Fourth Reich Archaeology - #115 - Immigration Abomination - Side B w/ Alex

Episode Date: September 25, 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!

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. So 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 a conspiracy, foreign or domestic, the Warren Commission of 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 when there's the more easy victims of a big lie than a small one. For example, we're the CIA. He has a mile. He knows so long as a die of freedom can never be secure. It usually takes a national crisis. can never be secure.

A lot of killers. You get a lot of killers. Why you think our country's so innocent? Not more than this is a day. This is for Thrike archaeology. I'm Dick, and you will be hearing from Don in just a moment. But before we get into today's episode, I'd like to say thank you for tuning in. Thank you to all of our returning listeners.

thank you to all of our first timers and thank you to all of our Patreon family members. This week we are returning with Side B of our Immigration Abomination episode, and we are going to have a little interview with Alex, who is a practitioner of law in the immigration space, and Don sits down with Alex to give. get her point of view of what the hell is going on today. You know, it seems like every day it is getting worse and worse out here. Just the other day I read that the Immigration Customs Enforcement, so-called ICE,

is moving towards what they're calling mobile detention facilities. And it is exactly what it sounds like, folks. They are putting or planning to at least putting people in these mobile detention centers effectively what they are are buses or vans and a spokesperson from ice even saying that what they want to do is they want to be amazon prime for immigration so there you have it folks things are getting pretty bad out here in the streets and without further ado i think we're just going to get into this week's episode so here goes 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 in a system that was designed by white supremacy. 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, Coofee, 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 could ban, take top, 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? It's always been about dollars and 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 a anti-Semitic to be 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 got to rely on apartheid system to uphold and occupying violent history been repeating for the last 75. The neck been never ended. The colonizer lie. All right. Well, Alex, thank you so much for joining us on Fourth Reich Archaeology. by this point, I will have given you a glowing introduction for our listeners, so we need not waste our time together with that. But welcome to the pod.

Glad to be here. As long as we have you, I think it might be helpful to just get a sense sort of what it is that immigration attorneys do and what it is that you do in your capacity. Yeah, sure. You know, immigration is a highly specialized field. So I can talk a little bit about what I do, but there are all sorts of immigration attorneys that do completely different things, folks that focus on business visas or family immigration. But where I specialize is sort of humanitarian immigration. So sort of asylum seekers and sort of the umbrella stemming out from their refugees withholding of removal protection under the Convention against torture. And what that looks like changes from administration to administration and certainly looks incredibly different now than it even did a year and a half ago before the kind of Trump 2.0 administration took office. And I'd be happy to kind of like dig into what it looked like when I first started and what it looks like now.

But I don't know. You tell me how deep you want me to go. Yeah, I think that that would be a great place to start. What did the landscape look like? How has it evolved? You know, where are the roots for the current extreme shift in Trump 2.0? And what are sort of the novel issues that are brought to the table in this brand new brand of fascism that we're experiencing? Sure.

So I guess to start, I kind of joined midstream. did a stint in corporate law doing deals at a law firm in New York City. And I kind of did a little bit of pro bono work and immigration on the side. I also did some clemency project, crime justice work. And I'm from Arizona, right? So immigration and border community is something that has always meant something to me sort of on a personal level. And so when I was moving to leave the law firm and figuring out what I wanted to do next, this sort of immigration justice job landed in my lap. And that was sort of at the end of 2018, beginning of 2019. And for those of you who were maybe paying attention at that point, that was sort of the era of zero tolerance,

family separation, and the caravans. So during Trump's first administration. And he was attempting to crack down on immigration. And unlike now, he actually faced some pushback and, frankly, some bipartisan pushback, his zero tolerance policy and the sort of kids in cages, images that came out of that policy were deeply unpopular kind of across the political spectrum led to a massive investment in immigration nonprofits. And we were sort of arming up. When I jumped into the scene, you know, one of the migrant caravans was on its way up from Mexico City, up through Tijuana. I was, you know, down in Mexico City doing sort of asylum, know your rights briefings and also going down to shelters at the border here in Nogales and Agua Prieta, supporting mostly a group of trans women who wanted to seek asylum in the United States because they were being persecuted because of their gender identity.

and perceived sexual identity. And when I started actually working in immigration justice, my role specifically was with one foot at the border in Nogales, Sonora, and one foot in the detention centers up in Eloy and Florence. And what that meant at the border was working in a shelter and educating asylum seekers on what asylum is. The reality then and now is that asylum is an imperfect protection in many ways, but one of the most important ways is it was a sort of outgrowth of World War II, right? When there was a certain notion of government persecution that people should be protected from based on, you know, who individuals are immutable characteristics of individuals.

But by and large, asylum seekers reaching the southern border don't fit neatly within those categories. A lot of people are fleeing non-government persecution from gangs or non-government entities. You have a lot of people who kind of fit into this particular social group category that aren't being persecuted necessarily because of their race, nationality, political opinion, religion. And so because that particular social group notion is so vague, you have a lot of people who really would face harm if they were forced to return to their countries of origin, who notwithstanding that reality are ultimately going to face an uphill battle seeking asylum. And the goal of those shelters was to help people understand that

so that they can make an educated decision about whether they still wanted to seek asylum and also so that they could know a little bit more about how to tell their story based not just on their lived experience, but based on the realities of U.S. immigration law, knowing that by the time they enter, if they end up detained, the likelihood of them getting legal representation is incredibly low. Yeah. I would then. Go ahead.

I was going to ask, you know, I'm curious, when the first contact happens with the authorities, you could imagine them purposely framing questions to migrants in a way that would elicit testimony that could be used against an asylum claim, right? Like to, I've seen it happen where the record from that first interview, the questions will kind of gear towards ruling out the official persecution. That's sort of the model case for asylum. Well, there's a lot that goes on there, right? Like these interviews are happening, maybe in Customs Border Protection custody, maybe in Border Patrol custody. And they're kind of in a black box when these interviews are happening. Attorneys are not permitted in custody.

When an attorney is encountering these folks, it's often way after that initial law enforcement encounter. And one of the main goals, at least from my perspective or in my opinion, of law enforcement, enforcement is to first not trigger that initial declaration of fear of persecution, right? Because it is that declaration of fear of persecution that triggers a person's rights in the United States, right? And now, like, they're not even really forced to ask questions to elucidate or to prompt folks to mention their fear of persecution. But certainly, like, I think you're right. Like, they often ask questions about economic distress or, like, why else are you coming to the United States? And there's this sort of catch-22 where you have a lot of immigrants who don't want to seem like a burden and want to

make things, like, they want to work hard and they want to be functioning members of society. But in saying, like, hey, I want to work, they're accidentally potentially undermining their asylum claim. Yeah, many such traps. Another question that I thought of while you were speaking is something that Dick and I talked about in what will be the first half of this episode, which is the ways that Jeff Sessions in that first Trump administration in that period that you were describing really scaled back the definitions applicable for protected social groups. Like for example, spousal abuse or partner abuse, gender abuse, that is private, but is maybe facilitated by or protected by the state in a lot of these countries where people are coming from. How much of

those rollbacks were restored? Like, were any of, did the Biden administration do anything to kind of turn the doubt? I guess this is just pushing your narrative forward in time a bit. Yeah. So, I mean, you look at sort of 20, 2018, 2019, and a peculiarity of immigration law, right, is that, you know, it's administrative law. Like, it's supposed to be sort of like non-adversarial fact-finding, at least in theory, but it's incredibly punitive. You have people in detention centers sometimes for, you know, years at a time, and you have an immigrant in immigration proceedings that is facing an immigration judge that, in theory, should be impartial, but is ultimately, subject to kind of the interests of the administrative branch of the U.S. government. And then you also have a DHS attorney who is representing the quote unquote government interests

and there is no right to counsel, right? There's a right to seek counsel but not, you know, free like you would have in a criminal circumstance. But because it's administrative law, who is in power really matters and influences how the law is then interpreting. So you can have decisions that the attorney general makes based on the Board of Immigration Appeals that then force immigration judges to then analyze cases in front of them in a different way. And so what you were alluding to is sort of largely in the realm of particular social group deciding what is sort of what qualifies as a reason for which someone can apply for asylum. And so these sort of interfamilial violence claims were undermined during Trump's first administration because of exactly that, the attorney general jumping in and saying, hey, we're not going to recognize this type of violence as something that you can base an asylum claim on.

at the same time, kind of in that 2018, 2019 range, you had an asylum ban that was struck down in court. You had in 2020, because of the pandemic, a pretextually justified border closure that essentially ground asylum seeking to a halt. and then, you know, deep hopes that under the Biden administration that, you know, Title 42, which was that border closure based on the, or supposedly based on the pandemic, we thought that that would be unwound. And unfortunately, the Biden administration, at least initially, took no action. So we were stuck in this world where you have asylum seekers stuck on the southern side of the border in Mexico. You have cartels that are profiting off of this with very sophisticated kidnapping rings and also human smuggling rings,

since people are desperate and not able to seek asylum at ports of entry anymore. And at the same time, you know, as someone working on the ground at the border, the personal knowledge that this like fear of the pandemic was deeply disingenuous, right? Like you have border patrol. I mean, my pettiest project ever, like I had a data tracker on what? I encountered border patrol or customs border protection, whether or not they were wearing a mask. Right? And so at the same time, we're saying immigrants can't come here because of the pandemic. We have, you know, law enforcement not wearing masks. And you have, like, University of Arizona students going down to Rocky Pointe to party.

Right. Yeah. Not exactly hiding the hypocrisy. Not at all. Like, if you live here, if you live in the border region, like, you can see that. just in your lived experience. You don't even have to be working kind of in the sector. Oh my gosh, there was also the migrant, so-called migrant protection protocols, right? Which is where immigrants were being sent back to Mexico to wait for the pendency of their immigration proceedings,

also subject to that danger and risk with cartels taking advantage of asylum seekers and migrants at the border. And, you know, all of that is horrifying. Like we heard constantly of kidnappings and atrocities being perpetrated against immigrants that were being faced to wait indefinitely once the pandemic started at the border for their proceedings to move forward. So it's funny because you hear now all of the Trump administration officials talking about how Biden basically opened the border. And it was four years of open border. and I think that a lot of people actually get the idea that it's literally open border, like people walking across and just flooding over the border during these four years

who don't live there, who don't really understand what's going on. So what is that, how does that land with somebody sitting in your shoes looking at the situation? Right. You know, I think that some people seized on those images for instance. out of Yuma where individuals, because they could not access ports of entry, were crossing on foot and surrendering themselves to law enforcement in order to seek asylum. And the reality is Biden was incredibly harsh on immigration. In fact, he re-implemented under a different name, almost exactly the same asylum ban that Trump had put in place during his first presidency, basically saying that

you are inherently not qualified for asylum if you transit first through a third, country and do not seek asylum there before you arrive in the United States. And what that means is, based on not the merit of your case, just based on the circumstances of your arrival, you're at serious risk of being returned to your country of origin despite the potential for harm. The border closure related to COVID-19 was not undone until years into the Biden administration's tenure. And I think there was this desire for the purposes of re-election and for Democrats prevailing in elections to appease what they perceived as the center and to look tough on the border and look like they supported law enforcement. And so the reality of the Biden administration was not immigrant friendly. At the same time, though, you have conservatives, Republicans saying the borders are open.

And guess what? those sound bites are being packaged and sold to immigrants. So it creates like a push factor or a pull factor. Correct. Right. And then you arrive at the second Trump administration and they're bragging about how effective they've been in enforcing the border and enforcing the law. And if the assumption is the goal, if the goal is or the assumption is that immigration is bad

and we want as few immigrants as possible, or that immigrants are harmful to society, then yeah, they've done a great job. But I obviously take umbrage with that assumption. I think obviously immigrants are massive contributors to our society, to our communities, to our economy. And, you know, the harm that is being perpetrated in broader communities and against immigrants is,

not just wrong morally, but it's incredibly expensive, right? This whole like immigrants are taking from us. Immigrants are a threat thing started as pitting kind of normal Americans against immigrants, largely around economic justifications. How then are we going to turn around and spend like hundreds of billions of dollars on what is like a massive deportation of machine, deportation machine, money that could be invested in our communities instead? Not to mention that they talk about enforcing the law and the importance of following the rules when, you know, among those rules is, you know, the Refugee Act and process, which is enshrined in our Constitution and chipping away at those rights for immigrants is just the start of chipping away at those rights for all of us. And we've seen that start to play out as surveillance ramps up, as we've had U.S. citizens deported. as you've had U.S. citizens shot in the streets.

It's scary. Yeah. And the economic point is interesting there. I was in preparing for this episode, listening as I often do to my own detriment. And at the expense of my own mental health, a lot of these administration officials interviews where they spout this really thinly veiled,

if veiled at all racist clap trap of anti-immigrants and sort of victim-blaming narratives. And one of those that Stephen Miller has been spouting on about lately is that it's the fault of all of the fraudulent asylum claimants that there is this massive expense invested in the deportation machine that if there weren't all of these people trying to defraud the United States by presenting false claims, he says, we could cure childhood cancer in the United States for American citizen children. It was setting aside the fact that obviously this administration and its hyper-capitalist policies is not looking to socialize medicine and transfer budget money to a health care

system or free health care, but it's like maddening. And I would imagine that it must be hard to hear all these lies day in and day out from where you're sitting. Yeah, no, I mean, it's, it pisses me off, right? Like, it's absolutely ludicrous. It's ridiculous. Like, if we wanted, if our leadership in this country wanted to have socialized health care and access to medicine, we wouldn't have to trade access to asylum for that. Like, we'd have to tax billionaires, right? Like, There are ways to solve literally everything. And I think, you know, it becomes a massive distraction. There are two ways to make things more efficient.

You can more efficiently say yes or you can more efficiently say no. The risks of more efficiently saying no are abuses of due process. You know, it requires further marginalizing, already marginalized individuals, speeding things up, denying access to counsel, worsening detention conditions, places where people are not getting access to adequate water, food, health care, et cetera, and rushing people through, restricting what it means to be here legally. So all those people who are like just do it the right way, we're in the process of stripping temporary protected status from hundreds of thousands of individuals in this country. We are redefining asylum in a way.

that is so narrow that more and more people will not qualify based on the way the laws are being implemented. And the other side of that is like we could speed up the process by presuming that individuals who are here and present from certain countries that the administration might call shithole countries are presumed to qualify for asylum because of the conditions there and that you'd have to prove certain other things to deny the claim instead. But that's never what we do. Like we never make it easier or faster. In fact, like one of the new proposed regulations is that essentially we should shut down the

affirmative asylum process. We should make it more likely or more required that we push people towards defensive asylum claims without even having to. to interview them. Right? So like where we could make things faster to the benefit of immigrants, we never do that. We only make things faster when it's

to the detriment of immigrants. Again, based on the assumption, that best case scenario is less immigrants in the country. And like realistically, when we're talking about asylum fraud, it's like we're not talking about people intentionally perpetrating fraud. We're talking about people with

bona fide fear of return to their country who will ultimately lose their asylum claim because the is not suited to modern circumstances. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And you raise a good point about the presumptions. I mean, the ways in which the asylum seekers are treated in affirmative proceedings, which, if I'm stating it correctly, right, they're processed by a different agency.

It's like less adversarial. It's a much more humane process that, takes their voice more into consideration versus, I mean, defensive, that means you're already in removal proceedings, right? You're already being deported? Correct. Yeah. Yeah. And you may be in detention as well during that process. Which, of course, is coercive. And like, that's the thing. So many of the, and again, my opinion, right? But I think the intention behind a lot of these incredibly cruel policies, whether it's family detention or detaining children or, you know, expanding immigration enforcement and immigration detention, these policies create coercive circumstances

that then put sort of like a foot on the scale in favor of removal because you have someone that then is picking between indefinite detention and fear of risk and harm in their home country. But the reality is like they're facing harm here. And maybe we could talk a little bit more about detention because I think there's a lot of confusion and uncertainty about why and under what circumstances are immigrants put into immigration detention. Yeah. So, I mean, the administration, their talking point is like, we're going for the worst of the

worst, right? We're going for criminals. Of course, they have conflated criminals. criminality with being an immigrant. And so what they're ultimately saying is the same thing, like going after immigrants to them as part and parcel of going after criminals. They are arguing that the law requires them to detain immigrants who do not have lawful or any sort of permanent status, period. And that's currently being litigated. But they are using broad discretion to detain as many people as possible. And, you know, this has been like a massive payout for private

corporations like CoreC Civic or GEO, who are the primary two companies that run the detention centers here in the United States. And for people who don't know or people who have not set foot in a detention center, they are exactly the same as a prison. Yeah. And what, do you say to Tom Holman who says, we're over there, they're at a meal over there. The conditions are great. We got the best of the industry detention conditions. Yeah, I mean, like, obviously not.

Like, we're hearing time and again that people are drinking fetid water in family detention in Dilley in Texas. Like, immigrants being forced to mix formula with contaminated water, right? Like, people who are eating around mold in their food. Like, not to mention unpaid labor that migrants. provide within those detention centers to help them be profitable. Yeah, it's it's maddening. And it seems like is detention expanding?

I mean, under this Trump 2.0, I guess maybe we can just go back to sort of the narrative of how things have been over your career and talk about where is all this money being spent? What is the administration doing now to ramp things up? Yeah. So the main reasons for, I think it was like an initial $70-some billion and now an additional 40-some billion dollars being invested in immigration enforcement is scaling up boots on the ground. Right? And these are like modern day slave catchers, right?

Like if you drive between Tucson and, oh my gosh, Ajo or whatever, like you'll see Border Patrol. Like you'll see them sitting in their cars, whatever. But it's boots on the ground, it's increased beds in detention. It is any of the infrastructure to scale up rapid expulsion of immigrants. It's millions of dollars on military flights to expel people. It's third country removals, like dumping people in South Sudan and Eswatini. right, which is another coercive tactic to try to get people to go back to country of origin, regardless of fear of persecution.

It's like, oh, well, if you don't do that, we'll just send you to South Sudan. Yeah. Right. And like, again, none of that money is going to like any of the nonprofits who would stand up against that, right? Like at the same time, you're seeing them eliminate contracts for the sort of social services and legal services infrastructure that would try. to hold or stem the tide. You know, this is something that I found frustrating because you're describing all of these

horrors and maybe they made a blip on the radar in the media over the last whatever year and a half, almost two years that we've been in this administration. But it's not something that is constantly being broadcast to Americans. It seems to me, at least. Maybe I'm just not watching the right things, but it seems like it was there. It's outrageous. You know, they're sending people to Seacot and El Salvador or they're sending people to Sudan or whatever, but then just kind of say it and then forget about it. Yeah, I mean, I think part of this is right. Like the American media machinery is also like about clicks and like what people want to watch and what will earn ad placement money or whatever. Like I think that a lot of these things are in the news. If, if you're.

looking. But I think one of the main things that's changed is Americans' empathy. Like in 2018, 2019, people were outraged. Money was flowing in in support of nonprofits working in the sector. And there was a sort of baseline empathy or like at least a belief that like people who are fleeing harm should be protected. And I think now like a lot of Americans just think based on kind of the talking points of the administration and super conservative folks here in the United States, that it's all grift, right? And that everyone is taking advantage of a system that is flawed. And like, yes, the system is flawed, but not in that way. And that we don't have to have empathy and we don't have to care about immigrants because they hurt us, even though there's no

evidence that they hurt us. But this is like the same old American story. Right. Like you leverage people's own struggling and you leverage America's deep investment in white supremacy and racism to push forward your own policy objectives. And a lot of people are getting rich as a result of this. Not to mention it's a distraction from like everything that Americans actually need. Right. Yeah. So I guess that's. that leads me to the final topic area, which is kind of what can be done, what is to be done, where are the lines around which that sense of empathy, that sense of solidarity with, you know, migrant communities who are existing here, as well as the people who are coming, continue to come, and will not stop coming, as long as the United States Empire. continues to enforce economic immiseration in the third world that pushes people out of the

periphery into the imperial core. Yeah. So like one one note, and I think, you know, this is kind of like a funny indirect payback or something, but like the pull factors are diminished. Like in the past year and a half, like the United States has become so much less aspirate. inspirational globally, right? And like one of the main ways that you undermine sort of like immigration or you've reduced immigration or whatever is you make the United States less desirable. And I don't think that was their goal. Like I think they still want to be the pretty girl in high school. But what they've effectively done is like drawn a mustache on her face. Right. Like we're not hot. anymore. No, like, we're less desirable because civil liberties and human rights are in jeopardy here in the United States, not just for immigrants, but writ large, right? Like, you see attacks on not just immigrants, but immigration attorneys insinuating that fraudsters as well. You have attacks on people because of their expressing their First Amendment rights. It's an

accidentally effective immigration tool if what you want is less immigration. But I don't know, to your point about like, what do we do? How do we get people to be more empathetic? I think the sad reality is like a lot of people have zero some thinking and they're not going to move on anything until they see a clear benefit. And in fact, in the United States, there's a long history of doing things that actively harm you as long as they harm someone else a little bit more. Like there's a reason that like white burger joint owners wouldn't sell burgers to black people. Right? And it wasn't an economic one, right?

Like racism is a really strong incentive in this country. Being like a little bit flippant and a little bit silly, part of me is like, I think we can all align behind flock cameras. Like if we can like focus on surveillance state and the risks to everyone, then maybe there are ways to chip away at like these other issues. Yeah. I mean, that seems to be a recurring dynamic that we see of just this overreach that gets met with a response. Like, it takes the overreach to provoke some kind of a response.

You know, in Minneapolis, there was a real spectacular invasion by federal forces that was met with this sort of not in my town coming together of people to kick them out. And of course, that didn't result in bringing deportation numbers down overall because it went less spectacular, right? Yeah, they're being a little bit quieter, right? They're just increasing the machinery. They're increasing the boots on the ground. They're increasing those arrests. And they're quietly removing people all over the world. And like, when they say worst of the worst, like sometimes what they mean is like a refugee that arrived here at two years old and had,

like a petty drug crime as like a teenager or college student, right? And now someone who spent their entire life and their adult life and has a family here is getting sent back to Vietnam after decades because of some petty crime that they committed. Meanwhile, you know, like if you were to go two miles east of me to the University of Arizona, you know, no one cares about drug abuse there. Or like you talk about like Brock Turner, like I went to Stanford, like slap on the wrist, right? We live in this world where there's a double standard. If you're a white guy and you perpetrate or you perpetuate crimes against other people, you have a future.

We don't want to ruin your life. But if you are a person of color, if you're an immigrant, if you're from a marginalized community, the tiniest mistake will be held against you for the rest of your life. And I don't think we want to live in a country like. that. Like, yes, sometimes there needs to be punishment, but like, what about restoration? What about investing in people? What about education and health and all of these things that actually would reduce crime if what we're really concerned about is crime? Right, which, of course, kind of the only conclusion if you're looking at what they're doing is that that's not the concern. Like you said, I think, and we talk about this on the pod, but it's the use of racism,

the sort of galvanizing of white nationalist racial ideology in order to solidify and consolidate this hardcore base for the excesses that the ruling class wants to impose down on the rest of the population and the divide and conquer to prevent sort of of cross racial solidarity that could lead to better outcomes for everyone. Yeah, no, absolutely. And like, that is not to say that people aren't afraid. Like, I think the fear is real. It is just not rational.

And you also can't create rules around exceptions, right? Like, the government is supposed to be a rational actor and not subject to the whims, racism and fantasies of the most. diabolical amongst us. But, you know, like supposed to with like a huge dash of whatever spices you want to throw on. Right. And half of those most diabolical among us, or not half, but let's just say that they're overrepresented in the cabinet and the administration all the way down to like the ICE lawyers. Like we talked one time, long time ago, who I believe still has not been disciplined, this Nazi

ICE lawyer that was posting anonymously about like, you know, genociding migrants, non-white migrants. Yeah. And like, sadly, it feels like a lot of people are down. Like a lot of people like, they're into the cruelty. Like, they think that it's deserved. And they, they see this as some sort of like merited payback when like the reality is like the marginal immigrant who receives benefits they quote unquote should not have received. is still a contributing member of society usually causing no harm like incidents of crime amongst immigrants is lower than incidents of crime amongst citizens yeah whereas mistakes going the other way we know concretely lead to death yeah 100% um well i know i want to be sensitive of your time

but i do want to give you the opportunity to tell our listeners here what can people do, you know, who are outraged by the way things are going. And, you know, if there's not something like the invasion of Minneapolis that's right there on the TV screen on the 24-hour news cycle, you know, slamming it in your face, like, how can people get involved? Where should people look? And what can people do? Yeah. I mean, so there's a huge array of different ways to get involved, depending on who you are, your resources, your competencies, whatever. I mean, obviously, like, if you have local legal service providers, regardless of the subject matter, whether it's housing, immigration, racial justice, whatever,

like, if you can contribute, and if it feels better for you to contribute on the ground in your own community, do that. Like, those are the organizations that do not get the clicks, that do not have, like, the viral campaigns that generate millions of dollars. see something, say something. Like if you are in particular a white person and are relatively safe in the face of law enforcement, see something, say something, document. That's something that costs absolutely no money. Vote with your dollars. Don't patronize places that perpetrate harm to the extent you can avoid it. And then support your community. Like I think, like so much of what we need is like finding community and building up like a sense of like neighborliness like so much of this is resulting from an absolute depletion of of empathy and mutual support and like even in myself I feel all of this rage and hatred that is poison and toxic and

it makes you want retribution. But at some point, if we want to build a better society, like it can't be about punishment. We can't punish everyone that is benefiting from or perpetrating the harms that are being caused today. And so if we want to be able to bridge that gap and to create a more beautiful world, like we have to find ways to be kind to each other and we can practice that in tiny ways every day. Well, Alex, thank you very much for coming on. This has been wonderful and I hope that we'll have you on again in the future to check in and see, you know, what's going on. I'm inclined to name you unofficial immigration correspondent for the pod. You've put everything so articulately and, you know, effortlessly. So it's, I'm sure

everybody's going to really appreciate hearing from you. Thank you so much again. Really appreciate it. Yep, glad to be here. Thank you.