Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Garrett Graff: Thanks so much for having me. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you, Greg.
Donald Trump (audio voiceover): People have worked for a farm, on a farm for 14, 15 years, and they get thrown out pretty viciously and.… We can’t do it. We got to work with the farmers and people that have hotels and leisure properties too. We’re going to work with them and we’re going to work very strong and smart, and we’re going to put you in charge. We’re going to make you responsible. And I think that that’s going to make a lot of people happy. Now, serious radical right people who I also happen to like a lot, they may not be quite as happy—but they’ll understand, won’t they? Do you think so?
Graff: This is at least the second time that he has floated, in some way, the idea that there would be large categories of potential workers who would be exempted from this mass deportation. So Trump was inclined to start to roll back this “everybody goes” mentality. And then Stephen Miller stepped in and said, No, no, no, we’re going to keep this going. And in fact what we’re, what we’ve seen in these last couple of weeks—particularly the aggressive ICE deportation and seizure tactics—really stem from Stephen Miller going to ICE leadership and saying, Hey, we got to do this more quickly, more aggressively. You guys aren’t meeting my hopes and dreams. So not only do I feel like this represents an important sign of weakness in the unpopularity of this policy but I also think it represents a secondary weakness about just how much Donald Trump is actually in control of his own administration. Who is the real president? Who is the real decision maker on immigration policy? Is it Donald Trump or is it Stephen Miller?
Graff: The reality is that no law enforcement organization can grow quickly—not even a healthy one. And you talk to almost anyone who’s familiar with criminal justice in the history of policing in the United States, and they can rattle off for you exactly the agencies that have gone down this path of quick hiring surges for political reasons: Miami in the 1980s; the Metropolitan Police Department, Class of 1989, in Washington, D.C., where Mayor Marion Barry tried to actually double the size of the force in a single year. Both of those agencies saw enormous tidal waves of corruption and criminality and misconduct by their officers in the years that followed, as did the Border Patrol. The reason is when you’re trying to hire that quickly, all of your guardrails are removed. Agencies end up lowering their hiring requirements. They end up lowering their training standards. They end up lowering their supervision and field training standards. And when you’re growing that quickly in an organization, you have people who are field trainers, who are supervisors, who are higher level officials, who are pushed up in the promotion ranks faster than they should be.
Sargent: Well, I want to underscore here that every single thing that comes out of this administration, whether it’s Trump or Stephen Miller … everything they’re saying screams to ICE agents that they are unshackled, right? Whether it’s Stephen Miller telling ICE officials in private that they’ve got to hit these supercharged new arrest quotas.… MAGA personalities in particular are absolutely salivating for the very conflict, the very clashes you are discussing there. They really just cannot wait for these not-very-well-trained ICE agents who are just used to kicking people around as if they’re just dirty migrants getting loosed. They’re really, really, really excited about it—viscerally. So they’re very unhappy about Trump floating this idea of sparing farmworkers. Let’s listen to a couple. First, here’s major MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk, who confirms that MAGA won’t like it one little bit. Listen to this courtesy of Media Matters.
Sargent: I love the way he can only blame people who are pressuring Trump and not Trump himself—because that would presumably be too much for his audience to bear. But that aside, this idea that not deporting migrant workers would break the MAGA coalition, as Kirk puts it, is really telling. A large chunk of MAGA wants every single undocumented immigrant deported, but some around Trump know that’s a political disaster. That doesn’t seem bridgeable. It’s a schism that isn’t going away. Garrett, what do you think?
Sargent: Well, there was a second MAGA person who really put it out there in a way that really underscores your point. It’s from MAGA media figure Michael Knowles. Listen to this, again, courtesy of Media Matters.
Sargent: Note that Knowles openly declares that Trump is going after people who are not gang members. They’re grandmothers. Knowles just says, Well, that’s good. This is exactly what MAGA wants: deporting grandmothers. I guess, points for honesty or something, Garrett?
Sargent: So Garrett, I want to underscore the importance of what you said there, ’cause I still think people miss it. The second Stephen Miller starts to shriek internally that he wants 3,000, 4,000, 5,000, a million arrests a day, they have to go after the grandmothers. There’s no other way to get the numbers up there. You cannot get the numbers up there unless you go after the grandmothers and all that they represent. You can’t get the numbers up by going after criminals for two reasons. One, there aren’t enough of them. And two, it’s incredibly resource intensive to go after the criminals. It’s less resource intensive to go after the abuelas and to deport day laborers from a parking lot at Home Depot. And that is the fundamental box that Trump is in here and others around him who recognize, unlike Stephen Miller: that deporting every last migrant in this country is a political disaster for them.
Sargent: MAGA views it as a civilizational emergency to have undocumented immigrants in this country at all, no matter how unthreatening. The broader public doesn’t view it that way. The broader public tolerates the presence of undocumented immigrants who are working jobs, who have been here a very long time, who have families, who are tied to communities. And this is, I think, the basic admission we saw from Trump up there, that’s an unbridgeable schism and a Gordian knot that can’t really be cut very easily.
Sargent: Really well put, Garrett Graff. Folks, if you enjoyed this conversation, make sure to check out his podcast, Long Shadow. Garrett, thanks so much for coming on with us, man.
Graff: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
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