Speaker 1: Also media Welcome to it could happen here a podcast
Speaker 1: about things crumbling and how.
Speaker 2: To pick up the pieces.
Speaker 3: Wooing we love to crumble.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and part of that is understanding what is going
Speaker 1: to happen and how it is going to happen, and
Speaker 1: absorbing that knowledge and what you can do with it.
Speaker 1: So today James is going to tell us about Trump's
Speaker 1: plans for migrants.
Speaker 4: Yep, yeah, I guess in terms of what's going to happen,
Speaker 4: we don't know, right. Trump said a lot of stuff
Speaker 4: in his first term and kind of didn't stick the landing,
Speaker 4: a lot of it he tried. But they're more experienced
Speaker 4: now and I think crucially they have a much more
Speaker 4: favorable Supreme Court and then probably will have an even
Speaker 4: more favorable Supreme Court by the end of this term.
Speaker 4: So a plan to deport up to a million people
Speaker 4: this year was one of the very few concrete and
Speaker 4: tangible promises that the Trump campaign made, Right. They had
Speaker 4: a lot of vibes, nasty vibes, but like in terms
Speaker 4: of like we will do X by Y, this was
Speaker 4: one of the very few. Now, Trump tried to deport
Speaker 4: a lot of people in his first term, right, like
Speaker 4: The one consistent part of his policy ever since he
Speaker 4: rode sideways down an escalator in twenty fifteen and then
Speaker 4: shit talked to Mexican people, has been an anti migrant policy.
Speaker 4: He didn't really stick the landing on mass deportations in
Speaker 4: his first term. In fact, Biden deported more people in
Speaker 4: twenty twenty three than Trump did in any year of
Speaker 4: his first term. In fact, Trump also fell behind Obama
Speaker 4: in terms of deportations per year. None of that means
Speaker 4: that he won't be able to do that this time, right,
Speaker 4: I'm just trying to put some numbers on his promises
Speaker 4: the last time, so I want to look first at
Speaker 4: how he could go about his promise in his second term. Right.
Speaker 4: One thing that he said he will do is use
Speaker 4: Title forty two again. So if people have not listened
Speaker 4: to the series I did last May or June on
Speaker 4: Title forty two, I would like to direct them there.
Speaker 2: Title forty two is a reminder.
Speaker 4: It's a public health law, and it's public health law that,
Speaker 4: in this interpretation, allowed CBP, specifically Border Patrol, to immediately
Speaker 4: return people to Mexico without processing them first. Sometimes they
Speaker 4: call it catch and release. Right, what it resulted in
Speaker 4: was these are not technically deportations. But when Trump said something,
Speaker 4: I don't think he's considering the exact meanings of what
Speaker 4: he's saying. Right, So, if we look at Title forty
Speaker 4: two expulsions, if he's going to bring back Title forty two,
Speaker 4: reaching that one million per year number is pretty easy.
Speaker 4: In fact, that happened in twenty twenty two again under Biden. Right,
Speaker 4: So if he considers those to be deportations, and that's
Speaker 4: within his one million per year goal, it's reasonable that
Speaker 4: he will reach to say that he will be able
Speaker 4: to reach that, and he will be able to do
Speaker 4: that with the current infrastructure, right without massively upgrading CBP, ice, ice,
Speaker 4: detention facilities, immigration judges.
Speaker 2: All those things.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So, like, if we consider those to be deportations,
Speaker 4: and one million a year is very much something that
Speaker 4: we might well see.
Speaker 1: Do you know where we're at this year or it
Speaker 1: hasn't been released yet.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 4: In twenty twenty two was the last stats I could
Speaker 4: find I linked to the CBP. If people want to
Speaker 4: look at the title forty two and title so Title eight,
Speaker 4: it's the immigration law under which people are normally received. Right,
Speaker 4: Title forty two ended in May of twenty twenty three.
Speaker 4: May eleventh, twenty twenty three with the end of the
Speaker 4: COVID nineteen emergency, because the reason they were using public
Speaker 4: health law as immigration law was because of this health emergency.
Speaker 4: Right now, obviously it was used extremely cynically. For instance,
Speaker 4: there weren't exemptions for vaccinated people, but nonetheless that's why
Speaker 4: they were using it. And when the federal emergency for
Speaker 4: COVID nineteen ended, so did Biden's.
Speaker 2: Excuse for using Title forty two.
Speaker 4: That I will link to the CBP data center in
Speaker 4: the notes so people can see Title forty two versus
Speaker 4: Title late over the last few years. As I pointed
Speaker 4: out last week, the US can also fund deportations of
Speaker 4: migrants further south, and it's done this at Panama. I've
Speaker 4: had a series from there last week. People haven't listened
Speaker 4: to it. I would love them to do so, but
Speaker 4: the numbers that they've been able to achieve they are
Speaker 4: pretty low, and I don't think that's really going to
Speaker 4: meaningfully impact his target. So let's talk about what everyone
Speaker 4: is most afraid of, which is mass deportations of people
Speaker 4: who are already living in the United States. Right that
Speaker 4: is definitely what his right wing trolls have been sort
Speaker 4: of hyping up, certainly over the last few weeks, right,
Speaker 4: the idea that they are going to come to your
Speaker 4: house and find you if you're an undocumented person in
Speaker 4: the United States. So to talk about this, I want
Speaker 4: to talk about, first of all, like the real nuts
Speaker 4: and bolts of how he would be able, if he
Speaker 4: would be able to do this right. And I draw
Speaker 4: very heavily here on a report by the American Immigration
Speaker 4: Council who did some calculations on the cost of a
Speaker 4: single ice detention, right, the cost of a single raid,
Speaker 4: the amount of agents that will be required to meet
Speaker 4: this kind of capacity. And there are two models that
Speaker 4: they use, and those are the models I think are
Speaker 4: most relevant. If we look at people who are in
Speaker 4: the United States without permanent legal status, we make an
Speaker 4: estimate for numbers, we're looking at about eleven million undocumented people.
Speaker 4: That's not going to be perfect, but if we use
Speaker 4: that as a ballpark, and then two point three million
Speaker 4: people who have entered since the end of Title forty two,
Speaker 4: and they're on various forms of bail or parole or
Speaker 4: bond and they don't have a permanent status here either rent,
Speaker 4: So we're looking at somewhere in the region of thirteen million.
Speaker 4: If Trump wanted to deport all of those people now,
Speaker 4: to do that, he would need to massively expand ICE
Speaker 4: detention facilities. About half of ICE's staff aren't Countrary to
Speaker 4: what you might believe about ICE kicking in people's doors
Speaker 4: and deporting them, half of ICE's staff work for something
Speaker 4: called Home Security Investigations. It's not that those people don't
Speaker 4: do deportations. They do, but they mostly focus on human trafficking,
Speaker 4: drug trafficking, transnational crime. Now, sometimes as people also do deportations,
Speaker 4: people might be familiar with the big HSI raids on
Speaker 4: certain employers who are employing a lot of undocumented people.
Speaker 4: Those still result in deportations, but that's not their primary tasking,
Speaker 4: and HSI has historically preferred not to do the deportation
Speaker 4: work because they feel that that makes it very hard
Speaker 4: for them to do the other work of like monitoring
Speaker 4: human and drug trafficking, because evidently migrants are going to
Speaker 4: be scared to go anywhere near HSI if they know
Speaker 4: that HSI could deport them, right, so they're not going.
Speaker 2: To talk to them.
Speaker 4: Now, it would be very easy for Trump to retask
Speaker 4: those those agents, right, that would obviously undermine work it's
Speaker 4: done to prevent drug trafficking and human trafficking. Whether or
Speaker 4: not he cares is a question that's you know, I
Speaker 4: think I probably have an answer for that. I guess
Speaker 4: up for debates somewhat. So Trump has already called in
Speaker 4: addition to potentially re equipping those HSI agents, he said
Speaker 4: he wants to employ ten thousand more Border Patrol agents.
Speaker 2: Right now.
Speaker 4: BP agents can do deportations, but it's not BP agents
Speaker 4: who are coming to your door in Chicago and coming
Speaker 4: after you, right that that's ICE Immigration and Customs enforcement.
Speaker 4: He's also said he wants to give borderploal agents a
Speaker 4: ten thousand dollars retention bonus and a ten percent raise.
Speaker 4: Just to put it in the perspective, there are twenty
Speaker 4: thousand BP agents right now, so that would be about
Speaker 4: a fifty percent increase.
Speaker 2: Right. This is not something he can do quickly.
Speaker 4: They need to go through the academy, They need to
Speaker 4: be recruited, trained, background check, et cetera. Border Patrol has
Speaker 4: a lot of waivers right now, so you can we
Speaker 4: can waive requirements that other law enforcement agencies would have
Speaker 4: few to work for them, if that makes sense, right,
Speaker 4: be it a ged or a college degree or another
Speaker 4: language or whatever. They are offering waivers a lot right now.
Speaker 4: They can increase that number of waivers to recruit more people, right,
Speaker 4: but that would still take a long time. So the
Speaker 4: estimate the American Immigration Council has is that to remove
Speaker 4: all of those thirteen million people in that's sort of
Speaker 4: in the one mass deportation as opposed to a million
Speaker 4: people a year scenario, would require between two hundred and
Speaker 4: twenty and four hundred and nine thousand stuff.
Speaker 2: Jesus Christ. Yeah, yeah, that is a lot of people.
Speaker 3: So I mean, like, for comparison as to how many
Speaker 3: that actually is the United States military active duties about
Speaker 3: a million people.
Speaker 2: Yes, that was exactly. That's a comparison, Not the Army,
Speaker 2: not the Navy, the military, yeah, like all of it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this would put DHS at like substantially more personnel
Speaker 4: than like the Marine Corps, right, Like.
Speaker 3: Yeah, not that people don't want to do, it's just
Speaker 3: like it is. Actually, we've talked a lot about how
Speaker 3: there are not guard rails on Trump like there were
Speaker 3: last time. That is true, and that is a very
Speaker 3: realistic thing to like be worried about and scared about.
Speaker 3: But that we're not just talking about guard rails. We
Speaker 3: are talking about a legist stickle hurdle. It is not
Speaker 3: a simple or necessarily possible thing to make an agency
Speaker 3: like that that much larger and have it actually function.
Speaker 3: Like just this is just physics we're talking about here. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's the same with anything. If cool Zone suddenly received
Speaker 3: one hundred billion dollars from Jeff Bezos and he said,
Speaker 3: do anything you want with it, we could not scale
Speaker 3: up to half.
Speaker 2: A million employees like we have.
Speaker 3: We have absolutely no capacity to handle that.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Like, I think what people have to remember is
Speaker 4: that every doal kicking ice agent needs to enable us. Right,
Speaker 4: They need paid they need health insurance, they need human resources,
Speaker 4: they need training. This would take a very long time. Sorry,
Speaker 4: it's one point three million or so. Okay, I think
Speaker 4: it's a little less.
Speaker 3: That's twenty seventeen data, so probably it's probably as closer
Speaker 3: to a million now, but yeah, slightly over a million,
Speaker 3: so but this is close to that's close to half, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's in addition to what they already have. Yeah,
Speaker 4: it's four hundred and nine plus whatever they have. It
Speaker 4: would also, of course mean like stantially increasing their investigative
Speaker 4: capacity because most deportations right now, when ICE arrest someone
Speaker 4: happened when someone else has already arrested that person. So
Speaker 4: like the person who's in detention federally or on a
Speaker 4: state level for something else that they did and they're undocumented,
Speaker 4: and that's when ICE can take them and deport them. Right,
Speaker 4: So they'd have to also increase their ability to search
Speaker 4: out and find people, not saying they can't, but you
Speaker 4: can't take you know, fucking Tim Poole bring him into ICE.
Speaker 4: He's not going to instantly know how to find people
Speaker 4: where to find people, right, So like this, this will
Speaker 4: take time.
Speaker 2: There is a practical.
Speaker 4: Constraint on him doing this, even if there aren't other
Speaker 4: constraints within the balance of powers. So Stephen Miller, dude
Speaker 4: with the giant head.
Speaker 3: I'm sorry, but you're going to have to be more
Speaker 3: specific when we talk about like conservatives who are about
Speaker 3: to come into power who have like.
Speaker 2: A weirdly huge head.
Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, that's like, find me a Californian who has
Speaker 3: strong opinions on gluten.
Speaker 2: Yeah that's me. I'm I'm PROGUREAE.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah, so Stephen Miller is he as the guy
Speaker 4: who's crafted a lot of Trump's nefarious border policies.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 4: It was Miller who who sook out Title forty two.
Speaker 4: And I want to talk about this a bit later.
Speaker 4: One thing that Miller did effectively, I don't want to
Speaker 4: say well, because it was objectively horrible. But one thing
Speaker 4: that Miller was good at was finding this obscure piece
Speaker 4: of public health law and mobilizing it against migrants.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 4: I think if you'd spoken to me in twenty fifteen
Speaker 4: and said what do you think Trump's going to do
Speaker 4: against migrants, I wouldn't have said, oh'll be Title forty two,
Speaker 4: the United States Code, you know, that regulates public health.
Speaker 4: He or people within his team were very effective at
Speaker 4: finding that and using that effective enough that the Biden
Speaker 4: administration kept it for three years after the Trump administration
Speaker 4: did it for one year. Right, And so Miller could
Speaker 4: find some niche kind of law. What he wants to
Speaker 4: do is use the national guard from cooperative states, right, Yeah,
Speaker 4: and to use a national guard from cooperative state in
Speaker 4: states that are not cooperative and where local law enforcement
Speaker 4: would not cooperate.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 4: So some quote unquote sanctuary states, and there's probably an overstatement.
Speaker 4: They don't in theory refer and document to people they
Speaker 4: arrest to ICE for deportation. Right now, what federal fusion
Speaker 4: centers do is allow for that even if it is
Speaker 4: a sanctuary state. Actually, but in theoretical terms, a sanctuary
Speaker 4: state would not at least contact ICE about every undocumented
Speaker 4: person they're arrested.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 4: So Bill's plan is to use the National Guard. Again, like,
Speaker 4: that's not what the National Guard does right now. They're
Speaker 4: not really trained up for doing that either.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 4: I've seen plenty of National Guard folks on the border
Speaker 4: fort It's a bunch of scared eighteen year olds, right
Speaker 4: who are trying to get money from Robert and I
Speaker 4: have met Texas National.
Speaker 2: Guide on the board, their kids, their kids. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Now, to be fair, that's not saying they're they're like
Speaker 3: innocent or inherent Like every group of soldiers who has
Speaker 3: done any good or bad things, and often but usually
Speaker 3: both at the same time, it's a bunch of scared
Speaker 3: eighteen year old kids. Yes, that's been the case for
Speaker 3: ten thousand years. Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 4: Anytime you have conflict reporting, you it's always shocking how
Speaker 4: young people are.
Speaker 3: It's always just like, oh, okay, all wars are fought
Speaker 3: by children. There's no non child soldiers, with the exception
Speaker 3: of I mean, that is the weird thing about the
Speaker 3: Ukraine War, right Yet, Like I remember the first time
Speaker 3: I wound up at the front there, it was like, oh,
Speaker 3: this is actually it is actually old men fighting this war,
Speaker 3: old men who repeatedly told me it's either me or
Speaker 3: my kid shows up here. And I already fucking lost
Speaker 3: my soul in Afghanistan. Yes, Like I literally had that
Speaker 3: interview with people. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4: It's crazy to me people who were in Afghanistan and
Speaker 4: have fighting again.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean I think those guys are probably out now.
Speaker 3: I'm talking fifty Yeah, I.
Speaker 2: Think twenty twenty forty, so it's forty years late. I'm
Speaker 2: sure they're too old now.
Speaker 4: But Robert talking of being too old, I'm voting. I'm
Speaker 4: not too old to be obliged to transition to advertisement.
Speaker 4: So that's what we're going to do.
Speaker 2: You're never too old for that, James.
Speaker 3: In fact, the older you get, it's kind of like
Speaker 3: how if you reread Moby Dick at different points in
Speaker 3: your life, it's a completely different novel every ten years,
Speaker 3: different book. The same thing is true with ulysses, and
Speaker 3: the same thing is true with these advertisements. That's right,
Speaker 3: save them, record them on your home device in every
Speaker 3: couple of months, listen and you'll learn something new from
Speaker 3: chumpa casino every time.
Speaker 4: All right, we're back, and I hope you've downloaded that
Speaker 4: chump of casino advert for later. And in the event
Speaker 4: of a great down scenario, you could have a whole
Speaker 4: library of those to listen to. So, talking of obscure legislations,
Speaker 4: we did right. Trump and his team have mentioned this
Speaker 4: thing called the Alien Enemies Act. It sounds like alien
Speaker 4: Ant Farm, but it's not in any way related.
Speaker 3: Sadly, not nearly as good as for one thing, it's
Speaker 3: cover of smooth Criminal Terrible terrible.
Speaker 4: Yeah, no, nowhere near the the same standard. That's a
Speaker 4: joke for people who are over thirty.
Speaker 3: Yes, anyone who tries to dance to that alien Ant
Speaker 3: Farm song today not only has to think about the
Speaker 3: fact that Michael Jackson was definitely a pedophile, but also
Speaker 3: their needs no longer work.
Speaker 2: It's a lose.
Speaker 4: Are just sadly shuffling along, properly mood walking while crying,
Speaker 4: uh taking iberprofen.
Speaker 3: I was at a street light show in Portland that
Speaker 3: was all millennials and every time, like the pit was crazy,
Speaker 3: but also it sounded like a cement mixer when everybody's
Speaker 3: knees got.
Speaker 4: Going, doting out hyperprofen in the way out.
Speaker 2: You're going to need this tomorrows.
Speaker 4: So the Alien Enemies Act, it hasn't been used since
Speaker 4: the United States used it in the Second World War
Speaker 4: for in tournament camps, right, which, at least for many
Speaker 4: of us, is a part of national shame. I guess,
Speaker 4: like a pretty terrible fucking thing that the United States did. Obviously,
Speaker 4: for some folks in the Trump administration, this is something
Speaker 4: that they're kind of aspiring to. I guess Trump has
Speaker 4: said that he would like to use this to deport
Speaker 4: gang members. That's not really what it's for. And like
Speaker 4: even sources within DHS have pointed out that they would
Speaker 4: have to prove that these migrants were sent by a
Speaker 4: foreign government, right, or someone that the US is at
Speaker 4: war with. This is going to be hard because, like
Speaker 4: if we look at Venezuelans, who are representing a larger
Speaker 4: and larger proportion of migrants since the elections, there they
Speaker 4: will actively shit talk the government of their country at
Speaker 4: the first opportunity. I have met hundreds, if not thousands,
Speaker 4: of Venezuelan migrants in California and in the Dallian Gap,
Speaker 4: and yeah, you're not going to find people who you
Speaker 4: can plausibly say were sent by Maduro that way. Yeah,
Speaker 4: but Miller's pretty good at finding these obscure laws and
Speaker 4: ways of doing things. So we would be fully to
Speaker 4: write this off entirely. But I don't think that will
Speaker 4: make up the bulk of these mass deportations. So I
Speaker 4: want to go to that American Immigration Council report, which
Speaker 4: our link in the show notes, right, assuming a million
Speaker 4: deportations a year, which is what jd. Vance said to
Speaker 4: the New York Times, that's the sort of steady deportation
Speaker 4: scenario as opposed to the mass deportation of thirteen million
Speaker 4: people scenario, which a steady one is is more realistic
Speaker 4: in terms of practicality rate. The cost of that, assuming
Speaker 4: that twenty percent of undocumented people decided to leave on
Speaker 4: their own, would be about eighty eight billion a year,
Speaker 4: which is a large amount of money. We'll talk in
Speaker 4: a little bit about what you could get with that money.
Speaker 4: A one off mass deportation would cost about three hundred
Speaker 4: and fifteen billion. The detention costs alone for that one
Speaker 4: off massed deportation of eleven to thirteen million people would
Speaker 4: be one hundred and sixty seven point eight billion dollars,
Speaker 4: which is probably why private prison group geo Groups stock
Speaker 4: swed this week. Right, if Trump wants to deport people,
Speaker 4: the average deportee is detained for fifty nine days before
Speaker 4: they're deported, and so they are going to massively have
Speaker 4: to increase their capacity. Right now, their current detention contract
Speaker 4: includes a minimum of twenty nine seven hundred and ninety
Speaker 4: beds between like increases and other facilities they have access to,
Speaker 4: and early twenty twenty four, according to the American Immigration Council,
Speaker 4: they detain thirty nine thousand people. Astute listeners will notice
Speaker 4: that eleven million and thirty nine thousand are quite quite
Speaker 4: desparate as numbers go. So, ah, yeah, I mean you're
Speaker 4: talking about a huge percentage of Like we'll get into
Speaker 4: this later, but in California, Texas, and Florida it's between
Speaker 4: five and six percent of the population are undocumented. Right,
Speaker 4: you're talking about building prisoned cities. If you were to
Speaker 4: detain that many people then one fell swoop. Again, that
Speaker 4: takes time, but in this case it's private sector actors
Speaker 4: like Geogroup, they can tend to move a little bit faster. Right,
Speaker 4: So to put that cost in terms of things that
Speaker 4: the government could do with the money instead, right, a
Speaker 4: decade of one million deportations a year means foregoing forty
Speaker 4: four hundred and fifty elementary schools or two point nine
Speaker 4: million new homes, or funding the head Start program for
Speaker 4: seventy nine years. A single year of mass deportation would
Speaker 4: cost nearly twice the National Institute of Health's annual budget,
Speaker 4: or eighteen times a global annual expenditure on cancer research.
Speaker 2: So I guess that's shit that we could have instead.
Speaker 4: But that's not all because undocumented households, contrary to what
Speaker 4: you might have heard, paid taxes. And if we deported
Speaker 4: every undocumented person in the United States, we look at
Speaker 4: twenty twenty two numbers, undocumented households paid forty six point
Speaker 4: eight billion in federal taxes and twenty nine point three
Speaker 4: billion in state and local taxes. That's a huge amount
Speaker 4: of tax revenue forgone right. Absolutely, Yeah, that again, that
Speaker 4: won't be the end of it, because some industries like
Speaker 4: construction and agriculture rely heavily on undocumented labor. And if
Speaker 4: you're worried about the cost of your groceries, now, now
Speaker 4: if people voted for Donald Trump because that EGGX costs more,
Speaker 4: shit will cost an awful lot more if we deport
Speaker 4: the undocumented people working in agriculture. Right, sectors of that
Speaker 4: industry do not function economically without underpaid migrant labor.
Speaker 2: And this is something that migrants are very aware of.
Speaker 4: Actually I broadcast interview with one of them last week,
Speaker 4: But they know that they will be underpaid because they're undocumented,
Speaker 4: but they still think that that's worth it for them
Speaker 4: to be safe.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 4: So for going that, I don't think Trump has not
Speaker 4: proposed a solution to this right length these sort of
Speaker 4: this long form thinking is not what he does certainly
Speaker 4: in his speeches, but that would have a massive impact
Speaker 4: on the economy. What he would also need to do
Speaker 4: is persuade the countries that these migrants come from to
Speaker 4: take them back, and that has historically been something that
Speaker 4: has been extremely difficult.
Speaker 2: The State Department.
Speaker 4: Doesn't see the sort of process of persuading people to
Speaker 4: accept migrants as really within its remit and it certainly
Speaker 4: sort of bristle that having to do this the last
Speaker 4: Trump administration. I think a mass deportation like this it
Speaker 4: would trigger some nations refusing to take people back, for instance,
Speaker 4: to Venezuela. Right, Venezuela is already not taking people back
Speaker 4: from Panama. You at the US funds deportations for Panama.
Speaker 4: Venezuela and Panama ceased relations after the election in Venezuela
Speaker 4: and Panama rightly claiming that that was a fraudulent election,
Speaker 4: and as a result, Panama is now looking for a
Speaker 4: third country to deport these people too. If the US
Speaker 4: attempted to deport potentially millions to people to Venezuela again,
Speaker 4: there's no guarantee that Madua has to accept them back, right.
Speaker 1: I can hear a lot of people saying, how is
Speaker 1: that allowed.
Speaker 2: To not accept take them back?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 4: I mean international law is like it's a unicorn, Like
Speaker 4: you know, if everyone agrees that they see it, and
Speaker 4: they see it, but it's not real, right, So like
Speaker 4: who is going to make them I guess, like like
Speaker 4: whether it's allowed or not, it's kind of immaterial. Madua
Speaker 4: is not how to steal the election right, you're not
Speaker 4: allowed to abuse human rights. Migrants are allowed to cross
Speaker 4: any country they want and claim asylum anywhere that they
Speaker 4: feel safe. But like here we are so yeah, in
Speaker 4: theory the country should accept its citizens back and practice
Speaker 4: will it?
Speaker 2: I don't know, certainly.
Speaker 4: It becomes like a bigger issue when you have millions
Speaker 4: of people, right, And if we have millions of people
Speaker 4: deported back, then like if we can't deport them, where
Speaker 4: are we going to detain them? That gets back to
Speaker 4: the cost of detentions, right, talking of costs should probably
Speaker 4: cover the costs of our podcasting set up here by
Speaker 4: pivoting to adverts again, Yeah, we are back, and for
Speaker 4: the final segment here, I want to talk about who
Speaker 4: Trump could pursue with these deportations. Right, there's two major groups.
Speaker 4: The obvious starting point would be two point three million
Speaker 4: people who cross between January of twenty twenty three and
Speaker 4: April of this year, before Biden signed his asylum bad
Speaker 4: to be prescribed. That to two million, two hundred and
Speaker 4: sixty four, eight hundred and thirty. Those people don't have
Speaker 4: permanent immigration status. Those are the people who you've heard
Speaker 4: from on this podcast who are in cucumber right. The
Speaker 4: people who we've interviewed for the last year and a
Speaker 4: bit now. They have various immigration status, but none of
Speaker 4: them are permanent. None of them have permanent residency. All
Speaker 4: of them are obviously registered.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 4: They normally have a notice to appear in court, which
Speaker 4: would make them easy to find and potentially easy to deport.
Speaker 2: The other group of.
Speaker 4: People are the undocumented migrant who have been here for
Speaker 4: longer than that. Many of them have most have been
Speaker 4: in the country for more than a decade. They're working,
Speaker 4: They often have citizen children right because of birthright citizenship.
Speaker 4: Most of the pay taxes. Most of these people have
Speaker 4: some form of revocable legal status, so that might be
Speaker 4: something called a temporary protected status. We talked about a
Speaker 4: temporary protected status last week as well, but it applies
Speaker 4: to people who are already in the country when it's granted,
Speaker 4: and it allows them to stay for a designated period
Speaker 4: of time while it's not safe to deport them to
Speaker 4: their home country.
Speaker 2: Let's say there's been a war or a natural disaster.
Speaker 4: Right, it's not safe to deport them, but it gets
Speaker 4: renewed two months before the end of that period. Let's
Speaker 4: say it renews every eighteen months, and you find out
Speaker 4: two months before the end of that period if it's
Speaker 4: not going to be renewed. If they didn't renew those TPSS,
Speaker 4: those people could either change status or would become undocumented.
Speaker 4: The TPS has existed since nineteen ninety and they're about
Speaker 4: eight hundred and sixty thousand people on TPS right now.
Speaker 4: The other major category that people will probably be more
Speaker 4: familiar with are dreamers, people who came to the United
Speaker 4: States as children and are undocumented, but they benefit from
Speaker 4: something called Darker Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, and about
Speaker 4: eight hundred and thirty four thousand young people benefit from this,
Speaker 4: which allows them to receive a renewable two year period
Speaker 4: of deferred action from deportation. Trump did try and go
Speaker 4: after this in his previous term in twenty eighteen. He
Speaker 4: ended up in a two year court battle which sort
Speaker 4: of finished up with NAACP versus Trump, and that ran
Speaker 4: out the clock on his term and Biden reinstated Darker.
Speaker 4: But again, because people have to register for Darker, their
Speaker 4: whereabouts are easier for someone like Ice to potentially find.
Speaker 4: Then after that, we have people who entered without being detected.
Speaker 4: We have people who overstayed their visas. Those people might
Speaker 4: be harder to find, right. The model of the undocumented
Speaker 4: migrant that people have in their head comes across the
Speaker 4: border with carpet shoes, sneaks past a BP checkpoint, and
Speaker 4: then lives in the United States without ever encountering migration authorities.
Speaker 4: That's actually not the majority model, but those people do exist,
Speaker 4: and that they would be harder for ICE to find potentially.
Speaker 4: Trump is also vowed to end parole programs that allow
Speaker 4: Ukrainians and Afghans to enter the USA and work. I
Speaker 4: would think that some of those would be pretty unpopular.
Speaker 4: People have been much more broadly in sort of with
Speaker 4: Ukrainian migrants than they have with other migrants from other.
Speaker 2: Parts of the world.
Speaker 4: They'll say, but it would be an easy one again
Speaker 4: for him to end right. The last thing he's really
Speaker 4: said he wanted to do is to end birthright citizenship. Yep.
Speaker 4: That is I spoke about this before in our Agenda
Speaker 4: forty seven episodes. That's pretty clear in the fourteenth Amendment
Speaker 4: they have some kind of fringes on the flag legal
Speaker 4: theory around this, but like I would think that that
Speaker 4: would require a constitutional amendment. But who knows, because he
Speaker 4: might have both Houses and the Supreme Court on his side,
Speaker 4: so he might just be able to get away with
Speaker 4: doing that. This obviously wouldn't rescind citizenship from people who
Speaker 4: have previously have children who are citizens. Talking of people
Speaker 4: have children as citizens, they are about four million mixed
Speaker 4: status families in the United States, so this deportation plan
Speaker 4: could potentially separate parents from children and children from parents,
Speaker 4: children from their older parents who they take care of.
Speaker 4: It could destroy these families, right, Deportations always destroy families.
Speaker 4: I've seen this happening myself, and it's horrible. The states
Speaker 4: where this would most likely happen the states are the
Speaker 4: highest documented population at California, Texas, and Florida. California thus
Speaker 4: far retains its sanctuary policies. Texas Florida very much do not, right,
Speaker 4: and so those would be the states where they will
Speaker 4: be the highest risk of this happening. That's between five
Speaker 4: and six percent of their population. And that's kind of
Speaker 4: where I want to finish up today. I've got some
Speaker 4: more stuff I wanted to say about his border policy,
Speaker 4: but I think I'm going to say that for another episode,
Speaker 4: because the border and immigration are different things. And I
Speaker 4: think sometimes this is something that a lot of legacy
Speaker 4: media doesn't understand. They have immigration reporters who report immigration law,
Speaker 4: the stuff i've spoken about today, but the border is
Speaker 4: not somewhere that they go, and it's not something that
Speaker 4: they cover very well. If you've been listening for a while,
Speaker 4: you'll know that I've spent a lot of time at
Speaker 4: the border on the ground, in the mountains, in the desert,
Speaker 4: and that's something that we've covered in great depth here
Speaker 4: and I'm pretty happy that listeners have a really complete
Speaker 4: understanding of it.
Speaker 1: Would California actually be able to enforce being a sanctuary
Speaker 1: state or.
Speaker 4: Now, yes, in the it's law enforcement doesn't have to
Speaker 4: caught ice, right. The federal government cannot compel local law
Speaker 4: enforcement to state law enforcement to do its work.
Speaker 2: That is very well established.
Speaker 4: Again, nothing's off the cards when you have both Houses
Speaker 4: of Congress and the Supreme Court. But again that would
Speaker 4: take time and it would take a court battle. So
Speaker 4: what they can do now is not report those people right,
Speaker 4: not say hey, we got someone here, he came in
Speaker 4: because we found him with a bag of weed. He's undocumented.
Speaker 4: You know, he was driving thirty five and a thirty,
Speaker 4: he's undocumented. These are things that people who are undocumented
Speaker 4: have to worry about, right, Like, for those of you
Speaker 4: who don't have undocumented folks in your life, Like it's
Speaker 4: a speeding ticket, it's the most minor in it's not
Speaker 4: paying a parking ticket and ending up in court, right Like,
Speaker 4: this shit is so minor to so many people, but
Speaker 4: it could tear someone's life apart. And so I want
Speaker 4: to like finish up by saying that, Yeah, Texas and
Speaker 4: Florida are going to be the places where we see this. Yeah,
Speaker 4: five percent of the population is a large amount of
Speaker 4: your population. If he even attempts half of that, people
Speaker 4: are going to see this. It's going to happen in
Speaker 4: your community. Now, I'm not saying he will, but if
Speaker 4: it does, like the time to start organizing to protect
Speaker 4: people you care about is now. Be that with their nations,
Speaker 4: to groups like Alo Torolalo, who have successfully sued the
Speaker 4: Trump and Bien administrations for my goods rights. Be that
Speaker 4: with organizing such that your own documented friends don't end
Speaker 4: up in court because they couldn't pay a parking ticket,
Speaker 4: right even if that means you paying someone giving someone
Speaker 4: fifty bucks for a parking ticket so that it doesn't
Speaker 4: ruin the rest of their life.
Speaker 2: Whatever it is. The way that we.
Speaker 4: Prevent this is through strong communities. We have to start
Speaker 4: putting those now. I know we've said this a lot
Speaker 4: this week, but we're probably going to say a lot
Speaker 4: for the next three months. It's like a lot of
Speaker 4: people have reached out to me since the Trump election,
Speaker 4: which was two days but also like seven years ago,
Speaker 4: because that's how time works, saying that they want to
Speaker 4: participate in mutual aid at the border. I would love
Speaker 4: for you to come and join us, of course it would,
Speaker 4: And like I think people have heard a lot about
Speaker 4: our mutual aid setup because of something I do a lot,
Speaker 4: but that I don't want you to come here and
Speaker 4: do mutual aid tourism, Like I want you to come
Speaker 4: here and understand and learn what we do and then
Speaker 4: do it yourself, or just do it yourself, like there
Speaker 4: was a time when this didn't exist and people started
Speaker 4: it right and you can start it to And I'm
Speaker 4: not going to tell you, like the specifics of what
Speaker 4: I think you should do, because I don't know. I
Speaker 4: don't know what the legal environment will be. I don't
Speaker 4: know what the legal environment will be in your state.
Speaker 4: But whatever the legal environment is, it will be better
Speaker 4: if we have strong and cohesive communities to look after
Speaker 4: one another.
Speaker 2: Right. If you're looking to donate your money.
Speaker 4: I've said it before ALOTLAO where I would suggest it.
Speaker 2: It's a L t R O l A d O
Speaker 2: dot org.
Speaker 4: They've done really valuable work in defending migrants rights in court.
Speaker 4: Haitian Bridge Alliance would be another great example of that.
Speaker 4: Will you link that, I'll put them both in the
Speaker 4: show notes.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: But the way we confront this is together. And it's
Speaker 4: super important that now in the next three months of
Speaker 4: that are and documented people in your life so that
Speaker 4: you check in with them, that you talk with them
Speaker 4: about what the best plan is. We don't know what's
Speaker 4: going to happen. I've outlined some scenarios here. None of
Speaker 4: them may happen, right, We don't know yet, but we
Speaker 4: have these three months and we'd be foolish not to
Speaker 4: use them.
Speaker 1: Ye.
Speaker 4: Yeah, talk to your friends, begin organizing. The solution is
Speaker 4: not to spare. The solution is community, and I know
Speaker 4: it can be really to spare. And if you're listening
Speaker 4: and you are and documented, I understand how petrifying this is,
Speaker 4: and just know that, like we're all thinking of you
Speaker 4: and hopefully there are people in your life who are
Speaker 4: there to help you and to help you get through
Speaker 4: a difficult time.
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