It Could Happen Here - Agenda 47: Trump's Border and Immigration Plan

Episode Date: April 9, 2024

James and Gare discuss Trump’s plan to end birthright citizenship and reinstate title 42, along with his other cruel and probably illegal plans for the border.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and

expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking.

It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Call Zone Media. Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast where my friend Garrison Davis and I incur countless amounts of trauma by watching videos of Donald Trump talking about things he doesn't understand. How are you doing today, Garrison? Oh, I'm doing fine and peachy on this

wonderful spring afternoon. Yeah, we'll sort that out for you. We'll bring you back down. spring afternoon. Yeah, we'll sort that out for you. We'll bring you back down. Because what we gathered here today to discuss, Garrison, is that we talked about Agenda 47 yesterday. So hopefully people have listened. If you haven't, you can go back and understand what Agenda 47 is. The short version is that it's Donald Trump's policy platform for his proposed second term, right? If he gets elected in 2024. And there is a lot of Agenda 47. There is a lot of Agenda 47. Yeah, yeah. Arguably too much Agenda 47. Yes, yeah, yeah. One could argue that, I think quite compellingly. What we're talking about today is his border immigration policy. And I don't think it'll shock anyone to hear that these are

major pillars of Agenda 47, right? He kind of launched his political career with an incredibly bigoted speech about migrants. And it's been the real through line. Like the only thing, one of the few things where he actually was able to be efficient enough to do a large amount of harm was at the border and with immigration right and it certainly

seems like he has plans to a lot more in 2024 post 2024 i guess biden's tried to counter this by lurching to the right but he's harmed a lot of people in the process but it hasn't stopped trump without taking a breath outflanking him far to the right on immigration policy so that's what we're going to talk about today. So Agenda 47's website, it's structured with a series of these scripted Rumble videos, which are embedded and then in a spectacular own goal, also transcripted, which just, like Garrison said yesterday, it is a joy to read Donald Trump speaking

without hearing Donald Trump speaking. You never know what's coming next. It consistently blindsides you. The best to ever do it. No one could replicate Donald Trump. So a lot of the pages detail his proposed actions on his first day in office, what he's going to do with his executive power. Sure. Which, as we'll go into, he seems to be, this is not a man who attended civics class and paid attention.

Well, because civics are being weaponized. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He, peace-loving American, didn't go. Okay, the other things address largely right-wing talking points, which in many cases kind of either fictional or over exaggerated or not

really related to what's going on with the border and migration. And he sort of proposes quote unquote solutions. Often it's not exactly clear how or if these things are legal, but I think as we'll get into that doesn't really matter. His big theme going through all of his immigration content is to end what he calls automatic citizenship for children. I'm not going to do the voice. I can't do the voice. Well, because you're cursed with your Britishness.

Blessed, yes. Yeah, sure. God's chosen people. Okay. Average Christian identity opinion ever. Yeah, yeah. Big Christian identity opinion ever. Okay. Yeah. Average Christian identity opinion ever. Yeah, yeah. Big Christian identity opinion ever. Okay.

So Donald Trump, right, his big thing is taking a swing at the 14th Amendment, right? At birthright citizenship. And it's very funny that, well, it's not funny. Actually, it's quite fucked. But if you're not familiar, the 14th Amendment was passed after the Civil War. And in the first part of the 14th Amendment, there's a sentence that reads, all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States.

Cool. That sounds very simple. Yeah, it does, doesn't it? It does. What you're not considering garrison is like some fringes on the flag tier legal bullshit which donald trump and his camp unsurprisingly are pursuing we're going to get to a little bit about this later like this is they're not the first group of people to make ending birthright citizenship their whole thing right it's been sort of a bug

bear on the right for a while so as i said the 14th amendment was strongly opposed by confederate states after the civil war right but they were forced to ratify it in order to regain representation in congress yeah i get fucked yeah yeah so donald trump's now bringing i guess coming back on behalf of the confederacy to uh to challenge the 14th of may many such cases yeah in this and many other ways uh that's why they call him stonewall trump and do do they yeah wait really yes no i don't think so okay i mean i guarantee i guarantee let's just google it real quick let's see what comes up stonewall trump it's going to be one of two things stonewall uh really splits wow okay no there's some cursed stuff there google that your own risk okay so

the 14th amendment is has been really pivotal in american history it's one of the most litigated amendments to the constitution right it gave us the road decision which has now been overturned gave us the obergefell decision which legalizes same-sex marriage it gave us Brown versus Board of Education more relevant here is that it superseded the Dred Scott case and enshrined in law the right of anyone born in the USA regardless of race or ethnicity to be a citizen and it has a few exemptions like I think the children of foreign diplomats and visiting heads of state are not US citizens so So like King Charles couldn't come over here, have another kid and then have that kid be a dual citizen.

Trump proposes that he's going to stop this immediately on entering office by executive order. Can you remove an amendment of the constitution by executive order, James? I'm not a legal expert by any means. No, I am a historian of anarchists in Spain. This is not the center of my area of expertise, but I'm pretty confident, like without going full Seth Abramson here,

that no, you can't. You can't just do that. Because it certainly feels wrong. Yeah, it doesn't pass the smell test. No, I think american history would be very different if you could change the constitution by executive order but this isn't going to stop donald trump crying the specific case he has a beef with is u.s versus wong kim arc it's called it's a couple of people who were chinese nationals who had a kid in the united states and the supreme

court found that their kid was citizen right we don't need to go into the case sure but republicans have been on this for a long time i think they really began to get concerted momentum behind it during the obama administration and obviously before obama was elected right donald trump sort of really entered politics with his birth allies right and this idea And this idea that Obama was not a US citizen, and therefore was not eligible for the presidency. And that sort of, that tendency continued in Republican politics. Lindsey Graham, a man who looks like a melting sloth, attempted to introduce a constitutional amendment

during the Obama administration and failed to do so. I don't think he actually ever introduced it. I think he just sort of shopped it around to see if he could get support and then failed. This has been a continuing theme since. Actually, Matt Gaetz, along with Gosar, Santos, and some other representatives tried to institute a house resolution last year ending birthright citizenship. Trump has also been cooking up some rather unique legal theories about this for a while. In 2018, he claimed that you don't need a constitutional amendment to change the 14th Amendment. He also repeatedly claimed that birthright citizenship is something that's either rare or in some cases he claimed it's unique to the United States, which is not true.

There are about 30 countries that offer birthright citizenship the legal justification that he offers most often comes from someone called john eastman do you know who john eastman is garrison i do not john john eastman was the one of the legal architects of trump's plan to overturn the 2020 election okay he has also been indicted in the in the georgia case against trump and his co-conspirators uh johnny's been also tried to do birth birth a shit about kamala harris um many of you will be able to draw the line between kamala harris barack obama and perhaps the underlying motivation for their birth and stuff but eastman is contending, I guess, that the quote, subjects to the jurisdiction thereof element of the 14th Amendment

means that somehow people who live in the United States, work in the United States, and pay tax in the United States are not subject to its jurisdiction if they're not citizens themselves. Which, look, it doesn't matter how... I think the big thing I want you guys to take away from this is that everything he wants to do is probably illegal, and none of that really matters, right? look it doesn't matter how like i think the big thing i want you guys to take away from this is that everything he wants to do is probably illegal and none of that really matters right because we have a court like he's he's got a supreme court which has but it's packed with

republicans right and has constantly affirmed his ability to do crimes and get off with basically no yes yeah like this is a man who tried to do a coup and is standing for election again. Like the court system is not going to save us if he has enough time and he can and enough political will. He will try and do this and I think it's not unreasonable to expect that he will attempt by executive order on the first day of his presidency to take birthright citizenship away from the children of undocumented migrants. Garrison, do you know what won't take rights away from your children? I forget what food service box we have

and therefore cannot make jokes about on air, but it's one of them. One of them can, one of them can't. And you have to know which one, whatever one advertises is the good one. Yeah, always. It'll be when they speak really fast at the end, just slow that down.

You'll hear them talking about your children. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests

and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun.

Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech

from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong though, I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better.

Listen to Better Offline on the iHot Radio app,, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere.

Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba.

Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzales wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. We hope you enjoyed those outputs the second thing donald trump is is big mad about is something called birth tourism or what he calls birth tourism right it's okay i think i think i see where this is going yeah it's when you take a holiday uh to the uh the womb you go in it like

a pod and it's very uh i thought it's where you take a holiday holiday somewhere to pop out a kid and they get automatic citizenship that's what it actually is yeah which is a great plan yeah yeah you go on holiday to uh like an all-inclusive resort and then you don't have to pay for your birth expenses because they're included when you go to your all-inclusive resort it's a great deal for everyone oh i didn't thought i didn't think of that yeah many few people have but now now the word's out so it might close that loophole what i think is interesting about his quote-unquote birth tourism claims it's not like obviously this again has been a right-wing talking point for a long time right it's that in this particular section of the agenda 47 website he includes links to provide evidence for some of his claims, which is a bold move for Donald Trump, a man who eschews evidence.

But what he links to is the Center for Immigration Studies, the CIS. The CIS is an extremely right-wing think tank. It's founded by someone called John Tanton, and it's listed by the SPLC as a hate group. The reason it's listed by the SPLC as a hate group. The reason it's listed by the SPLC as a hate group is because it pretty consistently publishes a work of someone called Jason Richwine, who is an unreconstructed race science guy, right?

Like a modern day phrenologist, if you will. This is a man who is so racist that he was forced to resign from the Heritage Foundation. Oh, oh, wow. Yeah, yeah. Which I didn't know was possible, actually. It was quite... I didn't know they had like a bar for that.

Huh. No, too racist for the Heritage Foundation is quite racist, as it turns out. Put that on the gravestone. Yeah, they probably will. After CIS, when there's a bit of a blow up about this during the first Trump presidency, So CIS, when there's a bit of a blow up about this during the first Trump presidency, and CIS claimed it wouldn't be unusual to occasionally include a racist or an anti-Semite given the volume of content they put out. So this led to the Southern Poverty Law Center conducting an analysis of their weekly newsletter.

I'm going to read you a summary of that analysis now. The Southern Poverty Law Center and the Center for New Community examined approximately 450 of CIS's weekly emails dating back almost 10 years and found that CIS circulated over 1,700 articles from VDare.com. Garrison's face just looks like they've stepped in something horrible. Yeah, I have yeah this podcast recording yeah yep that's right an average of three veda articles every week huh yeah so that that's where donald trump is getting the bulk of his statistics and information or at least like donald trump isn't writing this stuff right i don't think he has the attention span uh but whoever is writing

his immigration policy is sourcing from vdare do we want to explain what yeah go off garrison let us know so vdare is like this white nationalist like anti-immigration not like a lobbying group but like uh kind of they produce a whole bunch of rhetoric and talking points about all of the big risks of immigration it gets sent stuff to like fox news trump's used this stuff before it's it's not it's not great they receive like dark money from conservative uh like funding groups like donors trust it's it's it's ways to to it's finding a whole bunch of silly ways to try to justify their types of racism and they are they are still a problem they were founded nearly 25 years ago and they're still they're still going

yeah yeah i mean they uh they've they've compared the anti-white rhetoric to the rwandan genocide before and just they what i think is important to hear about vitae is that they exist to take straight up hate rhetoric and insert it into mainstream politics and yes they take stuff from like actual like like very like recognized like white nationalist groups and and turn it into rhetoric that is acceptable on fox news that is that is their entire goal yeah and cis one might argue exists to take that vdes stuff and dress it up as research articles statistics information that might inform policy there's a bunch of stuff in his sort of abolished birthright citizenship that I don't think we need to get into. He talks a lot about birth hotels. He links to a national affairs op-ed from Peter Shuck and Rogers Smith. These are the people who have really been like the originators of the abolished birthright citizenship movement. They wrote a book about it, I think in 1985.

It's also worth noting just so like Trump repeatedly claims in his little videos that children can then make their parents citizens as soon as they become citizens. Like, so if someone was undocumented, right? And their child became a citizen, their child, you know, five-year-old child can sponsor them for citizenship and away they are.

Now the whole family is American citizens is american citizens right and then the logic of this website goes that like biden imports these people they all become citizens they all vote for the democrats right and this is sort of the great replacement theory with a couple more steps it's worth noting the children have to be 21 to sponsor a parent and if that parent has entered the country in an undocumented way then the parent has to leave for a decade and then come back to apply it's not possible to simply citizenize your parents as soon as you become a citizen by birth right citizenship it would be an extremely long game to try and have a kid in order to gain your own citizenship i've met thousands of migrants who have entered between ports of entry, right? I've never met anyone who have articulated

this sort of goal, this route to citizenship. He then goes on to... He has this literally a bullet-pointed list of border policies, right? quote unquote extreme vetting at a quote national vetting center that's a little that's a little worrying that the national vetting center is going to be doing this vetting what are they vetting for who are they vetting yeah well the migrants uh it who's going to be doing the vetting probably the people who uh forced women to have abortions in their custody and lost thousands of children and haven't been able to relocate their families. So that'll be great.

It's not also clear what they're vetting for. He doesn't say that specifically. He does say that he wants to, quote, unleash interior immigration enforcement, which anyone who's lived in the United States in the last decade may have noticed so we in fact have interior immigration yeah i think that has been unleashed but yeah it's kind of mia's whole twitter thing but yeah i think i guess this is part of his massive deportation

thing right his goal to deport undocumented people he does not at any point differentiate between undocumented people and asylum seekers he seems to see them as one of the same yeah yeah yeah yeah they're all dangerous illegals or whatever yes yeah and anyone crossing the border for any reason other than with a visa in hand to him falls into this like should be deported if you're a certain uh uh skin tone yes yeah yeah plus the skin tone is what makes it a okay yes yeah yeah i think that's probably fair and uh what else has he got on his laundry list here let's see there's ending federal grants to sanctuary cities i'm not quite sure how he thinks that would work or what exactly he means by federal grants like are we just going to stop having highways in california that would be interesting dream yeah yeah let's return i'm

ready i'll be riding my bike everywhere like a king uh he also talks about and he calls he ending quote catch and release at the border it's not clear what he means by this. I've certainly heard this term a lot the past year, catch and release. Yeah. Catch and release was used to refer sometimes to Title 42, a policy that Trump put in place whereby migrants would be caught and immediately turned back into Mexico and released there, and they would generally try and cross again. And we've covered this in an entire series I made on Title 42, right? Another of his weird little bugbears is ending the visa lottery.

Are you familiar with the visa lottery, Garrison? Roughly, but not super. Okay. So the visa lottery is more properly called something called the diversity visa program. It allows for up to 55,000 immigrant visas a year for individuals from countries that are underrepresented in the US immigration system. So it's literally there to increase diversity, right? I guess it's DEI.

It's DEI. He must have recorded this before DEI was a big deal because he doesn't say that. Shame. I'm not sure how much equity there is going to be in the lottery program. Yeah. Well, you're about to find out, Garrison. Okay. Trump has repeatedly suggested that he believes that this diversity visa program

consists of non-U.S. countries raffling off green cards. Like you pay and then they draw your number. That's not how it works. It's the united states who decides who gets them it's a computer program that selects about 50 000 applicants from about 15 million i have met probably hundreds of people who have applied for diversity visas i meet them all the time every time i'm traveling for work myanmar thailand iraq kurdistan syria like uh you'll meet people from all these places

who have tried to apply through the system. Most of them end up not getting it because the odds are very slim. Sure. When they do get it, they then have to go through a series of vetting processes and then they have to make an appointment at a consulate. One of the last parts of the process,

making an appointment at a consulate to get an interview, right? What the Trump administration did last time was stop people from getting appointments at consulates citing COVID, right? With the COVID restrictions, get an appointment. That meant that de facto, because you only have seven months once you get awarded the visa to fulfill the process and get the paper visa and begin your travel, those people weren't able to get it. And so they had to go back to the start, right? Which is crushing. I know how much of their money and hope people allocate to these programs.

And to be told like, yeah, you got it. It's incredibly rare. And then to be like oh actually you can't make the appointment screw you it's crushing now the biden administration in all fairness has restored their right to book an interview but it's moved to the bottom of the priority list so in practice it's still happening that people can be they can quote unquote win the green card lottery and still not get a green card it's a a complete mess and Trump's proposal is to entirely do away with it. This would require legislation. That doesn't matter. He also has a little,

there's like a one sentence where he claims that Biden's border policies are killing migrants. And weirdly he links to an NPR article about it. He's not wrong. Like he's absolutely not wrong. But, but, but, but... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The but is that Donald Trump would kill a lot more. Great. I mean, yeah. Are those referring specifically to Biden stuff?

Or the stuff that Governor Abbott's doing? It's the increase in border crossings and border deaths from 2020 to present much of that is due to trump's title 42 policy that biden wholeheartedly supported defended in court right because when people were caught and then released back across the border they often they were offered unlimited crossings by uh the people who were like helping them cross or they de facto had unlimited chances to cross because they're facto had unlimited chances to cross because they're just being dropped back in mexico right yeah they often they're dropped without any resources in places where they have no community so they try and cross again and uh they end up

going to more and more remote places because they don't want to get caught right sure so they end up crossing in the places where there are gaps in the wall. Those tend to be very remote and those tend to be the places where people die. So you can map the deaths and you can see this in real time. And Trump's pretending to find this to be a problem. Yes, yeah. Trump is very sad about this. He's big sad. So he's going to make a kinder, gentler immigration system. Garrison, do you know what else is kinder and gentler than the immigration system? Well, I guess ads.

I mean, I don't know if ads might kill less people, but it's really hard to say. Yeah, I think they probably would. I think we can confidently say. Now that cigarette ads are banned. What if it's a banana advert? Because then you could get into the whole sort of, you know, like. All right.

Well, here, let's play these ads. Hey, guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities athletes entrepreneurs and more after those runs the conversations keep going that's what my podcast post run high is all about it's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories their journeys and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout?

Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast,

and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people.

I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba.

He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian.

Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzales wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation.

Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. Enjoy your fruit, guys guys i love ethical fruit yeah nothing grow your own fruit that's uh it's the message of this podcast and then if we didn't have if we did grow our own fruit we wouldn't have destabilized many of the countries that these migrants are coming from beautiful

georgia peaches yeah yeah if we destabilize georgia um boy can dream so there's a couple of other bug bears little little sort of things that trump has one of them is benefits for migrants now this this is something that's been hopping around the right wing for for a while it's really been more sort of one of their talking points in the last few months i think like since since right-wing streamers certainly started coming to places where i volunteered on the border i've heard them talking about it and i try not to hear them talking so they might have been talking about it before and i was just not paying attention just to be super clear undocumented people are not eligible for most benefits even people with legal status have

a range of hurdles, including... Even if you have a green card, there's a lot of stuff you can't have. Yes, yeah. And there are also public charge rules, which in some cases, some forms of assistance might be a hurdle

if you were looking to change your immigration status. So even if you had accepted them, that might stop you moving along the immigration pathway. That's only for things like SSI and TANF, but I don't think we need to go into the nitty gritty of it. He claims that people are coming here to live off benefits. He calls, quote, welfare a gigantic magnet drawing people from all over the world. They want to come to the

United States. They want to feast off the sweat and savings of the American taxpayer. Feasting off sweat is not a beautiful image. Well, to defend. Yeah, I know. He continues to claim that these migrants also take American jobs, right? So they're at once claiming unemployment benefits and taking American jobs.

And again, I don't think Donald Trump's stuff has to line up for it to be dangerous. jobs right so they're once claiming unemployment benefits and taking american jobs and again like i don't think donald trump stuff has to line up for it to be dangerous just to like inject a moment of like factual analysis again you have to wait at least five months after applying for a work permit when you arrive here as a refugee to get a work permit um you may not apply straight away many people wait for a year or more without the right to work. Undocumented workers working under the table are hugely underpaid, very frequently abused.

And the reason, again, why your fruit is cheap. He says in his day one plan that he's going to stop migrant workers taking American jobs by having American hiring provisions for all federal agencies. Federal agencies are not hiring undocumented people. Yeah, that's simply not happening.

That is just, like, believe me, I am a person who has been a migrant to this country. The amount of bullshit you have to go to to even do a government job like teaching is a large amount of bullshit. And they absolutely are not hiring undocumented people. And that brings us, Garrison, to the final pillar of the Trump immigration policy.

And for this one, Garrison, I want you to take a moment to listen to this clip of Donald Trump explaining the well-researched information that he uses to develop his immigration policy. I was thrilled to host a screening at Bedminster of the important new film, Sound of Freedom, about the power of faith in overcoming evil, and in particular, the evil of child trafficking. Big problem. We had it down to the lowest number in many years, just four years ago, and now it's gone through the roof. Even though the fake news media has tried to ignore it,

Sound of Freedom has been a national sensation and a colossal success at the box office, really big numbers. Everyone should see it. This is a very important film and very important movie, and it's a very important documentary all wrapped up in one. Oh, wow. that's crazy yeah film yeah yeah it's like you're sliding another eye there in between l and m i've heard english spoken around the world and I've never heard that pronounced that way

what a curious choice yeah well it's just a fascinating man I mean yeah besides the point like most of those had a freedom tickets were bought by right-wing billionaires and were for completely empty seats sure he goes on to detail the exact number of dollars it took in the opening week to talk about how it's such a success like yes a decent a decent amount of his entire uh child trafficking policy is him describing the film uh freedom it's incredible like that was that was a gift that i did not this is if you read the transcript, you miss out on some of these absolute Easter eggs that Donald Trump leaves for us. I think I saw a clip of him at a rally recently

where he was talking about Senator Freedom and he also said it like that. No, it was... I know what it was. It was him talking about David Lynch when there was that misquote about Lynch saying, like, Trump seems like an energetic guy or something and he's like philip philip director david lynch uh endorsed me for president he's like okay that's

not whatever yeah that is uh yeah so he's he's been saying this way for like almost 10 years at least because that's insane actually yeah like because because that yeah because that clip was from like the 2015 campaign rallies yeah wow it's so it's not yeah wow the power of senility an incredible thing uh if anyone else anyone we could do like the npr thing if you if they say film where you come from i don't think anyone else says philip i i really don't think so yeah no no there's not a he just comes up with this stuff from a blank slate

well that's cool you know what else is cool I love that this video is called Trump calls for a death penalty and we're laughing and we're laughing about philipm his pronunciation yeah well unfortunately Garrison it's time to stop laughing because, yes, Donald Trump.

I'm going to outline a death penalty thing. Quote, I will urge Congress to ensure that anyone caught trafficking children across our border receives the death penalty immediately. And that includes also for women, because women, as you know, are number one in trafficking. Children are actually number two. That's a sentence which you could pick apart for a long time. What does he mean by trafficking? That is extremely unclear.

He seems to mean the arrival of people in the United States. Right? Like, that's kind of what it sounds like. Yeah. It sounds like it just means crossing the border yes yeah he well because he and he also says quote i will use title 42 to end the child trafficking crisis by returning all trafficked children to their families in their home countries and without delay i made an entire fucking series on title 42 i recorded it in a week and i wrote it in a week and then we edited it and it has destroyed me and I have never recovered. Title 42 does absolutely nothing about child trafficking.

Title 42 returns all migrants or anyone crossing the border between ports of entry to Mexico, which suggests that he sees all these people as trafficked, right? Yeah. It also absolutely does not reunite children with their families this is the administration that separated families at the border and has in some cases been unable to find the parents of the children it separated friends of mine have worked for a very long time very hard absolutely not for the trump administration trying to find those people's families but it's really interesting that he is talking about Title

42 again. Title 42, if you're not familiar, is a public health law, right? It's to stop the introduction of infectious disease into the United States. It's a very old law that was initially designed around tuberculosis. And we know that the Trump administration planned to use Title 42 before coronavirus was a thing. Coronavirus is already a thing before COVID-19 was a thing, right? So he's just being completely open about his idea to manipulate public health law

in a way that allows him to do things immigration law would not allow him to do, right? He also finishes up, I guess, by making his claim. Once once again he goes back to the well that is the fucking border wall right uh i'm just going to quote here we created the most secure border in u.s history dealing a major blow to the cartels and traffickers we built hundreds of miles of wall we renovated hundreds of miles of wall we built hundreds of miles of wall we never had anything like it and then i got mexico free of charge to give us 28 000 soldiers to protect us from people coming into

our country illegally and it's not going to surprise anyone that this is bullshit right trump first made this hundreds of miles of wall claim in a debate with biden i filed a foyer for a new wall building that night. The best estimate I can come up with based on the documents I got from FOIA and from other people's FOIAs is that they built about 85 miles of new wall. They did replace several hundred miles of wall and in some cases that went from a pretty insignificant barrier to a pretty large one. The 28,000 soldiers thing, this will shock you is also not true there was an agreement in 2019 with mexico that didn't list a specific number of troops but it did say

that most of them will be in the southern half of the country and mexico's border with guatemala he then goes on just a complete tangent where he says i will rage war on the cartels just as i destroyed the isis caliphate 100 gone 100 destroyed uh-huh yeah that's why that attack in russia was yeah i was gonna say yeah it's it's gone yeah isis car bombed the street that i stayed on a couple of weeks after i left in october like this is why the the isis press people are like begging people to like to to believe that isis is like still a thing they're like no please we're we're still real we're still around please i'm a real boy yeah exactly yeah yeah the pinocchio isis that would be a highly entertaining film look i want to finish up by saying here that like

as we saw in donald trump's first term his malice is really only matched by his incompetence and his incompetence at the border is much less important i guess he's he's been able to be more competent at the border than he has been anywhere else in enacting his policies he managed to do plenty of things in his first term that are unconstitutional because the system only really works when the people playing the game agree that the rules of the game are more important than the outcome and that's not the case with Donald Trump right we we know that the fact that he dedicated so much of his agenda 47 page to migration tells us that peddling great replacement theories is going to be a major part of his campaign and a major part of his second term if he gets one the sources that he links to here

tell us that he's as addicted to right-wing rage bait as he ever was, and that he's still surrounded by cranks and crackpots with fringe on the flag level conspiracy theories. None of this stuff, none of my suggestions that what he's saying is false or illegal or impossible under the constitution mean that it's not dangerous, right? I would have told you in 2016 that it was illegal to bounce people back to Mexico without hearing their asylum claims because it is. But we had it under a democratic president

for three years. We had it under Trump for a year, right? It still happened. He succeeded in moving the border and migration debate massively to the right. And we have Biden advocating for things that would not have flown like that clinton would have been aghast at right and just by trump making this an issue even if he doesn't get elected in november biden's going to try and fight him on this by

claiming that he too is tough on the border that he too is tough on these fictional things like the taking of american jobs or migrants claiming public benefits or birthright citizenship right like biden has completely failed to plow his own path on this and he said he's entirely reactive to trump so i think i guess the big take-home here is that whatever happens in november things at the border are going to be terrible, just like they're terrible now. And you can't just rely on politicians to do things at the border.

Like, you can't just push it away and be like, oh, now that so-and-so's in charge, now I don't have to think about it. But that's the whole fucking problem, right? The reason that we are so broke, the reason that I personally am so broke and my truck is falling apart, is that that is what people are doing. At least with Trump, we got money. In 2018, when he held the

Mike Caravan at the border in Tijuana, my friends and I were there doing mutual aid. And we did just what we're doing now in Okumba, right? We fed people, we bought them blankets, we took care of them and we stopped them from dying. But at least Libs sent us money. Like we had tons of money. I remember spending $1,000 money. Like we had tons of money. I remember spending $1,000 on soft toys in Costco in Tijuana. That doesn't happen anymore because people think that they voted for the kind, gentle, nice guy.

And I guess like, I want people to look at this with the understanding that whatever happens at the ballot box, like you need to help at the border because neither of these politicians are going to. That's my speech. Thank you for listening to our podcast.

Anything else, Garrison? No, no, but we will be back tomorrow with more exciting, exciting news about... Yeah, what are we learning about tomorrow? ...47 agenda. Either... Actually, I don't know because we have not planned it out that far ahead.

Throughout the rest of the week, we'll be talking about Trump's plans for handling the gender question. Trump declaring war on cartels and his plans to fix the pharmaceutical industry. So, all good stuff. I can't wait. All the great stuff. Yeah. I can't wait.

It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going.

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