The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 8 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
President Trump has done it again. At a rally, he declared that his administration is now looking at suspending deportations for farmworkers and other migrant workers. Trump openly admitted this will anger the “radical right,” by which he likely meant Stephen Miller, who suffers severe night terrors about the very possibility that he might fail to humiliatingly frog-march every undocumented immigrant in this country and many others onto deportation planes. We think this should be understood as an admission of weakness by Trump both substantively and politically. At a minimum, Trump wants the public to think that he’s considering relaxing his mass deportation regime at exactly the moment when Congress has given him tens of billions of additional dollars for it. And MAGA personalities don’t like this at all. Today we’re discussing all this with journalist and historian Garrett Graff, who has a new piece up on his Substack Doomsday Scenario about the coming ICE crackdown and the horrors we should expect from it. Garrett, thanks for coming on.
Garrett Graff: Thanks so much for having me. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you, Greg.
Sargent: A few weeks back, Trump floated the idea that farm workers and hospitality industry workers might be spared deportations. This generated a huge backlash, after which he backed off and reiterated that all undocumented immigrants must be thrown out of the country. Yet on July 4 at a rally, Trump again floated the idea. Listen to this.
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?
Sargent: Now, I don’t buy that Trump will really go through with this, but he wants to be seen as entertaining it, and he knows MAGA wants a policy that’s widely reviled by the public. That’s a display of weakness. Your thoughts?
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?
Sargent: Well, Stephen Miller certainly is going to have a huge budget to carry out his vision. The Republicans just passed a bill that appropriates an extraordinary $45 billion for ICE detention. It also includes a huge explosion of hiring of ICE agents. You wrote in your piece that we aren’t prepared for how deeply dangerous it’ll be to have a massively paramilitary force of this size suddenly scaled up and given these vast new powers. Can you talk about that?
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.
Now, ICE is actually even more uniquely vulnerable to these problems than almost any other federal law enforcement agency. It already has some of the lowest hiring standards in federal law enforcement. It already has one of the shortest training periods in federal law enforcement. It already has some of the lowest educational requirements of any federal law enforcement agency. And I think, also, we have never seen an agency go through a hiring spree at this point as politicized and partisan and authoritarian as ICE. And that’s what really, really worries me.
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.
Charlie Kirk (audio voiceover): Now, this is not by any means a knock on President Trump. It is a knock on people that are trying to pressure President Trump and pressure him hard. We don’t know any of the details, but President Trump did say that the radical right people that he has a soft spot for wouldn’t like this. Hello? Hi. I’m one of those radical right people and I want to know what I’m not going to like. Because of all the different stuff that’s in front of us, if you want to break our coalition, go and push amnesty. That right there would be a complete collapse of everything that we have worked for. Everything.
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?
Graff: Yeah. And I think that this also has to do with the challenge of a lot of Donald Trump’s promises, which is the unreality of that which plays well at rallies versus the actual implementation of thoughtful policy in America. Every single person who knows anything about the U.S. economy, who heard Donald Trump promise these mass deportations and immigration enforcement during the campaign knew that this was exactly the problem that was going to come up. Pick whatever number you actually believe is the right number. Ten million, 13 million. More, less in terms of undocumented immigrants who are here. That’s a pretty big chunk of the U.S. workforce, a pretty big chunk of people who actually legally pay taxes and contribute to the U.S. economy year in and year out. And you can’t just remove them in the way that I think the magical thinking of the MAGA rally crowd believes—because they are literally doing jobs that Americans will not do for similar pay. And if you are Donald Trump realizing that you basically won the presidency based on the unhappiness around inflation that your predecessor experienced post-Covid, you’re really terrified about the inflationary pressures of immigration enforcement and, by the way, tariffs, which is the other thing that you watch Donald Trump hem and haw over the difference between what he’s willing to promise in rally snippets and Oval Office snippets versus what he is actually able to accomplish and wants to accomplish.
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.
Michael Knowles (audio voiceover): I think this could be a perilous objective for him. I don’t think this is necessarily the right course to go down. I see why. I see why he is going down it, because he’s got friends, especially in the business community who say, I’m losing all my workers. Go after the illegals who aren’t workers. Go after the illegals who are just sucking off welfare. Go after the workers who are criminals. Go after the workers with the face tattoos. Go at 11 million to 16 million illegal aliens in this country. If you want to actually start to rectify that situation, you can’t just deport the ones with face tattoos. You do kind of have to deport abuela.
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?
Graff: Yeah. And this is also the challenge of what we have watched ICE unfold and as it has turbocharged immigration. ICE is an agency that is coming up on 20 years old at this point. And in both Democratic administrations and Republican administrations, it has done good work. In the Obama years.… Obama’s ICE actually deported more people than George W. Bush’s administration, but what you saw was ICE focusing on actual legit criminals. Gang members, cartel members, people who were actually here doing bad things. And the honest answer is that’s not a huge number. I’m not saying ICE was absolutely perfect in the Obama years. I’m not saying it was absolutely perfect in the Biden years. I’m not saying there weren’t hard and emotional cases during either of those years—but there were frameworks of prosecutorial discretion that really saw people, and leadership and officers focused on deporting actually bad people. But those people are hard to find and locate, and there aren’t that many of them. And so the moment you begin to turn this dial up to say, We need 3,000 people a day, 4,000 people a day, 5,000 people a day that we’re arresting and deporting, you need to get into deporting exactly the people who have been making headlines over the last couple of weeks: people who have lived in the U.S., made lives in the U.S. for 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years in some cases, and have paid taxes, have raised families, have worked hard at their jobs, had careers, and are the people who the business community is really worried about targeting.
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.
Graff: Yeah. And an economic disaster. That’s the underlying argument to this: The reason that it’s bad politics is partially the emotional response of the families and communities that are being disrupted—and partly because it is going to tank the U.S. economy and particularly sectors in America where they rely on undocumented, under-the-table labor [such as] construction, hospitality, agriculture.
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.
Graff: Yeah, and I think I would put, Greg, a slightly sharper point on what you just said, which is this is a schism between the white nationalist and white supremacist believers and wing of Donald Trump’s supporters and everyone else in America who views America’s diversity as its historic strength and not a weakness. This is a fundamental existential disagreement between the racist white supremacists and white nationalists who formed much too large of a core and foundation of support for Donald Trump and the MAGA movement and everyone else in America who believes in just a different vision for a country that has always viewed immigration as its greatest strength.
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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