is.

And we need to push back against that idea that, you know, there's, we only have this much cake, and so if you take a piece and then someone else takes a piece, and then we run out of cake. And the, the idea is, like, you know, we're bringing in a lot of bakers. Like, it is people make things. We, the country only is people.

You know, like keeping people out. Healthcare is provided by people, houses are built by people, like, the, the entire country only is people. So actually, a growing population is a very good thing. Um, and people who have segregated rights just because they crossed a border is a very bad thing for all parts of society.

And presumably if you're... Well, I was gonna say presumably, I'm from the north of, uh, England and I don't feel like this, so I don't know why I'm saying presumably, but there are some people in the north of England or other places who go, "But we don't have any cake," or- Yeah ... decades of austerity have destroyed, destroyed things.

Yeah, I was just, um, arguing online , arguing online- Always a great start to the day ... with a stranger. Yeah, what to do with your morning before you get out of bed, while you're drinking coffee. Um, uh, yeah, with somebody who was saying- I'm glad you added coffee to that statement. Coffee and a fight with a stranger.

Yeah. That- that's my morning. Um, and it, it, it was someone, and they, they were from somewhere in the north, I presume, because they were s- speaking for them, and they were saying, you know, that, "We in the Red Wall have been, uh, you know, the most impacted by immigration." I was like, "No, you haven't. You've been the most impacted by the rich people who are taking wealth away from the, you know, common people, right?

The, by the fact that, you know, housing has been bought up, land has been bought up, uh, by the fact that people are avoiding tax and that that money is therefore not being fed back into your communities. You have been the most impacted by that, more so than us down here in London, but you have not been the most impacted by immigration.

We have, and that's also another reason why we're doing better than you frankly, because that immigration is helping us to do well." So much more immigration comes into the south and comes into London in particular. I think it's, I think it's 40% of all foreign-born, uh, nationals who live in the UK live in London.

Um, so the, these are places where people's grievances, which are legitimate because they have been left out, left behind, and they have had a total lack of investment in their towns and so on, are places where- They're, they're being told the only sort of language people have to express that grievance at the moment is foreigners bad.

And in fact, there are places where they have very, very few foreigners and the problems come from somewhere else. They come from the rich.

We've just heard clips starting with

Velshi tracing Trump's immigration "reset" to sliding poll numbers, not policy change, as ICE arrests surge and federal agents catalog the DNA of American protesters.

MS NOW reported from Social Circle, Georgia, where Trump-voting residents are fighting a plan to convert a local warehouse into a 10,000-person ICE detention center, feeling abandoned by Republicans they helped elect.

What Next detailed how USCIS, the agency running the legal immigration system, is being gutted through mass firings, indefinite green card suspensions, and hours-long polygraph sessions used to intimidate career staff.

The Brian Lehrer Show detailed the catastrophic conditions Haitian TPS holders would face if sent back to Haiti

This Is Hell! connected the mainstreaming of Britain's far right to a wider pattern: center-left parties across the West legitimizing anti-immigrant politics rather than confronting it.

And Bold Politics highlighted Zoe Gardner's case that small boats represent only 5% of immigration in the UK but consume 95% of media coverage, and that a well-managed open borders system is largely self-regulating.

And those were just the top takes, there's lots more in the deeper dives sections,

But first, speaking of unintended consequences of immoral policies, I’m just repeating the sad news about our new show, SOLVED! that we had to put on indefinite hiatus due to sudden economic instability and ad dollars drying up. Right now, I am getting back to basics and focusing on building Best of the Left to be the best it can be with the greatest reach it can. So, that’s where my focus is going to be and I’ll be keeping you posted on our progress as it develops. 

To our members supporting the show, you really are more and more of what’s getting us through right now so thanks to everyone who is a member or has made one-time donations. If you support us right now, our top priority is stabilizing the finances of the show to ensure that everyone is getting paid for the work they’re doing. Secondly, we have to invest in some growth strategies because making that line go up is the only way to get us the cushion we need.

So, if you haven’t signed up yet but are thinking about it, each episode of Best of the Left takes about 25 hours of human labor so it’s not particularly cheap to produce and essentially every dollar we can spare right now beyond basic costs will be going toward finding new listeners which would be good for us and for them, as I’m sure you’d agree. 

So, if you get value out of the show - and think others would too! - and want to get it delivered ad-free to the new, members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at bestoftheleft.com/support - there's a link in the show notes - through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple Podcasts app.

Plus, if you’re worried that signing up for a membership won’t be impactful enough for the struggles we’re facing, I understand that concern which is why we offer higher membership tiers so that you can voluntarily give us more money. But if those options still don’t seem like enough and you want to cut a check to help fund our marketing campaign, just drop me a email and I’m sure we can sort it out.

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or you can simply email me to [email protected]

Now as for today's topic, I always like to set the stage. 

Last May, Damon Hininger, the CEO of CoreCivic, one of the two biggest private prison companies in the country, got on an earnings call with his shareholders and said this: "Never in our 42-year company history have we had so much activity and demand for our services as we are seeing right now." That was a year ago. Since then, things have only gotten better for him. CoreCivic just posted profits up nearly 70 percent from the previous year. GEO Group, the other big player, posted a record $254 million in profit. The man who locks up immigrants for a living is having the best year of his life.

And in the same stretch where Hininger was telling his shareholders they’d never had it so good, the libertarian Cato Institute who mostly talks about not taxing the rich, not exactly a bunch of socialists, published a study finding that immigrants, both legal and undocumented, reduced the federal deficit by $14.5 trillion over the last 30 years, saving the government $878 billion in 2023 alone. Without immigrants, the country would currently be about three trillion dollars deeper in the hole than it already is. By Cato's own math, the people we're paying tens of billions of dollars to deport are the people who've been quietly propping up the federal budget for a generation.

In the big budget bill last summer, Trump and the Republicans allocated $45 billion to ICE for detention on top of the enforcement costs. That's a 265 percent increase. About 90 percent of immigration detention in this country is run by private companies, which means the vast majority of that $45 billion is going directly to CoreCivic and GEO Group. Before the bill even passed, those two companies and their executives had donated almost $2.8 million to Trump's 2024 campaign and inaugural fund. By the end of June 2025, ICE had already handed them nine new or expanded contracts. The donations turned out to be a hell of a good investment. Two-point-eight million in, tens of billions out.

Now, a small town called Social Circle, Georgia is currently suing the Department of Homeland Security because DHS spent $128 million in taxpayer money to buy a warehouse there, multiples of its assessed value, to turn into a 10,000-person detention center. The town currently has about 5,000 people. Seventy-two percent of the town voted for Trump in 2024 and they're now suing his administration. Multiply that by the eight mega-centers ICE is building plus hundreds of smaller facilities and you have a sense of where your $45 billion is going to build a program to incarcerate people who would otherwise being helping to reduce the deficit.

When you point this out to a right-leaning friend, they'll often respond with some version of "we just have to follow the rule of law." It's a clean-sounding argument, and it implies that the people raising objections are the ones who want chaos. 

The progressive view is that the laws criminalizing human movement are themselves the problem and need to be rewritten from the ground up. But you don't have to agree with that to agree that the laws we have right now are practically the worst possible version of immigration policy. The law is designed to route hundreds of billions to ICE and two companies who helped shape the policy to direct the benefits to themselves. The goal of which is to deport the workers whose taxes are propping up Social Security. According to David Bier at Cato, the enforcement bill itself is projected to add about $900 billion to the deficit. We're spending close to a trillion dollars to make ourselves poorer.

Progressives and conservatives can disagree about what immigration law should look like and still agree that whatever the destination, this is not where we should want to be. If you genuinely believe in rule of law, the question is; who benefits from the laws and who loses?

And to thinking conservatives out there, and I do mean thinking, the ones who haven't given up entirely on the idea that facts should still matter: Cato's data is Cato's data. The same Cato that publishes papers against the minimum wage and in favor of cutting Social Security is the one saying immigrants reduced the deficit by $14.5 trillion. So the question is, do you want to be angry about immigrants existing or do you want to be right about what they really do for the country? 

Trump-era populism made it acceptable to substitute accuracy for emotional reactivity on basically every issue, and the cost of that trade is now visible in the budget. 

And to working-class folks who genuinely believe immigration is suppressing their wages, if your wages are being suppressed, the primary culprit is the same political and economic system that just handed $45 billion to two contractors. Aim your focus higher.

I'm making this fiscal argument because it’s not being made loud enough, not because I think people only matter as taxpayers. The case for treating immigrants like human beings regardless of their economic contribution has been made for decades and it stands on its own. But there's a separate argument sitting right there in the budget data, and it should work because people absolutely hate having their money wasted.

In political circles the silence has a specific mechanism behind it, beyond just party-line cowardice. Any politician who names CoreCivic or GEO [or pharma or the insurance industry for that matter] by name knows what comes next. The same campaign contributions that just bought $45 billion in detention contracts can fund a primary challenger or a general-election opponent. 

The ethics watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, CREW, has been documenting the donation-to-contract pipeline in detail. Two-point-eight million from these companies to Trump, then tens of billions back. The defensive version of that mechanism is industry money quietly aimed at any incumbent who steps out of line. Naming who profits gets you primaried, which is why so many Democrats sound vaguely worried about immigration without ever standing up and making a real enemy of CoreCivic and GEO.

The political opening is wide open, though. Pew Research polling released in late April found that Trump's approval among Hispanic voters who supported him in 2024 has collapsed from 93 percent in his first month back in office down to 66 percent. Among Hispanic adults overall, he's at 22 percent. Reuters/Ipsos polling from around the same time found 57 percent of independents prefer a candidate who opposes Trump's deportation approach, and 70 percent of voters say a less aggressive approach would be a positive change. The space exists to demand fundamental change on immigration; not the horrors that Trump has brought and not back to the old status quo either.

So make this the argument every single time. When somebody says "we just need to follow the law," answer with "we need better land the $900 billion enforcement-cost projection. Ask your representatives whether they own CoreCivic or GEO stock. A lot of them do, and the answer should embarrass them. Support Representative Delia Ramirez's Dignity Act language to redirect detention funding back to communities, and support CREW's work documenting where the money goes. And always aim your focus upward, at the corrupt cabal of people writing the checks, getting the contracts, and passing legislation that shoots us all collectively in the foot, not down at the people being put in cages.

Note that we've begun putting my commentaries on YouTube so if you find them insightful, check out our channel and share them! Link in the show notes.

And now, we'll continue to dive deeper on 4 topics today. First up;

Section A, THE RESET IS THEATER

Followed by Section B, DUE PROCESS DISMANTLED

Section C, THE GLOBAL FAR-RIGHT PLAYBOOK

And Section D, STAKES AND RESISTANCE

You, you've written a book about it. You studied it in great detail in Donald Trump's first term. You've covered the, the, the separations, family separations. I don't know if even you thought it could get more cruel. No, and I think that the way that this was, was laid out, by you and your team is extraordinary because y- , before Donald Trump came back for the second term, I used to say mass deportation, those signs that I saw on the floor of the convention as I reported, from the Republican Convention during the last presidential election is, is, is family separation by another name.

But as you have so brilliantly stated here, it's not just family separation. It is abject cruelty. It is a violation of all of our civil rights and civil liberties. It is stripping away some of the basic fabric of American society in a way that while I think, if you look at this stuff closely, you understand that this is where this was headed.

It has gone to a degree that I don't think perhaps many Americans did expect when they saw those signs and they saw those balloons dropping, with Donald Trump in that celebratory nature. And the reality of this is it is now starting to play out below the surface as they have always intended inside, jails, local jails, prisons around the country, where, in many cases, people may not get their due process rights afforded to them under the Constitution of the United States.

They, we may see pretrial, preconviction, deportations of people who haven't had a chance to go through the system, and that is what they have always wanted to do. They use the cruelty that you're looking at on the left-hand side of your screen as an excuse to go in and do this under the radar, and that's exactly where we are in this moment today.

Kristi Noem and her jet, and Corey Lewandowski, and all the rest of it might be on the way out, but Markwayne Mullin, is just another face for the same exact strategies that Stephen Miller has always wanted, to effectuate in this country. This story of immigration is not disconnected from the story of oligarchy and big money that we follow very closely.

We know that for-profit prisons have profited handsomely from Donald Trump's deportation, campaign. In fact, just, this last month, one of the companies that I, I was talking about that well, CoreCivic, held its quarterly earnings call, and it laid out just how much money it's making, along with its expectations for the coming year.

I want to play a quick clip from that call with CoreCivic's CEO, Patrick Swindell, speaking about this. ICE was our first customer 43 years ago and has been our largest customer for over a decade. As we continue to look for additional ways to meet our government partners' needs, we believe we can make available substantial capacity to meet future demand.

We've informed ICE that we could provide it with nearly 13,000 additional beds, and this does not include additional capacity we may be able to provide through other means. Help me with that, Jacob. When you hear the CEO talking about expanding capacity to meet future needs, what does that tell you about the role of profit and investor expectations in shaping what we think shouldn't probably be policy that's shaped by them?

That the, this current state of the American immigration system is on its way to being supersized, and that is a immigration system that is defined largely by for-profit, immigration detention. And I have been inside, one of the most notorious ICE detention facilities, for-profit, run not by CoreCivic, but one of the other large companies, The GEO Group, the Adelanto ICE detention facility in the high desert here outside of Los Angeles, just a couple hours away.

Hop in your car and you drive up there, as I did with Lindsay Tuszlowski from the Immigrant Defenders, Law Center during the first Trump term. And inside, what I saw is what was reflected inside Inspector General reports, just deplorable, conditions. I saw a man curled up in a fetal position in solitary confinement.

These Inspector General reports talk about people, hanging themselves, making makeshift nooses. You already talked about a suicide at a time when, death in ICE custody is at record levels, just in the course of the w- very recent past here. And so we've heard these stories before. I have seen what it has looked like inside these facilities.

And now, with profit driving the expansion of all of this, with this so-called big, beautiful bill, putting literally, unprecedented amounts of money in the hands of this immigration apparatus, there will only be more of it in more places. And it will only become more deadly. We, we, we've noted that Kristi Noem is gone from the scene.

Markwayne Mullin is saying to some people the right things, like we're gonna have judicial warrants or, or whatever the case is. Stephen Miller's the architect of this thing. He's still there. Yep. Stephen Miller, in the first Trump term, Ali, not only wanted to separate the 5,500 children from their parents that they deliberately did in that family separation policy that was deemed - don't take it from me, take it from the Republican-appointed judge who called it, "One of the most shameful chapters in the history of our country."

Physicians for Human Rights, which won a Nobel Peace Prize, said it met the United Nations definition of torture, and the American Academy of Pediatrics called it government-sanctioned child abuse. He wanted to separate 25,000 children from their parents, not 5,500, before it was stopped, by people all around the country and around the world.

A- and, and that to me, ultimately, is I think w- was one of the most instructive things that you said earlier in this broadcast, which is Donald Trump is not backing away from this because of some moral opposition. This is a repeat. This is deja vu from- Yeah ... the first Trump term. When he stopped the family separation policy, as Kirstjen Nielsen stood behind him- That's right

the person who effectuated it by signing option three on the decision memo, he didn't say, "Whoa, I'm morally opposed." He said, "I didn't like the sight and the feeling of the families being separated." Didn't look good on TV, didn't look good- Yep ... in that audio from ProPublica that Ginger Thompson found. But Stephen Miller was still there, and they still tried to find ways to do it below the radar, and now we're back doing it again, and Stephen Miller hasn't gone anywhere.

that's actually the problem really of where we start, that the public has not understood the detention crisis that's existed well before Donald Trump. This has been a broken and abusive system since its creation. Now, Donald Trump has accelerated that- When, when was that created? Uh, Chris Rabb, we just had a guest on who's running- Yeah.

It began, right ... for congressional district in third, and he said, uh, he said, you know, we're, we're going back to the Clinton years- Absolutely ... where a lot of these detention centers were set up and almost the advent of private prison complex. That's exactly right. So I think if, um, I think if memory serves, we started opening ICE detention centers in the late '80s at some point.

I mean, this is a new thing, right? You and I have both been on the planet before ICE detention centers. Um, but they took off quite literally because of the money that is inherent in them. You know, we talk about following the money in the private prison complexes. That applies to immigration. GEO Group, CoreCivic, they're laughing all the way to the bank with the Trump administration, but it's not just them.

The, there is money flowing to all of these vendors, whether it's an ICE facility or what's called a intergovernmental services agreement, like when a county runs it. Everybody's getting rich off these detention centers and their facilities of human suffering. People, people who are supposedly providing the food, uh, phone calls, whatever it is.

I mean, I distinctly remember, and people can go back, I'm sure, and find this with an easy search. Around 2010 maybe it was, you could go into the shareholder, um, uh, meetings- And, uh, these places like, um, uh, like you say, uh, GEO Group and, and, uh, the- CoreCivic ... CoreCivic, they were saying to their shareholders, "We project our profits in the future to be out of, like, um, uh, civil pr- prisoners," or I guess prisoners, you know, citizen prisoners, "and move into the immigration space."

I mean, so that gives you a sense of, like, the... I, I, I mean, I, I was just, like, wondering, like, how could they project at that time? W- And, and this may be outside of your portfolio as, as somebody who's dealing with it where the rubber meets the, the road. Yeah, on the ground. Sure. But, like, how did they know?

Right? Like, in 2010, like, how did they know? Now, maybe they got those signals from, uh, Obama, 'cause Obama was certainly was deporting a lot of people. I don't know how much he was growing the detention, uh, part of it. But they certainly, they were out there spending millions to make sure that this type of situation showed up.

Yeah. And let's put it in perspective for all your listeners, right? American taxpayers are paying approximately $200 a day per person. The most recent quote of the people in ICE detention right now is 70,000. When we started this, when we were in the Biden years, right? Even in the first Trump administration, that number usually hangs around 13,000.

20- I mean, like, 20,000 was a lot We're at a place of exponential growth in, uh, hugely abusive centers that's going straight to the pockets of, you know, our 1%. But how did they know? There's several things that are happening, right? One, frankly, the American system has figured out that carceral systems are highly profitable for a long time.

They're taking their lead from the criminal justice system. Two, as soon as we started opening detention centers, as soon as we had the emergence of ICE... You know, people need to understand ICE is new. When we talk about abolish ICE- Yeah ... it's not that radical. They haven't been around that long, and they screwed it up horribly, so get rid of them.

Like, you and I, again, we've been... We were teenagers when ICE was created. Well- I think the first day it opened ... uh, sadly, I was, uh, a little bit older than that. But, um, you may have been. Um- I was, I was but a mere babe. Yes. I, I, on the other hand, was over, well into my 30s. But, uh, go ahead. Well, all right, so we're talking around 2003-ish, right?

Mm-hmm. When Congress makes the first allotment to ICE. Well, what does that tell everybody that's in the business of incarcerated systems, and where has that budget gone? That initial budget was around $3 million. We're looking at 45 million from the big, beautiful bill, and where that money is going, that money is going to those who profit off incarcerating human beings.

And you mentioned civil detention, Sam. That's a huge piece. I have so many people who don't understand the system because the anti-immigrant propaganda machine started to be able to fill these centers, right? And so what do people say in response to me when they see this picture of my client beaten half to death?

"Oh, he's a criminal. Send him back to where he's from." He's not in criminal custody, friends. This is civil detention. Will, will you explain that difference to people so they really understand? 'Cause I've been saying- Sure ... for years, and, and I think we are still, uh, there in terms of the law, that entering this country illegally, or I should say without documentation, or overstaying a visa, is not a criminal offense.

It's civil. It is the functional equivalent of a speeding ticket. And, and really, like, you know, depending on how much you're speeding, uh, the, the- Is that to cross without inspection is quite literally a Class B misdemeanor. The most time you could ever do that nobody judge will ever even grant time on it is six months.

A Class B misdemeanor is, like, public intoxication Is the worst you could think of for this sort of, uh, offense, right? And plus, it's not even the issue, right? When we talk about the difference of criminal and civil detention, it's critical for people to understand who are these human beings that are detained.

Yes, some people may have a criminal record, and they are going through the process of dealing with that in their immigration case. They have served their time or they're, they've entered a plea, whatever it may be. Everything that had to do with their criminal stuff is done and gone. They're not here for any criminal charge.

Plus, this idea... You know, Trump's people love to say, "We're gonna detain the worst of the worst." That is so inhumane and categorizes human beings that are applying for asylum. I have tons of clients who are simple asylee, s- asylum seekers. I have folks getting picked up and detained today with work permission, with driver's license, with Social Security cards, right?

We're talking about members of the community, period, end of story. They're your neighbors. Um, I want to talk about the brutality that has been going on in these detention centers. Uh, but- Yeah ... but just to, to, to put a point on this, when we talk about... Because the, there's obviously been for a long time a certain amount of xenophobia that has been in this country for, you know, since its founding.

Um, uh, whether it was about Chinese or Irish or Italian or Japanese or, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, Mexican, uh, what- whatever it was. Sure. Um, this has been exacerbated because there is so much money to be made, uh, in this, uh... You know, in 2005, George W. Bush and, um, uh, uh, wanted to essentially bring, uh, Latinos into the Republican Party and was looking to do immigration reform, and there was a lot of people who made money, uh, whether it was, um, uh, Mark Levin and, uh, Laura Ingraham in particular, and Ann Coulter who- Well, just look at Miami, the first, what we call the first wave, right?

Of Cuban immigrants fleeing from the revolution. That was a huge move from the Republican Party of trying to sign up Latino voters, specifically Cuban voters, and look at the success they had in the- They, they were successful ... uh, uh, incredibly successful. And George Bush and Karl Rove knew this was the future of, uh, of the country.

Uh, a- and, uh, but they were stopped by sort of like the, the movement conservatives. Mm-hmm. And, uh, that takes us to Tom Homan getting a bag... Now, I should say this is only of the FBI, so I don't know. Uh, I'm, I'm just going by what the FBI reported. A bag of, uh, from a fast food restaurant that was full of...

Maybe it wasn't full. I don't know what the size of the bag was, uh, or, you know, uh, what bills were. $50,000 from Someone, we don't know who, but we know, um, their ilk- Mm ... is someone looking for a contract from, uh, DHS, presumably either for a, a, a detention facility or many detention facilities, or maybe just to serve, you know, the, the meals at a detention facility or provide the phone service or whatever it is.

We're gonna wash the linens at them. That's right. Um, and he got $50,000 cash- Mm-hmm ... basically on the promise of like, "If I get into Homeland Security," which of course at that time he was, uh, being touted as being, uh, the guy from, uh, from CBP or from Homeland Security. Sure. And, uh, it gives us a sense of like this is a racket, and people- Absolutely

are making... All right. So, uh, tell us about- Well, let me give you one more example now. Please. For people, like take the... You know, look this up. This is all stuff that is easily at our fingertips, right? So people have probably seen in the news the effort by the Trump administration to open human warehouses.

They call them warehouses. They wanna Amazon basically ICE detention. So there's already been some investigative work in looking at those contracts and the spaces that they're purchasing. I think one example was a space was purchased three to four years ago, this is in northern Florida, for around $20 million, okay?

The government comes along and purchases it 24 months later for $180 million, right? Like that's what we're talking about. 

It comes as new NBC Decision Desk polling shows the president's approval on immigration issues falling, and Americans largely supporting the idea of reforming ICE. NBC Chief Data Analyst Steve Kornacki joins me with more from the poll. Steve, so great to see you at the big board in your element. Uh, but what does this poll tell us about how Americans view Trump's handling of immigration in his second term?

Yeah, I think something we're seeing here is it's taking a toll maybe on his broader standing. Start with that maybe. This is the overall job approval rating for President Trump, uh, in this new poll. Now, again, uh, keep in mind on this, this is a, a little bit different here. We're looking at all adults, not just registered voters.

It's a little wider net than we usually cast in polling. But still, I think it, it, it captures something here I think pretty significant. 39% among all adults is President Trump's job approval rating. That's one of the lower numbers that you're gonna see out here. That's one of the lower numbers I think you've seen since Trump came back to the White House to start his second term a little bit over a year ago, and I think that low number there is clearly related to this number.

This is more issue-specific. This is getting into immigration, border security. Trump's approval rating there, 40% in this poll. That is down from where it was earlier in his presidency. Uh, it's down from where it's been in other polls, uh, uh, throughout his presidency. Remember when Trump came back to the White House and in the 2024 campaign, immigration and the border were relative strengths for him.

Now that number is coming down for him, and I think that's also exerting, it seems, maybe a broader effect on his overall job approval rating. And then you look inside that number there on his handling of immigration and the border, a- and that's the big problem you see. Um, that's red on red there. I don't know if it shows up, but I'm circling the 72.

That's basically three quarters, almost three quarters of independents here in this poll saying they disapprove of how the president is handling border and the immigration. So, a- and also there if you, i- if you looked among, uh, independents here, too, um, a large number who have, have shifted, not just i, in, in opposition saying they disapprove, they strongly disapprove, so that depth of op- opposition there, too, I think thickening a little bit to the president o- on this issue.

Asking about that issue there then of, uh, tactics used by ICE and Border Patrol agents, again, wide consensus there. Two-thirds in this poll saying those tactics have gone too far. Again, this conducted really immediately in the wake of the events, uh, in Minnesota recently. A- and then a question I think here, uh, you showed this a- at, at the start of the segment, but going into that DHA- DHS, uh, funding fight here, what do you think, we're asking folks, do you think should happen here, uh, with ICE?

The plurality saying reform. Now, reform, obviously that's a broad answer. That could mean a lot of different things, but the, the plurality are basically saying they wanna keep it, but they wanna change it. There are 29% here, this is heavily Republican, who say keep it in its current form. And then there's this answer right here, abolish ICE, and you hear that slogan from the political left a lot.

29% here, uh, you know, a little bit less than one-third choosing that. I think what's interesting is a lot of that 29% Is coming from Democratic voters. Almost half of Democratic voters say that what they think should happen to ICE is that it should be abolished. So as you look at Democrats in Washington navigate that DHS fight, as you look at Democratic candidates in primaries on the campaign trail this year getting ready for 20, uh, 2028, I think one of the things they're increasingly looking at, we've seen this on a range of issues, is their own base is pushing them more and more, uh, into sort of maximalist positions and, and, and confrontation.

And again, half of the Democratic base wants, they say in this poll, to abolish ICE. 

Some Trump fans are absolutely losing their minds, not just at migrants at, or the radical left. No, in this case, they're actually raging at Donald Trump. What? Well, turns out some of Trump's shiny new ICE mega detention centers, or what I like to call concentration camps, are being dropped right in the middle of their quiet family values small towns.

You love to see it. Uh, so here's what's going on. So obviously, Trump's mass deportations are being complemented with what this administration has been pitching as Amazon style, oh my God, ICE mega jails. Wait, so people are peeing in bottles now? Is, is that, is that part of it? Uh, now these are nothing more than concentration camps, let's be honest, to house the product of his industrial scale roundups.

Obviously, those facilities, they have to be built somewhere. They don't get built in a PowerPoint or whatever . Uh, no, th- they get built on actual land in actual communities, and so they gotta go somewhere. Uh, and wouldn't you know it, a whole bunch of them are being slated for deep red pro-Trump areas, same areas that voted for his agenda.

So now on January 10th and 11th, more than 1,000 anti-ICE protests erupted across the country. I think we all know why, okay? But for those who might be confused, uh, you had ICE, an ICE agent murder someone, uh, Rene Good in Minneapolis. Okay? ICE agent Jonathan Ross stepped in front of her vehicle and fired three times, killing her.

Okay? This is the ninth killing by ICE since September, and by the way, they have been using the excuse of, "Oh, well, uh, they were trying to, uh, run, run over our agents." Uh, they've been using that, but there was a report back, all the way back in 2014 where ICE investigators found that these agents would purposely put themselves in the path of people's vehicles in order to justify shooting the occupants.

So let's be very clear about that. So now at the same time, we find out that Trump wants to put even more ICE agents out in the streets. Disaster. Uh, and then of course, he also wants massive new detention centers in towns that were told that this was all about law and order, and, "Oh, we gotta keep the bad guys out."

Right? Well, well suddenly those same back the blue slogans and signs are looking a little different. When the armored trucks and armed agents are parked outside of your kids' schools. Here's the twist. A lot of the loudest pushback here is actually coming from members of Trump country. These folks, again, cheered build the wall, and voted for mass deportations, and loved the idea of ICE, you know, going door to door, as JD Vance had said.

But they only really liked it, apparently, when it was an abstract boot on someone else's neck, not on their own. Now they're realizing that, wait a minute, I, I, I don't want these mega prisons near me. N- n- not in my backyard. And there are different reasons for it, one of them being property values. They realize that property values do drop when your town becomes a hub for prisons.

And when your local school and hospital gets militarized, that's also not good. And when small businesses lose their workers and their customers overnight because they don't want to be in the middle of a prison town or near a concentration camp. I mean, when your quiet little suburb starts looking like an occupied zone, people generally tend to stay away from it.

Suddenly now we're seeing Trump voters at town halls screaming, "No, not in my town. Not in my town. Put it somewhere else." Oh, fun. Uh, they didn't think law and order meant guard towers on the edge of their, uh, subdivisions or cul-de-sacs. Okay, um, in fact, uh, one person, Victor Crowley, 57, told the Washington Post, "I support the president, but I don't want this."

Adding that residents only learned about this potential project through the newspaper and had received no communication from federal authorities. Yeah, yeah, they, they, that's what they, that's what they do. They just make plans and then start to do them and tell everybody later. Now, politically, this entire thing is a disaster in slow motion.

Trump's approval rating has crashed from about 50% in March of 2025 to 41% by December. ICE's net approval rating stands now at negative 14. People hate this agency more every single month. Hey, it turns out the people saying abolish ICE back in 2018 were correct. That, that, that's one thing about being on the left, being a progressive, is we are right before everyone else, and then everyone else has to catch up to us.

But of course, before that happens, they kind of run progressives through the mud, you know. "Oh, you guys, you, you're not realistic." Oh, it turns out that you were absolutely right all along, and of course we never get the credit for it. But anyway, uh, look, that was before, by the way, that, that approval rating going to negative 14%.

That was before a thousand protests and another high-profile killing of a white US citizen. Okay? Uh, now Republicans are looking to the midterms, and they're realizing, "Oh, oh crap. Oh, this is not good. Oh, this is really bad." Um, yeah, turns out you can't run on freedom while turning your base's hometowns into a police state, and as, as well as the rest of the country, by the way.

Uh, I know freedom r- loving Republicans are like, "I didn't vote for a police state." Actually, yes, you did. You just... You thought it would be directed at someone else, of course. Uh, now, here's the thing. Trump can't back down from this. Of course not. He ran on this, um, you know, mass immigration raids, detentions, being tough.

If he suddenly says, "Oh, okay, we're, we're not gonna put the camps, you know, uh, in your town. We're, we're gonna put them more politically convenient places, okay?" Uh, well, then he's gonna look weak to the very base that he is already losing. Uh, and look, he, he built a trap out of cruelty and anti-immigrant slogans, and now he's getting caught in it.

This is what authoritarian looks like, uh, when it stops being a Fox News or right-wing media fantasy and starts being, uh, construction equipment and razor wire at the edge of your town. Look, you can't have industrial-scale detention, thousands of armed agents descending on your cities, and open contempt for civil rights, and then act surprised when the same machinery turns your communities into collateral damage.

The truth here is simple. When you try to normalize state violence against them, it's only a matter of time before it turns around and, well, comes after you. Affects you. So when you see Trump voters suddenly discovering their inner civil libertarian, don't tread on me, because ICE is building a mega jail next to their church, remember that they were fine with this when it only...

when they s- claimed to only target migrants, Black and brown communities, and Democratic cities. But now they're learning, some of them at least, the hard way that fascism never, ever stays in its own lane. Our job here as, uh, progressives, which I assume you are if you're watching, uh, we should stand with the people who are resisting these detention centers.

We should be exposing the hypocrisy and their cruelty, and to keep building a coalition that says no to this entire authoritarian Project 2025, well, project, not just when it touches your own zip code. And we also need to remember that democracy only survives- If we fight for it before the guard towers go up.

Well, the hot event of the summer, or I guess spring, happened yesterday. Was, was... Well, you saw The Devil Wears Prada 2. That was- I did see that, but I was, of course, referring to Border Security Expo in Phoenix. Ooh, that's...

I miss- I missed that again? I know. We didn't s- we didn't send anybody this time. It's like Coachella, that. I'm not going to anything that I should be going to. It's like Burning Man and Coachella mixed into one. Mixed into one with a bunch of racists. Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead. Right. Including Tom Homan and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.

They were there, and they had a lot to say about immigration enforcement, signaling a continuation of record high arrest and removal rates, promising to fulfill Trump's campaign promises of mass deportations. And Todd Blanche specifically emphasized cross-agency collaboration to prioritize criminals with significant ramping up of interior enforcement and denaturalization cases.

Nice. Oh, good. No, it's good. It's great. You know, they're, uh, they're so committed in their war against Brown people, um, that you wonder, you know, what, what it is that, that, you know, that will finally satisfy them. Is it... Will it be that every person of color leaves this country? Uh, or that we just strip away the rights of every person of color?

Because when you think about it, they're taking a pretty comprehensive approach. They're pushing through the Supreme Court the end of Voting Rights Act. Uh, they are actively, actively racially gerrymandering America to sort of negate the votes of, uh, people of color. They're trying to toss out people of color.

They're barring the entry to the country of people of color. Apparently, the only shade of brown these people like is brown as in Brown Shirts, like the Brown Shirts that were the sort of ground, uh, uh, troops for, for, for Hitler in his takeover of Germany. Ugh, what a country. Ugh, this does feel like a piano on my back.

Lighten my load, Minna. I'm adding another piano. Oh, great. A federal judge ruled yesterday that the Justice Department may keep over 600 boxes of 2020 election ballots seized from Fulton County, rejecting the co- county's claim that the FBI's actions violated the Fourth Amendment. The judge determined that because the government provided digital copies of the materials, Fulton County failed to prove it was harmed by the loss of the physical records.

The seizure is part of a broader criminal inquiry into the 2020 election, quote-unquote, "irregularities" led by the Trump administration. Oh, God. First of all, Trump- Another day in Smallville ... yeah, Trump-appointed judge. Um, secondly, the judge said there were procedural issues with this, but said not bad enough to stop the, you know, uh, to issue an injunction and have them return the, the, the voting materials.

Um, but secondly, or thirdly, you know, the, the, the, the ones who are really damaged here are the voters. Because clearly, while the Trump administration is doing this in some kind of twisted effort to resuscitate long-dead claims that the 2020 election was stolen, it's also part of their broader effort to get their hands on as many voting records as possible to challenge the ability of people to vote.

Now, go back to our last story. Who are gonna be their principal targets? People of color. People who vote for Democrats. Uh, so this is all part of the same effort. It pretty much, if you go and, and, and take a story that we do here and have a little short list that you use to follow it, and it-- or, or two baskets, and it goes either into a basket saying it was driven by corruption and greed, or it goes into a basket saying it was driven by racism and a desire to divide the country.

Uh, those are the two main baskets. Yes, there are ignorance baskets and so forth, but those are the two main baskets that most of the stories pertaining to this administration, uh, go into

US President Donald Trump has endorsed the idea of renaming the US Immigration Agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, to NICE. Taking to Truth Social, Trump has thrown all his support on the suggestion. The US president says that it's a great idea to call the agency National Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The proposal originated from a conservative influencer who said the change would force media outlets to refer to, uh, to ICE agents as NICE agents. A federal agency name change typically requires congressional action through legislation to amend the authority that established the agency. The move comes as Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, is facing funding uncertainty in Congress.

The agency remains a flashpoint in US politics, with Democrats pushing for tighter restrictions or even abolishing ICE, while the Trump administration continues to back aggressive immigration enforcement. As of April this year, Trump's approval rating on immigration has declined. A Reuters/Ipsos poll indicates that Trump's policies on immigration, deportation, and others could harm Republicans in the November election.

52% of Americans said they were less likely to support a candidate who backs Trump's support to deportation, while more than 42% said that they were more likely to support such a candidate. Meanwhile, concerns are growing over detainee conditions under ICE agents. According to NPR, ICE has reported twenty-nine deaths in custody since October, the highest since the agency was created back in 2003.

Next, Section B, DUE PROCESS DISMANTLED

I had a conversation with someone, he's, he's mentioned in the story, just by his first name, Juan. He lives in San Diego and he is a Mexican national, came to the United States when he was 12 years old, has lived in San Diego ever since, has never left the country, and basically married his high school sweetheart in 2021, who's an American citizen.

And so he went through the process that spouses of US citizens go through of, applying for his green card, submitting all of his personal information, subjecting himself to all of the biometric scans, the whole rigmarole. And he and his partner are basically called in for a completely routine green card interview.

And about a week before he's due to come in for this green card interview, and to be clear, this is something they've had to wait a long time for, so they're relieved when their, when their names and numbers are finally called 'cause they think, "Finally, we can begin to get this process, we can set this process in motion.

We can n-normalize, I can normalize my legal status." About a week before this appointment, his lawyer calls him and says, "Listen, I need to let you know that there have been rumors that at some of these routine interviews at the San Diego field office for USCIS, people are getting arrested by ICE."

That there seems to be some sort of coordination between USCIS and ICE, such that when people show up for their USCIS interviews for legal benefits, ICE officers are showing up unannounced and taking people into custody. They call this phishing, right? Yeah, that's essentially what it is. It, these are, these are easy marks.

These are people who are not trying to hide. These are people who have shared all of their information with the government and who are showing up for these actual appointments. And so here Juan is trying to weigh his options and ultimately decides, look, if they're gonna arrest me, they're gonna arrest me whether I show up for an interview or not.

I may as well try to move forward with this process. And so they show up, they do their interview. The person conducting the interview, who works for USCIS, actually says to him at the end of the interview, "Congratulations, you've passed." And he described to me this feeling of relief, "Finally, I've, I've, I've, I've done this," like we've, we're, we're finally moving forward with this process.

And then the Agent who is, or the official who is interviewing him basically excuses herself and says, "Okay, I, I have to step out for a second." And she gets up from her desk, and as she's leaving, she says, "There are two other officers who just wanna ask you a question." And these two guys walk in, they're wearing jeans and flannel shirts, and they say, "Do you know why we're here?"

And he says, "N- n- no. Why, why are you here?" And they say, "Well, we're taking you into custody. You've overstayed a visa." At one point, one of the agents actually said, and these are ICE officers, one of them said, "This is the process now." Which I have to say, to me personally, covering this stuff really stayed with me, the idea that, th- this is not the process, to be clear.

This is a complete audible. These are, these guys are completely running roughshod over what the legal, mechanisms and processes should be. But the reality now is that it's, open season for immigration enforcement officers, and USCIS is a part of that process. Is that legal? In a certain sense, n- none of this should be considered legal, but, the government is doing it without really regard or reference to any legal procedures or protocols.

And now what you're seeing across the board is, people showing up for immigration court hearings and getting arrested by ICE officers there. There, there was a case of someone actually, who already had a green card and who had a green card for a decade, who showed up for a citizenship interview and was arrested there.

And so basically everything has been on the table for this administration, and it, it, it makes people incredibly vulnerable, and it thoroughly effaces this boundary that was probably pretextual to begin with, that was separating at least some of the policy between handling unlawful immigration and legal immigration.

It shows you that ac- in the view of the ideologues inside this administration, there is n- no legal regard for people's rights or legal protections. So I guess that makes me wonder, hearing the stories of Anna and Juan, and thinking about so many other stories, is there such a thing as legal immigration to the United States right now?

It's a good question, and I think it's basically an open question. In, in theory, these kinds of legal immigration channels continue to exist. They should continue to exist. But I think by and large, the idea that anyone who is availing themselves of the legal immigration system, that they can be arrested and intimidated and bullied into abandoning their legal case, means that we're entering a zone, basically, as far as I'm concerned, without really any modern precedent of, the, these legal channels not really meaning anything.

And, and this, I have to say, is true, when I, when I look at other reporting that I and others have done, I remain really haunted by the fact that of those 252 Venezuelans who were sent under the Alien Enemies Act to El Salvador and prison last year There were a handful of them, not only had pending immigration cases before judges, but some of them actually had legal status.

One of them had temporary protected status. Some had been refugees. So the idea that someone with legal status could be subjected to the same mistreatment and summary deportation is something that should scare everyone in this country, because this is just a basic question of rule of law. Let me ask you a provocative question.

Does this happen with people trying to avail themselves of a legal immigration situation if they're white? I definitely think that there's a, a racial element to this. There's no question. That said, there have been stories-- I was just reading a story in The Guardian this morning about an Irish man who has been detained by ICE for an extended period, really without clear explanation or justification.

I, I do think that there is a very clearly racist element to a lot of this. The populations that are getting demonized and villainized and then actually targeted in very substantive, legally calculated ways by the administration are almost always non-white immigrants from, say, Somalia or Afghanistan or Venezuela.

But what's so scary to me, and what should be scary, I think, to everyone, about this idea of weaponizing the legal immigration system against people who are trying to do things the right way is, this is gonna capture anyone and everyone who's trying to go through the right channels. Because you combine the fact that there's this deep ideological and, and, and racist aversion to immigration in all forms, you combine that with the fact that there are clear directives from the White House for arrest quotas and deportation numbers to hit.

Y- they're looking for people, and the easiest people for the administration to target are people who aren't trying to hide, are people who are actually trying to do things the right way and are trusting that the legal process and their rights have some sort of meaning. So I think actually, even if what motivates this is a kind of racist ideological conviction, I think actually the implications are gonna start to grow even wider than that, and really affect everyone.

We begin today's show with Trump's repeated attacks on DACA, that's the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which has granted deportation relief and work permits to an estimated half a million immigrants who came to the United States as children. The targeting of people with DACA has intensified under Trump's second term, with nearly 300 DACA recipients detained last year.

Of that group, at least 174 have been deported, many after living nearly all their lives in the United States. Maria de Jesus Estrada Juarez is among them. She came to the US at the age of 15, and had been living here in the United States for over 20 years when the Trump administration detained her in February despite having DACA.

She was taken during her green card appointment and deported to Mexico within 24 hours. A judge later deemed her deportation illegal, and ordered her return to the United States in March. Juarez spoke to PBS News from her home in California earlier this month. We show up to the appointment at UCIS in Sacramento.

Uh, we walk into the office. Uh, we had my interview. At the end of my interview, the agent, the interview agent asked, uh, told me that he needed to speak to his supervisor. And sooner than I know, um, they knock on the door, and I got arrested, and I was told that I was being detained, and I was gonna get deported back to Mexico.

I know that the Deferred Action, DACA, it protects, uh, people that they were brought into the country when they were children for deportation. That's what the DACA program was created for. DACA was enacted by the Obama administration in 2012, and has been at the center of ongoing contentious litigation, with advocates worried about the program's future.

Well, a new decision by the Board of Immigration Appeals, that's BIA, may make it easier for the Trump administration to continue deporting DACA recipients. The new precedent decision by a three-judge panel outlined that DACA no longer guarantees protection from deportation for hundreds of thousands of people in the program.

The BIA operates within the Department of Justice. The decision came in the case of Catalina Social Santiago, a DACA recipient and longtime immigration rights advocate who was released from an ICE jail last October after about two months in detention. For more, we go to Capitol Hill, where we're joined by Congress member Delia Ramirez.

She is a Democrat from Illinois fighting to bring legislation to the floor to protect DACA. Her husband is a former DACA recipient himself. Congress member Ramirez is the daughter of Guatemalan immigrants. Welcome back to Democracy Now, Congress member Ramirez. If you can talk about the significance of the BIA decision and overall the Trump administration deporting over 100 DACA recipients.

Look, this decision by the Board of Immigration Appeals is a very concerning decision because, as you just mentioned, Deferred Action for, for children arrivals, the purpose of that was to protect these children from being deported. And the idea that now 500,000 or so DACA recipients who've had deferred action are now at the whim or at concern that if they get in fact stopped or if they go in to a check-in or some sort of procedure with immigration that they too can now be deported sh- should be concerning all of us.

I mean, these are folks that have been here, Amy, you know this, t- since they were two or since they were 14 like my husband. They don't know any other world, any other countries than the United States of America. And all of a sudden that deferred action, that protection that was afforded through this program no longer applies because of this panel of three judges who are ruling under whatever Donald Trump wants them to do.

And, uh, uh, representative, uh, The Washington Post is reporting that, uh, quote, "More than 140 new deportation judges have been appointed, um, uh, f- uh, following the DOJ's firing of 100 immigration judges since Tr- Trump took office." Your view of how Trump is trying to completely remake, uh, the immigration, uh, judicial system?

L- look, he's weaponizing the court system. He is firing judges for doing their job, for, uh, uh, practicing what they have taken on in their oath as a judge following procedure, and then he's replacing them, you know, one would call to question, with judges who are more concerned with being loyal to the president so they can keep their job than actually following the law that they swore to, to upkeep.

That's really concerning. Look, I've done a number of court visits to monitor what's happening in the courtrooms, and oftentimes what you're seeing is judges who are just rushing through cases, um, especially these merit cases, so that they can speed up these deportations of people seeking refuge in this country.

It calls to question what does our Department of Justice system truly look like when there is no justice because now you're hiring judges who are loyal to the president and not loyal to the law? Well, at the same time though, there was a federal appeals court ruling, uh, in Washington DC, uh, that, uh, President Trump's claims that there's an invasion, uh, uh, of the United States, uh, a- as a reason for shutting down asylum requests at the US-Mexico border, that court has ruled that that's, uh, unlawful.

I'm won- wondering, uh, your response given the fact that Trump issued that proclamation on his first day back in office. Yeah. No, look, I... First, I, I wanna tell you, uh, judges and the courts are in a really difficult position right now. I mean, you're, you're talking about immigration judges who have been serving for 15, 20, 25 years now being called to question because they are following the law, they're following the procedure that's been put in place by this Congress, right?

By the Constitution. And so when you hear the president use invasion or the Department of Homeland Security, this guise of protecting u- protecting us from domestic terrorism to be able to shoot people or justify the shooting of Alex Perdy or Rene Good or Silverio Villegas, you know that we have entered dangerous, dangerous territory.

At the same time, I have to make sure, Juan, that I say this clearly, this Congress also has a responsibility. We've had the Dream and Promise Act here for a number of years, and we have not been able to pass it through both chambers. Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley just recently used a discharge petition process to be able to extend protections for TPS holders from Haiti.

We have to do the same thing here in Congress to finally bring the Dream and Promise Act to the floor, to be able to bring the protections to these DACA recipients that should have already had a pathway to citizenship a long time ago. I, I also wanted to ask you about a particular, um, immigration facility, the ICE North Lake facility in, in Baldwin, Michigan.

There's a, a hunger, uh, and labor strike going on there for, by the detainees. Uh, could you talk about what you know about that and what you're calling for? Yeah, look, as you know, it's been very difficult for members of Congress to conduct these oversight visits. Um, in many cases, they continue to say, "You need to send an email."

They've denied entrance, which again, is a violation, right? Of the authority that's been afforded to us through the appropriations process. What is happening there is unconscionable. I have a bill to melt ice, and what it does, in fact, this ends detention. What you're seeing around the country, whether it's the conditions that children are being treated inside detention and families and individuals, uh, what is in their food, the conditions that they're sleeping in in these private detention centers, we have to address it.

It's why this bill is so important to me, and we're calling more members of Congress to join it. It ends detention, it disrupts enforcement, and then redirects all those billions of dollars used for private detention, um, to really incarcerate people in these- What feel like concentration camps back into the communities that have been impacted by ICE enforcement.

It's why we call the bill the Melt ICE bill. But we should all be looking at doing more oversight at these facilities, especially these private facilities that get to do whatever they'd like so that they can maximize their profit, and in many cases, you have seen the corruption between employees of DHS and the contracts afforded to these detention facilities.

Congress enacted the Temporary Protected Status program in 1990, and every president since then, Republican and Democrat, has embraced TPS.

President Trump, however, is trying to end it. Today, his solicitor general, John Sauer, told the justices that the statute clearly bars any court review of the administration's decisions, and he dismissed the idea that a separate law established to provide procedural fairness does not allow the courts to review the Homeland Security Agency's decision-making either.

Pressed by the court's three liberal justices, Sauer insisted that the courts cannot review anything. Here he is being questioned by Justice Sotomayor. None of those procedural steps required by the statute are reviewable. That's your position. Correct. What you're basically saying is Congress wrote a statute for no purpose.

Justice Kagan noted that under the statute, the Secretary of Homeland Security is supposed to consult with the State Department about what the conditions are in home countries where people have been forced to flee. "What if she didn't do that at all?" she asked, "Or what if the response came back, 'Wasn't that baseball game last night great?'"

Justice Jackson asked what would happen if the secretary used a Ouija board to make decisions. To all these hypotheticals, General Sauer stood firm, which prompted this from Sotomayor. Now, we have a president saying- at one point that Haiti is a, quote, "Filthy, dirty, and disgusting S-hole country." I'm quoting him.

He declared illegal immigrants, which he associated with TPS, as poisoning the blood of America. I don't see how that one statement is not a prime example showing that a discriminatory purpose may have played a part in this decision. Sauer pushed back, noting that the DHS secretary had not mentioned race at all, prompting this response from Justice Jackson, the only Black woman on the court.

Position of the Justice courts here- So your, the, the position of the United States is that we have an actual racial epithet, that we aren't allowed to look at all the context- Justice Barrett, the mother of two adopted Haitian children, interjected at that point to clarify the administration's position.

Are you conceding that individuals with TPS status could bring a challenge based on race discrimination? Sauer appeared to concede the point. Representing the Haitians, lawyer Jeffrey Pipoly described the administration's review as a sham. The secretary herself described people from Haiti and from other n- non-white countries as killers, leeches, saying, "We don't want them, not one," while simultaneously enacting a, another humanitarian, form of relief for white and only white South Africans.

That was too much for Justice Alito. If you put Syrians, Turks, Greeks, and other people who live around the Mediterranean in a lineup, do you think you could say those people are, are, that all of them, are they all non-white? An uncomfortable Pipoly resisted categorizing each group until Alito got to his own roots.

How about southern Italians? Well- Well, certainly, certainly 120 years ago, when we had our last wave of European immigration, southern Italians were not considered white. I think our concept of these things evolves over time. 

Amna, the president often touts a sharp drop in illegal entries to the country, which have gone down by 50,000 entries per month since the end of 2024.

But a new analysis from the Cato Institute suggests that's only part of the story. Legal immigration has fallen even more dramatically under the Trump administration, with 132,000 fewer people being admitted per month through legal pathways. For more on what's behind those numbers, I'm joined by that study's author, David Bier.

He's the director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute. David, thanks for coming back on News Hour. Thanks for having me on. This study shows that legal immigration has dropped sharply under this Trump administration. What specific policy changes are driving that gap? Well, the biggest one by far is the suspension of immigrant visa processing for 75 countries around the world.

These are for, mainly for family members of US citizens who are coming to reunite with their family members here. Many are spouses and minor children of US citizens. In addition to that, they've also suspended all, uh, entries from about 40 countries. So 92 countries now face a de facto legal immigration ban, uh, by this administration en- encompassing about half of all legal immigrants to the United States.

In addition to that, he's banned almost all refugees except for white South Africans, but even them, uh, even that group are, are being admitted at just about 10% of the rate that was previously, uh, being admitted before under the Biden administration. So those are some of the main ones, but every category.

You look at H-1B visas for high-skilled workers, international students also facing very severe restrictions through a variety of different policy means to reduce legal immigration to the United States. The president has been eager to tout this major drop in border arrests since he took office, going from about 47,000 arrests at the end of Biden's term to only about 8,600 last month.

Illegal immigration, as you note, was already dropping under President Biden, so how much credit does President Trump get here? Well, look, it's a continuation of a trend, so that's one of the main things that people need to understand. If you look at the peak and compare it to now, look, it's been a- an over 90% reduction, but almost 90% of that reduction happened under President Biden's administration before President Trump took office.

And so that is in, uh, in stark contrast to these cuts to legal immigration, where il- Illegal immigration was falling and legal immigration was rising under Biden. The, the trends are now both down under President Trump. You mentioned, um, asylum and refugee status. A big part of this administration's approach has been focused on restriction- restricting access to asylum.

Your study shows that asylum seekers have essentially been completely blocked from entering at the US-Mexico border, and fell 99.9% in the course of a few months. Who are these people that are getting turned away? And also, are they finding other ways to legally enter the United States, or are they just turned away completely?

Yeah, they're turned away completely. So these are people who are trying to come in, uh, request asylum at legal ports of entry. They're not trying to evade border patrol or cross the border illegally. This is something that every administration prior to this one had allowed people to do. In fact, even in 2019, Secretary, DHS Secretary Nielsen had encouraged, uh, people who are applying for asylum to go to ports of entry to apply, rather than cross the border illegally.

And what ended up happening is now we've completely eliminated that option for people to apply to enter legally. The only way to get into the United States now is illegally if you're one of these, uh, people seeking, uh, uh, protection from persecution in their home country. When you step back and look at the broader picture here, what do these trends tell us about the direction of US immigration policy right now?

Is this about reducing immigration as a whole? Absolutely, and you can even look at what the president himself has said. He said he wants to block immigration from the Third World. This is the type of rhetoric that we see from the far right online and, and in various policy forums. They want a reduction in both legal and illegal immigration.

Many of the responses that I've received to my study are cheering it on and saying this is a great thing for the country. But it's really quite different from what President Trump sold his entire campaign around as being focused on illegal immigration and being in favor of legal immigration. What are the potential economic impacts of this drop in legal immigration, too, in terms of the deficit, the birth rate, the social safety programs that we have in this country?

Well, our analysis shows that over the last 30 years, immigrants have reduced the deficit by $14.5 trillion. Almost all of that came from legal immigration. So, illegal immigrants did also help reduce the deficit by about $1.7 trillion, but most of it came from the legal immigrants. And if you look at the people who are specifically being targeted- by these bans.

They are not, uh, people who are likely to burden the country with, with deficits and debt. These are people who are actually going to contribute to the country through work and entrepreneurship. Many of them are prime age adults ready to enter the labor force, who we need right now to revitalize our economy.

Now, Section C, THE GLOBAL FAR-RIGHT PLAYBOOK

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So talk about, well, the title of your book, If We Tolerate This: How the British Establishment Made the Far Right Respectable.

If you can talk about who Farage is and what he represents. Yeah. So one of the big changes in British politics in recent years has been this very alarming and, and rapid rise of, um, ideas and rhetoric, um, associated with the far right. So, you know, very strong anti-immigration rhetoric, attacks on, uh, supposed elites running the country and so on.

You know, things that would be very familiar to your viewers in the US, um, from Donald Trump and his works. Um, and that's really, you know, the pressure there has really come from two sources. Um, one of them is a lot of, uh, far-right activity outside the electoral system. Um, you know, we've had kind of big street protests and rallies and, um, mob violence in some cases, attacking hotels that are being used to accommodate asylum seekers.

And then we've had a lot of pressure from Farage's political party, Reform UK, who have been, you know, trying to shape some of these resentments and some of this anger into a right-wing populist political project of the kind that we're seeing in lots of different liberal democracies around the world at the moment.

Um, you know, for Farage, this is just the latest stage in a kind of long political career where he's come from outside the mainstream right and has tried to make his brand of right-wing populist politics, um, the leading force, uh, in Britain. You know, so he was previously leader of the UK Independence Party, and via his leadership of, of UKIP, he, uh, played an instrumental role in, um, winning the Brexit referendum for the Leave campaign.

Uh, he then formed another party called the Brexit Party after that to kind of push for the hardest exit from the EU possible. And Reform UK, the latest vehicle, in fact, it's a renamed Brexit Party, but what he's doing here is actually trying to build a political platform that will allow his, him and his party to win power in Westminster nationally.

And the key themes that that's built on, um, you know, is heavily anti-immigration, and they make a real point of trying to kind of flex their muscles and show, uh, how ostentatiously cruel they're going to be to, uh, what they call illegal immigrants, which is a, a wide range of people who are living in the UK, some of whom have lived here for, for quite a long time.

Earlier this year, one of Reform's big pre-local election announcements was that it wanted to create a British ICE. So that kind of tells you- Ah ... uh, where they are on that. Let- You know, they made that an- Now, Daniel, let me play a campaign ad from Nigel Farage I'm in Essex today, and this is the Bell Hotel in Epping.

Now, you might remember these scenes being on national news last year. Anyone that comes illegally into Britain on a boat or in the back of a lorry will be detained and deported. But that's gonna mean having to detain quite a lot of people who are here already. They should not be free to walk the streets.

Policy's very simple. You vote for a Reform MP, you will not have a detention facility in your constituency. But if you vote Green or those that support open borders in the world, that's where the detention centers are gonna be. Equally, I could say the same of Labour and the Conservatives, 'cause they've done nothing to stop it.

Daniel Trilling, your response. Um, yeah, I mean, that kind of sums up what Reform are about. So like I was saying before, you know, it's kind of making a virtue of how, um, punitive and cruel they're going to be to, uh, certain groups of immigrants, but also kind of directing that at their political enemies as well.

You know, so this announcement, which Farage made a couple of weeks ago, was all about kind of stigmatizing his opposition. So the Green Party, who have also kind of broke through from outside the mainstream by taking a kind of strong left-wing position, you know, he's trying to class us, you know, o- open borders fanatics.

And I mean, what are they saying there? They're kind of threatening to use the power of the state, if they ever get hold of it, to intimidate their political opponents. You know, placing detention centers in areas that vote for parties that Farage doesn't like, um, you know, it's kind of punishing people for voting the wrong way and perhaps even trying to scare voters into, into not opposing him.

The question becomes now Reform. Reform, the Reform Party, which is again, a white nationalist party, folks, um, led by Nigel Farage, a career racist. Um, that's all he's known in his life is to be a racist, and absolutely has made racist statements, has had a long history of racism. It's undeniable. This guy is a carnival barker.

He's also a billionaire, a re- very rich man at least, but don't tell anybody that. He got 5 million pounds From a Thai businessman or a Thai, uh, located businessman, a Brit in Thailand, uh, from some cryptocurrency place, uh, that he owns. And Farage owns around 12% of a cryptocurrency business. I mean, Ni- Nigel Farage is the one who championed Brexit and lied to you and scared off white voters.

W- of course, of course, he tapped into their, uh, i- internalized racism and, and said to them, "Oh my goodness me, if you, if you don't vote yes for Brexit, you're gonna have immigrants swarming all over you. You know, they're gonna steal all the money that you're entitled to. You know, um, we, we've got the... We're gonna make four...

You will get 400," um, what is it? What did Boris Johnson say? "You're gonna get millions of pounds a week or a month, uh, if you vote yes for this, uh, Brexit." I mean, all of these conservatives who are now moving to the Reform Party all lied to you in the United Kingdom in, uh, 2016 when Brexit happened 10 years ago to, i- almost 10 exact years ago, almost exactly to the day.

Uh, June, uh, I think June 23rd of 2016, the infamous, uh, 52 to 48 vote for Brexit. Of course, people in United Kingdom thought that they were voting for something that they really weren't voting for, but some of them, many of them were voting for racism. Many of them, with the racist campaigns that were out there, were voting for racism.

Many of these people were. And so the phrase that James O'Brien of LBC, who is a really good person, I really like him, uh, is a good man.

Um, once had the phrase called compassion for the conned, con for the conned, and I guess contempt for the con man. Uh, uh, whatever, something like that. And, you know, even he had to park that phrase. A- and I never liked that phrase anyway because it seemed to, in my mind, let the people who vote for Brexit off the hook because no, they weren't fooled, and no, they're not dumb.

And yeah, I get it, some people in the United Kingdom don't read either. But- They do know how to vote, and they voted lustily for Brexit. Now, 52 to 48 is not exactly a blowout, but it isn't exactly as tight as you might think. And yeah, 52 to 48, yeah, it's reasonably close, but people knew what they were voting for.

And to say that they didn't know what they were voting for is the same thing as people would like to believe out here and tell you here in the US. "Oh, we didn't know what we were voting for. We didn't vote for this with Donald Trump." Well, yeah, you did vote for this with Donald Trump, and yeah, you did vote for Brexit, and you knew what was going on with Brexit because literally a week before Brexit happened, on June the 23rd, 2016, literally a week before that, a white female Labour member of Parliament was killed, murdered in her own surgery.

Now, that's her office. That would be her office. By a white male nationalist. Yeah. One week before. And so with that murder of the member of Parliament from the Labour Party, Jo Cox, first name J-O, last name Cox, C-O-X. With that murder that took place on June the 16th, 2016, people still continued to decide to vote for Brexit, even when that racist who murdered that female MP, white female MP, was supporting Brexit.

And that did not disturb the chains of the people who voted for Brexit because misogyny, because racism, because white fear, because white racism. And so you knew what you were voting for. And Nigel Farage was at the heart of the Brexit movement. He even had a party called the Brexit Party, which had become, previous to that, was called the UKIP Party, United Kingdom Independence Party, a racist-ass party that then morphed into the Brexit Party.

And then when Brexit was achieved, Nigel Farage decided to change its name again because, hey, the Brexit Party outlived its usefulness now that Brexit was implemented, albeit really disastrously, because it turned out to be a nightmare for my native country. But then what did Nigel Farage change it to?

Oh, the Reform Party. It's like a business that continues to fail, but just keep changing the name in the hopes that it will succeed. Oh, and Nigel Farage wasn't even a member of Parliament at that point because Nigel Farage was a member of the European Parliament, and he'd give all these speeches before the European Parliament in Brussels, and he would talk about how the EU was terrible and Brussels was awful, and this is just despicable, all the while, while trying to run to be a member of Parliament in the United Kingdom.

And he failed at it eight different times, eight previous times, seven or eight, before he finally, in 2024, became an MP in the United Kingdom. Finally. Seriously. It's just crazy. You cannot make this up, folks. And so MP for Clacton, Nigel Farage, or Farage, or Farage, however you wanna pronounce his last name.

And yes, he does have French roots. Oh, yeah. The guy that hates immigrants, the guy that stood b- in front of a poster that said "breaking point" on it and had all of these brown-skinned or olive-skinned people and tried to scare white voters with their own internalized racism to go, "Oh, you cannot vote for no on Brexit because if you vote no, all these brown, these olive-skinned people behind me on this big billboard that says breaking point in large red letters is somehow gonna be coming to a neighborhood near you down your street.

Oh, you've got to vote yes for Brexit." And, you know, lots of white people in the UK did, and there were lots of white people in the UK who did not vote for Brexit. But the racist scam and the lies of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson and a whole lot of other people worked to a T. And by the way, that photo of him standing in front of a poster with all these olive-skinned people, they were literally refugees coming in from some kind of war somewhere.

But, you know, people don't study history either in the UK, it turns out some people don't, and so it worked out just fine. And Nigel Farage absolutely pulled off one, didn't he?

With so much attention on the surge of far-right rhetoric in the United States and the rise of far-right politics across Europe, there's one country that's often missing from the conversation: Canada.

But in the years since what's been called the Freedom Convoy of 2022, reporting from Canada has pointed to a growing ecosystem of far-right and white nationalist groups inside the country, including the spread of so-called active clubs, groups of white nationalist men who basically operate fight clubs or fitness-focused clubs in anticipation of violence.

The Canadian Anti-Hate Network, an NGO, now says the white nationalist movement in Canada has never been larger or more dangerous. I'm about to get into all of that with Rachel Gilmore, an independent journalist who has been reporting on the far right in Canada and who's had to deal with all sorts of threats and harassment online as a result of that work.

My name is Mohamed Hashing, and this is Real Talk. And she joins us from Montreal. She. Rachel Gilmore. Thank you so much for coming on Real Talk. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here. Me too. L- l- there's so much that we're gonna get into, but I'm so happy that we kind of found the time to have this chat.

Um, you know, as I was prepping for this interview, Rachel, w- w- one thing I thought of asking you, you know, when, when w- when you have conversations in Canada when you're back home, you or me or whoever's listening, I, I feel like one of the things that you're, you ... The common phrases that people tell you over coffee is like, "Oh, man, thank God we're not the US.

You know, all this white nationalist stuff, all this far-right stuff, that's, that's south of the border. That's not us." How do, how do you react when you hear that? I know how I react, but how do you react? Yeah. I just, I mean, first of all, I'm very jealous of the world that they live in, where they think that doesn't exist in Canada.

Um, but yeah, and then I immediately destroy that world for them and tell them about the fact that we very much have our own white nationalism here. And in fact, a lot of the US white nationalism, I mean, we've exported some really awful guys down to the States. So- Mm ... you know, I mean, if you look at the Proud Boys- The Proud Boys

the guy who started that group was Canadian. So, you know, it's a, it's very much a, uh, mutual exchange of, of awfulness, uh- Right ... between our two countries. And, and Canada very much has its own problem with white supremacy. It's Gavin McInnes, if I'm not mistaken. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Um, but okay. Well, let's, let's delve into it.

You know, w- when it comes to issues relating to the far right in Canada, what's the landscape? What can you share about what's happening right now? So, the Canadian far right is really interesting, and it has some aspects that I think are kind of unique to Canada. Um, not necessarily because of- the country itself, but just the way that our far right has sort of coalesced here is I haven't seen anything like it.

And the extremism researchers who I lean on heavily, who are much smarter than me, um, but hopefully I can do a good job of parroting, uh, what they've told me. But, um, you know, they've told me that they don't see this really happening in the same way elsewhere either. And it's that we have this group called Diagolon that has sort of subsumed.

It's sort of, um, it's, uh, grown in this way where it adopts these other organizations that crop up. And it's sort of like we have this more centralized white nationalist movement in a way that other countries don't. They, they might have more infighting and more of these separate groups with big leaders and big personalities.

Whereas here in Canada, we kind of have these guys that are really controlling things and really like, uh, they are the main white nationalist network in this country. Well, actually, you know what? That's interesting. L- l- let's talk about it because there's, there-- you mentioned Diagolon. There's also others as well.

There's Second Sons, there's Dominion. Um, but for Diagolon, I mean, I think, uh, at face value, when you do a bit of research,

it's the way they introdu- And correct me if I'm wrong, the way they introduce themselves or the way they carry themselves is more like, "Oh, we're, we're comedians," or, "We're some sort of- Yeah ... m- meme creators," or w- th- it's something, it's something light-hearted, something that's not serious. Am I right?

Absolutely. Yeah. And, and actually, like Diagolon, Second Sons, and the Dominion Society are all tied together. They're- Okay ... they're basically, especially Second Sons and Diagolon, are really one in the same. It's the same leaders. Um, but I'll, I'll break that down in a second- Sure ... if you'd like me to. But in terms of Diagolon itself, they really came to prominence as a group of just live streamers.

They would do these livestreams where they would say some pretty egregious stuff, but they would later claim it's a joke. And particularly during, uh, the COVID-19 pandemic, they really hopped on that anti-science, anti-vaccine, anti-lockdown rhetoric, and were involved with the Freedom Convoy, for example.

Mm-hmm. And, um, they... So they sort of formed this, uh... They, they play this sort of propaganda role in a big way, where they, uh, claim to be joking, but the ideology underlying what they're joking about is very serious. If you listen to them for any extended period of time, they're very much accelerationists who have this sort of doom, uh, you know, pessimistic view of society, that we're headed towards collapse, so they wanna hasten it.

They, uh, have some members who are very much, like, white nationalists. I mean, Alex Brand is one of their most prominent, uh, members, and he's said things like, quote, "Are you gonna, are you gonna suggest deporting the Jews? Yeah. Yeah. I think we do all the time." Like, I've got that pulled up right here, and, and he's also spoken about, uh, you know, I've seen him watch footage of people from India being killed gruesomely by a train, and he's sitting there laughing.

Wow. Like, these are the things they do on their livestreams. And, um, but then they also at the same time, uh, you know, they, they explain their organization, like it's called Diagolon because they made a fake map when Jeremy Mackenzie had, like, smoked a bunch of weed. Jeremy Mackenzie is sort of the leader and founder of Diagolon.

Um, and so he was high and he looked at the, the places in the United States and Canada that didn't, at the time, have mask mandates, and noticed it sort of created a diagonal line across North America- Oh ... and he said, "Oh, we need to make our own country." Does that explain their flag? Exactly. So their flag is sort of this white diagonal line on a, on a black backdrop.

And, and so it's a joke country. And then what's difficult is some, uh, reporters came in and they were like, "These guys wanna make their own country of, of anti-mask people," and it's like, that is, that part is the joke for them. But what's real is the underlying ideology of anti-science, anti-vaccine, of white supremacy, and, um, you know, and they would say things like, "Our vice president will be a cocaine addicted goat named Philip, who's, like, demonic."

And, and so any time you call out Diagolon and point out these ideologies they're espousing, you'll end up being laughed at for, you know, falling for the meme. But the reality is, is that, like, while they do these joking sort of ideal- these, these joking, um, ideas of a, of a potential country- Mm-hmm ... and engage in, in that sort of thing, um, they're actually coalescing a following who are listening to their livestreams that run, like, sometimes they're, like, four hours long, sometimes even longer.

Um, and they do this. There's, there's various influencers in this space who do this several times a week at times. Um, and you can really immerse yourself in this world where they very much have a worldview that they're espousing that is one that is- far-right extremism And, and how successful have they been in building that following that you're talking about?

Unfortunately, quite successful. I mean, uh, we, I don't have a ton to go off of. Sure Um, but the re- the extremism researchers I've spoken to, between monitoring their gatherings, looking at the, um, the numbers who tune into their livestreams- Yeah ... they, uh, also, um, listen to the claims that these guys make about their numbers.

Obviously, they tend to be pretty, like, braggadocious, so they might say some numbers that, like, they could be inflating a little bit. But, uh, my understanding is that even if they have a lower number of participation, just based on who extremism experts at particularly the Canadian Anti-Hate Network have been able to track, this is the largest white nationalist network in Canada.

Um, so i- i- it's, it's a big group, and that is very worrying, and I think that there's these soft entry points because of the claims that it's just a meme and that it's a community es- especially during COVID, when there was a lot of people who may have been vaccine hesitant without actually being extremists, uh, that was a soft entry point that then led them down this pipeline towards broader extremist sentiments because they were taken in by this group at a time when they might have been socially ostracized because of the fact that they weren't getting vaccinated.

Um, and then these guys, in order to maintain that community, uh, they have to engage in the sort of groupthink that involves these more extreme ideologies. So it's, it's been- Mm ... uh, uh, they've been very powerful and very effective at, um, taking advantage of the grievances and, uh, vulnerabilities within our society to radicalize people towards their, uh, darker ideologies.

Look, once One Nation started to take Liberal votes, there was this real question of how the Liberals would respond to that threat, whether they would move closer to One Nation policies or, or push against it. I guess we have our answer. We do have our answer after Angus Taylor announced the Liberals', I guess, the, the first planks of what their immigration policy is, is going to be, and it really, both in the, the substance of the announcement, the tone that he was relaying as he spoke about it, and even the fact that, I mean, he's been the leader for a couple of months now, this is the first major policy offering.

And the fact that he's chosen to prioritize a hardline immigration policy gives a very strong indication of where the Liberals want to go, what they're concerned about electorally, and I guess the answer to both of those questions is One Nation. One of the things being talked about is how there was real similarities to Donald Trump's immigration policy, such as social media checks, uh, forced deportations.

Mm. One thing that puzzles me is why would the Liberal Party decide to mirror some of Donald Trump's policies when that led to such a disastrous federal election result? It didn't work last time. It's a great question, and I think it's something that we were trying to wrap our heads around when the announcement was, was made.

I think the first point to be made is that Angus Taylor and the other frontbenchers were playing down the comparisons with Trump and, and the idea that there would be ICE-style raids, you know, in Australia. But the comparisons and the echoes are very obvious. You mentioned two of them, the, the speeding up of the deportations, the checking of the social media history, and why they would want to go down that path again, given what we saw happen to, to Peter Dutton in the 2025 election.

It goes to this challenge that the Liberal Party has y- because they are shedding votes to their right, so one-time Liberal supporters and National supporters going to One Nation. And one of the motivations for those voters, I would argue it's not the only motivation, but one of those motivations is around immigration and national identity and Australian values.

And in order to, in the mind of Liberals, to develop a policy offering that assuages the concerns of those voters and is strong enough, what it requires them to do is do something that mimics or reflects the kind of ultimate hard man on immigration, and that is Donald Trump. And also I think we need to add into this equation Nigel Farage as well, the leader of Reform in UK.

So- The comparisons are there, whether the Liberals try and downplay them or not. There are echoes of Trump in what they're trying to do, and I think that carries enormous electoral risk. Before we move on to some of the detail, is any of this going to work? Because surely it will turn off a lot of migrant communities and voters who might naturally be conservative-leaning metropolitan voters.

I think the first point that we make on this is at this stage where we're at, where the Liberal Party finds themself in, is yes, they are the opposition to a Labour government, but really their main focus at the moment, their real opponent, whether they, they want to admit it or not, is One Nation. So we have to assess the policies that Angus Taylor is choosing to prioritize, and the rhetoric that he's choosing to deploy is in the context of a contest with One Nation.

Let's assume that he's successful, and they are able to kind of win back, stem some of that drift to, to One Nation. I would argue that it's not necessarily guaranteed that it's gonna happen. There's a saying that's sort of going around in, in federal politic circles at the moment that you can't out-Hanson Hanson.

But in doing so, as you mentioned, this has the potential to further alienate the broader electorate, which has abandoned the Liberal Party at the past two elections, and that includes electorates with high proportions of multicultural communities. And we see this happen time and time again after elections when those communities have rejected the Liberal Party.

There is a kind of flurry of commentary that we need to reconnect with those communities and, and really, to be frank about it, to not come across as not liking them. But then they come and, and announce policies such as these, and it has the potential to undermine all of the things that they attempted to do.

So electorally, I'm dubious that this will even work in terms of stemming the bleeding to One Nation. But even if it does work, it has the potential to cause far greater damage in the kind of wider electoral contest with Labour and the other parties. So when you think about it in that way, it begs the question, what on earth are they doing?

But of course, this is a strategy that they've chosen to adopt, and, and I think it's gonna be fascinating and a little bit concerning to see how it plays out over the next couple of months. Yeah, I mean, presumably Angus Taylor has a, has a plan, even though it, it's not entirely clear in that context. Just some of the, the detail we were looking at.

We mentioned the forced deportations. They're t- talking about 65,000 people the coalition says should be forced to leave now. Did Angus Taylor set out any detail about- How something like that would be achieved? What exactly would be done? No, and I think that was one of the features of this announcement.

So there was detail to a point. So he talked about it's kind of codifying the Australian values statement, making sure that visa applicants sign up to values. You talked about the, the kind of fast-tracking of deportations targeted at the cohort of people who have exhausted all legal avenues to remain in Australia.

He thinks there are about 65,000 of them, and also the social media vetting was another element. But in terms of the logistics and the practicalities and how that would work, there really wasn't any detail. There was no costings to, to back this up. Now, you would assume that if you're going to dedicate more resources to checking the social media histories or finding people who have exhausted all legal avenues and, and deporting them, that would cost money, it would cost resources, it would require an investment in the public service.

There was none of that detail, and in a lot of ways, this left more questions than answers. But I think perhaps in pursuing answers to those questions, we're slightly misreading what the intention of this announcement was. This wasn't an announcement, a speech that was detailing a policy which they intend to implement in government necessarily.

This was about sending a message. This was about symbols. This was about signals. But I, I'm not necessarily confident that we're gonna be able to get answers to those questions because I'm not entirely sure that the Liberal Party and the Coalition is doing the work or intends to do the work to answer those questions themselves.

Because where they're at electorally and where we are in the electoral cycle, the election's not for a couple of years, at this stage they're not talking about implementing a plan for government. It's about symbols and demonstrating to the electorate, and in this case the cohort of conservative voters that are leaving them, what they stand for, how they want to be perceived as a political entity.

So how much is Reform a surprise when it comes to the traject- trajectory of conservatism in the UK? Was Reform always in s- to some degree, even if it wasn't using that name, the horizon for the center right and conservatives in the UK? Because here in the States, where the Republican Party is today politically, I mean, this has always been what their more far-right members' rhetoric has been.

They've just embraced it and put it into action now. So was Reform always the horizon for the center right and conservatives in the UK? Yeah, I think, um, historically the conservatives, uh, like a lot of similar parties in Western Europe, have been quite, um, quite strong at drawing a line, uh, to, to show what, what they find acceptable and what they don't rhetorically.

So the kind of big historical example from the UK here is a politician called Enoch Powell. I don't know if that name will mean much to you, but he was a, um, a high profile conservative in the late 1960s. Um- And, you know, tipped possibly as a future prime minister. But he gave a speech in 1968 when he predicted that immigration to Britain from, uh, former colonies would lead to what he described as rivers of blood.

And this caused... You know, actually, his speech was very popular with a certain section of the population at the time. Um, but it was also very controversial. He was seen as, um, endorsing racism, and the then leader of the Conservative Party, Edward Heath, sh- uh, sacked him from his, uh, top team. And Powell was then treated as an outcast, um, for the rest of his political career, at least by the mainstream center right.

Um, what I think's happened, um, in our own time is that since the 2000s really, certainly the, the, over the time span that I've been covering these issues as a journalist, you have seen a kind of slow re-entry into mainstream politics of, um, uh, anti-immigration and xenophobic and racist ideas and forms of rhetoric, um, that have...

You know, they- yes, they've, they've come from, um, within the establishment. So Britain's press, for instance, has always been a kind of key purveyor of this stuff. Um, you've had, um, the conservatives and also s- to some degree Labour, as I was describing, kind of play this game of triangulation and trying to kind of keep a lid on everything by pandering a bit to anti-immigration rhetoric.

And then you've had the growth of right-wing populism for, or for people in Britain, uh, that means... Or rather, right-wing populism in Britain since around 2010, um, has been encapsulated by Nigel Farage. It's, it's his projects that have really kind of, um, flourished during this period. Um, and that's partly because Farage is very adept at kind of creating a form of right-wing populism that works within British politics.

So he's always very strongly condemned fascists and neo-Nazis like the BNP. You know, draws a clear line against kind of any association with them. Uh, Reform has never been, you know, Reform and its predecessor parties run by Farage, they've, they've never had anything to do with fascism, but they do still trade in these kind of far-right themes, um, that we've been talking about.

And, um, over time, that has, um, you know, kind of ground- Down the mainstream as well, particularly after the Brexit referendum of 2016, which Farage was i- instrumental in bringing about. It's prompted a kind of radicalization of the center right itself. So Boris Johnson, who I mentioned earlier, who tried to do his own version of, um, right-wing populism in charge of the Conservative Party was, was the example of how the conservatives themselves went down a far more radical path in recent years than previously.

Um, but then there's been something else that has happened in, I would say, the last two to three years, in fact, um, which is partly what prompted me to write the book, which is although this has been a fairly slow process accumulating over time, it's a bit like somewhere in the last three to five years, the, the floodgates opened, and you've just seen this kind of entry of, um, far-right rhetoric, extremist ideas, racist, uh, language and, um, and, and forms of rhetoric, um, just kind of, um, enter the mainstream very rapidly in a way that I've, I've not experienced in my lifetime, at least.

And it's partly a result of this accumulating over time. I think it's also what happens when you've got this, this kind of strong anti-immigration politics and a kind of strong demand for right-wing nationalism already established, and then a country comes under severe kind of social and eco-economic pressures due to other external factors, uh, you know, like cost of living, energy prices and so on and so on.

Uh, but I think the other big part of it is it's, it's also the way that, um, you know, media technology has developed and has just completely disrupted the, the settled ways of doing politics. So, um, the role that algorithmically driven social media has played in forming this kind of new far-right discourse and sort of dragging established politicians along with it, uh, um, can't be understated, I think.

You also point out in your book, if we tolerate this, like the proverbial boiling frog that sits in water as it slowly heats up rather than jump to safety, we have allowed something incredibly dangerous to creep up on us. Yet our political class seems at best indifferent and at worst too welcome it. So to what ex- extent is this due to any reluctance by the center to be critical of capitalism or to offer an alternative to neoliberalism and austerity, or to challenge nationalism?

Uh, to what extent is this because the, uh, the Labour Party, the left, the alternative to, uh, Reform, is not willing to critique capitalism to offer an alternative to, uh, neoliberalism and auster- and austerity and to critique nationalism, to critique the actual things that Reform embraces? Yeah, I mean, I think that's a huge part of the story, really.

Um- You know, what we've had in Britain is this long period where it's, it's become clear to most people that the, all of the sort of received wisdom of neoliberalism never, uh, no longer works. You know, and we, whether it was desirable in the first place or not is a different question. But you could say up until the 2008 financial crisis that it was a, a system of governance that, um, you know, allowed, allowed, allowed economic growth.

It allowed some people to get very wealthy, and governments could argue, well, if, you know, the rich are getting richer, um, this, uh, th- this will benefit other people in society, either through that wealth trickling down or through, um, a, you know, a, a center-left government doing a little bit of redistribution.

Um, since 2008, that has really not been the case. Um, Britain's been through, uh, the longest period of wage stagnation since the Napoleonic Wars, I believe, in the 2010s. Um, you know, wages have flat-lined for most people, uh, but prices have gone up. Housing costs have gone up. Um, money has also been taken out of public services, which has added another pressure to people's lives, and so on.

But until quite recently, politicians would still kind of talk as if the old way of doing things continued uninterrupted. The idea that there, there is no alternative, that was another of Margaret Thatcher's sayings, um, to the neoliberal way of doing things. And that has started to break down. I mean, the, the first kind of, um, shock to that was, was the Brexit referendum.

And ironically, it's, it's the conversation around immigration and the ideas pushed by the populist right that have for a long time were the only kind of critique of neoliberalism or globalization, which is often k- kind of used interchangeably as a term there. It was the only kind of critique of this stuff that was really, really allowed in, in mainstream politics.

You know, so particularly after, after the Brexit referendum, you would then hear lots of commentators in, in the mainstream media talking about, "Oh, well, this, this is a rejection of globalization. It's gone too far. There are sometimes, there are more important things in life than, uh, market forces and economic growth and so on."

But that was, they, it was as if you were only ever allowed to say that in relation to immigration policy and kind of national identity and national culture. Um, and I think Labour really failed, um- To seize the moment there. I mean, they made a good go of it under Jeremy Corbyn, but that didn't work. Uh, the Starmer government, uh, you know, they've, they've kind of made noises that we're living in a changed world now, and we need to do things differently, but there's no substance to it.

And I think this is really, um, a big part of why right-wing populism is doing as well as it is, is that there has been no convincing alternative to date put forward by the left.

So, um, the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, uh, is a great resource on a lot of this stuff. Yeah. And they actually published a piece breaking this down and, and breaking down the ties between them.

But effectively, as we just- explained, Diagolon really is a sort of propaganda arm where they post memes, they do the livestreams, they do a lot of irony poisoning and just, like, pretending that it's all a joke when in fact it's actually very real. And so people can joke their way into becoming radicalized where-

or they don't realize they're internalizing the, the things that they're joking about as they do so. Um, but then an interesting thing happened while I was monitoring Diagolon over the last few years. They did th- this thing they called, um, uh, the, the Rage Tour. And they, um... I might be getting that name wrong, but it's it was like the Road Rage Tour or something like that.

But, uh, they, they went on tour across the country and held events where they spoke to the public, to anyone who paid to, to see them at these events. And, um, you know, I got my hands on leaked audio of one of these events after, uh, you know, an activist had infiltrated, uh, one of these, uh, you know, weird little tour things they went on where they did a mix of shitty comedy and very real and scary, uh, hateful espousing of ideas.

And one of the things that stood out to me was Derek Harrison, who's one of the sort of... There's sort of three guys at the top of Diagolon: Derek Harrison, Jeremy McKenzie, who's really the leader, and Alex Friend. Um, those are sort of the, the big three guys, and then there's Jeremy's girlfriend, Morgan, uh, May.

And Derek Harrison, in this leaked audio, was saying that, uh, you know, at first it was all a joke. We were just kinda messing around. But then We had politicians. Trudeau said our name in the House of Commons But in the audio I obtained, they admit it themselves on stage. Listen to this This all started as a joke, you know, making YouTube videos, but then we got noticed, right?

The Prime Minister has said our name in the House of Commons multiple times. Right. So we realized that we can move the needle in politics in Canada. So we decided to take it a little bit more seriously. As you can tell, this isn't my style. 'Cause he, uh, highlighted Diagolon as a group, uh, that was concerning in the House of Commons.

And, uh, and he said, uh, Derek Harrison, "That's when we realized we should take this a little more seriously, 'cause we can really move the needle." And that was sort of the shift that I've observed, where now they have taken what was originally this shitty live stream, uh, you know, group that would just espouse these awful ideas, but generally kept that to the online world, um, aside from a few like little in-person meetups from fans and, you know, the guys who know each other.

Um, they ch- took that, and they have brought it offline and created this organization called Second Sons- Mm ... which is an active club. It is a group of guys who are doing military-style drills and practicing fighting with the underlying ideology of, you know, opposing immigration. Uh, it, it really is just like quite, um- A- and these active clubs- Y- There's, there's, there's, I guess, multiple active clubs, 'cause there's Nationalist 13, right?

NS 13. There's, there's, there's... It's not just one active club across Canada, from, from my understanding. Yeah. So basically, so the Second Sons have chapters. Um, it's hard to say whether those chapters are just like one guy in certain towns or if there's a couple. But you can see, like I monitor their Telegram chats, and, uh- Yeah

this is a, a social media app where a lot of... It's very loosely moderated, to put it lightly. So a lot of these guys coalesce there and, and can say things that they can't say on other social media. And they post pictures of their meetups, their training, you know, at gyms. And, uh, you know, they, they have outwardly said, Alex Vran, that they're inspired by groups like the United States white supremacist group Patriot Front.

They've gone on the record and said that they're inspired by Patriot Front. And, um, that's really concerning, because they are Training offline seemingly to engage in violence because of the fact that what they're training in is fighting and military style drills. And yes, there are chapters across the country.

And, and another thing that's fascinating that goes back to my original point about how this is, uh, really Diagolon and its, uh, you know, associates are absorbing the white nationalist and, and extremist, far right extremist movement in Canada. Um, there are other active clubs that were preexisting- Mm-hmm

uh, like the Frontenac Active Club, that have been absorbed by Diagolon, and they actually, like, formally announced that now this group is a Second Sons active club or part of their group. And these guys have uniforms. They've started trying to intimidate people with these public demonstrations where they all wear black and mask their faces. They've gone in front of- And that's a key thing, Rachel, right? Because they- Yeah ... they have held public rallies. Yes. Yes. Absolutely. Like, they have gone to, uh...

In the Niagara region, they- Yeah ... uh, held a demonstration around the statue of Isaac Brock. They went to a CBC, Canada's national, you know, public broadcaster- Yeah ... uh, location in Ottawa, which is also a block away from our Parliament buildings, and they were standing directly in front of some parliamentary buildings where MPs do their work.

Um, and they were holding a sign that said, "CBC hates white people." And, you know, just railing on, standing there. Like, the Jeremy Mackenzie gave some big speech. And, um, you know, there was also a demonstration that same day in Regina, Saskatchewan. Uh, and you know, these guys are all in their uniforms. Uh, very Patriot front-style, uh, aesthetics to their uniforms as well.

You can see the inspiration there. And, uh, you know, the banner is also very similar to the kinds of banners that the Australian neo-Nazi group, um, uh, the NSN tends to w- hold and walk around with. So there's a lot of cross-pollination and- Mm ... uh, inspiration there. I mean, Alex Friend has interviewed Thomas Sewell, who's a very prominent Australian neo-Nazi, on his livestreams.

And, you know, it's just like they say the N-word nonstop and just say all kinds of stuff. Um, but yes, it was, it was in person, and it was, um, it was concerning to me just that they have this level of organization because when you combine that with the sort of hateful ideology they espouse, I'm very concerned about, first of all, one of their members taking it upon themselves to act on what Jeremy Mackenzie, for example, says all the time in his livestreams, which is that someone has to do something about this.

This world is... You know, there's so much wrong with the world, someone has to do something. Um, but also the fact that they are, um, that something could happen in a more organized way, and it doesn't necessarily have to be anything as formal as an attack. I'm not saying that they're plotting anything along those lines, but you know, groups like, uh, the Proud Boys would go and they would antagonize what they would call Antifa or any progressive- Mm-hmm

protesters and get in these street brawls. So I am concerned that we might see an escalation in violence because these guys are training themselves for it. And what is the end goal of that if not to, uh, act on the violence that they're training themselves for? And ultimately, what is it that they want?

Like, I looked at some of the stuff that Dominion has put up. Yeah. And the, it's, you know... I, I guess the, the, the big-picture stuff is that they wanna establish mass deportation, and they wanna basically get rid of the permanent residency status, uh, in, in Canada, right? And they also, which I found interesting, they wanted to set up a voluntary, I guess, renunciation of your Canadian citizen- citizenship if you're a descendant of, of immigrants.

Um, so it's, it's, um, it's, it's obviously all related to immigration, most of it at least. Um, ob- there's also xenophobia, there's Islamophobia, there's- Yeah ... antisemitism. But, uh, a- again, from, from what you, you, where you are, what's the overarching thing that these groups want at the end of the day? Yeah, I mean, uh, it's white in nature.

It is the dominance of white people, and they believe that Canada is a country that- Belongs to white people, which is ironic, or not, maybe that's not the right term for it, but it, it's ludicrous when you think about the fact that white people haven't even been here that long and that we are only here because of colonialism.

But, uh, yeah, they, they basically don't want people of color in this country.

On that point, Angus Taylor gave some examples in his speech and, and since then about the specific incidents or examples of, of which migrants he might be thinking about- Mm-hmm ... when he talks about these policies. But did he say at any point specifically which country or which religious background he's targeting?

No, he talked in, in broad strokes, and I think when he talked about multiculturalism and immigration to Australia, he really- Broke it into two groups. He talked about what he characterized as examples of good migrants, and he used the example of his grandfather was the head of the Snowy Hydro scheme, and there were...

That was essentially built by migrants, and he saw firsthand how they integrated in Australian society, and they were mostly, mostly European migrants. And then what Taylor has done is characterized or contrasted them with essentially what he believes are bad migrants. He used this phrase, "migrants who have subversive intent," and it sorta creates this idea or this picture of people who come to Australia with sinister motives wanting to undermine our way of life.

Now, he did single out the refugees that had fled Gaza during the war and come to Australia as an example of people who had come from a country with a value system whose values were incompatible with his idea of Australian culture. And he said that that cohort presented a high risk to the country. Now, the government has responded to, to those claims by noting that that cohort has been the most kind of highly scrutinized in, in Australian history.

But that is the kind of big picture distinction that Taylor is attempting to draw, and it has really caused alarm in sections of the community. And for a long time in Australia, it was a bipartisan position that we have the most successful multicultural country in the world. Multiculturalism has not been part of a- Australian society, it is Australian society.

And Taylor is essentially arguing that that idea hasn't worked, and it hasn't worked because there are good migrants and there are bad migrants, and that we cannot continue to assume that this ideal that we have worked as a multicultural society because there are elements of it that just haven't worked and in his view have failed.

Well, and, and also abandoning w- what we always thought was a bipartisan support- Yeah ... of a non-discriminatory migration system. Yeah, I mean, he, he is saying that there, there isn't going to be discrimination based on country or ethnicity, but what he is saying is now that we should have an immigration system that discriminates based on values.

But if we take a step back and kind of look beyond questions about the practicalities of things like social media vetting and so on, what is Angus Taylor actually talking about? What is he actually arguing? It's about a different kind of Australia. He's proposing a different kind of, of country, he's proposing a different direction for the country, and I think it's a very significant and a very serious debate that, that he's proposing.

Let's, um, talk about some of the reaction. Are some analysts and journalists saying that Angus Taylor has sort of crossed some sort of traditional red line here for the Liberal Party when it comes to supporting our current immigration system? Certainly when he talks about the fact that we have a non-discriminatory immigration system has been the pillar of the system since the end of the White Australia policy.

It's one of the things that can happen in federal politics which I think as journalists we need to be really conscious of, is things happen in small increments to the point where they never necessarily seem hugely significant when it's announced. When Angus Taylor made that speech yesterday, it was largely unsurprising.

It was largely consistent with the themes that he'd been talking about for weeks. It's consistent with the sorts of things that Tony Abbott has been speaking about. He's a very significant thought leader in the Liberal Party. So it wasn't surprising, but then when you take a step back and think what he's actually talking about, it is a very, very significant shift in terms of the way that an alternative prime minister, in his case, the leader of a major party, is talking about a fundamental pillar of Australian society.

And in terms of the, the reaction that it's prompted, I mean, the, you had, um, the Greens immigration spokesperson David Shoebridge talking about this is essentially the White Australia policy in 2026. I, I was interested in that. What made the Greens say that they think it's a throwback to the White Australia policy?

So essentially, I th- I think what the Greens are when they're making that point is when you strip back what Angus Taylor is, is trying to hark back to, it is an Australia of decades gone by, and the, the Greens are essentially accusing Angus Taylor, and this is something that he would push back on quite strongly, but of harking back to an Australia from the White Australia era.

He is appealing to this sense of an Australia that has been lost, and it's been lost because it's been undermined by waves of immigration, and waves of immigration of individuals who have brought- Other cultures, cultures that he would argue are incompatible with Australian identity, and that has had the effect of undermining our society and our culture And Labour's pushed back.

They've called it dog whistling. Yeah. And that's, I think it was, it was always gonna be interesting to see what the response from the government was going to be. And I, I say that because they are sensitive to the, the political sensitivity of the immigration debate. They know that there is angst in sections of the community, people who aren't One Nation supporters, people who aren't themselves racist.

So it was, it was always gonna be interesting to see how hard the government came out in condemning Angus Taylor. And as you said, Tony Burke, the home affairs minister, was quite strong, and we've seen a number of other Labour MPs, the Social Services Minister, Tanya Plibersek, other backbenchers, such as Jerome Laxale, whose electorate of Bennelong is, is very multicultural, being very strong in this idea that multiculturalism hasn't been a positive and a core pillar of Australian society.

And Finally, Section D, STAKES AND RESISTANCE

I got out of my car. I had my... I always have my purse around my neck like this, and I had my cellphone, and I walked around to the side of the driver's side, and they had this young woman on the ground. And I held my cellphone out, and I was gonna start recording, and one of the agents that were right there immediately turned around, grabbed me by the neck, and threw me back on the ground and got on top of me.

Proceeded to try and handcuff me. I wasn't resisting. I, I was looking at him like, "What the hell are you doing?" In lengthy, detailed testimony, Moriarty recounted being handcuffed, pushed into a vehicle, and an agent cutting her purse from around her neck with a knife. Moriarty was never arrested and never charged.

As her testimony ended, commission member Ahmed Bassett asked Moriarty how the experience had affected her. It's insane. I too chose this. My grandfather was an appellate court judge for the state of New York. I grew up admiring him as an amazing man, and I wanted to be like him. Law and order.

Everybody follows the rules. We, it works out. And that's not what's happening now.

It's Consider This from NPR. The Illinois state government has been investigating the United States federal government. Specifically, a panel called the Illinois Accountability Commission has been conducting interviews and reviewing footage from last year's federal immigration enforcement crackdown in Chicago known as Operation Midway Blitz.

The Illinois Accountability Commission was created by an executive order of Governor JB Pritzker. Governor Pritzker joins us now. Welcome to All Things Considered. Glad to be with you, Scott. Today was the last day of the hearings. Lots of video, lots of testimony as we heard. What sticks with you? Well, I, the testimony of the eyewitnesses, the people who experienced the onslaught of CBP and ICE in our streets, was very powerful.

I- we heard from Miramar Martinez, who was a young woman who i- was sitting in her car. She saw ICE and CBP doing things that she knew were wrong. They were going after tackling brown, bla- brown and Black people, people with accents, people who were US citizens and here legally, people who hadn't broken any laws.

Mm-hmm. And she started yelling and, and beeping her horn, and you know what they did? They shot her five times, and she wasn't the only one in Chicago. There was, Silverio, G- Villegas Gonzalez, who was killed by ICE and CBP, and this all happened before people paid attention in Minneapolis. We really had to develop a playbook to deal with this, and one of those items in our playbook was, "Everybody pull out your phone.

Take a video when you see them doing something wrong. Keep evidence." And then this accountability commission took that testimony, and video Live testimony from people who were there, legal experts- Mm-hmm ... and so on. And this was led by, a federal judge, a state, senior judge, and they did deep dives into 16 different investigations.

They interviewed 60 eyewitnesses. They reviewed over 100 hours of ICE and CBP body camera footage. Can I ask- 250 different videos. Lot, lots of work done. What does accountability look like to you? Because these federal agents have broad immunity, if not the complete immunity that President Trump claims.

What is accountability? I'm glad you asked, because, first of all, that evidence has already been used in federal court cases to limit ICE and CBP and what they can do on our streets. It also has been used to fight back against Donald Trump trying to, deploy National Guard into our streets. Indeed, it was our attorney general who won the case at the Supreme Court that keeps National Guard from being deployed in any American city right now.

So, that's part of what's been done. That's an accountability item. The other, of course, is that these folks need to know that they may not be held accountable by this administration, they may not be held accountable by this Department of Homeland Security or CBP or ICE, Bovino, Homan, the rest of them.

Mm-hmm. But they can be held accountable when those people are out of office, when there's a new administration or a new Congress. Do you think or worry that President Trump will issue broad pardons to ICE and Border Patrol agents before he leaves office? I think he's gonna do that. The question is, can you really pardon the entire federal government?

Can you really pardon all of CBP and ICE? Maybe he will, but r- also, people can be held civilly liable- Mm-hmm ... for their personal actions here. So they... Look, what I want people to know is if you're an ICE agent, a CBP agent, and you're on the streets of any American city, we're keeping track, and if you do something wrong now, you're gonna be held accountable r- later.

So think twice before you break the law. On that topic of later accountability, I'll just note, it's not the point of the question, but I'll just note you're mentioned in the conversation about people thinking of running for president in the next election. When a new administration comes in, what do you want to see the federal government do reviewing what happened in Chicago, what happened in Minneapolis, what happened elsewhere?

Well, I think it would start with a change in the House of Representatives, a change in the Senate, which could happen as early as January of 2027, and that is with hearings. This Republican Congress is unwilling to hold any hearings or ask any questions. Mm-hmm. It's one of the reasons why everybody's paying attention to our accountability commission, 'cause we're the only people who are asking those questions and taking a record.

So I believe you're gonna see that investigation begin in '27. I think it's appropriate. Look, we all should know what's happened. People should know across the country, even if they live in neighborhoods that haven't been under attack yet- But to that- ... because this should never happen again ... to that point, though, how partisan the environment is.

How much, how much AI and other factors are just making up facts right now. That a lot of people are going to see this report and say, "That's a report that came from a Democratic governor, a partisan actor, and therefore I'm not going to read it. I'm not going to believe what I heard from it."

How do you get information to break through in this environment? Well, first we had testimony from Republicans at this commission, so it isn't some sort of partisan endeavor. We had, the leader of the Republicans in the House of Representatives, he's now, retired, but he came back in order to appear before the commission.

He talked about free and fair elections and the problem of deploying people who are wearing uniforms and masks and, and, automatic weapons, and doing that- A r-, in and around an election, which I believe is going to happen in November, and he warned us against that. And you've seen Republicans stand up against this administration.

Mm-hmm. I do not believe that standing up for democracy has to be some partisan endeavor. You just mentioned your concerns about the November election. I'm curious what you have learned from this commission, what you will take going forward about how state government, how local government can react if there's a strong federal presence again in November or another time.

Okay. Well, I think everybody needs to understand that the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution does allow the federal government to have their laws are supreme over state laws. Having said that, there, there are, ways for states to stand up and push back. I'll give you an example. I believe that in the November elections, you're gonna see, in state after state, you're gonna see Democratic governors deploying people to protect polling places, to make sure that even if there are, people wearing uniforms, ICE and CBP standing around near polling places, that we're gonna be able to escort people into the polling places.

We're gonna be able to communicate with people to make sure that they know that what ICE and CBP are doing is simply designed to scare you and that it's your opportunity at this moment to stand up for democracy, to do the right thing. This may be the toughest moment, but it is the most crucial moment for people to get out and vote.

You're talking about state authorities perhaps confronting federal authorities outside polling stations. Is that a scenario you're talking about? It's very important to recognize that we're not talking about confrontations with any weapons or anything like that. We are talking about peaceful protests.

Mm-hmm. We are talking about... B- remember, these elections, all across the country, elections are controlled by the states. Mm-hmm. And I have always advocated that we, first of all, keep it at the state level. I know Trump would like to federalize elections so that he can take control.

I've been in these centers for a long time predating Donald Trump and, um- Like I said, this has always been a system that we have been fighting.

You know, I've been an abolitionist of ICE detention since starting this work for very good reason. Um, but what we're seeing now is a true, a true human rights crisis. So more people have died in ICE custody under the Trump administration than we have record of of, of a president, and we're talking about a year and a half.

All right? I have clients who have died in ICE detention, and when I look at the medical records and see what happened to my clients, it is atrocious. It is gross medical neglect. I have a client who seized out in his dorm, having a massive seizure. They said, "He looks drunk," and left him alone and did not get him to emergency services for another four and a half hours.

He was brain dead when they took him to the hospital. He was forty-four years old, fleeing the war in Ukraine. Now, and then you talk about the overall, uh, inhumane conditions and treatment. So again, going out to the Everglades, I will not call that place what they call it, Alligator Alcatraz, 'cause it's disgusting.

It is the Everglades internment camp, and it is an absolutely abusive center that is operating with impunity and abusing people. Um, I just had released and filed a declaration in a s- in a case about this, uh, facility that's around First Amendment access to counsel, and showed the court the beatings that my clients took for absolutely...

Y- you know, there's no reason to beat anyone ever, but completely unprovoked regardless. People are crammed into literal cages. The facilities are disgusting. The toilets overflow. They live amongst sewage. They're giving fed portions of food that multiple clients tell me, "Katie, it looks like what you serve a baby in a baby jar."

They're losing weight by the, just pounds by the day. Um, and they institute a level of corporal punishment that I think most Americans wouldn't believe happens on our soil, and it is happening. They're taking people outside the Everglades, putting them into shackles, and leaving them in the sun as punishment without access to food and water, and just saying, "Stand there shackled."

In the Everglades, Sam, with the mosquitoes, with the conditions, with the heat, I mean, it's, it's really atrocious. And my client that I had shared with the court and that was is- wa- was, was released in the press, Rico, when they took him out and beat him so severely, and the picture that you may have saw, that you may have seen, excuse me.

You know, I talked to him eight days later, and he looks like that. Oh. He didn't get medical care, and right now as we are speaking, he is sitting in what they call the box. They only took him to s- they took him straight to solitary for no reason, which is a two-by-two-meter cage. And when he came to me last Friday, he said, "I have to sit for a minute 'cause I'm too dizzy.

I haven't seen the sun in eight days." The... And I think this is the thing that people don't understand, that th-this system of detention, uh, uh, and, and I think we maybe explained it in terms of, like, the money that's being made there, um, are, are they... Are your clients... Uh, because I've heard stories of, uh, of clients who have every legal right to be in this country.

They've either have work permits, they have... or they're in line for citizenship or whatever it is. Asylum pending. But they get thrown into these... They, they, they're in detention center, and they're just like, "This is just... This is torture. I'm literally being tortured, and I'm gonna s- I'm gonna, uh, just go to them and say I wanna, uh, deport."

And I've heard stories where they're not even letting people do that, to self-deport. The... So we haven't even gotten to the actual immigration court system in detention, right? So most detention cen- what most people who are in detention, when they go to court, it's a court in a detention center, and what has happened to the, to the immigration space in court is a whole other level of torture.

So we started the Trump administration with the Laken Riley Act, right? The Laken Riley Act was an attempt to lock up as many, many, many people as possible, regardless of what the, uh, the background of the charge. You didn't have to have probable cause. It was just like, if anybody's ever mentioned you did XYZ crime, you go to detention, you can't leave.

You're, you're mandatorily detained. Then they killed humanitarian parole. There's only two ways you can get out of ICE detention typically when your case is pending, humanitarian parole from ICE or bond from an IJ, an immigration judge, right? Humanitarian parole has been a, an option for immigrants in detention since detention centers started.

Trump killed it. It doesn't exist. They will not grant it. I've had people on their deathbed, they won't grant it. Bond, destroyed. They killed bond. There's a case called Yahiri Hurtado from the BIA that says the only people that are eligible for bond are those that were on a visa and overstayed it and had no other infraction for the time they were here.

That is millions, millions of people that would previously be bond eligible. So the system right now is intended to keep them there. Keep them there, keep them there, keep them there. And why do we think that is? 'Cause of the conversation we just had. Because the longer they're there, $200 a day. $200- Just keep it in your head, right?

$70,000. 200 bucks a day. I mean, that's, uh... W- uh, uh- If somebody who's good at math, tell us the math on that. I know. What is that? Like, one point, uh, five... Or is that 15 million a day? Um, uh, uh, it's just astonishing. Um, uh, I, uh, I, I'd love to have you back on, and we can talk, uh, more a- about this. Um, but, um, so what, what, what can be done at this point?

Like, I mean, uh, or, or I should say, what, what we saw in Minnesota It obviously sort of like, uh, made it harder for ICE to be in urban centers where there is a higher concentration of media. Uh, I've talked to reporters who say like, "In the rural areas, ICE is still working. They're still out there. These people-" Oh, yeah

have not gone away. Um, and so, uh, the, the problem is le- maybe slightly less intense out there because there's only so many people, you know, the, the, without the density, it's harder for them to arrest at the same, uh, rates they were doing before. You know? Well, and we have to consider the- ... thousands and thousands of people across the United States in hiding too, that have, that have seen this.

Yes. I mean, there are, there are families living like it's, like e- extreme COVID again, right? That's how they're living. Windows closed- I, I mean, it's like- ... staying home ... it's Anne Frank, uh, you know, we've been- Exactly ... talking to people- Exactly ... in Minneapolis who are like, "This is like an Anne Frank situation," uh- Yeah

where we have, uh, families hiding other families in their homes. They don't leave because, uh, they can't go to work, uh, they can't go to school. Um, on the back end though, like I've seen, we, you know, and, and I think we've talked to a couple of people who have organized against, uh, the, the purchase of a warehouse for a detention center, and we're hearing more and more about pushback from localities.

And seeing some success. Yes, and seeing some success. Um, but it does feel like it's, you know, a couple of small victories in this sort of like almost this tidal wave that's coming in. Yeah. Um, w- Yeah ... what else from your perspective can be done on this back end? I mean, like we just saw in Florida, uh, the Fifth Circuit, notoriously right-wing court, uh, deem that the federal government somehow had no involvement in the establishment of the Everglades internment camp, which of course is absurd.

Uh, I mean, on its face it's absurd. Of, uh, it would not exist but for the federal government saying- Yep ... "Well, build a, an internment camp here." Um- They're fed- they're in federal custody. Give me a break. I, I mean, it's absurd. And, um, so in b- in, in red states it becomes that much harder I would imagine- Right

f- because- Right ... the political will is, we wanna lock these people up. But from your perspective, like out- and outside, and I can't encourage people enough to support an organization, uh, like yours, um, there are, are many- I appreciate it ... um- Yeah ... a- a- you know, because obviously, y- you know, uh, a God know, a, a, having known a, a, knowing a couple of immigration attorneys, it's like, um, a, i- i- it's like triage, what's going on now.

Yeah. Uh- Yeah ... in a war zone. And, um- Yeah ... but so what else can we do, like hearing this, what else can we do? Obviously, you know, uh, we- Yeah ... we'll put a link to the Sanctuary of the South and, and, and, uh, w- w- we can feature others. Yeah, absolutely. But what else can we do? Yeah. So, I mean, one, I think there are major, major lessons and hope to be gleaned from Minnesota.

You know, one of the warehouses you're talking about that's been, uh, prevented is in Florida. That's crazy, right? That's Florida coming out and showing- Yeah ... that the citizens of Florida do not align with the DeSantis philosophy and the Trump philosophy. So we have real roadmap of saying, um, that resistance can work.

But the reality that people need to understand is that Trump started with immigration and this authoritarian surge for a reason Because one, it's primed already. We've already talked about why. Abusive system, highly profitable, et cetera, right? But the other thing is he has complete control here. The immigration system is under the executive, so you have to understand, he really gets to, in large measure, go forward as he desires.

So it's very hard legally to push back holistically, right? Right. So we have to take the fight to the street as we have. We have to continue pushing where you are in your communities, find people who are organizing, support your communities, and figure out a way to get involved. I guarantee you that there are people that are involved.

Reach out to us if you need connections. Um, but we also have to understand that what we're seeing and what we're doing now is laying a framework for the future, all right? We will be at a point where we're past the Trump administration, all right? We may all be so exhausted we can't stand by then, but it will happen, and generations will come behind us.

And by getting the public engaged in this issue, in what has been an abusive immigration system and, and to a complete humanitarian crisis under the Trump regime, we can change the system. We can defund ICE. We can abolish ICE. We can change detention centers. We can shut them down. So we have to keep this pressure up.

You get one question, and that's it, 'cause I don't really like MSNBC or MSNow, whatever it is. Collins didn't respond to our multiple interview requests, but when MSNow caught him outside his office on Capitol Hill, he seemed to prove Long's point, turning questions into a campaign speech. What is your response to residents of Social Circle who say you're not doing enough to prevent the building of this DHS facility?

Well, first of all, the, the community of Social Circle wants to help get this problem resolved- Mm-hmm ... that Jon Ossoff put on them. Mm-hmm. The pain that he inflicted on that community and my district. As a matter of fact, Laken Riley was murdered in my district, so you wanna know some people that actually feel the pain- Mm-hmm

of what these illegal criminal aliens have done, they understand that and they know that. We have been in constant c- contact with DHS and the city officials there in Social Circle to make sure that all of their questions are being answered. We've had some of our Democratic leaders come out and do more than our Republican leaders have done.

It's eerie. Is that uncomfortable for you? It's very uncomfortable for me. Is that kinda weird? I've had lots of discussions with Warnock's office, and I, I am proud of him for coming down here. It's very uncomfortable. You know, it's, it's not gonna make me vote Democratic. You didn't vote for Warnock. No, it won't make me vote for him, but I'm proud of him.

Senator Ossoff was one of the first elected officials to get in touch with Social Circle leaders and write letters to DHS demanding answers. He's also backing a bill that would require local approval before the federal government can open ICE detention facilities. Senator Warnock has gone even further, touring infrastructure sites in the town's elementary school, which sits less than a half a mile from the detention site.

Why are you helping them? Oh, I promised the people of Georgia that I would work for all of them, and so for me, this is not the difference between right and left. It's the difference between right and wrong. And what is happening in Social Circle, Georgia, what, uh, the Trump/Vance administration is proposing is wrong.

It's dead wrong. Why aren't Georgia Republicans doing more? I, I think you should ask them. That's a good question. Oh, we've tried, and they won't, they won't tell us. Well, look, in a party that Trump owns, that functions too often more like a cult than a party, and I think that at some point you have to ask yourself, "Why did you get in this work in the first place?"

If, I mean, if you cannot advocate for your own constituents, why wear the pin? In a way, this warehouse is the logical endpoint of what Trump himself promised on the campaign trail. I will never forget seeing the Mass Deportation Now signs everywhere. You know, in order to lead an unprecedented campaign like that, you need spaces to hold shocking numbers of people.

Is this essentially what many of the residents there voted for? I, I think that even the folks who voted for Donald Trump did not vote for this. I don't believe that the people of Social Circle, Georgia, thought that they were voting, uh, to triple the size of their town, uh, by bringing a 10,000-bed mega detention center- Uh, to their little neck of the woods.

On March 5th, Kristi Noem was fired as head of DHS. Then President Trump picked Markwayne Mullin to lead the agency. At his confirmation hearing, he tried to put distance between himself and Noem. We gotta protect the homeland, and we're gonna do that. But obviously, we wanna work with community leaders.

So it's important that we're talking to the communities, and if we're having, uh, additional needs, we can work with the cities, we can work with the municipalities- And then this, this town current- ... but we should always communicate with them. But Senator Warnock isn't holding his breath. Do you believe that Mullin will lead DHS in a different direction?

Well, I hope so, because the stakes are so very high. But I'm, I'm not focused so much on a person, I'm focused on the policy. And what we've seen from this administration is that Donald Trump makes his own policy. Under Mullin's new leadership, DHS has paused warehouse purchases and is reviewing projects already in motion.

What that means for Social Circle remains an open question. When pressed, DHS told MS Now that, "As with any transition, we are reviewing agency policies and proposals," and added that, "Secretary Mullin will work with community leaders. We want to be good partners." Social Circle City Manager, Eric Taylor, hopes they keep those promises.

If they fall through, the consequences will be impossible to ignore. So is all of this what I think it is? Yes, this is, uh, City of Social Circle sewer. This is the actual, um, the, the first stage in the treatment process. But- I can see the, the line right here. Yeah, this is it. So this is, we, we had the ability to treat 650,000 gallons.

When you've spoken to your own engineers, your own experts, worst-case scenario, what are they imagining would happen? Overflow. Overflow... Overflow of this. I'm, I'm tempted to make a joke about you being up shit's creek. Yeah, I am. Yeah. Yeah. You don't need to be an expert to do this math. Social Circle has a treatment plant licensed to handle 660,000 gallons of sewage, and is already operating at capacity.

DHS wants to add another million gallons a day to that, with no clear plan as to how. The town also has a permit for only one million gallons of water use per day. They currently use around 800,000 for 5,000 people, and DHS would like to use that water source too, for up to 10,000 more people. Do you think they just haven't done the homework that your teams have done, or do you think they don't care?

I'm not gonna say they don't care. Um, I don't believe they have thoroughly bothered to understand what our engineering concerns are. Before Taylor reached out to them, nobody from DHS had called, paid a visit, or coordinated with local engineers, police, or the fire department. Four months later, they've only had one phone call.

After that one phone call, you've never heard from DHS again? No. Um, they've indicated that they're, uh, willing to, uh, put their engineers in contact with our engineers. Um, to this point, that still has not happened. Do you feel like your community is being steamrolled? Absolutely. Absolutely. Um, I feel like at times that, um, I am one man standing in front of the freight train that's the federal government.

The facility was originally set to open in May or June. Under Mullin, the timeline is unclear. For now, Taylor is using every tool to make that impossible. I've put a lock on the water meter over there. You went over and locked their water at the facility? Yes. Can you do that? I don't know. I don't know.

Okay. I did. You did it. All right, it's done. I did, I did. And, and, and, and I, and I told them that I wasn't gonna remove the lock until I get a satisfactory answer about how they're gonna be servicing the water and sewer. You know, I, I'm a big admirer of John Lewis and, and his, um, get in good trouble, and that's my, uh, that's my one way of hopefully, you know, getting into some good trouble on behalf of, of this community.

The other question that's so often asked is about people arriving at the first safe country, and there is so much information both around the Schengen Agreement, but also people saying, "Why don't people stop in France? France is a safe country." I, I hate repeating these things. Um, I guess let's take those in turn.

So first of all, around the misinformation around the Schengen Agreement. Yeah, so essentially, um, within the EU there is a, a system for managing which state has responsibility for an asylum claim, and one of the criteria that can be used to determine who has responsibility for taking on an asylum claim is the first country of entry to the EU.

We're not in the EU anymore. Um, so that's pr- frankly irrelevant to us. Our refugee system is governed primarily by the Refugee Convention, where there is no obligation whatsoever of a refugee to claim asylum in any particular country, and certainly not necessarily in the first country of safety. If you think about it, that makes a lot of sense because the purpose of the Refugee Convention is to ensure that all signatories will protect refugees.

If the purpose of the Refugee Convention was to say the country right next to a country experiencing war, for example, must accept refugees, we wouldn't be signatories of it. It wouldn't... We wouldn't need to be because Well, lately Ireland and France have both been countries at pith. So the purpose of the Refugee Convention is so that people can, you know, share responsibility, so that we can share responsibility around the world for refugees.

Uh, um, the place that has the most refugees is, I think it's Iran, right? Um, Iran is usually top of the list. So ironically, yeah, the most Afghan refugees find shelter in Iran, and most Iranian refugees find shelter in Afghanistan. Um, yeah, and then the list continues with, I mean, the top five are all Middle Eastern and, uh, African countries, and then Turkey is in there.

Uh, Germany just about makes it into the top 10, but other than that, yeah, it's all, um, countries that are closer to... Because again, just as most migration is, uh, circular when it's done naturally, actually most people, uh, where if they leave their country at all, they go to the n- next country over or a country close by because most of the time, and this isn't just refugees, this is all types of migrants, we want to be close to what's familiar to us.

We want to, you know, i- th- the food, the customs, the traditions, the people that we know and love, that's what we wanna stay near, is actually a tiny, tiny proportion, even of people who are migrants at all, which is a very small proportion of people who ever go on a very long journey to, uh, far, far away from where they come from.

And then there was, the other part of your question was about the- People wanting to get to England, which- Yeah, rather than France. I mean, France is a safe country, and so is y- the UK. You know, and this is the trick, it's like, do you really think that, that France should just have to take refugees, but that the UK shouldn't?

Like, on what basis could that ever be a realistic... It's just not, I m- I, I get accused sometimes, um, when I say things like, you know, "Migrants are just humans, no worse than anybody else," um, of being naive. I'll tell you what's naive, is believing that the French are going to accept all the refugees who want to seek asylum in France, plus all the refugees who want to seek asylum in the UK, and that that's gonna be fine, and we don't have to bother about it.

I'm afraid that's, you know, fantasy land. It's absolutely fantasy land. The truth of the matter is the UK has to be part of this equation, always will be. And I mean, quite aside from anything else, we have, you know, colonized, um, a quarter of the world. A lot of people around the world who are in countries, whether it's unstable human rights, um, are, are poorly protected, speak English and have community here in the UK.

And that's not just us who experience that phenomenon, right? Um, most people who seek asylum coming from previous French colonies, well, they seek asylum in France. If you're seeking asylum from the Democratic Republic of Congo, the likelihood is you're gonna seek asylum in Belgium. You know, and, and people who are seeking asylum from Venezuela, they almost all go to Spain in, in Europe.

You go to, you know, if you can't go to the closest neighboring country, you go to the place where you will have some kind of cultural affinity, where you speak the language, where you have, um, community, so you can support you. That's natural, and yeah, I mean, it's just a simple fact of history. The UK's going to be part of that picture.

The podcast is called Bold Politics, and I feel like this is one of the subjects that politicians are often least bold on. There's just kind of... And I don't know if that's because they don't know the facts, they're too worried to get into the conversation, or they're worried about essentially racism in, in the country, and they think that's higher than maybe the sentiment actually is.

Uh, what's your take on it? Oh, I totally agree. I think, um, I think actually this is, uh, the truth is, is that over time, um, even moderate voices on migration have been silenced. They've been told, "You're out of touch, you're tarring anyone who's anti-migration as racist. How dare you speak like that?" And they have been shut down and silenced, and people who are in positions of power, and therefore really have no excuse, have been cowed, have been...

You know, they, they have, they have rolled over like huge cowards, and I'm so angry with all of them. Honestly, it makes me so furious that, you know, Labour politicians would triangulate this hard on migration. Show me the Labour politician that wanted to get into power, and the first thing they wanted to do in their first year in power was remove the right for refugees to ever obtain citizenship in this country.

D- what did you grow up wanting to be? Like, I, I, I really wanna give them a shake, honestly. And, um, it is a total cowardice, an idea that, well, we just have to. And, and the thing is about the we just have to thing is that, one, obviously it's morally repugnant. Two, everyone can see when you're doing it because you think you just have to, and you don't mean it, and so they're gonna vote for the one who means it.

Right. And then three, obviously, as we've seen, like, so many times, study after study, historical case study after case study, and looking at the polling in the UK, if you lean into the far right's messaging on migration, you empower not yourselves, but the far right. Um, and that's the part where I'm like, even if I can have no more trust in them as moral actors, even if I don't believe that they're skilled politicians anymore, don't they have the self-interest to recognize that they are fueling the far right and not themselves, and this is not going to work?

I think, I think they're scared that they can't achieve the change that needs to be achieved. They're scared that to turn this around, you really have to get to the root of it and change our immigration system and how it works very, very radically, and they don't know how to do that, and it, and it sounds really difficult, and there will be pushback.

And so in the lack of being able to do what they know they should do, they've just fallen into this incredibly cowardly, um... Lazy, pathetic, I mean, despicable dehumanization of migrants and refugees. Tell us what you really think. It's called politics. That was so, so well put. Um, there's a former Reform MP whose name I don't wanna say 'cause I don't wanna make him any more famous, but I, I saw that he messaged, uh, the prime minister on social media to say, uh, "This is demonstrating that we've won the argument."

Um, are we losing the argument on migration, and how do we get it back? You know what I think is really heartening? Now, we... Don't get me wrong, we're going through a really, really bad time on this issue specifically, but what's quite incredible given the absolute onslaught and pile-on and, and unanimity of the media voice and the political voice, uh, almost against migration, is how resilient the British public's fundamental decency on this issue actually is.

Uh, there is, there is a small hardcore of people who are horrific racists, and, like, I'd ever wanna engage with them. They, they are not, uh, the majority. The majority of people do not want people to be coming over on boats. That includes me. Hi. Uh, uh, we want this to be managed well. The majority of people realize we need immigration.

They may not realize to what extent we need it, but they realize that we need it, and that it's overall beneficial, but they just wanna see it managed well. The majority of people do not hate people just because they're Muslim or just because they were born somewhere else. They just want to know that it's m- it's being managed well.

Unfortunately, in a circumstance where it's being managed so disgracefully poorly, and the boats being the most visible part of that, essentially it's the entire system that's managed very poorly, um, people then react against it, and people are in opposition to it. But you dig down a little bit, you know, the polls that say, "Oh, people, people overwhelmingly say they want less migration."

Who, who do they mean by migration? They mean the small boats. Actually, if you ask them, do they, do they want fewer students? Do they want fewer doctors? Do they want fewer, uh, farm workers, uh, construction workers, hospitality workers? You know, all of the actual large groups that make up migration. They don't.

Um, so people are much more decent on this, uh, than we give them credit for. Unfortunately, there is a, a very racist messaging that is cutting through at the moment that is being funded by, you know, the, the newspaper owners and the billionaires who are funding the Reform Party, um, and a whole lot of, like, far-right influencers as well who are being funded to, to produce this messaging, and that is very difficult to fight back against, but that's the only option we have that isn't, as I said before, completely despicable.

That's going to be it for today.

As always, keep the comments coming in.

You can record - and re-record - a voice message by tapping the link in the show notes,

You can reach us on Signal at the handle bestoftheleft.01,

or simply email me to [email protected]

The additional sections of the show included clips from;

Velshi

The Majority Report 

NBC News

The Logical Leftist

The DSR Network

WION

What Next 

Democracy Now!

Trump's Terms

The PBS NewsHour

The Politicrat

The Truth

Full Story

This Is Hell!

Consider This 

MS NOW

and Bold Politics 

Further details are in the show notes.

Thanks to everyone for listening, thanks to Deon and Erin for their production work for the show, thanks to Amanda for all of her work behind the scenes, thanks to our editors and and thanks to those who already support the show by becoming a member, purchasing gift memberships, or making one-time donations.

You'll find the link to support us in the show notes along with a link to join our Discord community where you can also continue the discussion. And don't forget to follow us on all the social media platforms!

So coming to you from far outside the conventional wisdom of Washington, DC, my name is Jay! And this has been the Best of the Left podcast, coming to you twice weekly, thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show, from bestoftheleft.com.