Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Tori Gavito: Thanks for having me.
Alex Padilla (audio voiceover): Sir, hands off. Hands off. I’m Senator Alex Padilla. I have questions for the secretary because the fact of the matter is I have a dozen violent criminals that you’re rotating on your.... Hands off.
Padilla (audio voiceover): If you let me ... If you let my hands go, I’ll put them behind my back.
Sargent: So Tori, by all indications, he’s now been released. But my God, have you ever seen anything like that before?
Sargent: And by the way, I think we should really note the level of absolute contempt this shows for the entire process. She’s not a queen. She gets questioned by Congress on these issues—period. And for her people to throw him to the ground like that and cuff him.... It wasn’t as if he was doing something violent. The whole thing’s an absolute outrage.
Sargent: Absolutely. I want to go to what President Trump said today, and we’ll come back later to this incident with Padilla and what it reveals. Trump really made an extraordinary admission. Here’s what he tweeted on Truth Social, “Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace.” Tori, that’s really something. It’s a straight up admission that his own policy of mass deportations is targeting hardworking people—not criminals, hardworking people—whose jobs cannot be replaced when they are removed. Your thoughts on this?
But now that it’s being enforced in the way he’s enforcing it and the real-life consequences are hitting American businesses, his regime was not meeting the quotas of finding and rounding up the criminals. So he pushed them to go further and deeper into the beating heartbeat of American communities—churches, schools, workplaces—and this is the consequence. He’s rounding up not just immigrants that may not be here with documents, but he’s also rounding up people with mixed status, people who are trying to do their best just to follow a process to get in the right lines and get their papers. And it’s definitely showing that the Republicans are imploding on this a little. He must be getting heat from American businesses to put out that statement on Truth Social. And between that and then the heat that Miller’s getting in private meetings, where people are starting to question, How many billions do you want for this enforcement process that nobody likes?... Anyway, it’s a real opportunity for Democrats to just push.
Gavito: There really is. And you can see it even in that one Truth Social post. He goes from admitting that it’s removing hardworking people. And then he goes to saying, But remember the criminals. But remember, Joe Biden led in criminals. And I feel like he’s trying to play some shell game with us to get our eyes distracted back on the Miller rants when it’s just not how it’s being witnessed. And it’s not just L.A.; it’s all over the country. I mentioned that I’m from a border community. This Father’s Day, I’m going to head down to Brownsville to see my dad. He’s telling me three of the restaurants we normally go to are just totally closed. And I said, Why? Because the immigrant workers are scared? And he’s like, No, no, no, the raids have already happened. They’re closed. And it’s just like, my God, this is happening so swiftly across this country.
Gavito: Correct. Looking at Catalist data from 2024, it’s very clear that there were a number of shifts in the Latino vote. One was many, many Latinos did change their votes from Democrats to Trump. And secondly, many, many Latinos stayed home. And when we went after some initial research on those Latinos who had voted for Biden in 2020 but stayed home in 2024, one of the things that was really clear in our research was they just didn’t see Democrats fighting for them. And so then that permeated, I think, the entire story of why there was Latino vote switching too. They just didn’t see people fighting for them, and they were going to give Trump a chance. Now, giving him a chance and [seeing] Trump then [go] after workplaces where Latinos are getting swept up into the raids or know people that do—these are fathers and brothers—is remarkable.
Sargent: Well, it was really interesting to me that you guys tested this message saying that Trump and Republicans are ignoring courts and due process, trampling people’s rights and abusing their power. And you found that voters are receptive to the idea that that’s a threat to Americans as well. That seems critical. It seems to mean voters are starting to see the Trump immigration crackdown as something fundamentally dangerous and malevolent, right? As posing a broader threat. What’s the significance of that?
But what is clear is that that is not what Trump is doing. He is not going after criminals. He’s going after the workers—and the workers include you and me and our brothers and our sisters. So now it’s just way out of line. Americans know this is not making them safer. I was on a a briefing call from California this morning where immigrant advocates were saying there were reported over 30 workplace raids in L.A. County alone since Friday. When you think about that, that’s hundreds of people getting swept in. Now, Mayor Karen Bass in L.A. is saying there are whole functions of the city not working because people are so afraid. So if whole functions of the city are not working because people aren’t going to work, how does that keep normal Californians safe? This is absolutely tearing apart the fabric of what keeps America working, keeps us going, keeps us safe in our streets. So it’s definitely overreach.
Gavito: Yeah, they’re definitely imploding. $150 billion is what Axios reported as what Stephen Miller was asking for for this enforcement measure. $150 billion is a lot of money. Karen Bass, the mayor of L.A., was also reporting there are 700 Marines right now in L.A. That costs a ton of money. What are they even doing? What are they even doing with their time? It doesn’t appear that the protests are even ongoing anymore. So it seems like a total waste of money on work that isn’t even working.
Gavito: Yeah. Yeah, it is. And we know it’s true. This weekend is going to be very interesting. I don’t know, Greg, [if] you know, this weekend on Saturday, there’s a big “No Kings” rally. I think it’s being sponsored by different activist groups across the nation. Already mayors are reporting that National Guards are being deployed. Trump is deploying National Guard in blue cities where he can make a big story out of his fight with Democrats. And then the Republicans are doing his bidding in red states like Abbott sending National Guard in San Antonio, for example. Why? I guarantee the images from these protests are going to be multigenerational people in their sun hats because it’s summer [and they’re] trying to escape the heat.
Sargent: Yeah, the YouGov poll actually found that a small minority, in the 30s somewhere, favored sending in the Marines or the National Guard, while pluralities in the 40s opposed both. There are a bunch of undecideds out there, but it’s clear that this is tilting against Trump fairly heavily already. So there’s not like this reflexive move by voters to say, Oh, Trump’s sending in the military. Well, I want him to be tough. They’re not saying that. No matter how many times idiot pundits tell us otherwise, that’s not what voters are concluding.
Sargent: Yeah, I’m really glad you brought it back to Padilla, because I do think that this serves this larger impression that something really deeply wrong is afoot—that this unleashing of this enforcement regime is profoundly malevolent, dangerous, un-American in many ways, and just very threatening to Americans as well. And it seems to me that that’s what’s being typified here. Democrats have to jump on this now. This is the time. It’s a watershed moment. What do you think?
Fight for something you believe in. And people have said time and again—in our focus groups, our polling, in our research—about why they stayed home between 2020 and 2024: They just didn’t see Democrats speaking up, fighting for them. They didn’t hear from Democrats until very late in the cycle. In the last 100 days is when there was some breaking through. This is one of those opportunities for us to just get out there and speak from the heart. You don’t need polling every single time before you say a word. Just speak from the heart that what you see is messed up. It is messed up to see a man pushed to the ground and handcuffed for going to a press conference to ask a question when he has every authority to do that from being a senator to being on that particular subcommittee. So use your words, Democrats. Now’s the time.
Gavito: Good to talk to you. Thank you.
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