Democracy Now! Audio - Democracy Now! 2025-08-20 Wednesday

Episode Date: August 20, 2025

Headlines for August 20, 2025; Occupied D.C.? Six GOP States Send National Guard to Washington as Outcry Grows over Trump Power Grab; For-Profit Presidency: New Yorker Mag Reveals Trump Family’s Frenzy to Cash In on the White House; “Unprecedented and Not Normal”: ACLU Sues over Legal Black Hole at “Alligator Alcatraz” ICE Jail

From New York, this is Democracy Now. If Trump cared about safety, he would stop kidnapping immigrant neighbors. Because terrorizing people, terrorizing families is not safety. If Trump cared about our country. safety, he would fund Medicaid. He would fund schools. He would fund snap. Because people being sick out of school and hungry is not safety. Why has President Trump deployed the National Guard to the streets of the Capitol? Six Republican-led states, West Virginia, South Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana have all agreed to send troops. Yet some of their cities have worse

crime rates than D.C. We'll go to Washington to speak with the head of the group Free D.C., then the number. How much is Trump pocketing off the presidency? We'll speak with New Yorker investigative reporter David Kirkpatrick. I tried to look at all the sources of income flowing into President Trump and his family and decide which of those were derived really from the presidency and how much they were worth. came up with about $3.4 billion to date. And finally, to Florida, where immigrant detainees held at the so-called Alligator Alcatraz are stuck in a legal black hole. So says the ACLU they've taken the Trump administration to court.

Well, we brought this lawsuit because people who are held at Alligator Alcatraz haven't been able to speak with their lawyers confidentially or request release from custody on bond. we want to make sure that people can actually have that constitutional right to speak to their lawyers and to be able to request release from the detention facility. All that and more coming up. Welcome to Democracy Now.org, the war and peace report. I'm Amy Goodman.

Israeli attacks on Gaza have killed at least 56 Palestinians over the past day, even as three more people starved to do. amidst Israel's months-long siege. Among the latest dead are 22 more people killed while seeking food. With the latest killings, health officials report the death toll from Israel's 22-month-long bombardment and siege of Gaza has topped 62,000. But that number is likely a vast undercount as more than 11,000 people remain missing and are presumed dead. The U.N. says nearly 19,000 children are among the dead. Meanwhile, Gaza is home to the largest number of child amputees in modern history, with over 4,700 cases of children who've lost limbs to Israeli bombs,

many of which were supplied by the United States. This is Mohamed Hassan, a boy who lost his leg to an Israeli strike in July that killed his mother and other family members. I was going to buy falafel. When I came back before reaching home, I looked up and saw the missile falling on us. I tried to run, but it was too fast. I found myself thrown against a wall, and when I looked, my leg was gone. Then someone carried me and brought me to this hospital. In Israel, protesters led by family members of Israeli hostages

blocked a highway in Tel Aviv Tuesday to demand a prison. exchange and a ceasefire in Gaza. The protest follows nationwide demonstration Sunday that saw up to a million Israelis take to the streets demanding Prime Minister Netanyahu end the war. The only thing that works is putting pressure on the Israeli government to make a deal, to seal the deal and bring all of our hostages back and stop the war in Gaza. We will not stop until all our hostages are home. The United Nations marked World Humanitarian Day Tuesday by issuing a grim report

documenting the killing of 383 aid workers around the world last year. That's a 31% rise from the year before, driven largely by the Israeli attacks on Gaza, where 181 humanitarian workers were killed by Israel last year. Meanwhile, 60 humanitarian workers were killed in Sudan as they worked to bring aid to people displaced by civil war. This is UN spokesperson Jens Larke. This must be a wake-up call to the world. People representing the best of humanity, trying to help others, are being killed in record numbers, and some of them in cold blood. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro says his government is deploying four.

and a half million soldiers across Venezuela after the United States said it would be shipping more than 4,000 Marines and material to the Caribbean region. This comes after the Trump administration secretly signed a directive approving the Pentagon's use of military force supposedly to target Latin American drug cartels. The Trump administration's accused Maduro of being the leader of the Cartel de los Soles, offering up to a $50 million reward for information leading to Maduro's arrest, which critics have slammed as another attempt by the United States to destabilize Venezuela and other countries that oppose U.S. policy. Meanwhile, Mexican President Claudia Schenbaum has denied reports her governments collaborating with the United States

for a sweeping new initiative dubbed Project Portero to combat drug Cortez. which had been touted by the Trump administration as an effort to strengthen U.S.-Mexico relations. Shane Baum spoke from Mexico City Tuesday. It is important to clear this up because any joint communication is done together. We do not validate anything issued by a United States government agency that has not consulted with the Mexican government. In California, advocates are demanding the release of a high school student who was taken by federal immigration agents earlier this month while he walked his dog in a Los Angeles neighborhood. The family of Benjamin Marcelo Guerrero Cruz described it as a kidnapping as several plain clothes masked men wearing tactical vests forced the 18-year-old into an unmarked van. Educators and activists are calling on local officials and schools to protect Godedero Cruz and other immigrant students.

The teen is being detained at the troubled Adelanto Ice Jail about an hour and a half from his family in L.A. In more news from California, customs and border protection officers opened fire on a family during an arrest operation in San Bernardino. The family was inside their vehicle on Saturday. when armed-masked officers emerged from unmarked cars and surrounded their truck. An undocumented father from Mexico was driving the vehicle, his 18-year-old son, and 23-year-old son-in-law, who are U.S. citizens, who are in passenger seats. They refused to get out of the vehicle, prompting the officers to smash the windows. Fearing for his life, the driver sped away with the agent firing his weapon. At least two bullets struck the vehicle.

Law enforcement reportedly later arrived at the car. the family's home, but no arrest remade due to sanctuary policies that prohibit local police from collaborating with federal immigration agencies. This all comes as the Washington Post reports ISIS planning to double its detention capacity to imprison more than 100,000 immigrants. ISIS has already expanded its jails with plans to open new facilities across the country, including in Nebraska, where a remote prison so-called work camp, dubbed cornhusband, by Republicans will detain hundreds of immigrants awaiting deportation. We'll have more on ICE's expanding detention machine later in the broadcast with Eunice Cho,

senior counsel at the ACLU National Prison Project, who's brought the Trump administration to court over so-called alligator alcatraz in Florida. In Massachusetts, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu has rejected demands by Attorney General Pam to dismantle Boston's sanctuary city immigration policies or face arrest and the loss of federal funding. Boston was among 22 local governments across 13th states given a deadline of August 20th, that's today, to comply with the Justice Department order. Mayor Wu spoke outside Boston City Hall Tuesday. The U.S. Attorney General asked for a response by today. So here it is.

Stop attacking our cities to hide your administration's failures. The Trump administration seeks to divide, isolate, and intimidate cities and make Americans fearful of one another. But Boston is proof of something far more powerful than lies and intimidation. That safety and community come from loving your neighbor as yourself. Federal prosecutors in Washington, D.C. have launched a criminal investigation into President Trump, claims that police manipulated data to make crime rates appear lower. The probe will be run out of the office of Trump's handpicked interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, former Fox News

personality, Janine Piro. According to the Washington Post, Piro's instructed prosecutors to maximize criminal charges against anyone arrested during Trump's federal takeover of Washington, D.C., law enforcement, with the exception of people carrying rifles or shotguns in violation of Washington. Washington, D.C. laws. In those cases, Pira said prosecutors should not seek felony charges. President Trump said Tuesday, the Smithsonian Institution is too narrowly focused on negative aspects of U.S. history, including, quote, how bad slavery was, unquote. Trump's comments minimizing the horrors of chattel slavery came after the White House ordered a far-reaching review of Smithsonian Museum exhibitions in order to ensure they align with Trump's interpretation of U.S. history. A federal judge has ordered Mississippi to

redraw its Supreme Court district lines after determining they violate the Voting Rights Act of 1965. On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Sharihan Aycock ruled the map, which has remained mostly unchanged for over a century, unlawfully dilutes the power of black voters. Mississippi has had just four Black Supreme Court justices in its entire history, even though Mississippi's population is nearly 40 percent African American. In Texas, Democratic State Representative Nicole Collier has filed a lawsuit challenging the authority of Republican leaders to put lawmakers under police surveillance. On Monday, Collier was confined to the Texas State Capitol overnight after she refused to be

followed by state police monitor assigned to surveil her. every move, a requirement for Democrats who'd fled Texas over a plan to redraw the state's congressional district maps to give Republicans five additional seats in the 2026 midterm elections. Collier spent a second night locked in Texas's state Capitol Tuesday, joined in solidarity by fellow state representatives. Meanwhile, in California, Republican lawmakers have filed a lawsuit seeking to block a bid by Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom to redraw California's congressional.

congressional maps to give Democrats five additional House seats. Newsom said the move is specifically designed to counteract Republican gerrymandering in Texas. The Justice Department says it's agreed to provide Congress with documents from its investigation into the dead serial sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. The House Oversight Committee is set to begin receiving the files on Friday after its subpoenaed all records and communications from the case files of Epstein and his longtime co-conspirator Gilane Maxwell. On Monday, Trump's former Attorney General Bill Barr gave a deposition to the Oversight Committee about Jeffrey Epstein after he, too, was subpoenaed. The committee, however, has not issued a subpoena to Alex Acosta. That's President Trump's former

Labor Secretary, who, as a U.S. attorney in 2008 in Florida, approved a non-prosecution agreement that shut down the federal probe into Epstein's sex trafficking ring and allowed Epstein to serve little time in prison. Meanwhile, in a highly unusual move, the Trump administration announced this week it's tapped Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey to be co-depity director of the FBI. He'll serve alongside Dan Bongino, a former Secret Service agent and right ring podcaster, who Trump previously tapped as the FBI second in command. Bailey's appointment comes after Bongino publicly clashed with Attorney General Pam Bondi and threatened to resign over the Trump administration's refusal to release the Epstein files. And in Minnesota, an appeals court

has overturned the felony conviction of a water protector who was criminally prosecuted as part of a brutal crackdown on nonviolent indigenous leaders and protesters opposed to opposing the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline. The court found pervasive prosecutorial misconduct and irregularities in the case, ordering a new trial. Mylene Villard was arrested in 2021 after attaching herself to a 25-foot bamboo tower erected to block a Line 3 pumping station in Aiken County. She appeared on Democracy Now in 2023. All their children and grandchildren. I'm here because there is a real climate crisis and nobody seems to care.

I'm here because that's the only thing I can do right now. I have to show up and I have to defend this land and have to defend the rights of the people who have been on this land forever. To see our 2023 interview with Mylene Villalard, an indigenous lawyer and activist Tara Hauska, go to DemocracyNow.org. And those are some of the headlines. This is Democracy Now. Democracy Now.org, the War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman in New York, joined by Democracy Now's Juan Gonzalez and Chicago.

Hi, Juan. Hi, Amy, and welcome to all of our listeners and viewers across the country and around the world. Tennessee has become the sixth Republican state to agree to send National Guard troops to Washington, D.C. to assist President Trump's growing takeover of the nation's capital. The Republican governors of Louisiana, Ohio, South Carolina, West Virginia, and Mississippi are also sending National Guard troops. Many of the troops arrived Tuesday. The Republican governors deployed the National Guard, even though many of the states

have cities with worse crime rates than D.C. This comes as the online news outlet, the handbasket, reports D.C. National Guard members have begun actively training to carry pistols on the streets of D.C. President Trump sent in the National Guard last week after claiming D.C. is facing a crime emergency, even though records show violent crime in the district is at a 30-year low. In January, the U.S. Attorney's Office in the District of Columbia put out a press release headline, Violent Crime in D.C. hits 30-year low. But President Trump has questioned the and now federal prosecutors have launched a criminal investigation into whether D.C. police

manipulated data to make crime rates appear lower. The DOJ probe will be run out of the office of Trump's hand-picked interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, former Fox News personality, Janine Piro. Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports a new poll found 80 percent of D.C. residents Trump's executive order to federalize D.C.'s law enforcement. D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser's accused Trump of engaging in an authoritarian push by deploying the National Guard. This is Mayor Bowser speaking Monday. The numbers on the ground in the district don't support a thousand people from other states coming to Washington, D.C. You know that. This is not about something that is bits into logic.

So if you want to know what's happening, the question is really not for us. It's for why the military would be deployed in an American city to police Americans. That's the question. Community organizers have rallied against Trump's deployment of the National Guard. This is Samantha Davis, the founder of the Black Swan Academy, which helps empower black youth. this is not about crime this is about control this is not about public safety this is about power last week donald trump suggested that our children in dc as young as 14 should be tried as adults let me ask you do we want that no and trump's you

attorney has said that she wants to come after our youth and was frustrated because I can't get my hands on them. Do we want that? No. Trump threatened that if D.C. didn't start punishing our children more harshly, then he would federalize our city. Do we want that? Trump will not bully us into praying on our children. We will not sacrifice. our children to a tyrant. We go now to D.C. where we're joined by Kea Chatterjee, the executive director of the group Free D.C. Kea, welcome to Democracy Now.

These, the number of troops that have been deployed, can you give us an update? We know six Republican-led states have agreed to send troops. And as NPR reported this morning, in a number of cities in these six Republican-led states, the crime rates are worse than Washington, D.C. That's right. Thank you so much for having me. What we're seeing here is something that would be considered an act of civil war if D.C. were a state if we had equal representation under the law. There's National Guard coming from one state to another state against the wishes of the elected officials and of the people who are here. So this is clearly straight out of the playbook of any dictator.

They want to take over the capital of the country in order to silence dissent. And we actually are very vulnerable to that here in D.C. Because we don't have statehood. We don't have equal representation under the law. We don't control our elected officials don't control our own National Guard. These are vulnerabilities that are not just vulnerabilities for the people of D.C., but these are vulnerabilities to the people of this. country and our democracy and therefore vulnerabilities to the entire world that is being put at risk

by this takeover of D.C., this armed takeover of D.C. that is combined also with this surge of Trump's forces that are, you know, doing a lot of the same things that we're hearing about in the rest of the country in terms of kidnapping people, you know, and we're seeing a lot of illegal activity here, too. We're seeing illegal checkpoints. We're seeing, you know, racial discrimination. We're seeing illegal stop and frisk. I mean, that's touching people's genitals without their consent. What we're seeing is lawlessness, but it's all coming from the White House. How is it manifesting itself on the ground right now in the daily life of D.C. residents?

Well, people are both very rightly, you know, taking precautions, you know, walking in pairs, letting people know when they're leaving places, because sometimes we're seeing, you know, people going to work and getting snatched up, put in chains. And because these, you know, these gangs of Trump's federal agents are often unlabeled, they're often wearing masks. We don't know who's taking them sometimes. Family members don't know where their loved ones have been taken. But we're also seeing a sense of defiance in the people of D.C. I think people in D.C. do understand that we have to protect our community. And that also, ultimately, we as a broader community in D.C., but also we're going

to need allies all throughout the country and the world in order to do what people have done as they rise up against dictators all over the world, ultimately take them down by banding together and not cooperating. And so I think in D.C. we have both a sense of defiance. But But and a leaning into all the things that make D.C. so beautiful, right? Like, leaning into our neighborhood culture, loving our neighbors, you know, listening to go-go music on the streets. We have people, you know, banging pots and pans every night at 8 p.m. to represent the eight wards of D.C. This is, these are called casero lasos. They're tried and, you know, this is a tried and tested tool of taking down dictators by showing a sense of joy, showing a sense of community.

And so what we're seeing is, a lot of defiance, a lot of pride in D.C. culture, a very clear sense that we, the people, are going to have to keep ourselves safe and take this down. But also, you know, it is, it is, it is a lot of brutality that we are experiencing and that our communities are experiencing, and we want these forces gone now. We want them out of our communities. D.C. is united in this. We do not want them here. We want them gone today. And so, you know, we have this, We have this bill in front of Congress that we're asking our allies around the country to support. They can go to freeDC project.org backslash allies or freec project.org backslash occupation.

If you're from any of those states that are sending guards here, that is dangerous not only for us, but of course also for those states where those guards are not available in the middle of a climate crisis during hurricane season in states that are extremely vulnerable. I wanted to ask you also your reaction to this report by the Washington Post that the Justice Department is now going to launch an investigation into whether city officials manipulated data to make crime rates appear to be lower and how you feel your mayor, Muriel Bowser, is responding to this occupation. Our elected officials are following the law, and that is exactly. what we are not seeing from the White House. That is where the criminal element is coming from. And so we understand that dictators want to make up their own numbers, want to make up their own truth. We saw this with, you know, labor statistics. We're now seeing it with other statistics. Like this is all out of a playbook. In some ways, it's very predictable. But it's also very well known

what people do and the people power that can come together to take down this kind of dictatorship. I'm wondering if you can comment on the $1 billion that Congress has withheld from Washington, D.C., what that means, and where money is being spent? Yes, so $1.1 billion of D.C. local funds. So that is our locally raised funds were frozen by Congress. I will say that we had a unique moment when this money was frozen where all of the senators in the U.S. Senate voted to give these resources back, but then it got stuck in the House of Representatives and they never voted to give our money back. You know, obviously, if they want D.C. to be safe, then they would allow us to fund housing, food, education, all of the things that we know reduce crime rates. And, you know, as I said earlier, if you want to keep D.C. safe, you do the opposite of what this regime is doing. You stop mass firings. You make sure you're funding health care, education, food. Those are the things that enhance safety and having a sense of community. And so we do also continue to demand the release of our local funds and allowing us to spend those money, those resources here in D.C.

where, again, we've raised these resources locally. There's no other place in this country where the federal government can come in and steal local tax dollars, freeze local tax dollars. And so I think it is important for people to understand why this is an important moment for people to care about a free D.C.,

to care about statehood for the people of D.C., and to actually give us, for once, equal representation under the law, because the reason we don't have it is a legacy of society of state. slavery and a legacy of racism. And this is a moment for people who believe that in equal rights to stand with D.C. because right now you're either with D.C. or you are with tyranny. And whether it's a corporation or anyone else in this, any other entity in this country, this is a moment

where people have to decide, are you on the side of the people or are you on the side of this dictator and this tyranny? I just wanted to ask you about President Trump's threats, against the unhoused population of Washington, D.C. This is Jason, Jesse Rabinowitz, of the National Homelessness Law Center, speaking outside the White House. Locking up people you don't like or don't want to see as textbook authoritarianism. Trump is testing opinion by focusing on groups that he believes to have little public sympathy, like folks who live outside.

Right now, they are coming for homeless folks, trans folks, and migrants. But rest assured, soon they will come for everyone who is not a white, straight, cis, wealthy Christian man. The only solution is solidarity and collective action. And finally, Kia, we're just wrapping up right now, Kaya Chatterjee. They've already dismantled the largest unhoused encampment. Can you talk about what's happening to the unhoused in Washington, D.C.? As these, now it looks like thousands of troops are moving in and now being allowed to carry pistols?

It's incredibly dangerous for our unhoused population. And I think one thing that's important to understand about our communities is that these are community members that are woven into the fabric of our communities in D.C. We have a newspaper called Street Sense Magazine, Street Sense newspaper that is written by and sold by, people who are houseless in our community. These are neighbors who we know. We see them outside. We talk to them every day. And witnessing this brutality is so harmful to our communities and to those people. They are literally putting all of people's belongings into the trash. They are trying to make it a crime to be poor. They are trying to make it a crime to simply exist for people who are poor. We know that sleeping is a biological necessity. And if you say

that it is illegal to sleep outside, what you're saying is that somebody's existence is illegal. And that's not just somebody. These are our neighbors. This is our community. They are being treated with such incredible brutality right now. And we need that to end. And that is our fundamental message is that the people of D.C. are united in wanting these escalated forces, Trump's escalated forces out of our communities today. There are bills that would end this sooner rather than later, there are bills that would end it today, and we are asking for everybody's support to, you know, to allies from around the country and around the world, visit our website. Again, it's freeDC project.org, backslash allies or backslash occupation, and find out

how you can help us because we are very united that this attack on our people, whether it's our houseless neighbors, whether it is immigrants, whether it's anyone else that needs to end. Okay, a Chatterjee, want to thank you for being with us, Executive Director of the group, Free D.C. Coming up, the number, how much is Trump pocketing off the presidency? We'll speak with New Yorker investigative reporter David Kirkpatrick. Stay with us. Who do you think you are? He plays us with his hate, turns man against man, but it's really not a game. And I pray to the ancestors love do not be fooled by this man's foolish talk the serpent woke again in different times and places

there's a burning cross leading the mob people in chains he's a quack circus sack creeping from the past he's the symbol of the monster we no longer want to be what we used to be Lila Downs performing demagogue at our Democracy Now studio. This is Democracy Now, Democracy Now.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman with Juan Gonzalez. The number. How much is Trump pocketing off the presidency? That's the headline of an exhaustive new investigation published by the New Yorker magazine.

In the piece, journalist David Kirkpatrick writes, quote, many payments now flowing to Trump his wife and his children and their spouses. would be unimaginable without his presidencies, a $2 billion investment from a fund control by the Saudi Crown Prince, a luxury jet from the Emir of Qatar, profits from at least five different ventures peddling crypto, fees from an exclusive club stocked with cabinet officials and named executive branch. In March, Forbes estimated that Trump's net worth had more than doubled over a year to $5 billion. And a few months later, the New York Times estimated Trump's wealth had grown to $10 billion.

But these estimates and others did not attempt to look at how exactly his fortune is growing. David Kirkpatrick writes, quote, although the notion that Trump is making colossal sums off the presidency has become commonplace, nobody could tell me how much he's made. I decided to attempt to tally up just how much Trump and his immediate. family of pocketed office time in the White House, unquote. Well, David Kirkpatrick joins us now in our New York studio. Welcome to Democracy Now. It's great to have you with us. Explain how you arrived at the number. And what is the period of time that he has made this money?

Well, what's important here is that I'm trying to be fair to the president. I'm not out to get Trump here. I went through and looked at all the sources of income, the income streams flowing into the Trump organization, the president and his family, and I asked, is this money that he would have made absent the presidency? Because he's got hotels, he's got golf courses. Sometimes people go there just to play golf or rent a hotel room. We're not talking about that. So I only wanted to look at money that he has made because he is or has been in the White House. And then I tried to ask as best I could, what is each one of those things worth? And that's how I came up with $3.4 billion. And again, I think what I hope will make this report correct,

incredible. And the reason I urge people to read it is that it's, I've tried as best I can to be fair. I've shown all my work, and people can make their own conclusions. And, David, could you talk about some of the specifics from the small to the big? For instance, the ubiquitous MAGA hat at Trump rallies. How is, Trump has a private store that sells these? Can you talk about that? And also the family's investments in crypto? Yeah, the hats. I was quite surprised to realize that in addition to the campaign merchandise sold by his campaign, which all candidates and all presidents do, that's money that goes

into the campaign coffers that he can't really touch for personal purposes. The Trump organization also has its own online store, and they sell all kinds of Trump merchandise that looks very much like its campaign merchandise, but this money flows to Trump and himself, you know, $20, $40 for a pair of flip-flops, a pair of beer cooosies, a baseball hat. He's making, you know, millions of dollars, you know, I don't know, forget what the tech number was with 20 millions of dollars over the last few years selling this kind of merchandise, which is arguably competing with his own campaign and diverting some of the money that his supporters might think is supporting the MAGA movement and his candidates to his

own pocket. That's the, you know, that's the small end. Nobody thinks that anybody who's paying $50 for a baseball hat is actually going to get any influence, you know, over the president in return for that. That's just a way of making money. On the other extreme, there's significant amounts of money flowing into the Trump organization now through its various or the president's various crypto enterprises. Some of these, you know, predate his return to the White House. But I tried to look here at all the money that they made off of the White House over the course of the two terms and the time in between when he remained a kind of kingmaker in the Republican Party. So, and most of it has happened around his second term, you know, shortly before through his second term.

In terms of crypto, you know, should I go through and break down all the ways they're making money off of crypto? Yes. Okay, well, here you go. So first of all, for people who might not be familiar with crypto, all it is. really, is a kind of online ledger or spreadsheet keeping track of who owns what. There's a number of ways that the Trump family has tried to take advantage of this new technology. He started out by selling NFTs, non-fungible tokens, which are basically sort of digital cartoons of himself. Then he moved on to setting up a company. His family, his son set up a company

called World Liberty Financial, and that's done a couple things. It sold a kind of token or online certificate that would ostensibly allow somebody to vote on whatever its future's plans and the crypto business might be. They raised, you know, $550 million selling those tokens, and 75% of that flows to the Trump organization. Then it went into a new business selling what's known as a stable coin. A stable coin is basically the online equivalent of a dollar. It's not really an investment. It's just a kind of like almost a checking account. It's a way to transfer money here and there, perhaps more efficiently by doing it digitally. For the company, World Liberty Financial, they get to make money off of investing that money

in treasuries while it's out in the world circulating as a stable coin. So they go into the stable coin business. Their first customer is a company owned by the United Arab Emirates that puts up $2 billion to buy a stable coin while that money is out. circulating as stable coin, they're going to get about 4% a year on that, I calculate, by investing in a short-term treasuries. So that's a couple. There's a few others he's gone into. His meme coin is perhaps the most famous. The President Trump, right around the time he was elected, before he was inaugurated, went into this business selling a kind of online

novelty, basically just a joke. It's a kind of digital certificate that just allows you to say, I paid money to own a little Trump novelty. That's it. That's all it is. There's nothing to it. And it doesn't even purport to sort of hold wealth, although you can trade it back and forth. He's made about $300 million selling those meme coins.

And the last thing is a little bit of kind of financial engineering that his company, Trump Media and Technology Group, a publicly traded company of which he's the chairman. A little bit of financial engineering that that company has done. Now, that is the company that owns Truth Social. Truth Social is a very small online platform, social media platform. It doesn't have much revenue, maybe a million dollars a quarter. It's never really made a profit. It doesn't have much chance of ever making a profit.

And yet the stock that owns it, Trump Media and Technology Group, trades at a kind of surprisingly high price. People on Wall Street consider it a meme stock. It trades basically on how. people feel about President Trump. And in the last couple months, really in June, that company has done a remarkable thing, which is they have sold, they've issued new shares of stock. They've sold the stock at their inflated meme coin price, and they've taken that money, and they've bought Bitcoin. They've also done the same thing to try to stockpile some cash, but they bought about

$2.3 or $2.4 billion worth of Bitcoin, and they've stockpile about $7,000. And they've stockpile about $760 million worth of cash. So at the last quarter, they said, look, we've got $3.1 billion of liquid assets on our books. So I calculate that since President Trump owns 42% of that company, he has an ownership interest in that $3.1 billion. So as I was doing this reporting over the last few months, my calculation of their net worth, of his net worth, bumped by, I shouldn't say his net worth, of the amount of money he's made

with the presidency, jumped up by a billion dollars. Other members of the family, for instance, Jared Kushner and his daughter, in terms of the investments by foreign government sovereign funds in them and what that looks like? I think you're thinking about Jared Kushner's private equity firm. So after he left, after Trump left the White House, in 2020, his son, Jared Kushner, who had been in real estate, went into private equity, a new line of work. And he went to the Persian Gulf to solicit money. And he asked the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia to invest. Their panel of advisors said, this is a mistake. He doesn't

have a track record in private equity, only real estate. There could be some public relations problem here. People are going to say this is the payoff to the family of a president. The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, who controls the public investment fund overruled that and nonetheless invested the $2 billion with Jared Kushner's private equity firm. Since then, he's accumulated as much as $4.8 billion in assets under management, almost all of it from foreign sources, quite a bit of it, also from the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. under standard private equity terms, he would get 2% a year of that money as asset management fees with Saudi Arabia. It's a little bit lower. But that is also, I'm counting as money flowing into the Trump family coffers as a result of their time in the White House. Can you tell us, David, about the family? I mean, in the first term, many of them were

advisors to President Trump. They were in the White House. They would have to deal with ethics rules. We don't see that right now. So I'm wondering how the family business has changed from the first term to the second term. And I also wanted to ask you about, for example, President Trump says he struck a trade agreement with Vietnam. He'll apply a 20% tariff on Vietnamese imports down from the 46% he threatened. The reported deal comes just weeks after the Trump Organization broke up. ground on a $1.5 billion golf course in Vietnam? A few questions there.

Yeah, a few questions there. So during the first term, President Trump, on his way into office, volunteered that he and his family were not going to do any deals overseas because they didn't like the way that looked, right? It raises the specter that some foreign interest or even foreign government is going to try to buy favor with the U.S. government by paying... Trump and his family privately. During the second term, the family has said, we're not going to do that anymore. We're no longer to abstain from those deals. Donald Trump Jr. has said publicly,

look, we restrained ourselves last term and people accused us of profiteering anyway. So we're not going to lock ourselves in, quote, unquote, the proverbial padded room. We're just going to go ahead and be businessman and do as many deals as we can. And they've done quite a few. Now, again, in my accounting, I'm not including deals which appear to be a extensions of the business they were in before he was elected. He had licensed his name for use on four conominium buildings around India before he ever went into the White House. Now there are five more Indian projects. Fine, let's leave that aside. That's more or less legitimate Trump business. On the other hand, since late 22, when he was really the presumptive

Republican presidential nominee, he's had a whole flurry of new deals around the Persian Gulf with one Saudi Arabian company, and that's in, you know, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, a couple in Saudi Arabia and one in Qatar. And I don't think there's any way those would have happened without the presidency. And that adds up to, I would say, you know, guessing as best I can, the various income streams involved, that's more than $100 million right there in terms of its present value. You mentioned the Vietnam project. That's another one that I think, you know, would not have unfolded as it has, were he not return to the White House. That is

probably, you know, physically going to be the largest Trump branded property in the world. It's planned size is about three times as big as Central Park with 54 holes of golf. It's very hard to know how much the Trump family

is actually going to make out of that property. On his most recent financial disclosure form, he said that the Trump organization had already received $5 million in initial licensing fees from lending their name to that property. He's not going to build it. He's not going to own it. They're just lending their name and some management services. So I figure over 10 years, which is kind of a minimum term

for management or licensing agreement, he's likely to make at least $50 million with a present value of about $40 million. Probably it'll be a lot more than that. And how much of this is, in your perspective, is legal? And also how much of it is unprecedented for a president? As far as I can tell, it's all legal. You know, I don't have any evidence of a quid pro quo. I don't have any evidence of a specific instance where he has explicitly sold a public favor for personal profit. And the remedy that our laws prescribed for potential conflicts of interest is disclosure.

Elected officials disclose what they own and how they're making money. And the voters or the Congress can decide what's appropriate or inappropriate. and I guess we'll have to see how voters feel about that. The other part of your question, I think, was what again? How much of this is unprecedented for a president? Oh, yeah. Well, a lot of, that's been widely reported. There's nothing like this before, right?

A lot of presidents make money after they leave, selling books, you know, various other endeavors. But he and his family are making this money while he's in the White House, and the scale is really quite novel. And in the last 10 seconds, you talk about. about the frenzy? Well, that's right. What really surprised me about all this is just how fast they're making this money.

They seem to turn down no opportunity. And that's what makes the questions about a conflict of interest all the more pressing, because I feel like when they are so evidently zealous, so eager to make money, it really sharpens the question of what a buyer, so to speak,

might be getting for that. David Kirkpatrick, I want to thank you so much for being with us, reporter with the New Yorker. We'll link to your piece, the number. How much is Trump pocketing off the presidency? Coming up, immigrant detainees held that the so-called alligator alcatraz in Florida are stuck in a legal black hole. So says the ACLU, which has taken the Trump administration to court, back in 20 seconds. man built a railroad man got a move man made a record put a needle to the groove man being up oh and man been down now man don't want no one around

Well, first they stole our language, then they stole our names, then they stole the things that brought us fame. And they stole our neighbors, and they stole our streets, and they left us to die on Rican Beach. Rican Beach by Linda Sagata of Hooray for the Riffraff, performing in our Democracy Now studio. This is Democracy Now, Democracy Now.org, the Warren Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman with Juan Gonzalez.

We end today's show looking at what Republicans have dubbed Alligator Alcatraz, that recently opened immigration jail in the Florida Everglades. This is President Trump speaking during a tour of the jail in July. You know, snakes are fast, but alligators are going to teach them how to run away from an alligator, okay? if they escape prison. How to run away. Don't run in a straight line. You look like this. And you know what?

Your chances go up about 1%. Okay? Not a good thing. We have a lot of bodyguards and a lot of cops that are in the form of alligators. You don't have to pay him so much. But I wouldn't want to run through the Everett Lades for long.

We'll keep people where they're supposed to be. This is a very important thing. Monday, a federal judge in Miami heard arguments in a federal lawsuit brought on behalf of people detained at the immigration jail, built out of temporary tents, trailers, chain-linked fences with barbed wire, located an area of the Everglades at high risk of flooding. Lawsuit alleges immigrants at the jail have been routinely subjected to human rights abuses

and denied due process. The case brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Florida and Americans for immigrant justice. We go right now to Eunice Cho, Senior Counsel at the ACLU, National Prison Project, lead attorney in the federal lawsuit who argued in the Miami courtroom. Can you explain what took place on Monday, what you're suing over, and how the judge responded, Eunice? Well, thanks, Amy.

We brought this lawsuit because people who are being held at Alligator Alcatraz have had very little and limited access to talk to their attorneys. And until this weekend, we're unable to file bond petitions to request release from custody. Now, as you know, these are basic constitutional rights that are afforded to anybody that is held in government custody. And what was happening at Alligator Alcatraz is simply unprecedented and not normal. What happened on Monday is that we actually secured a very important victory. Because of the lawsuit, the federal government has decided that they're going to reverse course and they are now allowing immigrants who are held at Alligator Alcatraz the ability to petition the immigration court for release from detention,

which is something that the government should have never been able to do in the first place. And I just have to underscore, it shouldn't take a lawsuit to force the government to abide by the law and by the Constitution. The court order also transferred the case to another federal court in the Middle District of Florida, closer to where the facility is located. So now that court will issue a decision regarding the right of access to counsel at the facility. And we look forward to continuing that fight. And Eunice, could you talk about the difficulties that lawyers have had in reaching their clients and also family members being able to visit? Well, that's a very good question.

At the very beginning of this lawsuit, there was no attorney access whatsoever. We had attorneys who were trying to visit their clients who would go to the facility and like any other facility in the United States, normally you'd be able to walk into the facility, show your identification card and your bar card. But here it was completely different. Attorneys were met at military checkpoints by armed guards and turned away from the facility being told that they could try to email an address to request a visit. When people were trying to email those email addresses, everything was bouncing back. There was no ability to get in touch with clients at all. After we filed the lawsuit, the governor DeSantis said that the facility would

start allowing limited attorney access at the facility. There have been some attorneys who've been able to visit their clients in person, but there have also been many attorneys who've never actually had the chance to meet with their clients there because the delays have been so lengthy. One person had been detained at the facility for over a month, and despite repeated requests for an attorney visit, that still didn't happen. Families, of course, are not able to visit anyone at the facility, and the only way that people can communicate with their families is via a monitored recorded phone line where people

can really only speak to their families for a few minutes at a time. And your lawsuit also seeks to force the government to provide information about who is being held and where. Talk about the way that the government was disappearing people or has been disappearing people. Well, that's a great question. Usually when somebody is held in immigration detention, there is an online locator system. where people's names show up and you can see where people are being held in detention. And as you can imagine, if your family member has been taken by ICE and put into detention, they could be held at over 150 detention facilities nationwide.

And it is so important to know where they are so that you can establish contact, so attorneys can get in touch to help defend their cases. And here at Alligator Alcatraz, ICE has simply not been recording anybody who is being held at the facility. So even if you enter their name in the system, there's simply no result, which is profoundly disturbing when people are just being whisked off the streets. We have stories of people who were picked up in front of their churches, people who are on fishing trips with their families, people who are driving home from work being pulled over by the highway patrol and then transferred into immigration custody.

Really, people are being pulled over for the quote-unquote offense of being brown. And this really is a huge pattern of what is happening with this facility at Alligator Alcatraz. Eunistro, you've highlighted the story of a man with disabilities who was forced to sign a document that turned out to be voluntary deportation form. Explain what happened. Well, you know, one of the big problems with what's happening in Alligator Alcatraz is that guards are going cell to sell, asking detainees or pressuring detainees to sign voluntary departure orders, really taking advantage of the United Alcatraz, is that guards are going cell to sell to cell, asking detainees or pressuring detainees to sign voluntary departure orders, really taking advantage of the very desperate conditions in which people are in. And all of that is happening without the ability to contact counsel about the very momentous decision that this represents. And we are hearing of cases of people who have valid claims to stay in the United States, even have court dates

scheduled, who are signing these voluntary departure orders because they don't know what they're doing. And I think a very good, clear example of this is the story of an intellectually disabled person who was called at Alligator Alcatraz. Guards told him he was signing a piece of paper in order to get a blanket. And in fact, he was signing a voluntary departure order and was deported only a few days later. The other abuses that are happening at Alligator Alcatraz just continue. We heard a story of a person who was denied a bond hearing. His bond hearing was canceled. And a few days later, even though he was still actively in immigration proceedings, has not received a final order of removal from the United States,

was wrongfully deported from the United States to Guatemala. And he still remains there today, despite many attempts from his attorneys to have him return back to the United States. This is just the type of harm that is resulting as a result of these constitutional violations that are taking place at Alleghener Alcatraz. And Eunice Cho, this detention camp was built in complete secrecy. You talk about the state of Florida never holding a public hearing or obtaining local approval or going through an environmental review process before appropriating this land and building this facility?

Well, everything about this facility is not normal. It is not precedented. And it is still somewhat unclear as to what the exact legal authority that it gives the state of Florida to be establishing this facility and holding people at the facility. And as you mentioned, the process in which the facility was built, it was so rushed. It went without environmental review. Our friends at Earth Justice and Friends of the Everglades have also brought a separate lawsuit challenging this reckless plan to build a massive detention center in the heart of the Everglades

without going through any environmental review as required by law. And so another federal court, of course, is deciding that issue as we speak. I wanted to ask you about the bigger picture. you are senior counsel at the ACOU National Prison Project. Washington Post reporting ISIS planning to double its detention capacity to jail more than a hundred immigrants. ISIS already expanded jails, plans to open more around the country. Another one in Florida, including in Nebraska right near Lincoln, a prison so-called war camp dubbed by Republicans cornhuster clink.

Overall, how are you dealing with all of the? these and the corporations, the private prison companies that are profiting? Well, I think this is profoundly disturbing, and I think this is unprecedented in nature. ICE has received $45 billion from Congress, $45 billion to expand the nation's immigration detention infrastructure. And to put this in perspective, last year, ICE received $4 billion for immigration detention. This amount of money will allow ICE to more than double the size of of the immigration detention system in less than six months and expanded to a carceral system that's larger than the entire federal prison system.

They are planning to detain over 100,000 people per day. And I want everyone to think about what is being built with these funds. While we're contending with historic cuts to Social Security, healthcare, education, veterans benefits, cancer research, these ones are being used to build detention centers around the country to lock up families, neighbors, and, our coworkers in these facilities as we speak. Not only is ICE planning to enter into contracts with private prison companies who are going to overwhelmingly benefit from this expansion, it is also planning to expand detention in

military bases with tent camps as well as local, state and prisons, federal prisons that have gone unempty for years. This is an expansion of disaster's proportions. I want to thank you so much for being with us. Eunice Cho, Senior Counsel at the ACU National Prison Project, lead attorney in the federal lawsuit. I'm Amy Goodman with Juan Gonzalez.