Factually! with Adam Conover - You are not safe.

Episode Date: April 25, 2025

(In addition to your weekly Factually! episode, this week we're bringing you a monologue from Adam. This short, researched monologue originally aired on the Factually! YouTube page, but we are sharing audio versions of these monologues with our podcast audience as well. Please enjoy, and stay tuned for your regularly scheduled episode of Factually!)Trump's deportations aren't just illegal, they're a signal that he intends to erase anyone who opposes him.Visit https://groundnews.com/factually to stay fully informed, see through biased media and get all sides of every story. Subscribe for 40% off unlimited access through my link.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a HeadGum Podcast. So in the past couple weeks, reading the news has become kind of a surreal experience. I mean, Trump is throwing innocent people into unmarked vans and sending them to foreign concentration camps, but whoops, we're supposed to ignore that because JD Vance just killed the Pope and Jeff Bezos shot Katy Perry into space for feminism. That's right, she kissed the world and nobody liked it. I mean, this is such a weird time to be alive that the same day Katie girl bossed too close to the Sun I got a notification on my phone from the LA Times which asked me what's to stop Trump from exiling you to a

foreign prison. Isn't that wild? Do you remember when phone alerts used to be like people are mad at Miley Cyrus for shaking her ass? Now they're like five helpful tips to save yourself from the gulags. Well, it's actually a good question. What is to stop Trump from sending me, or you, or anyone we care about to a hole in Central America to die? I mean, in the past few months, our government has pulled a student off the street for the crime of writing her opinion in the newspaper, thrown her into a van, and flown her 1,500 miles from her community to rot in a cell.

It's detained its own US citizens for looking Mexican. And Trump has directly defied a unanimous Supreme Court order to bring back a man they admit they sent by mistake to a Salvadoran prison. Things are so bad in America right now that the AARP is literally advising senior citizens on how to prevent border patrol from searching their phones. Imagine what an asshole you have to be for a grandma to not want to show you her camera roll. So if you were wondering what life was going to be like under authoritarianism, this is it. You're living in it baby. Welcome to America, land of the scared where no one is safe.

And that's the point. The Trump administration's cruel and lawless behavior is designed to frighten you and make you feel unsafe. But you know what? That fear you feel in your chest also gives all of us tremendous power. Power that many of your fellow Americans are currently using to protect your neighbors and themselves. Power that you have too. In this video, I'm going to tell you how you can use it to fight back against what is happening in this country.

But first, if you want to support the channel directly and all the work we do here, and I hope you do, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. And if you'd like to see me in person, watch me perform my new hour of stand-up comedy live, well, you can come see me in South Carolina, Oklahoma, Washington State, or anywhere else. We're always adding new tour dates. Head to adamconover.net. So far, the most famous victim of Trump's campaign of state terror is Kilmar Abrego Garcia. He initially crossed the border illegally when he was 16 to escape threats from gangs,

but he was granted withholding of removal status by an American judge due to the danger he faced, which allowed him to stay here. He's now lived in the United States legally for the last 14 years and has checked in with the government every year without incident. He worked a union job and he has three young children with his wife who is a U.S. citizen, as are his children. And in 2019, during Trump's first term, a judge even ordered the government not to deport Abrego Garcia because again, he was here legally and had protection of a court order. But in March of this year, Abrego Garcia was stopped by ICE in an Ikea parking lot, illegally

arrested while his son watched, and then illegally shipped without trial to a prison in El Salvador called Seacot. And just in case you haven't heard about this yet, the conditions in this prison are horrifying. Each cell is designed to hold up to 70 people and the lights are on 24 hours a day. Prisoners can't have visitors, go outside or even communicate with their families. I mean, look at this place. It's basically the prison from Andor, except you can't escape and you don't get to make friends with Gollum. In fact, by some measures, it's not really accurate to call it a prison at all.

Because men like Abrego Garcia are being held without trial or due process, CICOT meets the United States Holocaust Museum's definition of a concentration camp. It goes without saying that all of this is blatantly unconstitutional. So unconstitutional that even our arch-conservative Supreme Court unanimously ordered Trump to bring Abrego Garcia back to America. That's right, even Antonin Scalia's ghost weighed in from hell and was like, yo, this is f**ked up. And even though the Trump administration admits that they deported Abrego Garcia by mistake,

excuse me, by mistake, Trump's Attorney General has refused, literally saying it's up to El Salvador if they want to return him. I mean, think about how crazy this is. Just a few years ago, when Brittany Greiner was arrested in Russia for the crime of vaping, it was such a big priority for the country to get her home that doing so was a major victory for the Biden presidency. But now, a man has been unjustly separated from his wife and children, sent for no reason to a brutal foreign prison, the Supreme Court is literally ordering he be returned, and even though it's the president's fault, he's just going, uh, sorry, I couldn't possibly stop Big

Swang El Salvador. Wink. I mean, give me a f***ing break. Just a few days ago Trump was palling it up at the White House with his new best friend El Salvador's president, Nayab Bukele. I mean look at this, they're literally f***ing holding hands. Nayab is such a sycophant he'd give Trump a kidney and you're telling me he won't return a guy we're paying him to hold? Yeah, that's right. The Trump administration is literally paying El Salvador to hold Kilmar and others like

him without trial. Now, you might ask why are they bothering to do that when there are plenty of prisons in America? We are after all the world's biggest jailer. Well, the reason is because imprisoning him in a foreign country gives them an excuse not to return him. Trump is like a bully who steals your lunch money then hands it to a friend so when the teacher tells him to give it back he can say, I don't have it anymore.

I mean it's such a flimsy f***ing excuse that you'd think they'd be embarrassed to tell it. But no, the flimsiness is the point. They didn't arrest Abrego Garcia by mistake, they didn't deport him by mistake, and nothing is stopping them from bringing him back. You know it, they know it, and they know you know it. That is the point. They are trying to let you know that they can send you to a foreign prison at any time

on whatever pretext they like, and not even the Supreme Court will be able to bring you back. They're trying to tell you that you are not safe. That's why Republicans are posting smug little selfies in Seacat. Oh, look at that little tough guy pose. Dude looks like a tattletale who's proud of ratting out his classmates for smoking pot in the parking lot. And that's the point. This little dweeb and his little dweeb friends are trying to convince you that if you step out of line, they can do this to you too, no matter how peaceful and law-abiding you are. Rumeysa Ozturk is a former Fulbright scholar who was studying at Tufts.

Last year she wrote an op-ed in her student newspaper asking for her university to acknowledge the Palestinian genocide. And honestly, it's a really tame, very polite op-ed. Anybody who's honestly threatened by a student urging their own university president to meaningfully engage with resolutions passed in a student newspaper has a brain made of wet chowder and shouldn't be allowed to hold a pair of f**king scissors, let alone public office. But apparently a little chowderhead p**y named Marco Rubio was so scared of the threat Rumeza posed to the nation that he revoked her visa without informing her, then had a

group of unidentified men surround her and throw her into an unmarked van. And the Trump administration, by the way, knew she didn't do anything wrong, even by their definition. The State Department literally reported that they couldn't find any evidence linking her to terrorism or anti-Semitism. The source of that news, by the way, came from this video's sponsor, Ground News. You know, the reporting about Trump's actions right now has so much spin around it, and that's why we use Ground News to double check our sources in our research process.

Ground News rates every source based on factuality and bias, which lets you make sure you're getting accurate news on even complicated breaking stories. For instance, on this story, even though the Washington Post is listed as a center-left news source, you can see that the right-leaning news sources are reporting exactly the same information, though there are less of them, which means that right-leaning viewers are not getting this story. And you can tell that it's true because they have a factuality rating again for every single source.

And get this, you can get 40% off if you use my special code, Factually, go to groundnews.com slash factually. Once again, if you want to see the biases of all your news sources, head to groundnews.com slash factually for 40% off. So look, it's a bad thing to arrest someone who didn't do anything wrong, but it's even more terrifying that Ozturk did not get any semblance of due process. She was never informed that her visa had been revoked, and she was never informed that she was about to be arrested.

And that's f**king crazy. You know, we have certain assumptions in America that we can speak our minds without being persecuted by the government and that we'll have due process. I mean, what else is the liberty and justice for all supposed to mean? Those ideas are as American as the Costco guys posing with a chicken bake in front of a giant wall of paper towels. Due process gets five big booms. Boom! Boom! Boom!

As of the filming of this video, Oz Turk, who was kidnapped by ICE on March 25th, is still in jail, 1,500 miles from her home, without trial or charges. And she's not the only one. Mahmoud Khalil was arrested March 8th in front of his pregnant wife, and he's now been in prison for so long he'd just missed the birth of his child despite not having been charged with any crime. And just last week, Mohsen Madhawi was arrested at his citizenship interview, also without having been charged with the crime. I mean, this dude was such a model immigrant who came here the right way that they slapped the cuffs on him the moment before he was about to become a citizen.

What all of these people have in common, the only thing they have in common, is that they were foreign students studying in the US who attended protests or wrote in support of the people of Palestine. That's it. The only thing they did wrong was express their political opinion about American support for another country's war. Last time I checked, expressing political views in America was not supposed to get you arrested by the government. Wasn't there an amendment about that?

I think it was one of the early ones. So why were they arrested in the first place? And why are they all still being held in jail without being convicted or even charged with anything? Simple. The Trump administration wants you to be afraid of exercising your free speech. They want you to feel like if you protest, if you speak out, even against horrifying violence and cruelty and unconstitutional behavior, you could be next. And hey, just to let all you white people know that you're not safe either,

they're even arresting random Canadians. The government detained this nice lady in an ice-cold cell for 11 days. Yeah, even looking like Alanis Morissette won't save you. That's the jagged little pill they want you to swallow. And are you an American citizen who feels safe with your cute little passport? Oh, you think the Bill of Rights protects you? That's so nice and cozy. Well, Trump is even openly talking

about sending US citizens to prisons in El Salvador. During his meeting with the Salvadoran president, Trump said this. Home-growing is next. The home-growing is built, you gotta build about five more places. Our president is literally asking the leader of a foreign country to quintuple their concentration camps to make room for any US citizen Trump wants to whisk away in the middle of the night. And do you really believe that that was a hot mic moment? I don't.

I think he wanted us to hear it. So that all of us know that we are not safe. So that we all feel that the only way to survive is to stay quiet and let Trump do whatever he wants. But right now, staying quiet is the most dangerous thing we could do. Think of it this way. We're in a tug of war. Right now Trump's tugging it hard, trying to pull America into direction we have never

gone before. But we, the people, are on the other side of the rope. There's a lot more of us than there are of him, and some of us are starting to pull back. For weeks now, we've seen sustained protests in the streets all across the country, and that energy is starting to catch on. Last week, Senator Chris Van Hollen flew down to Seacat to meet with Kilmar Abrego-Garcia, and that visit was so politically effective that House Democrats planned their own visit, and even the grandstander-in-chief, Cordy Booker, announced he's planning one too.

And yeah, sure, this is mostly just the Democrats having a dick measuring contest, but at least they're finally showing some balls. The more this story stays in the news, the more outraged Americans become, the less power Trump has. And we saw that last week in an extremely rare midnight decision from the Supreme Court.

After an ACLU appeal, as vans were literally driving people towards deportation planes, the Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to stop, and when they did, a bus carrying at least 28 detainees who were bound for CICOT turned around. That Supreme Court ruling was a direct result in part of public attention on this issue of people refusing to let Trump's campaign of fear stop them from pushing for what they know is right. Hell, we are seeing so much pushback we've even got Joe Rogan quoting Ben Franklin. Here it is, Benjamin Franklin. It's better a 100 guilty persons should escape than one innocent person should suffer.

That is wisdom. It is the foundation of freedom. I mean, when Joe Rogan is on the same side of an issue as Rachel Maddow, you know you've got a broad base of support. And there is strength in that. Because if none of us are safe, then that means we're all in this together. And that gives us power, because it means we will have solidarity with each other and stand up and fight for each other. And there are so many ways that you can join that fight. Sure, you can pressure your elected leaders to take action, but you can also print and share free Know Your Rights cards from the Immigrant Legal Resource Center. You can join the upcoming May Day protests on May 1st by checking out maydaystrong.org.

And you can join an immigrant rights organization in your community, or check out the National Immigrant Justice Center for ways you can volunteer to help immigrants directly. Authoritarianism relies on your fear. It feeds on the silence that it tries to instill in you through that fear. But here's the thing.

Fear doesn't have to make you quiet. It can also make you scream your fucking head off. And when all of us are screaming at once, that's powerful. So it's time for all of us to get loud together. That was a HateGum podcast. Hey, I'm Tony Hale. I'm Matt Oberg. And I'm Kristin Schall. And we're going to be hosting the new podcast, The Extraordinarians, where we are going to

be interviewing extraordinary people, doing extraordinary things, things that we have never and probably will never do. We talk to people who have broken records on slacklines suspended by hot air balloons. Yep. We're talking to people who have done multiple flips on trampolines. You'll have to tune in to find out how many flips they did. Subscribe to Extraordinarians on Spotify, Apple podcasts, PocketCasts, or wherever you get your podcasts and watch me.

and watch me. God. Watch it on the YouTube. There's new episodes that we release in every Wednesday. We do. I've never seen you cry before. This is upsetting for all of us. They don't let us pray for lunch.

They do. This podcast is so competitive they make you just talk it down. Guys, we're watching a spin out. Please subscribe. Oh, man. Extraordinarians. Hi.

I'm Jessie Klein. And I'm Liz Feldman. And we're the hosts of a new Headgum podcast called Here to Make Friends. Liz and I met in the writer's room on a little hit TV show called Dead to Me, which is a show about murder. But more importantly, it's also about two women becoming very good friends in their 40s.

Which can really happen, and it has happened to us. It's true. Because life has imitated ours. And then it imitated life. Time is a flat circle. And now. We're making a podcast that's about making friends. And we're inviting an incredible guest like Vanessa Bear.

Wow, I have so much to say. Lisa Kudrow. Feelings, they're a nuisance. Nick Kroll. I just wanted to say hi. I'm Matt Rogers. I, I have so much to say. Lisa Kudrow. Feelings. They're a nuisance. Nick Kroll. I just wanted to say hi. And Matt Rogers. I'm like on the verge of tears.

So good. So good to join us and hopefully become our friends in real life. Take it out of the podcast studio and into real life. Along the way, we are also going to talk about dating. Yep. Spousing. True.

Parenting. Career-ing. Yeah. And why we love Thelma and Louise and it's the greatest movie of all time. Shouldn't need to be said. No, we said it. It's just a true thing.

So please subscribe to Here to Make Friends on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, or wherever you get your podcasts, and watch video episodes on YouTube. New episodes every Friday. Hey, I'm Jake Johnson, and I host the Headgum podcast We're Here to Help with my partner Gareth Reynolds.

We're Here to Help is a call and advice show, think car talk from back in the day. We're determined to help fix life's dumbest problems. We also have guest helpers join us from the entire cast of New Girl to Michael Cera, Andy Sandberg, Jimmy Kimmel, just to name a few. So do me a favor and come check out an episode and then bounce around our catalog. We're over 150 episodes so far, so there's plenty of stories for you to discover. Subscribe to We're Here to Help on Spotify,

Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday, and bonus episodes drop on Wednesdays.