Fourth Reich Archaeology - #114 - Immigration Abomination w/ Alex (Side A)

Episode Date: September 18, 2026

This week, Dick and Don are back together talking about a topic that seems to have fallen out of the media spotlight lately, but that is more than deserving of serious attention and concern. Deportation numbers are breaking records each month, due process is being whittled away, hundreds of thousands of people are losing legal status with the stroke of a pen based on what country they’re from.Even as the policies around mass deportation decline in popularity (even among Trump voters), administration officials continue to peddle mask-off Nazi rhetoric to dehumanize the most marginalized members of society. All in service of the classic fascist maneuver of prioritizing a hardcore base of support among ideological extremists - white nationalist eugenicist racists, in this case. Side B will include an interview with Alex, a veteran immigration lawyer, who shares her perspective on the insanity from the center of the Maelstrom. Head on over to Patreon if you’d like to get at it sooner!The cover of Victor Jara’s “La Partida” featured in the episode can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8LaF-tFgg0&list=RD_8LaF-tFgg0&start_radio=1

The following passage is from Adolf Hitler's Mienkamp. Listener, please know that as I read this, I'm shaking my head to indicate that I do not agree. Of course, this is an anti-Nazi podcast. The point of reading this passage is to note and take note of the degree to which the thinking of Hitler is reflected in the subject matter of today's episode and the attitudes of those who lead the world, unfortunately, today. If nature does not wish that weaker individuals should make with the stronger, she wishes even less that the superior race should intermingle with an envis

inferior one, because in such a case all her efforts throughout hundreds of thousands of years to establish an evolutionary higher stage of being, may thus be rendered full time. History furnishes us with innumerable instances that prove this law. It shows with a startling clarity that whatever Ariens have mingled their blood with that of an inferior race, The result has been the townfall of the people who were the standard bearers of a higher culture. In North America, where the population is prevalently teutonic and where those elements intermingled with inferior race only to a very small degree, we have a quality of mankind and a civilization which are different from those of Central and South America.

In these latter countries, the immigrant, who mainly belonged to the Latin races, mated with the aborigines, sometimes to a very large extent indeed. In this case, we have a clear and decisive example of the effect produced by the mixture of races. But in North America, the teutonic element which has kept its racial stock pure,

and did not mix it with any other racial stock, has come to dominate the American continent, and will remain master of it as long as that element does not fall a victim to the habit of adulterating its blood. In short, the results of miscegenation are always the following. A, the level of the superior race becomes lowered, and B, a physical and mental degeneration sets in that leading slowly but steadily towards the progressive trying up of the vice. vital sap. The act which brings about such a development is a sin against the will of the eternal creator. And other sin, this act will be avenged. Colonialism or imperialism, as the slave system of the West is called, is not something that's

just confined to England or France or the United States. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make it. It's one huge complex or combine. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. And this international power structure is used to suppress the masses of dark-skinned people all over the world and exploit them of their natural resources. We found no evidence of conspiracy, foreign or domestic, the Warren Commission, the science. I'll never apologize for the United States of America. Ever.

I don't care what the facts are. In 1945, we began to acquire information, which showed that there were two wars going. His job, he said, was to protect the Western way of life. The primitive simplicity of their minds renders the more easy victims of a big lie than a small law. For example, we're the CIA. No, he has a mile. See, there's so long this is. All right.

Freedom can never be secure. It usually takes a national crisis. Freedom can never be secure. Pro Harbor. A lot of killers. We've got a lot of killers. Why you think our country's so innocent? This is the CIA.

National global. This is Fourth Reich archaeology. I'm Don. And I'm Dick. Welcome back, listener to our show. We are back. bringing you a live, at least the two of us are live together for the first time in a couple weeks again. Tell you what, listener, when we say that we are just two guys with full-time jobs,

you'll notice that sometimes that means our schedules don't line up. We got to improvise. We got to take extended breaks from our Shee Harvey Oswald series within a series because we really want to be sure to dig super deep into the next installment of that, which you're all going to love. But the good news is that we're back. We are here and we are ready to bring you some podcasting. So before we do that, we just want to say, please help us spread the word, word of mouth, social media, like rate review, you know the drill. Reach out to us. and if you are willing and able to do so, support us over on Patreon. Dick, glad to be with you, my friend.

Yeah, I'm so glad to be back in the driver's seat, in the captain's seat, and to be speaking with you on air, man, it's really nice. I will just say, you know, when we say that this is our, we're doing this in our free time, we really mean it. You know, there's that Elizabeth Holmes, uh, Nathan Fielder meme that's going around where it's like, why would I deceive you? Why would we deceive you, listener? We're telling, we're telling the truth here.

It's just two guys. We're on, as you've said before, we're on a shoe string budget here on a shoe that doesn't have any strings. And we're just doing our best. We're getting the message out. We're getting the word out. And I was so excited. We're going to get into this week's episode, which is going to be about.

If you've read the episode summary, you know already that it's going to be about immigration and the immigration abomination. That is the current state of things. But before we do, I just want to cover what is in the news because I'm really, it's like burning a hole in my pocket. What is going on with McLemore and Ed Shearin and this beef that's happening? Because I got to say, if this whole Palestine thing comes to a hell of. head because of Maclemore, man, that would be amazing. This guy is going to turn everything, make everything mainstream.

It's a wild time to be alive where McLemore is now the voice of reason in this saga. Yeah. And I don't know if you saw just, I think just before we got on, I saw that Mclemore is now donating a million dollars to the cause. and Robert Kraft, the stadium owner, the owner of the New England Patriots, the guy who, I mean, you've heard about this, right? He told Ed Sheeran that if he doesn't drop McLemore from the tour, that he's going to not allow Ed Shearin to play at his stadium. And he told all the other stadium owners to not let Ed Shearne play, which is really like such an unhinged thing. to say and do. Yeah, I mean, we've got our lawyer hats on for this episode.

I almost wonder if that's not some kind of an antitrust violation, like a group boycott. It is prohibited. I wonder if McLemore or Ed Sheeran could bring a claim under the Sherman Act. I don't know. I'd have to brush up. Yeah, totally. Or a ticket holder, even, someone who is going to go see McLemore,

who can now no longer see McLemore. We'd have to look at those terms. What's funny about it is that Robert Kraft is now weighing in because of all the blowback, right? I'm so glad to see, you know, like we gripe about this all the time on air. I'm so glad to see that we're actually somewhere in the historical timeline in this narrative where people say things and it matters, right? People talk and speak up about the atrocities, the genocide, and it actually has an effect, right? And Robert Kraft saw that it was having an effect. so he had to make a statement.

And of course it's like this mealy mouth statement where he says that he's done so much for the Palestinian and the Jewish people and all of this and that. And, you know, in response to McLemore inviting him to donate to the cause. And I am, I was heartened to see that it's actually affecting these guys. I will say one thing. So Ed Sheeran, he's, you know, obviously taken aside here, even though he was. would never admit it, even though he's saying that he's apolitical or whatever. Yeah, both sides in genocide is choosing the side of the Genocidare.

There should be no doubt about that, obviously. The Easter egg here for me is that Ed Sheeran's got a song out that's in Persian. I don't know if you knew this or not. He's got a song that's actually spoke. He speaks Persian in the song because I think one of his producers are Persian. And this whole thing tracks, I think, right? Because it's no doubt that the Persian, the record producer that's involved in that is a monarchist pro-Israel Persian, L.A. Persian. I have no doubt in my mind that that's going on there.

So I got to think that that's sort of something that was in play in all of this. Oh, yeah. And I also saw a clip going around with Ed Shearin, like bringing Ukrainian. nationalists onto the stage and decrying pootler and stuff like that so of course his politics only go as far as the u.s. state departments perceived allowable political range the overton window of the official narrative of the spectacle and you're right i mean it's an example the macklemore thing of course it's still confined to the realm of spectacle, but it breaks a little bit of containment. It's a little bit of that old DeBordian anti-spectacular spectacle that is such a hard line to toe,

but an important one, nevertheless. And I think that the words of David Byrne with respect to Xurance music really say it better than we possibly could. I think it's time to make a musical change. change too. It could be the form of it, how long it is, what it sounds like. People keep coming up to me and saying they like my music, so I think why change it? Well, it sounds terrible. It sounds terrible. Yeah, everyone out there, you've got to destroy it, you got to burn your Ed Shear and records and your CDs and to the extent that you have any physical media left, you got to get rid of it, you got to delete him from the iTunes store, the unfollow on Spotify.

And then the last thing I want to say about this is how AOC has also weighed in, which is like, how is it that they're always able to get AOC's take on this stuff? And it's always in some interview where she's on like the steps of Congress, like walking out of Congress where they ask her for her opinion on this, where they're like, where do you, where do you stand? Are you going to listen to Mac, you're going to listen to Ed Shearin? And she's like, no, no, I'm not an Ed Shearin fan anymore.

Yeah. I mean, she is there on behalf of the spectacle to wrangle that anti-spectacular stuff right back into the fold and make it just more grist for the mill. Yeah. Yeah. It's all just so, it's amazing. What a time to be alive. But I digress. Now is a good time to transition to today. topic where Dick, I'll hand it over to you. But I think in that same tradition of anti-spectacular spectacle, you know, here we are using our free speech rights that still do currently exist on paper and trying to inform, educate, and entertain you, audience so that you too can intervene, if not in the spectacle, hopefully in your real lives, in the consciousness of those around you. You want to tell them what's up? Yeah, this week we're going to spend a little bit of time

talking about the ever-present issue in the Fourth Reich immigration. It's something that we have talked a little bit about in our geopolitic series. And, also we did that what we will hope to be more than just a one-off down by law series. And we come back to this notion over and over again. And that notion is that since the beginning of the age of empires, the ruling class and these ruling kingdoms, they've had to deal with this phenomenon, this issue of migrants, leaving their homes. And these homes are often, almost always, in places where,

The ground has been raised. Their communities have been pillaged by those in power, by the very empire that these people seek to migrate to. And they do it to seek a better life in what we and others have called the Imperial Corps, right? And it's no different to what's happening today. The phenomenon we are seeing today with this mass migration into the United States, that is a phenomenon that has been occurring for so long, and it will continue to occur as long as it is the policy of the United States to meddle in the affairs of other countries, to go out and exploit the resources of dark-skinned people. It's going to happen for as long as war and the exploitation and all of that is a business. and at this point in the timeline it really does feel like at least to me and I'm sure to you

Don that immigration has really become this prism this lens through which virtually every one of society's ills can be seen through right like you can't find a job blame the immigrants you know there's a burden on our health care system blame the immigrants we're not gaining, you know, there's voter fraud. Blame the immigrants. Crime, you guessed it. Blame the immigrants. And I think something that became like

abundantly evident to me as we're putting this outline together this, this week, is that nowadays in the United States, it's really the only way that you're able to have this big tent movement, to have this us and them movement is by differentiating

between people who are legally here and people who are not, right? Because the reality is, is that this day and age, as long as you're willing to do the dirt, basically anybody can join the ranks of the fourth, right, can climb that ladder, right? Doesn't matter if you're gay or trans or black, Latino, Muslim, whatever your identity is, as long as you're willing to serve, it's a rainbow coalition, right? And as long as you'll be able to do that and as long as you are here at least, you're good. So if you're not an illegal immigrant, as they say, you're good. Yeah, at least that's how the Trump administration campaigned on the issue. And of course, we saw in 2024 that Trump did get,

you know, much more support from black voters, much more support from Latino voters. He kind of made inroads in a way that the Republican Party hadn't done in many, many years. And I think now the excesses of Trump's immigration enforcement have scaled that back a little bit. You know, we see all of these opinion polls showing deep, deep unpopularity, not only of Trump as a president on the whole, but of his immigration policies in particular. So, you know, it's the sort of facade of the spectacle, the falsity of the narrative, hitting the wall of the truth. And the fact is that these people who were willing to give Trump the benefit of the doubt

for whatever reason, at least a significant chunk of them, are not, actually on board with like cruelty for cruelty's sake. You know, they see the narrative of your life is going to get better if we get rid of these illegal immigrants. They see that house of cards just crumbling into a pile as there are massive deportations, but yet people's lives aren't getting materially better. Prices aren't going down. You know, none of the promised benefits are actually coming.

to fruition and we'll talk a little bit more about that both in our discussion and with our guest on this episode who we'll talk about and introduce in a minute yeah it's certainly a part of the trump administration's playbook but lest we be uh designated at this podcast that isn't really blaming the dems for anything don't forget that uh kamala's campaign don't forget that the the Biden administration, the Obama administration, they very much were pushing for this anti-immigration policy, right? Even Kamala during her campaign was talking shit about how you can come to America but do it the right way, right?

Legal immigration. The immigration issue became very much folded into like the tough on crime issue, right? And the irony is, of course, that as we've talked about in the other episodes we've done on this, it's very hard. virtually, dare I say, virtually impossible for someone to legally, quote, legally immigrate into this country if you're coming from certain parts of the world. And just as it has been the case historically, the irony to all of this is that those parts of the world are the parts which have been hit particularly hard by U.S. imperialism. Think about Central America, think about Afghanistan,

think about Iraq, think about Haiti, Somalia. and on and on and on. Yeah, and, you know, these are also the countries that have been scapegoated by the Trump administration for really the purpose of just peddling racism as a means to divide and conquer the working class and to galvanize a base among white racists under the MAGA brand. So that's the old playbook, right? you hear people like J.D. Vance and Stephen Miller, these sort of mask-off fascists, both really standing in for Peter Thiel and this cabal of genocidal South African Nazis

and their Zio-Nazi Israeli-friendly pals. And they're talking about the dangers of, quote, importing the third world and making, the United States dirty by the presence of these undesirable populations, that racism, which again, this is picking up on the theme that we laid out in the down by law and in, especially I think there were number two and four of the geopolitic series, but that racism is the point. It's counterposing non-white immigrants as threats to the homeland in order to coalesce and consolidate the power base for this movement around white identitarian ideology, white nationalism, you know, and it's again, you were

right, Dick, like that white nationalism, there are in this fucked up absurd world of ours, there are black white nationalists in the United States. There are Mexican white nationalists. Like that guy, Myron Gaines, right? Sudanese but is a white nationalist. Nick Fuentes, Mexican, but white nationalists. These Groyper fascists, and that's exactly how fascism works, right?

It's not getting the support of more than half of the population. It's getting the extreme support of a molten core group that has sufficient numbers to act and to sort of make narrative. interventions in the spectacle that then push history forward, that push the contradictions in the class struggle forward to further develop, to further expose these contradictions and on the side of the ruling class to further consolidate that strangle hold on power and that pursuit of total control of maximum exploitation of, you know, increasing the power, the profit margins for the ruling class. Yeah. So, I mean, we'll spend some time this week just checking in on what's

going on in the country's immigration policy. And really what we're going to focus on is like, kind of like how we did in the down by law series where it's like there's something that is on the books, there's a law or a policy on the books, and then there's a way that in practice, the administration, at least for now, is working its way around that, right? Like, there might be a law in the books that's very favorable for immigrants, you know, very pro-immigant rights, but in practice, through policy decisions, through guidance, through, you know, through directives, the administration is basically using those laws as a way. to push people out of the country.

And it does really seem like even though these issues, they're ever present, as of late, it has this feeling that it's just sort of been hushed about on both sides of the aisle, even as the midterm elections approach, right? And while there are some seriously harmful egregious efforts by the Trump administration, And even though some of those have been rolled back by the courts, the Trump administration, through the things that we're going to talk about in the coming minutes and in the next hour or so, the Trump administration has continued to tilt the playing field in its favor and has increased the amount of control and the degree of exploitation over people it claims do not belong in the United States. after you and I get the chance to discuss some of these brass tacks and kind of get the information out there, we're privileged to also have a discussion with a real immigration attorney full-time doing the work out there and to get her perspective working on all these issues across a wide range of immigration-related issues

who's been in these trenches for years. So we'll look forward to that as well, and we hope that you enjoy it. But without any further ado, let's get digging. I've also announced a permanent pause on third world migration, including from hellholes like Afghanistan, Haiti, Somalia, and many other countries.

I didn't say shit all you did. Remember, I sent that to the senators. the Democrats. They wanted to be bipartisan. So they came in and they said, this is totally off the record. Nothing mentioned here. We want to be honest because our country was going to hell. And I say, why is it? We only take people from shithole countries. Why can't we have some people from Norway? Sweet, just a few. Let's have a few. From Denmark, do you mind sending us for you, me? Send us some nice people. Do you mind? But we always think people from

Somalia, places that are a disaster, right? Filt, dirty, disgusty, written with crime. Then on the road would have never invented the wheel. They can just come into the country, have a baby in a hospital, that baby can sit on a jury when he can decide who our mayors are, our governors are, our presidents are. Citizenship means nothing if it is open to every. Portation maxing.

since we're fully funded, we just got to keep going. All right. So before we get into the meat of this episode, I guess the starting point is to, at least I wanted to focus this episode on the most vulnerable of the immigrant groups, and that is the children or the minors that come to this country and a policy and a law that's in the books known as special immigrant juvenile status. Now, special immigrant juvenile status or SIG, as some people call it, it's a form of relief that has been around since the early 1990s. I want to say in 1990, the INA, the Immigration Naturalization Act, was amended to include this kind of relief. And basically all it says is that the, so the SIG relief is a allegation relief is a, of a certain percentage of visas every year to this group of people that fall under this special immigrant juvenile category. And what it boils down to is that the law in the book says that anyone, any minor that enters the United States unaccompanied, so you're an unaccompanied minor that comes to the United States and is able to show abuse, neglect, abandonment from their parents, from one.

of their parents. It doesn't have to even be both of your parents. If you show up in the United States as an unaccompanied minor and you're able to show that abuse, neglect, or abandonment, and you don't even have to be a minor when you apply, but if you do apply while you're under 21, I think in some states, it depends on the state you're in, but I think for the most part, if you're under 21 and you're unmarried, you can apply to this form of relief by filing a form, which is called an I-360. And by filing the form, you have the right to remain in the country and have your SIG application heard. And if you're approved, if you're granted the relief, you are basically given the, the, the right to apply for a visa once your application is approved.

Now, during the late years of the Obama administration and in 2013-2014, the number of unaccompanied minors that were coming to the country, it skyrocketed. Whether this was, you know, this was due to the influx of migrants coming from Central America. There was this increased attention to this form of relief, but the number of miners coming into this country just skyrocketed so much so that there became this backlog of visas, because there's only a certain number of visas that are available each year. So you would have these miners show up to the border or they get apprehended and they would file for this relief and they would get their relief, but there wouldn't be a visa ready for them, right? So they would have to wait in the country. Another part about this special immigrant juvenile status relief is you have to be in the country in order to get your visa. So what was starting to happen then, which was eventually promulgated and turned into policy, was what was known as deferred action, where the Department of Homeland Security and USCI,

what they would do is they would say, okay, you have got your SIG application in and you actually are approved. You have shown your special immigrant juvenile status, right? You came to this country as an unaccompanied minor. You have shown that there was some abuse or neglect or abandonment that you've suffered back in your home country. And by the way, usually you do that as an unaccompanied minor in this country. The way you do that is you go to a state court. So you would go to a state court judge and the judge would file this order of emancipation that would say basically to the world that you were emancipated from your parents. And once you do that, you are basically showing that you have this abandonment, right?

Starting in 2014 in the late years of the Obama administration and the Biden administration, USCIS and DHS started doing what was called the deferred action. policy, which meant that once you had that I-360, once you had your approval of SIG, you would not be deported, even though you didn't have otherwise didn't have lawful status, right? You have your SIJ application approved. You're not there. You're not in the United States on any visa. You're just, you're in the country, basically an applicant who's been approved in the waiting line for a visa. that was considered enough for, you know, lawful status in the country based on this deferred action program, which meant that DHS would not put you in deportation proceedings while you waited for your visa priority date to become current. And this was the law.

It's more like lawful non-status. Exactly. Exactly. You were sort of in this waiting zone. And for the longest time, you would tell people who would get the SIA, application approve is that you're good you have status until your visa became current because it was like a foregone conclusion in fact for the longest time when you got that approval notice from u.scius that says hey your si j application's been approved right there in that notice it would

say you're through the deferred action you're good for four years while you wait for your your visa to become current and then once your visa became current you would file what's called an I-485 form and your status would be adjusted and that's your pathway to a green card and permanent permanent residence in the United States and all of that changed when the Trump admitted during Trump 2 where they decided to do away with this deferred action program and so what would happen is that you would this SIG status and even though you had this status, notwithstanding that status, you would be placed in deportation proceedings. And because of the visa backlog, while you're in deportation

proceedings, of course, if your visa, if your priority day became current, you could always get your visa. But because it takes so long for this process to happen, ultimately what's happening to you is you're still being put in deportation proceedings, notwithstanding the fact that the government has found that you fall under the special immigrant juvenile status, and then you get deported. And of course, remember, once you're deported, you no longer qualify for that visa, because in order to have SIG status, you need to be in the United States. Yep. Yeah. I mean, it's just taking, like you said, the most vulnerable people,

giving them a promise of some kind of status, some kind of a pathway to, if not citizenship, at least legal status and then rug pulling them, maybe even detaining them and deporting them to a country that maybe some of these people barely know. Exactly. And I should say that all of this has come to a head in a lawsuit that was filed by a nonprofit and some law firms. It's styled as the case Matter of ACR versus Noam. And what that lawsuit did is a class.

action brought by all of these a class of these SIG applicants basically challenging this rescission of the deferred action program a federal court in late 2025 ruled that the the rescission they basically put a pause through an injunction that the Trump administration's policy of rescinding this deferred action program that was it violated the administrative Procedures Act. And so all is that to say is right now all of this is in flux. And so the Trump organizations, the Trump administration's policy of rescinding deferred action right now is still up being decided through the courts. And in the meantime, this policy is on pause. Yeah. So pay attention. Watch the space. And sadly, as the next, as the next,

topic that we'll discuss briefly will reveal there's not much hope to be placed in the courts considering that you know the Supreme Court which has the ultimate say over all of these issues of federal law is stacked to the gills six to three with not only like conservative justices but with far right like freaks I mean people that do not give a goddamn about maintaining all of the legal principles that have animated, at least the spectacle of a system of justice since the nation's founding. That next topic is another type of immigration status, and I think we can talk about it pretty quickly because it's fairly straightforward. This status is called TPS, temporary protected status, and it's another one of these sort of pieces of low-hanging fruit that in order to pump the deportation numbers,

the Trump administration picked right off of that rotten tree. So TPS is a status for people coming from countries that are declared by the State Department to be dangerous or uninhabitable as the result of natural disasters, major violence, political conflict, or other sort of ravages that create conditions so dangerous as to make the return of people to those conditions really unconscionable. So the first one was in 1990 for El Salvador, believe that that was spurred by an earthquake or a hurricane and there have been sort of successive countries that have joined the list. I think the current number as of the beginning of Trump too was 17 countries that had some form of TPS available to

certain people. Of course, it's not available to everyone. You still have to make a showing and you have to obtain this status. But the Trump administration, the Trump administration, as soon as it took office the second time around just started again rug pulling all of these millions of people of their status many people have been here for decades had built lives here had become part of their communities here in the united states and you may recall that the first group targeted were Haitians and those Haitians with TPS I think number over a million, and the removal of TPS for Haitians did make its way to the Supreme Court. And in June of this year, there was a six to three ruling along partisan lines that basically gave Trump the green light to end TPS.

And it was enemy of the pod, Samuel Alito, who penned. the majority decision where he said, you know, there's nothing racist about removing this status. There's nothing problematic and basically echoed the administration's talking points about executive power being at its height when, you know, enforcing the laws on the books and using the power that's delegated to the executive from Congress. So this TPS status, is resulted in all people formerly enjoying legal residency becoming instantaneously deportable at the stroke of a pen. Now 13 out of those 17 countries have been revoked, and the big one in the balance is the OG TPS country, El Salvador. And the reason why that's controversial, of course, is because Nayyib Buckele, the president,

of El Salvador, Trump's sort of crypto bro dictator buddy, who has, as we talked about, offered his services as a concentration camp operator to house immigrants and other, even other, non-immigrant criminals from the United States in his super prisons. He doesn't want TPS to end for Salvadorinos because it would be. hurt his economy, right? Because those people who are living in the United States, who are established in the United States, they are sending remittances back to El Salvador. It accounts for a significant portion of their GDP, and he doesn't want that to go away. So we will see what ends up happening there. But in the meantime, you know, there's just so much gaslighting from the administration

about their policy reversal on TPS. You know, you hear people like Tom Homan saying, well, it's right there in a title. It's just temporary. It's supposed to be temporary. And basically ignoring the fact that a country like Haiti, which is undergoing massive turmoil provoked by U.S. foreign policy, and just the constant, constant, just pillaging,

and utter destruction of that poor country by the United States to make an example of it, right? The first ever free black republic in the world that won its independence from French colonialism at the beginning of the 19th century. The U.S. has long stamped out any flame of democratic self-determination of economic development, in Haiti and continues to do so to this day. And of course it's racist. Of course there is a racial element. And it plays into this whole narrative of look at these shithole countries, look at these people that have low IQ. They're literally saying that these people are genetically inferior and are not fit for self-governance. They're echoing the words of the Dulles Brothers

uncle Robert Lansing when he was supporting the invasion of Haiti by the Marines in the 19-teens for the same racist imperialist reasons. And so again, you know, just like these juveniles or, you know, people who came here with the juvenile status, the people who have been living here with TPS are now deportable and are accounting for these record deportations. And now is a good time, I think, to point out, right? After the subsiding of the massive ice presence, right, the spectacular invasion of so-called sanctuary cities by ice, like the presence in Minneapolis last year, in Los Angeles,

those sort of battles on the television have gone by the wayside as the government lost battle after battle with people engaging in solidarity with one another to protect their neighbors. But nevertheless, the deportations have preceded a pace. And these sort of exploitations by the administration of people who are going, by the rules, right? Doing all of the things that the right wing, that the quote unquote conservatives always are asking, why don't these immigrants come in the right way? Why don't they file the paperwork? Why don't they wait in line? That's exactly what people with SIJS and what people with TPS have done. They have followed the rules. They have sought legal status. And their thanks for

following the rules is that they get on the government's radar, they become identifiable to the authorities, and they're singled out as the easiest people to round up and to deport. So each month from June of 26 through August, and here we're recording in September, so obviously we don't have September numbers, but June set a record. July broke that record, and August broke that record yet again for the number of monthly deportations and a substantial chunk of it, including the large portion of those deportations that are people with no criminal record are these folks who the hapless thanks that they get for following the rules is fast-tracked easy deportation. Yeah.

It's fucked. I think at this point it's important to note that a lot of times when you talk about these different forms of relief, a lot of folks will say, well, okay, they're put in deportation proceedings. There's a process there, right? These immigrants, they have a process. They get their due process through the immigration court system, right? And it's true that it used to be, like, for example, if you were a special immigrant

juvenile status and you were placed in removal proceedings, you could go into the immigration court and say, hey, immigration judge, I'm in removal proceedings, but look, my visa date is coming up next year or, you know, it's months away. I'm asking you to just stay these proceedings, right? Press pause on these deportation proceedings because in a matter of weeks or in a matter of months, my visa date is current and I can apply for an adjustment of status and I can get, eventually, I can get a green card. I just need that time, right?

And so you hear folks often on the other side say, okay, yeah, there's these deportation proceedings, but these people are still afforded due process. And I think this is a good point to transition to why that's a whole bunch of bullshit. Yeah, it sure is. So I think, you know, just a couple of points that we wanted to point out. I'm sure that there's a lot more, and I think some more maybe we'll get into with our guest. But one thing that came to us from a source from right inside the Board of Immigration Appeals, again, remember, first, it's important to note, the immigration judges are not judges like an article.

three judge that's appointed, confirmed, and has life tenure so that they can at least allegedly exercise their judgment neutrally without any favoritism or political bias. Works a lot worse in practice, of course, but it works even worse for immigration judges because they don't even pretend to be neutral. These are employees of the Department of Justice. Their boss is the Attorney General, they can be fired by the Attorney General if they don't tow the party line. And the same goes for the BIA, the Board of Immigration Appeals. The Board of Immigration Appeals reviews the decisions from immigration judges before they can be certified for review by an actual court of appeals.

And in this Trump administration, what our source has told us is that Trump gave the BIA employees sort of an ultimatum, right? These are people who are processing immigration appeals and determining whether or not they're meritorious and should be sent to a board for review. And so the ultimatum is either you become a rubber statement. you deny without reading every single petition that crosses your desk, without regard to the merits, without examining the case, without even looking at the facts. In other words, without any due process whatsoever. Or if you don't want to do that, we will, you know, give you a severance package. We'll give you early retirement. We'll let you take a little parachute and go on with your life in some other job.

And from what it seems like, from what we hear, many, many of these employees, you know, these are people that take the law seriously. They opted for exit package, right? They're gone. Yeah. Leaving behind the hacks who are willing to play along with this absolute evisceration of due process. Yeah. And just to put a really fine point on it, you know, they are Department of Justice employees, and you do have this phenomenon in the immigration space where they can get fired, of course, by their boss being the attorney general. But there's this phenomenon where notwithstanding whatever Board of Immigration Appeals holding is, the attorney general can come in and write his own opinion and overturn any longstanding precedent in the board.

BIA. So like there might be some long-standing precedent, the BIA, about certain people of a certain country having protected status or certain categories of people, I should say, having protected status. The attorney general, the, the attorney general could, in theory and in practice, they have done this historically, come in and say, oh, no, no, no, notwithstanding this long case history and this long line of precedent, going forward, this is now the long, the when it comes to this group of protected people, they're actually no longer protected, right? This happened with Trump One, with Jeff Sessions, putting out all of these crazy opinions about people who were the one that comes to mind right now is the significant others,

the partners of gang members as members of a particular social group, or victims of domestic violence as members of a particular social group that are protected. That's like the wild thing about this area of law is that it's not really like a judicial system because at the end of the day, the attorney general can come in and notwithstanding what the law is can just make up a whole new precedent. And just to drive the point home about these judges and these courts, there has been massive turnover in the executive office of immigration review, the immigration judges that are the trial court considered like the trial level judges. This is the court of first instance when you're in deportation proceedings and you go

into immigration court. There has been a massive turnover in these court personnel and a lot of these folks, I think we've covered it in one of our prior episodes. I want to say it was endowed by law. They're getting ported in from the military. These are people who have like no background in immigration law that are being assigned these positions and you guessed it the denial rate for things like asylum relief has shot up astronomically I think at this point there's something like a 94% denial rate on asylum applications in immigration court god damn what what can you even say what I can say is that Things get even more Kafkaesque, right?

You have these migrants put in the maw of this bureaucracy, this Byzantine system where the card, the deck is totally stacked against them from the get-go, notwithstanding what the laws are in the books in practice, things are totally stacked against them. It gets so much worse because in the last couple of months in the past six or seven months or so, it's becoming increasingly evident. And I should just, let's take a step back. So a critical part of immigration case, of someone who's in deportation proceedings or someone

who is fighting for their lawful status in the United States, a critical part of their case is figuring out what the government's record is, right? Figuring out what the government has on them, right? And because a critical part of the government's case is, is proving alienage or with removability, right? They have to prove in order for you to be deported, the government has to show that you actually don't, you're not lawfully here, right?

And so a critical part, if you are someone that's in the system, something that you wanna know from the get-go is like, what evidence is there out there? And oftentimes these immigration proceedings, these cases go on for years and years, And they switch through many different agencies, sister agencies, through under the Department of Homeland Security, right? You could be, do you have, you could be dealing with DHS, you could be dealing with USCIS, you could be dealing with USCIS, you could be dealing with CBP.

It's that alphabet soup, right? And one way, and it's been a longstanding practice since the beginning of the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, uh, the law. that came to books is known as the Freedom of Information Act. It's been a longstanding practice for these immigrants to make these FOIA requests and get their records to prove their status to fight deportation proceedings. Because oftentimes you will have these people because, again, it's been, you know, they're in this process for years. They might have attorneys, different attorneys come and go.

They might be in different agencies. There might be records that they would have submitted themselves years and years ago that they now need for another case, but because of some happening, something happens and they don't have access to those records anymore, they will do a FOIA request to the government and say, hey, give us what's called the A file, or give me the entire record that you have on me

so that I can prove my case or I can resist deportation. And in the past, the government has sort of followed pretty, you know, done a pretty good job of getting people their records in a timely manner and has sort of played ball. But what we're seeing in like the last couple of months in this past year is that the Trump administration is doing these gnarly redactions and withholding a lot of key evidence when migrants are asking for their AFIR, when migrants are doing these FOIA requests. And it's like these bogus redactions.

Like, you know, someone will go in and ask for their records and they'll come back redacted on the basis because FOIA has a bunch of exemptions, one of them being, you know, the government's not going to release any information that has to do, you know, that might impede on someone's personal privacy, right? So this migrant will, this person in the removal proceedings will file a FOIA request and then they'll get back their AFIL. And then there's a ton of redactions that says, well, we can't give you this information because it, would impede on someone's personal privacy when in reality it's the person the person who's asking for the information is the person in the file and there's really no basis to say that that person can't access their own information there's no basis to say that on personal privacy grounds they can't figure you know they can't learn what the the government knows about them yeah and you know just as we've discussed how

the rolling out of surveillance and targeting and AI targeting and mass murder in places like Palestine is a laboratory for things that will be brought back home. I think it's also analogous to look at the whittling away of due process in the immigration court system as a potential crystal ball for what sorts of plans these people have for whittling away our legal rights, our constitutional rights, our due process rights in other areas of the law. You know, as we talked about, I think it was in the episode with Isaac recently, about the targeting of people supporting pro-Palestine causes. I mean, kind of where we started off with McLemore in this episode, that right now it's like, okay, well, a private company can refuse to

contract with you, and that's not illegal. But next time, maybe he'll be arrested for saying free Palestine. Maybe that will be classified as some kind of a terrorist slogan. And, you know, these experiments in repression, these experiments in legal Byzantine mechanisms for psychological torture are going to be deployed against people who use or attempt to use the few remaining rights that they have left. This is when we say we live in the fourth Reich, you know, we have often been scoffed at for saying that, but I think now is the time when there's nothing to scoff at that this is something that is already here for the most marginalized people in our society, and it's coming to a less marginalized community near

you while the upper, upper crust walk away with the whole bag. sell the empire for parts, you know, getting a little far afield. But as we see, these individuals that are rolling out these policies that are coming up with these new ways of repression, of domination and of illegal control and criminalization, they're all getting much, much richer and more powerful. And we have kind of been ringing. this bell for a while now, but if we don't do something pretty fucking soon, the sound of the ringing bell is going to be like the sound of the train to Auschwitz. Yeah, I just want to end with that thing you said a minute ago about how selling the empire for parts just to drive it really, drive the point

home. We are witnessing the age of decline for the United States Empire. We are active. We are actively, living in an era where we are seeing day in and day out, an empire in decline. And what we know from history is that empires don't go into decline willingly. They go into decline kicking and screaming. And so this stuff that we're seeing here with immigration, the stuff we're talking about with Palestine and the genocide, it's all linked and it's all coming together, coming to a head in this real way and I'm sorry to say that it's only going to get worse. Things are only going to get crazier and crazier. And I'm not sure if McLemore is going to be able to get us out of this one.

Yeah. But meanwhile, we are grateful for the people who are out there doing the work, throw in their time and energies against the creep of this machinery of fascism, people like our guest, who we will now turn to. If you'd like to hear that interview this week, you're going to have to head on over to patreon.com slash forthright archaeology and sign up as a patron. If not, it will be on the free feed soon enough as all of our content eventually is. Meanwhile, on behalf of Dick, my name is Don saying farewell and keep on digging.

I've been trying to figure out a way to say this all day. One of the reasons why I wanted to come on this tour was because I wanted to stand up here on stages and stadiums across America and say two words that are very near and dear to my heart, free Palestine. I said free Palestine. My message is for peace, love, for all human beings to be treated with dignity, respect, and equality. So I say free Palestine. I say free Lebanon.

I say free Cuba. I say free Congo, free Sudan, free all people in America, living in fear over this terrorist organization, ICE. None of us will be free. until we are all free. This song is called Hens Hall. Yeah. The people they won't leave. What is threatening about divesting in one of peace.

The problem isn't the protests is what they're protesting. It goes against what our country is funding. Block the barricade until Palestine is free. Block the barricade until Palestine is free. When I was seven, I learned a lesson from Cubanesee. What was it again? Oh yeah. Fuck the police.

Actors and badges protecting property. And a system that was designed by whites of press. But the people are in the streets. You can pay off meta, you can't pay off me. Politicians who serve by any means. A-Pack, Coofy, and all the companies. You see we sell fear around the land of the free, but this generation here is about to cut the strings.

You can ban TikTok, take us out the algorithm, but it's too late. We've seen the truth, we bear witness. Seen the rubble, the buildings, the mothers and the children, and all the men that you murdered, and then we see how you spin it. Who gets the right to defend, and who gets the right of resistance?

has always been about dollars in the color of your pigment, but white supremacy is finally on blast, screaming free Palestine to their home in last. We see the lies in claiming it's anti-Semitic to the anti-Zion, slicing Jewish brothers and sisters out there and biding in solidarity and screaming free Palestine with them organizing and learning and finally cut in ties with a state that's gotta rely on apartheid system to uphold an occupying violent history

been repeating for the last 75, the neck been never ended, the colonizer lied. Students in tents posted on the lawn occupying the quad is really against the law Police in their squad where this genocide land and your definition hot destroying every college in Gaza and every mosque pushing everyone in the rockin dropping bombs the blood is on your hands biting We can see it all and fuck no I'm not voting for you in the fall Undecided you can't twist the truth the people out here united never be defeated when freedom's on the horizon yet the music in this street's quiet complicit in their platform of silence

to the artist what you gotta say if i was on a label you could drop me today i'd be fine with it because the heart fed my page i want to ceasefire fuck a response from drake what you're willing to risk what you willing to give what if you were in gaza what if those were your kids if the west was pretending that you didn't exist you want the world to stand up and the students finally did