America's Talking - Trump Issues Series of Border Security Orders ‘To Protect America From Invasion'

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello and welcome to America in Focus, powered by the Center Square. I'm Dan McAulb, Chief Content Officer at Franklin News Foundation, publisher of the Center Square Newswire Service. President Donald Trump wasted no time this week, reversing his predecessor's policies, signing executive orders related to the border, related to energy, undoing diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in the federal government, and so much more. Joining me to discuss this today is Casey Harper, Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief for the Center Square. Casey, let's start with the executive orders related to immigration and border security. What actions has Trump taken?

Starting point is 00:00:36 This is Judgment Day on the southern border, the southern border crisis. Trump issued a flurry of executive actions, as you said, that have already had huge impacts on the border. He essentially shut down the border almost entirely. He sent troops to the southern border, you know, about 15. 1,500 troops to the southern border. He reinstated remain in Mexico, which is a policy that he had during his term, and Biden actually undid, which said that asylum seekers who were coming to the U.S., while your claims are being processed, you have to wait in Mexico. You can't, because what

Starting point is 00:01:14 would happen, and this is what happened under Biden, people would come into the country. They would say, oh, I'm an asylum seeker. And they would say, okay, we need to process you. Come back in six months for your court date. In some cases, Casey, it was three, four years in the future in this court days. Right. So it was like, oh, sure, I'll be back. And then they never came back. I mean, who would come back? You know, they're going north. They're going to New York City. They're going to Chicago, wherever they're going. They don't come back. No one ever follows up. And that, you know, and that became the norm. That's why when Democrats and Biden were saying, oh, Republicans are blocking this Senate bill we had to shut down the immigration crisis. That was why it

Starting point is 00:01:50 rang so hollow, although I'm not sure people really understood that. I mean, there was just a few executive actions that created most of this problem. So that's a big one. He also doing things with Title 42, which is a COVID-era policy that allows, he's talked about this on the campaign trail, about basically it tightens up the border in the name of preventing COVID. So he's got all these executive actions. And then maybe most importantly, as a deterrent in addressing past years, is he's restarted deportations. He's starting with, you know, the most serious criminal illegal immigrants, but it doesn't seem like he's planning to end there. Tom Homan, the border czar, has talked about this at length in public, but they're starting with criminals, those with,

Starting point is 00:02:31 you know, criminal records, and they're going to move on from there. A lot of people don't know, Dan, I've written about it at the center square.com, but ICE has basically not been deporting people, hardly at all, since Biden took over. They've only been deporting, you know, criminals. Of course, you know, they deport people here and there. There has been no massive deportation program running alongside this illegal immigration that's been coming in. But Trump's restarting it, really just putting ice back to where it was. I mean, even like President Obama deported way more people than President Biden did. And immigration was much less of an issue under Obama. And so there was really some intentional things being done by Biden at the executive level to exacerbate this

Starting point is 00:03:11 immigration crisis, regardless of the Democratic rhetoric, regardless of them talking about that Senate bill. It was really a handful of executive actions that opened up the border and stopped deporting most people. How about his executive orders related to energy? He undid Biden's EV mandates requiring a certain percentage of vehicles sold by auto dealers to be electric vehicles. He opened up drilling, oil and gas drilling across the country. Tell us about a little bit more about this. Yeah. So he's Trump in his famous way said drill. baby drill. And he talks a lot about the quote, liquid gold under our feet. And so he is trying, he's just opening up in a much bigger way, the domestic drilling in the U.S. removing boundaries.

Starting point is 00:03:57 He's, you know, going to open up LNG export sites, I believe. He's exiting the Paris Agreement, which is, you know, of course, no friend of drilling. The EV mandate that you mentioned is particularly interesting because it would have forced basically over half. of Americans in the next, you know, decade to transition to electric vehicles because it was what seemed like a very technical regulation about tailpipe emissions, but they wrote the regulation in such a way that most, you know, gas using cars would not be able to pass the rule. So you can say, oh, it's just regulating tailpipes. But if you ride it so strictly that most cars can't meet that standard, then people are going to have to transition to electric. And that was the plan. That was the whole

Starting point is 00:04:41 point of the regulation. And the EPA itself said, you know, that there was. We're getting towards more than half of Americans being on electric vehicles, you know, the next decade or so, actually even sooner. And so Trump opened up drilling. He did away with that mandate. And, you know, I think there's going to be more things. He's also made it really clear. He doesn't like wind energy. And Republicans don't either.

Starting point is 00:05:02 He thinks wind energy is ugly. These giant windmills, it doesn't do much. It kills the birds. And then when these big pieces of windmill, you know, break down, there's nowhere to put them because they're gigantic. They're huge. I mean, if you've ever driven by one on the highway, when they're taking one, you know, one propeller on the windmill. So it's this a new era of energy. I think, you know, electric energy will keep plotting along and growing, but it'll happen into more a natural rate, not with federal regulation and subsidy forcing it. How about the diversity, equity, and inclusion orders that he signed? He essentially shut down diversity, equity, and inclusion departments within the federal government. put on paid leave, those working for those departments. Tell us a little bit more about that.

Starting point is 00:05:52 Yeah, I mean, this was pretty sweeping. I've been covering the DEI and the federal government for years now, and all the funding that goes to it, and it's so extensive. It's so intertwined. There's so much money going to it that people don't realize. But Trump's orders are pretty extensive so far. I think it'll be interesting to see compliance. So, as you said, at this moment of this recording,

Starting point is 00:06:12 all DEI employees and the federal government should be laid off. They should be on paid leave right now. There should be no DEI employees in the federal government working today. They say DEI employees, what? Yes, all these agencies have employees making big money for the explicit purpose of advancing diversity, equity, inclusion in the United States and within their own agency as they define it. And they all define it differently and they all have different goals and different equity action plans. and some have more employees than others. And, you know, the EPA talks about environmental justice and how different climate policies impact some communities disproportionately.

Starting point is 00:06:51 And FEMA wants to make sure that aid is distributed in an equitable manner and all of the stuff. But it's just there's so much money that goes into this stuff. And all those people are now on paid leave. According to the executive order, they have just a few weeks to basically fire all of them permanently. And they have to create a list of every day. DEI thing they're doing. And so it's really like an audit of the federal government and a systematic dismantling. And then that comes alongside Doge, which is related because Trump issued an executive order

Starting point is 00:07:24 to create the Department of Government Efficiency, which I believe part of what it's going to do is going to be rooting out, finding these things, and eliminating them as well. Thank you for joining us today, Casey. Listeners can keep up with this story and more at thecenter square.com.

America's Talking - Trump Issues Series of Border Security Orders ‘To Protect America From Invasion'

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