Bulwark Takes - Inside Trump’s Brutal Anti-Immigrant Agenda

Episode Date: November 30, 2025

Bill Kristol and Aaron Reichlin-Melnick discuss Trump’s escalating nativism and the implications of his increasingly aggressive anti-immigrant policies.

Hi, Bill Crystal here, editor at large of the bulwark. Very glad to be joined today by Aaron Reikland-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, a lawyer, advocate, analyst of all matters, have it to do with immigration policy and a few others as well. I see you've been opining on the law of war, but we can quite correctly and intelligently and sentently, but anyway, we could leave that issue aside for I guess for a minute or we'll come back to it if you want. But anyway, Aaron is a great expert on immigration. as we've done this a couple of times before and a real resource for anybody

who wants to understand what's going on. You should follow him on Blue Sky and X or X, whichever you prefer. So, Aaron, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me again. So I thought today we would try to update people on what is going on. We've seen headlines, obviously. There's the kind of internal enforcement side of things,

the ICE Border Patrol stuff, a lot of visibility. Maybe we start with that. And then I want to talk a little more than people normally do about what the administration is also doing and revoking TPS, temporary protected status, and other things in the, let's call it the legal side as opposed to internal enforcement, the kicking people out or restricting people from coming in side of immigration. And then maybe we can talk more broadly about the bigger picture

almost of where they're going with this, with their immigration or anti-immigration policy. So tell me, I mean, we've seen the videos from Chicago at all. What's going on? Is it more aggressive than you expected? Is it subsiding or is it going to continue, et cetera? Yeah. The long story short is that across pretty much every sector, Trump's crackdown on immigration is accelerating. In the ICE enforcement, DHS enforcement in the interior side of things, while the Operation Midway Blitz has formally concluded and there are debates over whether what was known as Operation Charlotte's Web in Charlotte, North Carolina has concluded, The pace of immigration enforcement is significantly up and continues to be up.

And a lot of this is due in part to the fact that the Trump administration is getting the funds online that they got at the start of July in Trump's one big, beautiful bill act. $75 billion for internal enforcement. That's $45 billion for detention and $30 billion for other parts of the interior enforcement system, such as hiring. And they have new staff coming online every day, new detention benefits. coming line on every day. And so we are really not seeing anything slow down, even if individual operations in individual cities may have dialed back a smidge. That's really, I mean, I think it's the point, but you made that point extremely clearly and well, because it's so important. I have the sentences that around a lot of people who

don't approve of what Trump's doing. There's kind of a sense of, well, maybe we're past the worst of it. It might die down a bit. But I guess in pure, I mean, analytically, there's no necessary reason for that to happen, right? No, and the data doesn't show it either. Arrests are rising every single month. There has been no slowdown. Detention is rising every single month. There has been no slowdown there. In fact, the detention system is now supposedly around 70,000 beds. When Trump took office, there are about 40,000 detention beds around the country. So now the system has increased in size by about 75% on its way to doubling in size, probably by the year end. And of course, who is being sent to detention is increasingly people without criminal records. If you look at, if you break down the statistics that are available to us, which is whether people have any prior conviction whatsoever. And prior conviction here, I want to really emphasize, does not mean all murderers, rapists, et cetera. Prior conviction includes things like misdemeanor,

illegal entry. It includes things like traffic violations, driving with a suspended license, You know, things that are small, nonviolent offenses, everything from that to much more serious offenses. So the percent of, you know, the number of people arrested and held a nice detention with serious criminal records is increasing by about, like, 30, 40 percent. The number of people with pending criminal charges has about doubled. And the number of people in detention with no criminal record whatsoever, no pending charges, no criminal convictions, no matter how minor, has increased by a thousand percent since Trump took office. It is now the single largest group of people held in detention, 40%, 41%, and that number is rising every two weeks when the Trump administration releases data, which we finally have now that the shutdown is over.

So just to be clear, so 40%, two-fifths of those in detention have no criminal record, and another pretty good chunk of that other 60% have very minimal, let's say, criminal records. David Beer at the Cato Institute got hold of documents that ICE produced a Congress breaking down the actual conviction record of those who have prior criminal convictions and what it showed is only about 5% of the people who had some sort of criminal conviction had a violent offense. There is an additional 10% or so who also have some serious offenses that can include drug offenses, it can include other things, which are more serious. But we are not talking about the majority of people having serious criminal convictions. The majority of people

held who have some prior interaction with the criminal justice system, it is usually low-level offenses, misdemeanors, or violations. And if Trump and his people, Steve Miller, I suppose in particular, want to, are serious about just getting rid of everyone in the country or as many people as possible who are in the country who are undocumented, the pool of people they can keep going after is large, am I right? I mean, how many, what's the absolute number of how many have been deported or rounded up do we know? Or, and what's the number of sort of potential? people they can keep going after. Yeah, well, of course, you know, this is something where the Trump administration loves to throw around crazy high numbers. J.D. Vance says, throws around completely

invented numbers, like 20 million, 30 million people. It is crazy. Every month, the number of people in the country who are undocumented seemingly raises by another 10 million. Now I see people saying 40 million. And now I've seen people start saying, well, it can't even be 40. It's got to be 50 million. So that number keeps going up and up and up. But when you actually look at this, you look at the census data, you do economic studies on this. The undocumented population is about 14 to 15 million. And you will get consensus on those opinions from pretty much everyone on the center, center left, center right, the center right, the further right you go, the higher the estimates get. But even fair, the foundation for Americans for immigration reform, which is one of

the more extreme groups out there, even their estimate is 18 million, which I think is incorrect, but that gives you some sense when you compare it to these 30, 40, 50 million numbers that even one of the most anti-immigrant restrictionist groups out there isn't even saying that those numbers are right. So that population, how many people of the Trump administration actually rounded up and deported, we're looking at so far somewhere around 300,000. Now, the Trump administration says they've deported over half a million people. They are putting out numbers claiming they've hit half a million deportations and two million people have left. Do not believe those numbers. The half-million figure is based on real numbers, but they've just distorted it and, you know,

characterizing things that are not deportations as deportations. So when we actually look at the hard data that is provided by the government to the public, the limited amount that we have, we are looking at probably around 300,000 in so far since he took office. And self-deportation? Do we have much data on how many people are deciding to leave the country in advance of getting picked up? Yeah. So the Trump administration says around 25 to 35,000 people have used the CBP home process. That is the system where people can essentially self-report to the government and get $1,000 once they return to their home country. About 35,000, 25,000 people have used that. An unknown number of other people who have been locked in detention have taken what's known as assisted voluntary return, which is a similar thing. But there, it's far more coercive. It's, it's, it's, it's, It's people in a detention center being handed a piece of paper and told either you sign this and you get to go home tomorrow or we're going to keep you locked up here for nine months while you fight your case.

And a lot of people have never been in jail before. They've never been detained. They're in a prison jumpsuit. They're away from their family, their friends, and they say, I can't take this. And they just sign the paper. So those numbers are probably much higher. And then the Trump administration throws around this 1.6 million figure where they say 1.6 million people left the country without being deported.

deported. And that's based on a figure that produced by the Center for Immigration Studies, a anti-immigrant restrictionist group, more on the center right than the far right. And I would say that estimate has a number of asterisks over it. And the most crucial one being, it comes from a data source that economists have said is not actually valuable for getting direct population level numbers. So we are waiting. I think this is a little frustrating an answer. The most responsible thing to do to figure out this question of how many people have left without being deported is to wait a year or two for the census to produce new data. And once we have that census data, we'll be able to get a reliable estimate until now all the previous, all the estimates that

can be produced come with huge asterisks on them. But I suppose the implication of this is if they wanted to, I mean, I guess everyone, some people have assumed even I sometimes, well, this thing at some point subsides, then I can spend four years plowing through every major American city. But there are plenty of people for them to continue to go after. Yes. I mean, right, it's not like they're using up the, they won't, now they could choose politically to quote declare success a year from now and say we've deported X million and another X million of self-deported and we're kind of subsiding, but they don't have to do

that if they don't wish to. No, and I mean, realistically, even if they double the numbers they're hitting it out, even if, let's say, they managed to hit their one million deportations a year figure, which I said For a while, I don't think they're going to hit this, you know, they may be on track by next year to hit half a million in a single year. So they would have to double on top of that. But let's say that they do hit half a million and, you know, then we're still talking about 27, 25 plus years, 28 years to hit 14 million. You know, say they have hit a million in a year. That's still over a decade.

And that's even, we're still talking about probably a decade or more of this level of enforcement or high. higher if they actually wanted to deport everybody. Well, I suppose self-deportation would reduce, if they could claim that, incidentally, I'm making this up twice as many people are self-deporting as we're deporting, then they could say they could do this, make more much more progress than four years. But either way, it's only eight to ten years. Yeah, either way, it's a big project. It's a big project.

And, you know, I think this is really crucial of people to understand why no government has ever tried to do that before. We are talking about 4 to 4.5% of the United States population, nearly one in every 25 people in the country. In some locations, one in 10 people in the country. In Los Angeles, it's either one in 10 or 1 in 12, somewhere around that. You are talking about trying to kick out huge parts of the country, entire neighborhoods worth of people. And that, if you want to do that, and the Trump administration does want to do that, you are talking about transforming the country into far more of a police state. You are talking about transforming the relationship United States citizens have with their

law enforcement communities. Because, of course, it's not like undocumented immigrants are sort of ghosts who flit amongst the population unseen and, you know, and interacting with them. No, they're customers at businesses, they're family members, their friends, their parishioners at churches, their students in schools. And so, you know, even in a classroom, you know, you have a Maybe a child who's been here for 10 years undocumented. They're a senior at high school. Maybe they're the prom queen. And they get deported.

That's every person in the school who knew that person who's impacted. So the ripple effects of this are far more broad than just 4% of the population. The ripple effects impact pretty much everybody in some way or another. And as this operation continues over the next few years, it's just going to be more and more visible. Yeah. And to say nothing of the economic effects. So let's move then to the other side of what they're doing, I suppose, or they're maybe more than one side to the other side, but the most visible things I've seen up in the announcements of removing temporary protected status or letting it expire, I suppose, not extending it for various groups of immigrants, Haitians, Venezuelans, and others. How does that work?

What are those numbers like? What's going to happen? I mean, there are a ton of these people in the country. Yeah. So temporary protected status is a form of protection. that Congress created 35 years ago that allows now the DHS secretary to say there are extraordinary conditions in someone's home country. There's ongoing armed conflicts. There's a natural disaster or just conditions are so poor that it would be wrong to deport people back

there because you'd be deporting people into harm. And at the time that the Trump administration took office, there were about 1.3 million people who had temporary protected status. Now, about a million of those people got temporary protected status under the Biden administration. Of that million, 350,000 Venezuelans were actually protected by the Trump admin. In fact, by Trump himself in his last days in office. So we're talking about, though, the biggest populations here are from Venezuela and Haiti, which takes up most of that million. The rest are much smaller populations.

Some of them, less than a thousand people. You know, South Sudan, there are not very many South Sudan. There are not very many South Sudanese here, but when the country fell into civil war, that Biden administration, I think, correctly said, we're not going to send someone back into the middle of the civil war. That's the whole point of TPS. Well, the Trump administration believes inherently that all of these types of statuses that are temporary and administrative discretion are wrong.

And they are invoking a provision of the law that says, well, we can refuse to continue granting TPS if we think it's against the national interest. And their national interest argument is, we just don't want these people here. And that's really all it boils down. They're not saying things are better. In some situations, they are. In a few of the TPS terminations, they are saying it's better. But realistically, they're just saying, we don't want these people here.

And so they've said Haiti. Haiti is falling into gang warfare. The situation there is dire. We don't care. We just want them out of the country. Same with Venezuela. They're basically saying, we want to go to war with Venezuela. We're firing drones into people alleged to be Venezuelan,

drug traffickers. But actually, Venezuela is totally fine. We can just deport everybody back there. We're ending protection, even for the people that Trump himself personally protected. And so this is really going under the radar, but it's a million people have been rendered, you know, undocumented, de-documented. They had legal status. They had protections. Yes, they were temporary protections, but the presumption was they wouldn't lose those protections until conditions improved. But that's not what the Trump admin is saying. They're saying, we don't care if the conditions have improved. We just want to get rid of it anyway.

Who cares what happens to you? And so they've actually potentially made more people undocumented so far than they have actually deported. And that really undermines communities, yeah. Yeah, what happens? You're sitting there, you're, you know, John Smith, and you've been working. I take it, you can work when you have a TPS and you can work. You can even travel. You can leave the country and come back in.

Pay taxes. You're doing whatever. And then you're rendered or have the prospect. to being rendered undocumented. Yeah. So you're susceptible then to being removed. Your employer has a problem continuing to keep you if he's, if he and she's careful about, you know, not hiring undocumented people, et cetera, right?

Yeah. And for some of these people, they've been here for more than a decade. Haiti was first granted temporary protected status in 2010 because of the earthquake 15 years ago. And there's about 50,000 Haitians who have had temporary protected status for 15 years. And these are people now who have. have been living and working legally in the country for a decade and a half, every 18 months, they have to submit to a new background check to ensure that they are still in compliance with every rule. That means any criminal conviction. And basically, you're, heck, you can have a very

minor few things. But basically, any significant criminal offense beyond like a low-level traffic offense will get you to lose TPS. So these are essentially the most vetted people in the country, every 18 months they are vetted by the federal government for 15 years, and the Trump admin is terminating TPS for them. So, you know, that means a lot of them might be small business owners, they'll be managers, there'll be senior employees, people who have been here for a long time. And when the Trump administration, you know, when they terminated, they've now said they wanted to end in February for Haiti. There will be lawsuits over this. Essentially what they're saying is at that day, you know, 12.1 a.m. the next day, you know, you know, You're no longer here legally.

You no longer have the right to work. You have to leave. Now, for a lot of people, some of them will leave, absolutely. Others may not. They may become undocumented. They don't get picked up or arrested automatically because now they just become one of the 14 million. But also, crucially, they may be applying for some other form of benefit. They may end up seeking asylum.

They may try to get a green card through some process that one or two people might be available for, but the lion's share will not be eligible for anything. They will probably just become undocumented. And so that hasn't, I mean, a lot of those announcements have been prospective or coming soon, you're going to lose your TPS, right? I mean, we haven't really seen, I don't have the sense that we've seen massive effects yet

on the TPS side. Am I right about that? We have for Venezuelans, 650,000 Venezuelans have lost their status. And then the population, which had had TPS TPS the longest. There were 50,000 Hondurans who had had TPS since 1998. I think there were probably some fair arguments that Congress should have stepped in and given them a green card because the situation for which they got it had probably passed. But nevertheless, you know,

we're talking 50,000 people who had been here legally for 25 plus years, 27 years in total, renewing every 18 months for 27 years paying a, like an application fee every time, paying their taxes, complying, and now they have nothing. You know, for 25 years, a quarter century, they've been here legally, and now they're sort of figuring out what to do with their lives. And I'm sure that's disrupting tens of thousands of families, many of them with American citizens, given how long they've been here. Yeah, no, I'm sure it is.

I mean, to Venezuela, many of when we're in South Florida, I was talking to a friend who lives down there who says he hasn't, he's sort of surprised there hasn't been more uproar and also, so far as you can tell, more attempts to go out to these people who are now undocumented. So he says the sense that there've obviously been all kinds of people who have left jobs

or have, there's been disruptions and family disruptions and people worried about coming to jobs. I think that they used to come to construction or housekeeper, any restaurants. But yeah, I mean, I guess that's something that looms ahead, right? I mean, when we're thinking about the next year, or two or three, as you say, these people, some will self-support or leave and some will

apply for other things, but you're increasing the number of undocumented people in the country. Yeah. And again, you know, it is quite possible that today there are more undocumented immigrants than when Trump took office, not because, I mean, again, this depends on how you define the term undocumented. And there are some definitions of that that include people with TPS and DACA and these what migration policies you just call these twilight statuses. But there have been more people moved from a twilight status, the people who had some form of legal authorization to work and remain here

without facing immediate arrest and detention if they encountered a ICE officer, then have been deported. And the Trump admin has reduced the population of people with some form of legal status and put them into the bucket of the totally undocumented than have actually been deported so far. That would appear to be the case when you look at the data.

And on the other aspects of legal immigration, I think one sees the headlines, the only people who are going to get asylum or 7,500 Afrikaners, apparently. Well, not asylum, refugee status, because that's really too crucial. I mean, you know, this is, I make that point because it's a really crucial distinction because asylum is for people who are already here. To apply for asylum, you have to be present physically in the United States. The refugee program is about bringing people in who've already been approved for status abroad. there, Trump has just destroyed the refugee program, 45 years of refugees coming to the United States since 1980, the program for set up under Ronald Reagan, brought in hundreds of thousands of people during the Reagan admin, you know, further been used for things like bringing Bosnians over here,

following the wars there, bringing Rohingya Muslims, following ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. It's really been a valuable program to the United States. And, you know, when it is studied, I think it's really crucial to emphasize, because they always say we want people here who will assist. Well, refugees pay far more into the system than any other immigrant group. Refugees are an enormous job creators. They help revitalize communities because they essentially act as a targeted funding source from the federal government. The federal government helps people get on their feet. And that can be used. And it only goes to communities usually that need more people, communities that have seen falling populations. So refugees help revitalize

dying communities, and that's happened over and over across the United States in a lot of measured, proven ways. And that program has effectively just been ended and is now only bringing in South Africans. But inside the country now, the Trump admin has used the really horrific shooting, really tragic shooting that's happened in Washington, D.C., as an excuse to even further crack down on asylum. Of course, they claim the asylum system has been abused and, you know, they want to make reforms to it, but their reforms appear to be an effort to just shut it down and deny everybody. 100% across the board, maybe a few exceptions here and there. They are really gunning to eliminate asylum as a viable path to ever remaining in the United States.

And we have data, obviously, on refugees and on people who sought and received asylum. And does that data, I mean, I suppose the answer if a Trump person would be, well, you say 40 years, that's exactly what we're objecting to, 45 years of open borders and people flooding in from third world countries and unvetted. And that's the point. That's not a bug. That's a feature. And so, but we have a lot of data on who these people are and how they've behaved in the United States, right? Yeah. And certainly, you know, if you could say every person who granted asylum was a saint, granted asylum was a saint or granted refugee status was a saint, of course not. You know, these are large populations, millions of people. Many of them came as children, maybe as

Adults then did something wrong, and, you know, no system of vetting is 100% perfect, and it can't be. You know, news stories coming about about the man who committed this heinous act in D.C. It suggested he was suffering from severe mental issues, and had been deteriorating. Apparently, friends and family had considered, you know, bringing in authorities because they worried he was suicidal. You can't know. And someone can be clear and pass every record when they enter five, ten years. in the past and then some life changes. There is no pre-crime.

And I think we have to talk about what are the best systems to find the most obvious public safety threats. And you can't also say, well, you're just going to have to prove that you're not going to do anything in the next 60 years. You know, if you come here as a 20-year-old, you need to prove to us that for the next 60 years, everything in your life is going to be perfect and you're never going to have any trouble. And that's just to say, prove that you're not a human being.

And what the Trump administration is doing with new restrictions, with its travel ban, with new rules that they're implementing in the last couple of weeks, some of which predate this horrible accident, is they are trying to impose country-specific bans on the immigration system so that if you come from certain countries, they want to make it so that it's virtually impossible for you to get any immigration benefit. even if you are here already, even if you've already been vetted, because they say, well, we can't guarantee vetting from those countries. And therefore, we shouldn't let anybody in. But of course, again, as we've seen, someone can be the world's most secure person vetted over and over and over again, and they have a mental break. Someone can be, you know, there's always a first incident. You have a European here, you know, so Europe shares all of its data with the United States. They can have a perfect record. They have not a single blemish on their file. They come here as a 20-year-old university student and turns out they've been harboring a secret and, you know, they're a serial killer and

nobody ever knew about it. You just cannot, there isn't a world in which you can do that. And so you have to focus your resources on the most obvious public safety threat, do as much vetting as is reasonable. But to say, because you are from Afghanistan, you're incompatible with this country is absurd. And it's not what this country stands for. It's, you know, I really emphasize, we said, 1965, the civil rights era, that we will not judge people based on where they are born, that every person can become an American. I think that is something that we have to stand up for, is why, you know, what is the strength of America?

The strength of America is that we are the strongest assimilation engine in the history of the planet. And we are enormously successful about that. And every culture that has come here over 150 years has assimilated into America and America has assimilated into a bigger, broader nation of immigrants. And we have to stand for and saying we are a strong nation. We do have a strong culture. And Afghans who come over here, they will Americanize.

They always do. Every culture has died. Also, I mean, so just two points to that. I guess I totally personally agree with that. And I think it's well said. But we also have a lot of data on just how these people have done. That is, someone could say, well, that's very nice, Sarah. And it sounds very good.

But, you know, here's the data. You know, these people who got refugee, who got asylum or immigrated from this country or this set of countries have a crime rate that's 10 times that. of Native-born Americans. They have an unemployment rate five times that. They're unbanked public welfare. And so you can say these nice things, but the data cuts against you. But my impression is the data to the degree we have, and I guess we have a fair amount, doesn't support the notion that these people are a terrible burden on the U.S. one way or the other. And then my second point, which is a slightly different, but am I right in reading that the Trump administration is not talking

about retroactively, sort of unadmitting, expelling, I guess, people who were vetted and cleared and who've been living here, you know, without thinking that they were here only temporarily until last week or something. So two different points. Yeah. So, of course, you know, first on the data, obviously population data varies from certain nationalities to others. Certain nationalities do better, but oftentimes that's really about who the flow is. You know, again, refugees take the longest to become net fiscally positive because they start out from such a low level. And they do get support. The part of the refugee program is you get one year of support getting on your feet. And that's enormously helpful. But it still means that the net fiscal benefit eventually becomes positive. It just takes a little bit longer because people usually start sometimes with nothing but the clothes on their back. You know, if you're coming from a refugee camp, you start from nothing. And the great promise of this country is that you can build yourself into something. And then second generation immigrants perform economically better than every other. group. They are more likely to go to college. They are more likely to succeed economically. They

have the highest positive fiscal benefit for the United States. Children of immigrants are more likely to start businesses. It just really, really show that, you know, give people a generation or two people leave time. I mean, that's children of immigrants, however they've come second generation. So it's not even, that's pretty striking, actually. It's not even that they're not too much of a drag that they're actually ahead, so to speak, of... Yeah, second-generation immigrants are enormously entrepreneurial. And this is something that data has shown for many decades. You know, children of immigrants are more likely to start businesses than native-born

American citizens who are third generation or further away from that. And it's hard to say why there's a lot of reasons for it, of course. But some of it is the immigrant striber attitude is, you know, if you come from parents who picked up and moved thousands of miles across the world, you maybe get some of that. attitude from your parents of like you always have to push forward and move forward and come up from that position. And I think that's a really valuable thing. It has helped fuel this country. You know, you look at Fortune 500 companies. An overwhelming number of them were started by immigrants or children of immigrants over the last century. And crime, I mean, similarly, it's not as if our crime

problem is primarily or even in a big way an immigration problem. Am I right about that? Yeah. And look, statistically legal immigrants commit fewer crimes than Native born American citizens across the board. Undocumented immigrants commit slightly more crimes than legal immigrants, but still less than native-born immigrants. Wow. This data has been studied over and over again. And I think that's because people know that their status is precarious.

And, you know, again, of course there will be bad actors. Nobody is trying to suggest otherwise. But that's why you focus your resources on the bad actors and not engage in really collective punishment. because as a group, statistically, it is less crime than Native Oran citizens. If you want to lower the crime rate in a city, bring in more immigrants, statistically, that will lower the crime rate. Now, of course, as the population goes up, the net number of crimes will increase.

But, you know, it's a hard thing. That's why statistics are complicated. No, but, I mean, it's striking that in New York, which famously, the crime rate has gone down over 20 years, and due to policing or due to whatever, but it has quite a lot from when I was there. And immigration in New York, a number of immigrants in New York is quite large. Obviously, this has been a hub for immigrants. So that would just be a common sense confirmation of what you're saying. Say a word about the retroactive thing that Trump is ordering or trying to order even now about the Afghan population. So now the Trump administration is now trying to use

the tragedy that happened in D.C. as an excuse to say that every immigrant, essentially every immigrant that came into the United States in the last four years, legally or other is a threat. And they have ordered a re-check of every refugee who came into the country, over 200,000 refugees. Every person granted asylum, which is 150,000 to 200,000 people. And as well as they're saying, we also want to look at people who came from travel ban countries. These are the list of countries that President Trump imposed travel restrictions on. And they have suspended granting new applications, suspended all visas that are being granted to Afghans. So we're really looking at an effort to potentially strip legal status or find a way to retroactively go back and deny people their green cards, their asylum, their refugee status.

People who came in multiple years ago and have now been here without any trouble and they want to say, we want to go back and like make sure that no corners were cut, which is ironic when you look at refugees because, again, the Trump administration is redefined refugees to include Afrikaners who they say are facing discrimination. but refugee status is supposed to be about facing persecution. And they repeatedly refer to the Afrikaners they're bringing over as facing discrimination. But, you know, that's not a lot of people face discrimination. That is actually not a ground for asylum or refugee status. It has to rise to the level of persecution. And there have been many reports that inside USCIS, the message that came out was approve every South African case that you get.

So they are on the one hand rushing these people through the system to redefine the refugee system to mean conservatives and white people who they claim are persecuted or discriminated against while going back and saying all of these other refugees who came in, they are all suspicious and we want to find some way to strip their status. And of course, beyond that, it's more than just refugees. They're now talking remigration and these other white nationalist claims to go about a bigger population. No, I want to get to that and close with that.

It's so important, the bigger point. But just on the, so the Afghans I know here, they're quite a few. North of Virginia, who cooperated with our military, our intelligence community, that's this guy who had the terrible breakdown and tragically shot and killed people here, National Guard's people in D.C. But other people I've gotten to know here in Northern Virginia, who did work with us, who've come here, who've built lives, zero problem with any law enforcement that kids are in school and so forth, they're now going to, at risk of being expelled, just at a kind of group punishment, kind of way? I mean, is that

possibly? Doable? I do want to emphasize, we don't know exactly what this review process is going to look like. There are a lot of rumors and other things flying around right now. And so the message I can give right now is that we don't have very much concrete. What we know is that they have suspended granting any new status. So anyone

who is in the process right now, who's an Afghan, including potentially others who come from other travel ban countries like Cuba or Venezuela, they're saying we're taking a pause. We're just not going to look at these or not approve them. You know, people who are scheduled for interviews can still come in. They have their interviews. They can maybe get to the final stage of yes, no, but the Trump admin has said you can't check the box yes yet. I think you can probably still check the box. No, but we're going to suspend all approvals. What they're going to do after that, what they're going to do for the now they've already named in the last two weeks, 400, 500,000 cases that they want to

re-review is not yet clear yet, you know, what they're going to do there. But theoretically, in some of these cases, they could claim that the person was never eligible for the status in the first place and therefore should have their green card or other thing taken away from them. And there is a ground of immigration law where the government can say, we think you weren't eligible for this status. We're going to try to take it away from you. For green cards, that can be done in the first five years. And so for a lot of these people, if they have green cards, they'll still be in that period. And the Trump admin might say, well, we're going to try to put you in removal proceedings and strip you of your green card.

Now, that would have to be individualized. They could not sign a memo that says everybody who got a green card, you know, from 2021 to 2025, we hereby strip their green card. That's not legal. They can't do anything like that. They would have to do it on an individualized basis. But what that process is going to look like, how many officers they're going to assign to it, how much is this going to be more of a public relations thing, than an actual effort to, you know, painstakingly review 500,000 files. It is too early to tell. We will find that out when they reveal more details. But if you're living here, suddenly you have this cloud over you and you're, you know, makes all kinds of decisions problematic and the choices, obviously.

And, okay, let's talk a minute about the broader thing, which I'm very struck by. I think many people have been the DHS tweets embracing remigration. You might say a word about what that term means. And then more broadly, I guess the degree to which it just turns out, it seems to be turning out, that they have embraced what you earlier were distinguishing center right and pretty far right and really far right, anti-immigration or agendas or let's say restrictionists, maybe more neutral term. And I feel like there was some debate a year ago, you and I discussed this at a couple of places. You know, would they be sort of, you know, restrictionist or really aggressively, you know, trying to go after everyone or embracing the most far-right

version of let's get people who have come here over the last 40 years, get them out of here, get their kids out of here. And I feel like, I mean, somewhat to my surprise, I got it. I don't know to my surprise, but what I feared, I guess, seems to me to be coming true more than what I had hoped, which is they've gone all the way. They seem to want to be inclined to go all the way towards the most extreme anti-immigration agenda. Is that right? Maybe I'm overstating that and explain a little bit what remigration is and all that. Yeah. So for those who are not familiar with the term, remigration is a phrase that's been around for a few decades. It did not emerge exclusively from the far right, but became adopted by the European far right as a sort of shibboleth, which to them,

what it means in the European far right is ethnic cleansing. It means not just deporting people who are present in the country unlawfully, but deporting people who are legally who don't have citizenship and even potentially deporting people who had citizenship who are not ethnically European. And people with children of immigrants, right? I mean, it's very clear that it's not just the people who came here at age 15 or 35. It's people who, you know, were born in those countries. And it comes out of the European far-rights belief that certain peoples are, you know, the very fundamentally racist belief that certain peoples are incompatible with being in Europe. So, you know, the far rights in Germany want to kick out all of the Turks, the far right in France,

want to kick out all the Algerians, you know, the far right in England want to kick out all of the Pakistanis and the Bengalis and the Polish and the Albanians. And so you really have this belief that the sort of late 20th century, early 21st century, ways in which societies have become more diverse is wrong, and they want to go back to having sort of ethno-states. And now, of course, the phrase does, did not emerge originally out of that. It wasn't invented by a white supremacist, but it was heavily adapted by it. And the crucial thing about it is that if you don't know that context, it might sound like something you can pitch as, well, we want remigration.

Well, you know, a moderate politician says that he can just say that and he won't explain what that means. And we see DHS as well. They don't really spell out what that phrase means. And the state department is using this as well. They don't really spell out what it means. And so people who are not familiar with that context might think, well, it just means deporting the undocumented immigrants. But it's not. It is very clearly a wink at this more aggressive attitude of ethnic cleansing. And unfortunately, President Trump and the Stephen Miller and others really have leaned towards this recently. In a Truth Social Post, a couple of days ago, President Trump said, you know, most of the 53 million immigrants in this country are on welfare

or criminals or come from insane asylums. Fifty-three million is, I think, a high estimate, potentially a little too high, of every person's foreign. I think he uses the term, let me, foreign, foreigners or so in this country, right? Not immigrants, which actually sounds more ominous, right? Because they're, like, not part of the country, you know, right? Yeah. And of that population, 25 to 26 million of them, about half are naturalized U.S. citizens, including his wife.

So his wife is in that. Both of his wives, you know, Ivana, who passed away, was also an immigrant, includes his in-laws. It includes many, many people in this administration and their parents are naturalized immigrants that are in that group of 53 million that he so casually slandered. And I do think we've seen now with Stephen Miller has been posting all weekend about how certain cultures are incompatible. And it's starting to sound a lot like the 1920s and the 19-teens when the U.S. last passed the great nativist national origins quota bill on the belief pushed by eugenicists that certain cultures were fundamentally incompatible with the United States and therefore should not be permitted to enter. And the cultures they were particularly concerned about were the Italians and the Jews. And they were wrong then and they're wrong today.

But I don't think even then, I mean, I'll just say, obviously it wasn't around, but talk to my grandparents and stuff. I don't think anyone thought once they were in and had been in for 10 years or whatever that they were at risk of being sort of retroactively judged incompatible and deported. They certainly were very strict. The walls, the fences came down, so to speak, and no more of them got in and famously up until the actual. outset into World War II, so tragically. But, yeah, so this is even worse. I mean, the idea that we're going to deport, I don't know who, right? I mean, J.D. Vance's in-laws or something.

And presumably then, they're considerably their children because they have been judged incompatible. I mean, anyway, it is so striking to have a president, as you say, and senior advisors embracing, not just the term, but the whole concept, that 53 million foreigners is really sent to chill down by spimes. You're not talking here about immigrants. or people who came in the last four years. Maybe TPS was too generous.

That's a legislative decision. Congress could change it, of course, and so forth. We're talking about, we're calling foreigners, people who have been here for, well, for decades, obviously. And as you say, half of them have. I mean, yeah. I gave a talk at St. John's, Lafitt Church in Lafayette Square a while back, and I talked about the very first refugee program in the modern era, which was Hungarians, brought over from Austrian refugee camps in the early 1950s. And at the end of the talk, a woman in the audience came up to me and said, I was one of those children. I came over at age five in 1952.

And, you know, so that's, she's in that 53 million population, that woman who came over in 1952, and the U.S. citizen now came over because of refugee status. And it was wonderful getting to talk to her. And you think she is in that group. She is in the foreigners that Trump is now attacking. And I think it's really, you know, imperative on. those of us who love this country and who love, really, I think, what this country stands for, this belief that anyone can be an American to stand up for that at a time like this and say,

this isn't right. We've done this before as a nation. We've done awful things to immigrants in this nation. We did Japanese internment. In the 1880s, after Chinese exclusion, entire communities in the West Coast were ethnically purged, you know, with lynch mobs coming and telling every Chinese immigrant that you had to leave, you had 24 hours to leave, or we're going to kill everybody. So we've done some of those ethnic purges before, and they are black moments in our history, and we have to learn from that history and know that we can move past this, and that every fear over new ethnic groups has been proven to be wrong over history, every single time.

But also, I mean, the federal government and state governments, I guess, may have turned a blind eye to some of what was happening. And as you say, they certainly were restrictionists in terms of going forward stuff, and there were ethnic pogrom, so to speak, against various groups. But still, we haven't had, to my knowledge, a president of the United States and his senior advisors in a sense embracing, since, I don't know when, I mean, since, well, Lincoln addresses this in 1860,

embracing the notion that if you came from abroad, you're less of an American, that if you've been here for, I don't know how many generations they now want to say, two, three, four, five, you know. I mean, that is explicitly what Lincoln takes on in his famous statements about there is much, you know, descendants of the generation, people who sent us to the Declaration as people whose great-grandfathers fought in the revolution. And that's been American dogma in a good

sense, I would say, for almost forever, really. And it is very striking that they've gone that far. They didn't have, I mean, one could have imagined a restrictionist policy that we wouldn't have liked, a lot of demagoguing about immigrants that we would have deplored that didn't go this far, don't you think? In the real nativist, kind of European nativist direction, what might say. Yeah. And I do think it's crucial to say, despite as we're talking to this in very apocalyptic terms about this, as a policy measure, we have not yet seen that kind of actions. Right now, it is mostly rhetoric. And that's why I said, we're keeping an eye on what they're going to do with this effort to strip status. You know, is this going to be just a PR thing where they find five, ten people

and say, you know, we found these people who shouldn't have got status, but the overwhelming majority of people are put in fear, but nothing actually happens to them. It could well be this. And we don't know yet. And of course, the courts will play a role in this. If they really start doing aggressive things, they're going to have problems. And as I've said from the beginning, denaturalization, which Trump talked about stripping citizenship from people who are naturalized immigrants, is actually very hard for the federal government to do with good reason and not something that they can do at scale. You know, it requires every case requires filing in front of a federal judge and convincing a federal judge after a trial that the person, you know, should have their citizenship

stripped because they committed fraud or what have you. So it is not an easy thing for the federal government to do. And I don't want to suggest that they're going to do it. But they are talking as if they want to do it. And I think that is extremely notable and a worrying sign of where we're going less than a year into the Trump administration as they are still getting more resources online every single day for deportations. And it affects people's social and cultural attitudes, even if it doesn't lead to the government being allowed to

access people's interpersonal behavior and so forth, communities and stuff can be affected. Immigrant communities are in fear right now. And I think if you know anyone who's an immigrant, who's a Latino or others, very few people are insulated from this. In fact, when you look at polling on this issue,

Pew Research asked a question. They did a poll of Latinos. They have Pew Hispanic. They just focuses on polling. the Latino population. And we are now at a point where 60% of Latinos say that they think next year will be worse for Latinos than the last year. That's up from 30% in Trump's first term. So the Latino population is worried about the Latino population. And that includes tens of millions of people who are U.S. citizens, native-born, or naturalized. Yikes. No, and then all the money is you say we haven't really gotten into that.

we've got to stop, but how much, how many more ICE and Border Patrol people will be out there and we'll see if the courts can check them a little bit. They're trying to, but the administration fights that or goes along and how effective that is, these are all questions. Yeah, one really quick point on that that I do think it's important to emphasize, because, of course, Congress is going to have to act eventually. All of that money expires in four years. October 1st, 2021, that money is gone. They have to have spent all 75 million in the next four years. And unless Congress affirmatively decides to give them more money, it'll be up. And that means they would have to go

engage in probably mass firings because you can't keep that many personnel on board unless Congress increases the funding for it. So we are at a point where Congress, I think, we're at a crossroads on this issue. The administration has three and a half years, a little bit more than three years now to continue this aggressive path to mass deportations, after which the money runs out and it's gone. And they won't have deported everybody. And so I think it's really important for us to say, is there a better way forward? What can we do? How can we address this? I think paths to legal status and giving people a way to fix their papers so that we can use these resources if we want to use them on public safety threats, on people who do have serious criminal records, on recent

entrance who've been here for five minutes versus people have been here for 30 years. And I think that's what the American public at polling consistently shows they want to happen. And I think, you know, what nobody wants is the status quo. And unfortunately, you know, that's what we're getting with inertia in Congress. Yeah. And of course, Congress doesn't have to wait three years to agree. We all we'll assume, but can't do anything because it's controlled by President Trump's party and President Trump would, I suppose, veto other stuff. But as he derailed that border bill and before he's president in 2024, but of course, responsible people could step forward. So maybe maybe some will. It would be better if they did. Aaron Reikland-Meldick, thank you really very much for

joining me today and joining us, very clarifying and illuminating, if not entirely cheerful discussion, but very important for people to understand what's happening. So thanks so much. Thank you so much for having me, and I hope to come back and do this again. We will probably have to, yeah, and thank you all for joining us today.