Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Todd Schulte: Thanks for having me. I’m a longtime listener, first-time participant.
Schulte: Yeah. I think it’s really important to keep in mind that for your average voter, they may not have known what to expect on immigration policy. The president said a lot of things the first time he ran. There were a lot of really awful policies he put in place, but the promises to deport as many people as possible—thankfully, thanks to a lot of work people on the ground did—didn’t happen. This time around, you have seen over the past six months—just to be very clear—an unprecedented layering of tools and policies designed to inflict as much chaos and harm on immigrant communities as possible. And at the front of that is an effort to strip away status from millions of people, subject millions and millions of people to immigration enforcement, with that goal to maximize the number of people who—I want to be clear—would be arrested but also are going through their lives fearing that they themselves or their family members could be subjected to arrest at any time.
Schulte: I think it’s really important to, yeah, just be really clear about that. The president is right when he is saying his immigration policies are going to do incredible harm to the economy. We at FWD.us actually just came out with a report last week and it showed that the three pillars of his policies—deportation, stripping away work authorization, cuts to legal immigration—are going to cost the average American family $2,150 a year.
Schulte: We have really clear evidence on public safety. So let’s be clear, arrest quotas in general, whether in the immigration context or not, lead to worse public safety outcomes. Putting more people in prisons and more people in jails lead to worse public safety outcomes. And the jurisdictions that have reduced the use of incarceration have seen crime drop more. So let’s be really clear: This is not about public safety. It is about, as you said, maximizing these numbers here. I think that’s such an important quote there. And also, outside just the ICE context here, when you’re talking about prioritizing other huge government agencies, the IRS is going to be looking into harboring provisions. The IRS is not going to be looking into people who may be involved in tax evasion or are super high-net-worth earners here. We know what the game is here. We should be honest. The game is to push out as many immigrants as possible, and I think it’s interesting that you have people on the record saying that.
Schulte: I think it is. I’m going to read a quote from the story as well. It said, “Some ICE employees believe that the shift in priorities is driven by political preoccupation with deportation numbers rather than keeping communities safe.” I don’t know who the ones are who don’t think that’s what it is, just to be really clear. They’re very clear what this is here. Again, we are not talking about a process where we are saying the goal here should be an immigration system where we’re giving people legal status and a process that they can go through if it has a background check. That’s what we should be getting toward. And look, there is no humane or just or fair or orderly immigration enforcement mechanism when there’s 14 million people who are undocumented. That’s why what they’re doing, number one, is incredibly unpopular—and we can just talk about that. And number two, what is really popular is, yeah, we should have a functioning legal immigration system. We should have a smart and secure approach to border security, but we should have a process that people can go through who are building their lives here to earn status and citizenship. And that’s what I want to be talking about and, and Democrats should be talking about too.
Sargent: If I understand you correctly, you’re saying there are two sides to the coin here. On the one side, you’re hearing from all these ICE officials who are demoralized and we’re hearing from the public a similar message: Why the hell are we going after the grandmothers, the carpenters, the day laborers, and so forth? Everybody’s reacting badly to that. But what people don’t seem to understand is that the other side of this coin is that there aren’t pathways to legal status for so many of these people. That’s the real essence of the problem. You even got people like Joe Rogan noticing that this is the problem. So if I understand you correctly, the point would be to talk about people’s dismay over the targeting of all these low-level people, and then let people know—let voters know—that there are other options, that we could be making it easier for them to get right with the law and easier for them to build lives here peacefully and so forth, right?
Sargent: I think Trump knows that he’s got a problem here as well with the ICE morale issue and with the unpopularity of what we’re talking about here. Trump’s been spending a lot of time tweeting out this crap about how ICE officers are getting attacked. His propagandists are pushing all these numbers about those supposed attacks on ICE officers, and the numbers just don’t add up. They’re all bullshit. The other day he said they’re under “daily violent assault,” right? The real victims in this country are ICE agents. This seems designed to help boost morale inside ICE, I guess, but it isn’t working clearly. I want to flag one other thing that an ICE officer said in The Atlantic piece. He said people are demoralized by the fact that they’re basically being turned into a “goon squad.” I got to think that a lot of these ICE officers didn’t quite think they signed up for going after carpenters and grandmothers. Todd, can you shed some light on this? To what degree are ICE officers in the grip of the same ideological fervor as Miller is? I tend to think they aren’t. Don’t most of them think of themselves as going after real bad guys? What’s the real story there?
Sargent: That memeification of the shackling of human beings is really dark, and I just want to pick up on it for one second. They’re memeifying all sorts of different cruelties toward immigrants right now. They’re memeifying Kristi Noem getting all dressed up in some bizarre getup and posing in front of tattooed migrants in prison cells. They’re memeifying the frog-marching of migrants onto deportation planes. I think there’s a connection between that and the broader unpopularity you’re talking about here. For the MAGA movement, all this stuff is thrilling—these memes, right? They are in the grip of the same ideological fervor as Stephen Miller is. They believe the presence of undocumented immigrants in this country—their mere presence—is a civilizational emergency, a dire threat to the makeup of the country that they want. But the broader public doesn’t see it that way. The broader public sees them as grandmothers and carpenters and day laborers. The broader public doesn’t have a problem with their presence here, and that, to me, is the big schism between MAGA and the rest of the country on this that you see so disgustingly and glaringly illustrated with those awful memes. There’s no chance that your average swing voter thrills to those images. No chance at all, I think.
Sargent: Yeah.
Sargent: Just to close this out, let’s look forward for a second. The big bill that Donald Trump just passed is cranking at least $150 billion into Trump’s border and immigration agenda. We’re looking at $45 billion for new detention facilities. What do you expect to happen with all that money? It does seem like a lot of people inside ICE don’t want to be turned into this army of people that are being asked to make war on people who really are, for all intents and purposes, living quiet, peaceful lives in American communities. Where does it all go?
So this is at a time when, again, status is being taken away from millions of people. We’re dismantling basic constitutional protections. We are dramatically expanding a deportation machinery to where, when the president of the U.S is meeting with leaders from Africa, a central thing is, We need you to take people to your country who aren’t from there. What we’re trying to see here is how we fight back and push back against this effort here because it is an effort to sow chaos—and we’re going to see the supercharged effort. And so I think the important thing for policymakers, for people listening to do is to also understand they can make a difference. If you look at Los Angeles, I think the people who are going and signing up at corners to fight for day laborers are doing incredible work there. And so I encourage everybody to know [that] you can [play] a big role in your local communities—and to be inspired by activists and people who’d never thought about this issue before to show, I’m not going to have this money go and harm people in my community. I’m going to stand up for the basic decency of my community, whether it’s people born in the U.S. or not.
Schulte: Thanks so much.
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