It Could Happen Here - How Congress Could Bring ICE to a Store Near You
Episode Date: August 6, 2026Investigative journalist, Kevin Foster discusses the Combating Organized Retail Crime Act and how it could widen ICE’s surveillance dragnet. Sources: https://truckingresearch.org/wp-conte...nt/uploads/2026/01/ATRI-The-Fight-Against-Cargo-Theft-Exec-Summ-12-2025.pdf https://www.cargonet.com/news-and-events/cargonet-in-the-media/2025-theft-trends/ https://www.freightwaves.com/news/is-cargo-theft-costing-60-billion-annually-what-that-number-actually-represents https://www.levernews.com/the-real-story-behind-the-highway-robbery-panic/ https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/2853/text https://www.newstore.com/articles/unified-customer-profile/ https://law.vanderbilt.edu/eyes-everywhere-ices-expanded-use-of-surveillance-technologies/ https://www.aclu-wi.org/news/mobile-fortify-ices-dystopic-facial-recognition-app/ https://www.opb.org/article/2026/05/06/oregon-state-police-violated-sanctuary-law-sharing-data-ice-lawsuit-claims/ https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/retailers-secretively-using-face-recognition https://vera-action.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/Oppose+CORCA+Organizational+Sign-on.pdf https://davisvanguard.org/2026/07/orgs-oppose-retail-crime-act/ https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/press/rep/releases/grassley-durbin-advance-bipartisan-packages-in-national-defense-authorization-act-to-crack-down-on-crime-and-protect-kids-online https://www.opb.org/article/2025/12/24/underground-mutual-aid-hillsboro-immigrant-families-ice/ https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/5 https://www.tucsonspotlight.org/ice-detention-bars-tucson-mom-from-her-own-trial/ https://news.azpm.org/p/azpmnews/2026/6/11/230128-a-tucson-resident-was-arrested-for-shoplifting-now-shes-in-ice-custody/ https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU01/20250122/117827/HHRG-119-JU01-20250122-SD004.pdf https://revealnews.org/article/how-a-us-citizen-was-scanned-with-ices-facial-recognition-tech/ https://innovationlawlab.org/news-and-analysis/video-evidence-surveillance-tech-used-op-black-rose https://www.404media.co/ices-facial-recognition-app-misidentified-a-woman-twice/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript
Discussion (0)
This is an I-Heart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Crave, Netflix, and Disney Plus from $94 a month.
Price guaranteed for two years on Internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit.
Visit bell.ca for details and to check availability.
Bell, connection is everything.
Hey, Portlandia fans.
Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here.
The Dream of the 90s is alive in podcast form.
We're launching Podlandia, A.O. rewatch, our brand-new podcast,
where we revisit every episode of Portlandia together,
breaking down sketches, going deep on our iconic characters,
and pulling back the curtain on how it all got made.
And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life.
Guest stars, collaborators, and friends,
including director Jonathan Chryssel,
the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin,
legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more.
Kyle is going for it here.
You fully improvised, not just words, but a song.
Well, I thought you were all going to write a song.
I remember you thinking that.
Listen to Podlandia, AEO rewatch on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Nick Totoro.
You probably know me from NYPD Blue, The Longest Yard, or Spike Lease Black Klansman.
And on my new podcast, delivering happiness with Nick Totoro, I deliver pizza to a new guest.
I've shared a slice with everyone from Seth Rollins.
What are you doing my belt?
To Bill Burr.
I don't think I've ever met somebody so exactly out of their mind as I am.
And now we even have more great guests coming up, including the great John Tuturo.
It's called Happiness, delivering happiness.
And many, many more.
Open your free High Heart Radio app.
Search Delivering Happiness with Nick Taturo.
And listen now.
This is Chelsea Handler from Dear Chelsea.
Every week, the news gets worse.
The world gets crazier.
And Yamanika is here to tell whoever's responsible, you're the problem.
Do you know I just found out who Sidney Sweeney was?
If he got a bunch of women, then I should have a bunch of men.
Do better or do less so I don't have to do so much.
I'm Yamanika and I'm out.
Listen to you're the problem with Yamanika on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
Welcome back to It Could Happen Here and our retail Thunderdome.
I'm Kevin Foster and today we're continuing our dive into organized retail crime.
In the last episode, I went over the multi-year propaganda campaign waged by the retail lobby to make organized retail
crime into a national crisis, requiring stricter policing and penalties, and investment from all
levels of government. I recommend listening to that episode before this one, but in short,
huge swaths of politicians bought right in, spending hundreds of millions at the behest of
retail giants, despite a serious lack of evidence. I also touched on the advancements in surveillance
at retail stores. Whether we see a rollout of AI-powered robots in the coming years may not
matter so much as many industry leaders are already implementing facial recognition technology
and creating watch lists under the guise of loss prevention. And this surveillance dragnet is a key
element in the rising concern around the Combating Organized Retail Crime Act, or Corka,
which passed the House of Representatives in May with resounding bipartisan support. In all likelihood,
Corka will be signed into law and today's episode is about why that is very bad and how it's going to
impact the American public, notably immigrants. Let's get right into it. The Combating Organized
Retail Crime Act has remained in circulation for years, but to get it over the finish line,
the retail lobby and supporters of the legislation ultimately found a new bogeyman, cargo theft.
And this is how they've managed to turn a manufactured retail theft story into a national security
problem that demands intervention by the Department of Homeland Security. In a nutshell, the cargo
theft narrative has striking similarities to organized retail crime. The American Transportation
Research Institute says there's between $1.8 billion and $6.5 billion in yearly losses because
of cargo theft, but this includes indirect costs, a measure of cost across the entire supply chain.
In terms of the actual value of goods, CargoNet, a nationally coordinated database, placed total
cargo theft losses at 725 million across the U.S. and Canada in 2025.
Despite total physical losses being under a billion dollars, there have been more attempts
to dramatically inflate the numbers. Phil Brink, the quote, head of fraud media and education,
unquote, at freightwaves, a trucking logistics and news company, estimated the total losses
could actually be closer to $60 billion because of underreporting of theft. No clear evidence is
provided to back up this assertion other than unnamed experts. If this sounds familiar,
it's almost the exact same story as the National Retail Federation's fraudulent organized retail
crime numbers, where they inflated their stats by an order of magnitude, mostly based on vibes.
And while Cargo Theft did spike in 2023, a funny little side note is that AI integration into
logistics might be a big part of the problem. Reporting in the news outlet, The Lever, indicates that
Instead of modern-day highway robberies,
cargo theft is beginning to look more like people
simply impersonating trucking companies
than fooling faulty new AI logistics systems,
and once they're cleared by the AI,
they can essentially just pick up the cargo and roll off.
So between retail crime and cargo theft,
we're essentially operating under two manufactured crises,
and yet here's the language in a combating organized retail crime act.
Quote, organized theft groups impact the national security
of the United States through finance,
advancing transnational criminal activity and providing profit and proceeds supporting larger criminal
goals of the criminal organizations."
In other words, retail crime is now a national security threat and it demands the influence
of Homeland Security and ICE. Specifically, Corka calls for the establishment of a coordination
center to combat organized retail and supply chain crime. The DHS Secretary will establish
the center and it will be run by an individual chosen by the
director of ICE. Fantastic. In essence, this coordination center will be the hub for federal
law enforcement activity and connections between the national and local level and the public and
private sector. Obviously, ice deepening its involvement in our day-to-day lives is something to be
concerned about, but here's where it gets really crazy. The bill states, quote, in general,
subject to the approval of the director of the center, information that would otherwise be
subject to the limitation on the disclosure of confidential information set forth in Section 1905
of Title 18 United States Code may be shared if such disclosure is operationally necessary.
Putting the legalese aside, what this means in practice is that ICE can access confidential
and proprietary data from retailers, and because operationally necessary is an extremely broad,
undefined term, ICE is essentially given full discretion over what data they can collect.
If anyone questions them, they'll likely just say we need to play it safe because organized
retail crime is a matter of national security that could finance drug and weapons trafficking
harming Americans. So that retail surveillance dragnet I mentioned in part one, the AI facial
recognition, the robots, the customer profiles, they say can be leveraged to boost customer loyalty.
ICE could potentially leverage that data in its immigration crackdown.
Imagine a world where ICE knows who is going to which stores and when.
No need for scanning license plates on the streets anymore.
Now they can just look up your customer profile and head over to Walmart
when you're doing your bi-weekly grocery run.
Given what we've seen in the past year and a half,
ICE will likely try to leverage this heavily.
They already have facial recognition technology like the Mobile Fortify app,
which, according to Vanderbilt University School of Law,
is connected to a database of over 200 million images.
The ACLU of Wisconsin states that you may already be in this database,
as it's connected to other databases containing federal biometric systems,
passport and visa records, and state driver's license photos.
A depressing little side note, some of this may have been preventable.
For example, in Oregon, the state police are being sued for sharing data with ICE,
even though they and our governor were warned by Congress members to close certain loopholes
that gave ICE access to DMV records.
Now, obviously, grocery stores present a significant vulnerability to maintaining our privacy
due to basic human needs.
Nothing is clearly stopping ICE from running face scans out of retail stores and creating
a new front for their anti-immigrant crackdown.
And there's already a blueprint for this.
The ACLU published an article in January the state.
year about Wegmans using facial recognition and sharing data on, quote, persons of interest
with law enforcement on a, quote, case-by-case basis. It's unclear how or if retail stores will
challenge ICE's access in any way. As of now, many have been fully on board with the organized
retail theft hype train. On the other hand, on May 11th of this year, a coalition of 40
civil rights organizations, including the Immigrant Defenders Law Center and the National Association
of Criminal Defense Attorneys sent a letter to Congress, urging the House not to pass Corka,
highlighting how it would massively expand DHS's role in authority in domestic law enforcement.
And the issues don't end there.
They also pointed out how Corka gives DHS influence over local and state law enforcement
through the ability to expand certain grant requirements.
In effect, this coalition sees a pathway for DHS to push jurisdictions toward more intrusive
data collection and surveillance, especially if that jurisdiction is receiving federal grants.
Additionally, the coalition noted how the sunset provision for the Corka Coordination Center,
quote, includes no requirement to dismantle data sharing systems, delete collected information,
or reverse any entrenched surveillance practices, unquote.
So these practices could very well be here to stay with,
without some sort of intervention down the line.
Good luck to us trying to get that.
I think, as James put it in a conversation we had,
it's like trying to convince a bunch of the HOA moms
that we need to be softer on retail crime.
It just doesn't really seem like it's going to happen.
And unfortunately, this coalition letter largely fell on deaf ears
with only 59 Democrats and one Republican voting against Corka in the House.
I've spoken with many people about this,
and there's often this question of, like, do they know?
and I'd argue it's their job to know, and this pill is pretty cut and dried power expansion
for ice. It's kind of hard to tell how they wouldn't have seen this coming, especially with
progressive groups warning them about it. And by now, this coalition has grown to over 120
organizations urging the Senate not to pass Corka. In spite of this, in the Senate Judiciary Committee,
Republican Senator Chuck Grassley and Democratic Senator Dick Durbin have teamed up to add Corka as an
amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 27. This would essentially
just mean entrenching this into our defense policy, and if that happens, which seems somewhat
likely, I suspect it's curtains and Corka is going through. I highly doubt that the Democrats are
going to hold the line on the NDAA for something they clearly either don't care about or don't
seem to understand. But what they might care about are the products and services that support this
podcast. Get Bell,
pure fiber internet with craved Netflix
and Disney Plus from $94 a month.
Price guaranteed for two years on internet
with a two year term and auto pay credit.
Visit bell.ca for details and to check
availability. Bell, connection
is everything.
This is Chelsea Handler from Dear Chelsea.
Every week, the news gets worse. The world gets
crazier and Yamanika is here to tell
whoever's responsible, you're
the problem. If you come over
here to play games, I'ma
check you. Okay?
If you do some in the news that don't sound good, I'm gonna play you.
Join Yamanika Saunders as she breaks down the week's most problematic stories on her new podcast.
You're the problem with Yamanika.
Do you know I just found out who Sidney Sweeney was?
New episodes weekly every Wednesday is part of my new network, the Dear Chelsea Network.
If he got a bunch of women, then I should have a bunch of men.
Do better or do less, so I don't have to do so much.
So join Yomeneke each episode as she has to answer.
answers one question. Who's the problem?
I'm Yamanika, and I'm out.
Listen to you're the problem with Yamanika on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
I'm Nick Totoro. You probably know me from NYPD Blue, the longest yard, or Spike Least Black Klansman.
But I'm also from Queens, which means I know pizza.
And on my new podcast, delivering happiness with Nick Totoro, I deliver pizza from Prince
Street pizza to a new guest.
Are you delivering pizza now?
Then we sit down for a real conversation.
I've shared a slice with everyone from Seth Rollins.
What are you doing my belt?
To Alex Rodriguez.
Just to let you people know, we're talking to one of the goats here.
To Bill Burr.
I don't think I've ever met somebody so exactly out of their mind as I am.
And now, we even have more great guests coming up, including the great John Titoro.
It's called Happiness.
Delivering Happiness.
Mariano Rivera.
Oh, my God.
And many, many more.
Open your free high-heart radio app.
Search Delivering Happiness with Nick Detourl.
And listen now.
What's up, fam?
I'm sports journalist Ari Chambers.
Hey, what's up, y'all?
It's your girl, Sam J.
And we're the host of everyone watches women's sports,
a new podcast from Together and I Heart Women's Sports.
Because let's be real.
Women's sports is giving us way too much to talk about these days.
So Kelsey Finler, she became the first female solo roer
to go from California to Hawaii.
My first thought is, like, what's up with the snacks?
Like, what are we eating?
The highlights, the rival.
the breakout stars, the moments to take over your entire timeline.
And the conversations that start during the game and somehow keep going all week.
Every week, we're breaking down the biggest stories across women's sports.
Naomi Osaka showing out, she beat.
Sabalinka.
Shout out to you, Naomi.
You get the palm, Naomi.
You get the palm for that.
Because we're not just interested in what happened.
We're interested in why everyone's talking about it.
Because everyone watches women's sports.
Listen to everyone watches women's sports.
On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get.
get your podcast. And we're back, and I'm imagining this is starting to sound pretty frightening,
and it is. To cool the temperature a bit, it's important to consider ICE's capacity for enforcement.
They've had ways of accessing various surveillance tools for quite some time now. To some extent,
they likely could have done some of this stuff with flock cameras or other automated license plate
readers. But I think the threat in retail comes more from the pre-existing infrastructure,
and the fact that this bill seems to give ICE sweeping access to confidential and proprietary information.
Still, there are strategies for resisting this. I won't lie, many of them are time-intensive and require
consistent community effort, but that's the world we're in. For example, in Hillsborough, Oregon,
just west of Portland, local mutual aid groups began delivering groceries to immigrant families
who were afraid to go outside in the middle of Operation Black Rose, which was the massive ice surge
last fall in winter. In Los Angeles last summer, similar groups set up community defense corners
outside Home Depot parking lots in an attempt to protect day laborers from ice raids. These usually
manifested as just pop-up tents with community members, water, and snacks. Certainly didn't stop
everything, but I know one group in Pasadena that was allegedly the last Home Depot in L.A. to be
raided, and they had a consistent community effort for months. In terms of shopping, avoiding loyalty programs
may end up being necessary, as this is one of the ways that we hand over a lot of our data to stores,
but shopping locally or at stores that collect less data will probably be the best bet.
So Corka clearly has a number of ways that it could be abused by ICE,
but to get the full extent of what we're dealing with,
I got in contact with Laura Conover, who is the district attorney in Pima County, Arizona,
which contains Tucson and borders the Mexican state of Sonora.
Contrary to D.A. Stefan featured in the first episode,
Conover has actually been an outspoken opponent of Corka. In particular, she has tied Corka to the Laken Riley Act, saying Congress is just compounding mistakes it already made.
The Lake and Riley Act became law on January 29, 2025, passing Congress again with a substantial amount of bipartisan support, greater than 60% in both chambers.
It's a particularly abhorrent piece of legislation as it, quote, requires DHS to detain certain non-U.S.
who have been arrested for burglary, theft, larceny, shoplifting, assault of a law enforcement
officer, or any crime that results in death or serious bodily injury to another person, unquote.
Notice how it says arrested, not charged, not convicted, but simply detained for one of the
crimes listed, even if the individual didn't actually do anything wrong.
The law also allows states to sue the federal government for alleged failures in immigration
enforcement, meaning the federal government can effectively be held liable for a number of things,
such as if an undocumented immigrant causes harm to state residents, including financial harm
greater than $100. It's tough to say the extent to which this could be applied, but the
through line between this and Corka is pretty clear. Ice could monitor retail locations for thefts
and shoplifting through Corka, then they're essentially liable if they don't seek to detain someone
who has stolen more than a hundred dollars of worth of merchandise.
Conover has specific examples of the ways in which the Lake and Riley Act is burdening local
jurisdictions, destroying due process protections, and ultimately how Corka will very likely make
this worse.
For example, it was Conover's job to prosecute the case of Jessica Corales-Duarte, who entered
the U.S. when she was two years old with her mother who had fled domestic abuse in Mexico
and obtained legal status through the Violence Against Women Act.
Corrales Duarte became a DACA recipient, and she's now 32 or 33 based on the articles that I read, and she has two children.
But in the past year, she was arrested and charged with shoplifting and theft, and her DACA status has been terminated.
She allegedly stole up to $5,700 in perfume from an Ulta beauty location over three days, which put her over the felony theft threshold, though this number is disputed by her defense.
She had no prior criminal record and conover said based on a taped confession,
she likely would have qualified for a program where she could pay restitution and get back on her feet.
Then ICE came in.
They detained Corales Duarte as she was leaving her home for her waitressing job.
The ensuing months were a disaster.
ICE held her at the Eloy detention center about an hour from Tucson
and blocked her from attending many of the court dates for her shoplifting case,
according to an article in the Tucson spotlight.
here's DA Conover on the situation.
So for example, in our case, the result was just defendants disappearing into federal custody.
And before any normal process.
So you've got a victim who's now totally out of luck for any kind of restoration,
be that through probation or through restitution, which is important.
You know, so victims' rights are violated.
The defendant obviously gets no due process.
You know, in our experience, they hardly had any contact with their attorney,
and their attorney was just rendered totally ineffective in the local court.
So it confounds the entire normal criminal justice process.
It's like the opposite of collaboration.
So not only are Corales-Duartre's rights violated on multiple levels,
but it also actually hurts the property owner because they won't receive restitution if someone is deported.
It's not clear whether Corales Duarte was involved in some sort of organized retail theft operation,
but I want to stress again that the people in such a situation who actually do the stealing,
commonly referred to as boosters are often poor, homeless, or struggling in some way themselves.
Many of you probably already know this, but undocumented people commit less crime overall than American citizens,
an analysis by the National Institute of Justice using data from Texas between 2012 and 2018
found that undocumented immigrants had offending rates less than half of that of U.S.-born citizens.
This is in spite of the fact that the U.S. makes it much harder for undocumented people to obtain
good-paying jobs, which can drive people into poverty and therefore crime.
And for all of this, Kanova informed me that Corales-Duarte appears to be in process for deportation
away from her children.
There are just more effective and humane ways to deal with this,
like the diversion programs mentioned,
which don't need to involve the federal government.
But instead, we're just giving more power to ICE.
With Lake and Riley and with Corka,
you're talking about such a street-level local issue
where we have local police and prosecutors
whose entire purpose is to prosecute local crime.
and to just give some random federal agency authority over that,
sweeping new authority of that,
just doesn't make any sense operationally.
Not to mention the particular agency is one in which there's bipartisan concern
about how recklessly they're being managed.
On the note of recklessness with the expansion of ISIS surveillance network
comes greater concern over warrantless enforcement,
constitutional violations, and technological means.
mistakes. The podcast Reveal reported a case of ICE scanning the face of a 23-year-old
U.S. citizen purely on suspicion. And according to Innovation Law Lab, the same seems to have happened
to a woman in Oregon, where ICE used a Palantir-developed platform called Elite, which,
without a warrant, essentially geo-fence is an area and creates targets with a, quote,
immigration nexus, unquote. In this case, the Mobile Fortify app returned two different
incorrect names and images for the same woman. Still, ICE has told lawmakers it's a definitive
measure of immigration status that effectively supersedes other evidence of citizenship,
such as a birth certificate. The National Institute of Standards and Technology is also reported
that facial recognition tech is less accurate on women than men, black people, and other individuals
with darker skin. This whole gets much worse when you're not in a controlled environment where you can
get a well-lit, straight-on shot of someone's face with no obstruction, certainly something that
isn't going to happen under the floodlights of a grocery store entryway.
So again, I can't really say to what extent ICE will actually integrate all of these technologies
or what capacity they'll have for enforcement, but it seems like the worst-case scenario could
be a warrantless surveillance frenzy where they couldn't care less if they're detaining the right
people. I say the right people, as in the individuals that they're actually targeting and
I don't actually believe there is a right person to be detained.
It's all bullshit.
But as Corka also calls for local and federal collaboration,
cops could very easily worsen this problem
and ICE can leverage the Lake and Riley Act to ramp up deportations.
It's not good.
But anyways, here's some ads.
Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Crave Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month.
Price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit.
Visit bell.ca for details and to check availability.
Bell. Connection is everything.
I'm Nick Tuturo.
You probably know me from NYPD Blue, the longest yard, or Spike Lease Black Klansman.
But I'm also from Queens, which means I know pizza.
And on my new podcast, delivering happiness with Nick Totoro, I deliver pizza from Prince
Street pizza to a new guest.
Are you delivering pizza now?
Then we sit down for a real conversation.
I've shared a slice with everyone from Seth Rollins.
What are you doing, my belt?
To Alex Rodriguez.
Just to let you people know, we're talking to one of the goats here.
To Bill Burr.
I don't think I've ever met somebody so exactly out of their mind as I am.
And now, we even have more great guests coming up, including the great John Tuturo.
It's called Happiness, Delivering Happiness.
Mariano Rivera.
Oh, my God.
And many, many more.
Open your free high-heart radio app.
Search Delivering Happiness with Nick Totoro.
And listen now.
This is Chelsea Handler from Dear Chelsea.
Every week, the news gets worse.
gets crazier and Yamanika is here to tell whoever's responsible, you're the problem.
If you come over here to play games, I'ma check you. Okay? If you do some in the news that don't
sound good, I'm going to play you. Join Yomeneika Saunders as she breaks down the week's most
problematic stories on her new podcast. You're the problem with Yamanika. Do you know I just
found out who Sidney Sweeney was? New episodes weekly every Wednesday is part of my new network,
the Dear Chelsea Network.
If he got a bunch of women,
then I should have a bunch of men.
Do better or do less,
so I don't have to do so much.
So join Yamanika each episode
as she answers one question.
Who's the problem?
I'm Yamanika, and I'm out.
Listen to you're the problem with Yamanika
on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast,
or wherever you get your podcast.
What's up, fam? I'm sports journalist, Ari Chambers.
Hey, what's up, y'all? It's your girl, Sam J.
And we're the host of everyone watches women's sports, a new podcast from Together and I Heart Women's Sports.
Because let's be real. Women's sports is giving us way too much to talk about these days.
So Kelsey Finler, she became the first female solo rower to go from California to Hawaii.
My first thought is like, what's up with the snacks? Like, what are we eating?
The highlights, the rivalries, the breakout stars, the moments that take over your entire timeline.
And the conversations that start during the game and somehow keep going all week.
Every week, we're breaking down the biggest stories across women's sports.
Naomi Osaka showing out.
She beat Sabalinka.
Shout out to you, Naomi.
You get the palm, Naomi.
You get the palm for that.
Because we're not just interested in what happened.
We're interested in why everyone's talking about it.
Because everyone watches women's sports.
Listen to everyone watches women's sports on the IHeart Radio app.
Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast.
And we're back.
To round out this two-parter, I'd like to connect some of the dots from the first episode
to Corka. To do so, I've chatted with James about a concept known as moral turpitude.
Moral turpitude is a vaguely defined concept and there's lots of nebulous legal language surrounding
it, but in essence, it's a crime that is considered morally offensive and it's important
to immigration law. Notably, included in this definition is larceny or theft, and a conviction
for one of these crimes can render an immigrant either inadmissible or deportable. Here's some of the
conversation that James and I had.
inadmissibility could be important for someone who is inside the United States.
Let's say they call it Ewee entered without inspection.
That means coming into the United States, not through a port of entry, right?
Let's say they went over the wall, under the wall, around the wall, through the river,
through the desert, through the mountains, right?
There are many ways that people can enter without inspection.
They could then be found inadmissible long after entering the United States because they hadn't
been admitted, right?
They just came in.
Just imagine, like, you want to go to Disneyland.
It's prohibitively expensive, so you climb over the fence.
You were not admitted to Disneyland.
Yeah.
Right.
So if Disneyland found you, they would kick you out.
Yeah.
The issue here, let's say if someone has been in the United States for a number of years,
but they are undocumented, if they are found guilty of a crime, including moral turpitude,
or convicted of a crime involving moral turpitude,
and the offence carries a maximum sentence of one year or more
and the person committed the offence within five years after the date of admission,
they are then deportable.
Now, if they eweed, if they ended with that inspection,
there are other reasons they could be deportable, right?
Yeah.
But I'd say somebody has a visa.
The same is true with inadmissibility, right?
So we recently had a Supreme Court ruling about admissibility
with regard to permanent residents,
which kind of brings them closer in line to visa holders.
But admissibility doesn't just mean them giving you the visa.
It could also, for example, impact you if you went somewhere else
and returned to the United States, right?
So a crime involving moral turpitude could then render you inadmissible
so you could be detained or not admitted to the United States when you came back.
It's also important, I guess, to note that some diversion programs,
state diversion programs don't count as a conviction in terms of federal immigration law.
If a guilty plea is not entered.
So if somebody who could previously have got into a diversion program ends up not in a diversion program,
in addition to Corka, right, we have all these state sentencing enhancements.
Yeah.
We see in California, right?
If that person ends up with a conviction, instead of being put in a diversion program without entering a place,
that is a night and day different in immigration terms, right?
It's black and white.
One is a conviction for what is probably a crime involving moral turpitude
because larceny is a crime involving moral turpitude
and I think that's what this generally falls under, right?
Yeah, again, not a lawyer.
But like, if that is the case,
one of these sentencing in harmstments at a state level
results in somebody now having, for federal immigration terms,
a conviction of a crime involving moral turpitude,
they are now inadmissible.
And in a single conviction, as I said before,
can make a non-citizen deportable
if it has a possible sentence for a year or more,
which these sentencing enhancements make a lot more likely, right?
Yeah.
And good luck, I guess, trying to find some way
of getting that conviction overturned
or like, you know, now you're fighting against all this lobbying
that retailers are doing, right?
And all this propaganda that has been put out there
that it's going to make it harder and harder
for people to avoid those convictions in the first place
and then to get them overturned.
Yeah.
I don't want to get like too doom and gloom about it,
but like do you worry that there's just a combination of factors here
that could massively worsen things with the level.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like every time we make a new law,
we're giving a new powers of the state, right?
And every single law is backed up by violence.
The matter of it's a parking ticket or murder, right?
The state can lock you up, beat you up or shoot you up.
that is the basis on which all laws rest, right?
So you don't pay a parking ticket that you don't go to court.
Eventually someone's going to turn up,
but your door and it's going to be a person with a gun, right?
That is the structure on which the state exists
to use the crass, barbarian definition of the state, I guess.
And this is a big one, right?
We are handing a bunch of tools here to an entity
which is tearing families apart,
which is ripping children from parents,
which is taking grandmothers away from their grandchildren, right?
Yeah.
I mean, what do you...
Maybe this isn't for the episode,
but what do you think people should do?
Yeah, like, the answer to this is the same as the answer to everything.
It's stronger communities.
It's like people steal things because they need to meet their material needs.
I'm sure some people also enjoy stealing stuff, right?
That's the thing that exists,
but the vast majority of theft is happening
because people are not meeting their material needs.
we need to work out a way to meet each other's material needs.
And like I was in Minneapolis in January, right?
Very hard for me to be hungry in Minneapolis in January.
Like I'm vegan. I'm annoying to feed, right?
People would constantly bring me food and hot tea and like,
that's not that be all and all, but guess there's a long way there.
Like if your neighbors aren't hungry,
and I guess to know if your neighbors are hungry,
you have to know who your neighbors are.
Right. So like, start by knocking on someone's door, you know, start by, hey, your truck's not working. Let's work it out. I bet I can find a YouTube video we can watch. And if you have a bunch of sockets, let's see if we can fix it.
So I know the ending of this is sort of bleak, but I just want to be honest with you about the possibilities. If I used this to take Corka as far as they can, as DA Conover told me, you give them an inch and they take a mile, then this will get very bad.
Surveillance capitalism isn't going to draw a line at immigrants, but that doesn't really matter either way.
Clearly, the Democratic Party, given their votes, support is not going to stop this.
As James said, it's going to come down to community.
So go find your co-op grocery store, get to know your neighbor's faces before ICE gets to know your face at the grocery store.
Thanks for listening.
It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media.
For more podcast from Coolzone Media, visit our website, Coolzone Media.
visit our website, Coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
You can now find sources for it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions.
Thanks for listening.
Hey, Portlandia fans.
Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here.
The Dream of the 90s is alive in podcast form.
We're launching Podlandia, A.O. rewatch, our brand new podcast where we revisit every episode of Portlandia together,
breaking down sketches, going deep on our iconic characters, and pulling back the
curtain on how it all got made.
And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life.
Guestrars, collaborators, and friends, including director Jonathan Chrysall, the mayor himself,
Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more.
Kyle is going for it here.
You fully improvised, not just words, but a song.
Well, I thought you were all going to write a song.
I remember you thinking that.
Listen to Podlandia.
A.O. Rewatch on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
This is Chelsea Handler from Dear Chelsea.
Every week, the news gets worse.
The world gets crazier, and Yamanika is here to tell whoever's responsible,
you're the problem.
Do you know I just found out who Sidney Sweeney was?
If he got a bunch of women, then I should have a bunch of men.
Do better or do less, so I don't have to do so much.
I'm Yamanika, and I'm out.
Listen to You're the Problem with Yamanika on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast,
or wherever you get your podcast.
I'm Nick Tutank.
You probably know me from NYPD Blue, The Longest Yard, or Spike Lee's Black Klansman.
And on my new podcast, Delivering Happiness with Nick Tatoro, I deliver pizza to a new guest.
I've shared a slice with everyone from Seth Rollins.
What are you doing my belt?
To Bill Burr.
I don't think I've ever met somebody so exactly out of their mind as I am.
And now, we even have more great guests coming up, including the great John Tuturo.
It's called Happiness, delivering happiness.
And many, many more.
Open your free High Heart Radio app.
Search Delivering Happiness with Nick Tuttle.
And listen now.
I'm Nancy Glass, host of the Burden of Guilt Season 3 podcast.
This is a story about a horrendous situation that destroyed two families.
It's a scorched earth war that shows just how far someone will go to get what they want.
Cindy said I had to choose between the truth and my family, and I had to choose the truth.
Listen to season three of Burden of Guilt on the Eye Heart Rural
radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
This is an IHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
