Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Pramila Jayapal: Thank you for having me, Greg.
Jayapal: Yes, absolutely. I am introducing the No Roundup Act, and this is a piece of legislation that repeals this long dormant immigration law that Donald Trump is using to fuel his cruel and inhumane mass deportation campaign. This is the same law that came out of World War II; it was used for the internment of Japanese-Americans back then, putting Japanese-Americans into concentration camps in the 1940s. It was also the same law that was used—it was called Special Registration at the time—right after 9/11 to register and then put into deportation proceedings Muslims and Sikhs across the country. I fought back against it at the time around Special Registration.
Sargent: Your bill would essentially repeal the law that Trump is citing as the authority to do this, correct?
Sargent: I want to come back to this in a bit, but first, to the other news. The administration has arrested Mahmoud Khalil, and they’re trying to deport him even though he has a green card and an American wife. The administration is accusing him of ties to Hamas, but as The New York Times notes, officials have not accused him of having contact with Hamas, taking any direction from it, or providing any support to it. Your reaction to all this?
Sargent: I want to play some audio of White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. It signals something pretty ominous; I think that they’re going to really escalate this. Here’s what she said about Khalil.
Sargent: Congresswoman, the White House press secretary is saying there that the administration has given the names of particular people to Columbia and demanding help in identifying them. She seems to threaten some kind of action if Columbia and other colleges don’t play along. That’s pretty worrisome, no? Where could that lead? What do you think they have in mind here?
I want to be very clear: This is not about Israel and Palestine. This is about the right to free speech. This is about our constitutional rights, and it affects a very, very broad swath of people across the country. My phone is blowing up about this. I know members across the caucus are hearing about this. And I hope we have a very, very strong response, similar to my statements, Senator Durbin’s statements. This is absolutely authoritarian attempts to suppress any kind of free speech.
Jayapal: Look, fear and suppressing of dissent is the playbook of dictators, of authoritarians, of fascists. And this follows on stripping federal funding from Columbia, nominally around not cracking down on antisemitism. Again, I would say that this is all about stopping universities from being able to have debates, conversations, and protests on campuses—a hallmark of American democracy. We are not Russia. We are not China.
Sargent: You mentioned earlier that four of the colleges in your home state are getting this type of pressure or contact. Can you go into a little detail there?
Sargent: When you say that they’re being investigated, you mean by the Trump administration?
Sargent: Right. I think part of the game here is to just create the impression for the public across the country that universities are harboring enemies within.
Sargent: I think if you put together the effort to register all noncitizens along with this latest news, you really get to the to the conclusion that the administration is using all its tools to try to spread a reactionary terror of the state among immigrants. It’s almost as if the idea is that everyone needs to fear the knock at the door or fear getting snitched on by colleagues or your professor. There’s some signs this is working. What are you hearing from your constituents and from those of other members who are focused on this? How bad is the fear getting?
From a pure democracy protection perspective, this is the start of authoritarianism. We are already in the midst of it, and it’s very terrifying. Everybody should be paying attention.
Jayapal: Absolutely. This is quite new; obviously, it just happened. I’m the ranking member on the Immigration subcommittee, so I’ve been trying to get at how they even arrested him. It’s very unusual for the secretary of state to be involved in deportation proceeding—that’s usually DHS—so it took us a minute to figure out what provision they were using. And my staff has been on the phone with Mr. Khalil’s attorneys, really both on that individual case, which many members have an interest in because of where the family is resident and constituent, and on this broader question that you and I have been talking about.
Sargent: To be clear, you’re working on a letter that you’re hoping will get a lot of Democrats? Look, there are going to be some moderate Democrats who don’t want to sign this thing, right?
Sargent: Obviously, Democrats run the minority in the House and Senate, but can’t they do more going forward to try and exercise a little oversight here? This seems to me to be a really legitimate area where you could ask some very hard questions of the administration. For instance, have they produced an actual written rationale to Congress explaining the decision to arrest and deport Khalil? Could Democrats do more? Are you hoping to do more? Are you hoping House Democratic leaders and Senate Democratic leaders will do more to pressure the administration to be transparent about these policies?
We are working on all of that, but it’s tied to a broader point that you’ve been making. We need to stand up strongly for our democracy. The more people understand that this is not about one issue or one group of people, that this is really about all of us, the more successful I think we’ll be and hopefully the stronger Democrats can be in really fighting back.
Jayapal: I’m just introducing it now, so we’ll see. But hopefully by using the real life examples of what happened in the Japanese internment, in Special Registration—which at the time that I started speaking out on this as an activist back then, I actually sued the Bush administration successfully around the deportation of then Somalis across the country, and we prevented the deportation of 5,000.... We were pushing back hard on Special Registration, and many Democrats were not with us at the beginning but they did come along later. This may be one of those cases. I hope not. I feel like we have enough history to show that we’re on the right side here by eliminating the special registry law that is always used to target immigrants, people of color, including Japanese-American U.S. citizens in the ’40s. So I’m hopefully optimistic that we will be able to get a good group of Democrats, but we’ll see. It’s always a push.
Jayapal: No, I actually think it’s gotten even worse in some ways—because it’s now even broader. Throughout history, the U.S. has become a nation of immigrants not by everybody coming along easily. Every group, from the Polish to the Italians to the Arab Americans, has had challenges—certainly the Chinese Exclusion Act, [to name one]. We have all of these ways in which the immigration system has been pretty exclusionary and we’ve had to fight to change it and make it more fair and inclusive and humane. The phrase was the Statue of Liberty turned toward Europe and not to the rest of the world—we’ve always had some of those challenges.
I think what they’re trying to do is distract us from the fact that it’s unelected billionaires trying to steal money for their tax breaks for the wealthy billionaires that are really to blame for the woes of the American people, not immigrants. They want somebody to blame and they don’t want it to be Elon Musk, Donald Trump, or the billionaires. They want it to be the immigrant next door to you and me.
Jayapal: Thank you so much, Greg. Appreciate it.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.
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