Bulwark Takes - Trump Said He’d Target Criminals—Now Some Hispanic Voters Feel Betrayed

Episode Date: October 1, 2025

Sarah Longwell and JVL take on Trump’s harsh deportation push—from newlyweds caught in a green card sting to families torn apart by surprise raids. They discuss whether these tactics are reshaping public opinion, why Hispanic voters are turning against Trump, and what the polling really shows about America’s conflicted view on immigration. Tickets to Bulwark Live in DC (10/8) with Sarah, Tim and JVL are on sale now at https://TheBulwark.com/events.

Grab a coffee and discover non-stop action with BudMGM Casino. Check out our hottest exclusive. Friends of one with Multi-Drop. Once even more options. Play our wide variety of table games. Or head over to the arcade for nostalgic casino thrills only available at BetMGM. Download the BetMGM Ontario app today. 19 plus to wager, Ontario only.

Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connix Ontario at 1866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. But MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Hello, everyone. This is JVL here with my best friend, Sarah Longwell, publisher of the bulwark. We're talking about immigration today because there's some stuff happening that maybe isn't what was exactly promised, or maybe it was what was exactly promised. It really depended on what you wanted to believe back in November of 2024. We're going to start with a case in California where a newlywed couple showed up for what they thought was their final interview for,

the Brazilian-born wife to get her green card. It turns out it was an elaborate sting operation in which U.S. authorities lied to an American citizen and his wife in order to separate her from their attorney so that they could then detain her. Let's have a listen. We let her out of our sight. She never came back. We were lied to.

We were tricked in order to have her separated from the attorney that we brought with us, specifically for any kind of worst case scenario like this. Barbara was sent to a facility in Adalanto, California, and then one in Arizona. Her husband sent her urgent court filings for signature. These would likely halt her deportation, and he believes the detention center withheld them for a week and still isn't processing them in a timely way. He got a call at 4 a.m. Monday morning from his wife. saying she's in Louisiana.

He fears this is the last stop before deportation to Central or South America. There is a serious clock ticking here. If my wife is sent from this country, if we cannot stop that, it very realistically could be years before she's able to rejoin me here in the United States. We did everything by the book as much as we could.

This is how we treat the people who dream of becoming Americans. Sarah, does that call the people does that call to mind any sort of historical examples where a disfavored group was told, oh, just come with us. We're taking you someplace nice. And then it turns out they were put to a camp of some sort. Boy, you want right there. Look, I do think this is not what people anticipated when they said, yes, we want something done about illegal immigration. I do think I hear this all the time. focus groups where voters think, and again, I think you're right, the way you introduced this in terms of people telling themselves a certain kind of story, right? They told themselves that what

Donald Trump was going to do was go after gang members and criminals and drug traffickers, but not like, you know, people who were just working or who were on a path to citizenship or people who were legitimate asylum seekers. I think that Americans have a certain amount of faith that I think was quite clearly misplaced that we would do the kind of immigration in their minds, right? And we would do it in a humane way. And I think that some people, especially the people closest to the process, like if you talk to Hispanic voters, which is one of the groups that Trump is now doing the worst with, like he did sort of overperformed with Hispanics during the election. And they were as pro-securing the border as any group I listened to.

They were indistinguishable from other sort of mega voters. But now they do sound much more like, hey, I see a lot of this in our communities. Kids are seeing their parents get pulled out of schools. I didn't think they were going to go after the grandfather who'd lived here for 20 years. And I think that it's a little bit, we've had this conversation. where I hear this. And so I know it's true that people kind of had their own sense of what it would be like. I also know that's not really what Trump said. I mean, they did say they were going to do mass deportations,

that they were going to deport millions and millions of people. Tens of millions. I mean, literally, that's what the line was we're going to deport 20 million people. I know. The problem is, is that the average American thinks that there are 20 million. I think there are 20 million, 20 million criminals. And also, I think there is. There's a number of trend to Agua in the United States is 10 times the steaming army.

I don't know. When you heard Trump say the other day when he was like, we saved 300 million lives. And you're like, did you? That's the, that's all of us, bro. It's all of us. You saved all of us from fentanyl. Fet and all of fentanyl deaths. I mean, the way that they use statistics is often.

And it does, it trades on the American people's sort of, just, yeah, like, I don't really know these numbers and what they mean or, or because you have to disaggregate. There's some people who will tell you, well, anybody who's here illegally has done crime, right? They kid that, that is the crime. That's the crime. And so those people have to be deported. But even if you start pushing on that, usually they say things like, well, if they've been here, X amount of years and they're paying taxes. Like, Americans want to have lines around it.

But, of course, it's like different person to person. And it's sort of arbitrary in terms of what they think crosses the moral line that says, well, this person shouldn't be important. Is it the person they know from their church? Or is it the person from somebody else's church? Because if it's somebody from, it's Carol, who, oh, I know Carol. I said thanks to Carol and Bible study. Well, sure, Carol's one to go.

But if it's somebody else's Carol. But I didn't even know Carol was here illegally. Right. But if it's somebody else, it's not Carol, but it's Jessica, who is in the next townover's Bible study. Well, she lied. She should go. I want to push on all this a little bit by playing something from Joe Rogan's show, where Rogan sounds a little bit choked up in his sort of like, this isn't what I got into this for.

Here's Joe Rogan. It's insane. We were told there would be no, well, there's. Two things that are insane. One is the targeting of migrant workers, not cartel members, not gang members, not drug dealers, just construction workers, showing up in construction sites, raiding them, gardeners. Yeah. Like, really? Before we break down Joe Rogan, I do want to read to you some replies on the Twitters.

and these are from not nobody's. These are from people with blue check marks and, you know, James Kirkpatrick from V-Dair. It's far important, sick, to arrest construction workers than cartel members because that's what's destroying the blue-collar job market for Americans. From the white rooster.

Why the white rooster, who could say? I mean, those are the ones that work for slave wages and have drove out any chance for young American men to compete in the trades. I mean, it goes on from there. I would say from the down south patriot, well, Joe, on this, fuck you, they are parasites on the economy. I get that you have fuck you money, but us peasants don't. Get your head out of your ass and wake up. Anyway, it goes on like that. From and again, these are, I assume, we've got a blue check.

You're probably not a bot. Although, who knows, on Twitter these days. But I would say you do not see a lot of people in sympathy with Joe Rogan, at least on Twitters. I do think there's a fair number of people who are sympathetic to Joe Rogan. I mean, I think that there is a, because here's the thing about Rogan. Rogan was a Bernie guy before he was a Trump guy. Right. And so this guy is sort of a populist.

He's red-pilled, right? He's not a Republican. He doesn't have this idea. Like, he, he sort of, he wants to be pro the working person, pro the average person, right? That was kind of Bernie's deal. And this is where a lot of these guys got really, and I don't want to, I'll say bamboozled. I'll say red pill. But they got sort of, they're like reactionarily radicalized by saying, oh, I hate woke.

And, you know, we've got to do something. out crime, but they all had their own personal moral lines that they were just sure Trump wouldn't cross. And now they're all like, well, do you know that Trump is especially cruel when he does these things? And I just think, and we're also, they, they are realizing, I mean, it's sort of like, I don't know if you've been following this Megan Kelly deal. She's, she really gets into it with a lot of us at the bulwark on the Twitter, which you're not on, which is. good on you. But her thing, you know, people have been like, hey, maybe you should distance yourself from the anti-Semitism of Tucker and Candace Owens. I mean, Candice Owens, I don't know if you catch any

for sure. She just did something with Weinstein, the sexual predator, Hollywood. And it's, Candice Owens is an insane person, just an insane person, an anti-Semite, a bigot, and she has an extraordinarily popular podcast. And like Megan Kelly, kind of the way Rogan does, right? It's like a quasi-cultural, but like fruited in conspiracy and just asking questions. Is Macron's wife a man? Who could say? God, I hope they win that lawsuit against her. But anyway, Megan Kelly was like, I will not distance myself from these anti-Semites on the right. And how dare you ask me to? And the more you ask me to, the more I dig in. But this, there is a period of time where I think

Rogan was kind of basking in the fact that Donald Trump was going to come on his show. And Donald Trump was buttering these guys up and telling them what they wanted to hear. Oh, no. He goes on the all-in podcast. Sure, man, we're going to do HB1 visas. We're going to staple them to your passport or whatever, your diploma that you get when you graduate from an American college. Well, of course, now he's like, yeah, you could have one of those if you pay me $100,000. And so Trump just lied to all of these people. And they should be, I don't, I think that they, what they need to do is think about how embarrassing it is for them, how they got sucked into a world where they tolerated a lot of really gross stuff because these other famous people

who were adjacent to them. They felt like they were suddenly in their orbit. And now they're looking up and they're having to take some moral stock of where things are and it's tough. So there are three possible pathways for people like Joe Rogan. Pathway number one is they can shift their views and decide actually, yeah, I guess, I mean, I don't like it, more in sorrow than an anger, but we do have to deport all these people. That's pathway one. Pathway two, they can say that they do not agree with this and just sort of turn their toe in the dirt and look down and shake their heads, but not actually turn on Trump. And Pathway three, door number three, is they could actually do something. They could say,

this isn't what I signed up for, this is wrong, this guy needs to be stopped. That begins with creating a check on him by getting at least one of the houses of Congress under control of the opposition party. And after that, it probably means getting the Republican Party out of the executive branch. Which door do you think they're going to choose? I think it's going to be person to person. And I think it's about where these things go. I do think that some of these guys have a little bit of their finger on the zeitgeist. And I think if the zeitgeist starts to move, they are both contributors to it as well as people with their fingers in the wind.

And I believe Joe Rogan that he has a genuine moral problem with what Donald Trump is doing. and it wouldn't shock me at all if he both just to keep people guessing to be like heterodox when now that like Republicans are so dominant in the culture and also maybe because it's genuinely what he believes and because the people attacking him right now start to piss him off like that is what happens that these guys half of it is just like the online getting radicalized by who's yelling at you do they though or do they this is a real question I think you're right It is going to be person to person. There is also a, like, hey, got to get back on side.

Maybe. Like, sometimes they crack back because they don't like being yelled at by white rooster number 27. But, like, Theo Vaughn was very upset about being used in that Department of Homeland Security snuff film about deporting people, you know. And so I think that – and for a lot of them, too. to, like, their reputations, like, Epstein was a big thing for a lot of these guys. Like, no, you're going to show us the Epstein files. And so I think it depends on how much indignity, how much humiliation Trump can put them through and where they feel like the cultural winds start to blow.

Well, we'll see. We're about to have CBS News under control Barry Weiss. No, those things are a real problem. But you know what? This is what I mean, though. At what point does, if you love to be heterodox and the mainstream media, now that the corporate media is all sort of center-right anti-wokesters, at what point are you like, oh, I'm not saying anything interesting now, I'm just on the dominant side? I do not believe that any significant proportion of those people ever actually enjoyed being heterodox. I believe that heterodoxy was an excuse that they constructed retroactively to explain why they were taking positions designed to get them power.

Maybe. I don't know. I don't actually find being in these guys like these, you know, Manosphere podcasters brains like that interesting. They do have quite an outsized impact on our culture, but like it bores me. I'd actually, I want to talk real quickly about, I think that it's interesting. So, like, Rogan is, for me, the Rogan backlash is more akin to, okay, so there's a chunk of voters who do, who think that the excesses of Donald Trump on immigration are bad enough that they're very frustrated about it, right? We talked about Hispanic voters. We talked about now some of the big podcasters. But if you look, so the New York Times, this is just in this past week, they asked about immigration. And while Trump's overall approval rating on immigration is 46%, okay, so he has at 46 approval, he's at 52% disapproved. So not great for being one of his signature issues, but a slim majority, 51%, say Mr. Okay, so 51% say Trump is going too far on immigration enforcement, and only 44 think that the deportation process has been fair.

there's like a majority of people who are like there are excesses here there's too much happening that's bad but and this is important 54% say they support deporting illegal immigrants compared with 44% who oppose it 51% say that the government is mostly deporting people who should be deported compared with 42% who say the government is mostly deporting people who should not be deported And so this is the thing to understand when you're like, man, if Trump's underwater on this signature issue, why isn't his overall approval rating coming down on it or why isn't there more backlash? And the reason is, is that overall, the majority of Americans do want illegal immigrants deported. And that is like, I think that's a tough thing for a lot of people to swallow. but I think it's important that people sort of people will tolerate and they will push back against

the excesses. They'll be like, don't keep the kids in cages, but do deport all their families. Like there is a majority of Americans who want to see this deportation thing happening, which is why it's not hurting Trump as much as you would think. That is the, that's like, that's the tough medicine of all this. Yeah. It's a it's tough medicine because it's stupid and it's unclear whether people really mean it, right? I mean, do they, they say they, because it's clear they say they want this, but do they really like do they do they want it in theory but not in practice? Do they do they really want the construction workers and the landscapers outside of IHop deported? Is that what they want? And nobody knows. Do they understand the. consequences to the macro economy, right? Do they understand what happens to housing costs, right? They also want housing costs to go down. Do they understand that if you start destroying the construction sector and driving up wage prices and housing construction, that housing costs go up?

Well, this is where the comments you read about Joe Rogan are really instructive, right? It's sort of the way that people think about the tariffs, which is they're just sure that if you get the illegal immigrants out of those jobs that they're going to be flooded with white working classmen who are now, you know, working for, that this is, these are the opportunities that are being robbed of sort of American men. It's like 4.1%. I mean, it isn't, like, we aren't at 10% unemployment. Sure.

I'm just saying, like, this is what they think. No, no, I know. And tariffs, tariffs are not going to bring American manufacturing back, but that doesn't stop a lot of people from being like, well, if you. you just stop making these things in China. They're just going to move the plant to Michigan. Yeah. If only we would have all of our movies shot on sound stages in Los Angeles

and all of our watches made in Detroit, then everything would be fixed. Sarah, as always, the problem is the people and the solution is the people. I don't know how we're going to get through this. Guys, hit like, hit subscribe, follow the channel. We'll be back with more terrible news like any minute now. good luck america all right everybody we are sold out of tickets to all of our shows on the fall tour except for october eighth in washington dc and was on a call yesterday planning out what we've got in store for you it's going to be fun obviously jv l will be there so they'll be elements of darkness

we're also bringing in sarah mcbride for a conversation with sarah longwell that i'm super excited for maybe we might get will summer up to talk about some of the crazy shit that's happened on the maga ride i've got some other plans in store for you so it's not too late get your tickets now washington dc october 8th you go to the bulwark.com slash events the bulwark.com slash events i hope to see you all there it's at the lincoln theater awesome venue appreciate them for hosting us uh and so i hope to see you all in washington okay