Bulwark Takes - Tim Miller: Trump’s Raids Could Change America’s Schools

Episode Date: August 13, 2025

Tim Miller joined MSNBC’s Chris Jansing to discuss growing fears about immigration raids near schools as the new year begins. Families are afraid to send their children to class, worried that poorly-trained ICE agents could target them. Watch Chris Jansing Reports on MSNBC: https://www.msnbc.com/chris-jansing-reports

What do you do if the safe zone is gone? What do you do if you're a parent? What do you do if you're a kid? Yeah. Well, look, I think it's really tough for people who are dealing with, have families of mixed immigration status, right? Which is a lot of families. Which is a lot of families, right?

And so I think that it's a real challenge. I know that the school district in L.A. and others are, you know, like providing resources and stuff, but I can understand how they are going to feel unsafe and uncertain as you have going back to school. I think for those of us that are citizens, it's incumbent upon us to speak out about this. I think for Democrats, for sure, and if there are a small number of Republicans left who feel this way, pushing back against some of these ICE aggressive tactics, I think it's important.

You know, coming out of the election, there was a feeling that, ooh, Donald Trump won on immigration. Immigration isn't an issue anybody should talk about. You should focus on kitchen table issues. I disagree with that. Immigration is fundamental to what America is about. There have been a lot of pro-immigrant, Republican, and Democratic politicians in the past. I think the American people want a secure border, but they also don't want people drawing guns on kids at schools because they think they might be undocumented. Like, that is not a popular position.

It's a position that, like, 15 or 20 percent in the Stephen Miller wing of the Republican Party are four. And so not being afraid to speak out about it, call it out, and be kind of the line of defense, at least politically speaking, for those who are vulnerable as what is necessary. at this time. We showed the statement from LA, the Los Angeles School District Superintendent also put it this way. Children have been through enough from the pandemic to natural disasters. They should not have to carry the added weight of fear when they walk through their school gates. When children witnessed peers, parents, and other individuals detained, the image is not easily erased. These moments imprint on young minds, distracting them from academic lessons and replacing intellectual curiosity with worry.

But is fear the point? Well, fear is the point, and they want people to self-deport. But I would also say, look, the Republicans used this idea of parents' rights. It's like pretty good effect over the last few years. A lot of this was pushing back on, you know, whatever, LGBT material in schools and COVID stuff and other related stuff, and some of it was hypocritical, and some of it was BS. But, like, that was a rally in cry, parents' rights. And to me, I think that, again, this could be something,

you could get unity on pushing back on this. I think all, again, not all parents, there's going to be some extreme parents in any issue, but most parents don't want their kids to have to see this, right? Like, forget, and even if you're a kid of a citizen, you're like, you don't want to see your classmate being harassed, having cops with guns wrong, so parents can speak out about this, say no. I wonder if, Tim, some of the people who have expressed concern about immigration in this country, and look, there are issues. Sure. Without a doubt, but when you see your kid's buddy, when you see your little girl's friend in this situation or her parents, his parents in that situation, does that start to maybe slowly change the way people view it?

I mean, I think so. Look, you see it on a variety of different issues, right? Like we've talked about the scope times about how the manosphere started to push back on these iced masks or masked ice agents because that goes against their kind of don't tread on me ethos, right? I think for parents, you know, even conservative parents or their kids, in school, like they want their kids feel safe in school. Obviously, if there is, you know, a criminal activity, they want police to be able to go in there. But, you know, seeing this kind of harassment of other students, I do think it has a chance to change hearts of minds. And it's only going to do so, though, if people speak up about it and draw attention to it and push back on

it. And I think that it's especially important, by the way, to push back on it now, because they have this huge influx of ICE agents. And they say this was mistaken identity. What are all the 10,000 new ICE agents who haven't been trained going to do? I had the misfortune of debating Dean Kane on a YouTube show yesterday, the new ICE agent, the Superman guy. And I was saying to him, I said, do you even know what rights my group have? He said he was going to join nights. And these people don't know the rules yet. They don't know the rules of the road.

And so it's important to speak up now because you're going to have this influx of new agents that might act inappropriately because it's malicious, or it might just be that this is what happens. You have these mistakes when you're putting all this money into a military enforcement campaign. and you've got a bunch of amateurs that are coming in to execute it. I want to, if I can, to get to Tim, is there a point of diminishing returns? Because I think it does, it does seem like both sides are pretty well dug in.

Is somebody going to blink? Yeah, look, we're talking about, like, kind of several different things here, right? The Democrats need to fight in the states where they have power to fight. You know, I think it's important that California does, you know, what they can to try to offset the lost Texas seats, Even if that's not my preferred policy, it's like, look, if the Republicans are trying to snag an extra 5, 10 seats so they can hold on to the House undemocratically, then California should use the levers that they have. I talked to Attorney General Rob Bont to last week, who assured me that the Democrats weren't going to flinch on that fight. So I think that's one element to this. And I think that Speaker Jeffries is important for him as a leader of the party to be ensuring that he wants to be the Speaker – excuse me, the minority leader, Jeffries, wants to be Speaker Jeffries.

And so these seats really matter to him. I think there are other people and other parts of the party that should do other stuff. And I take Charlie's point on that, right? And I think that being out in the streets protesting on things you care about, whether it be immigration, which we talked about in the last segment or some of these other issues, I think that there's room to do all of that. I think that minority leader Jeffries, Governor Newsom, Governor Pritzker, they've got a job to do, which is try to offset the Republicans' efforts to take some seats.