Pod Save America - “The Clown Prince of CPAC.”

Episode Date: February 25, 2021

Trump tightens his grip on the GOP ahead of this weekend’s CPAC speech, Texas Democrats analyze why they came up short in November, and new Data for Progress/Vote Save America polling shows overwhelming bipartisan support for voting and democracy reforms. Then ProPublica’s Dara Lind talks to Dan about Biden’s immigration moves and the influx of unaccompanied minors at the border.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, please visit crooked.com/podsaveamerica.For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail].

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. On today's pod, Joe Biden's strategy for dealing with the star of this weekend's CPAC, Texas Democrats' analysis of why they came up short in November, and new polling on a democracy reform bill that may be even more popular with voters than the COVID relief bill. Then Dan talks to expert immigration reporter Dara Lind about what's really going on at the border with unaccompanied migrant children.

Two quick housekeeping notes before we start. Very cool pod save the world this week. Tommy interviews Ugandan musician and member of parliament Bobby Wine about his presidential campaign against a military dictator. And then Ben and Tommy talk about the line between legitimate criticism of Israel and anti-Semitism and how right-wing hacks like Mike Pompeo demagogue the issue to attack their political opponents. It seems like they might have strong views on Mike Pompeo. As do I. I had it written that they were attacking him because he's a lying sack of shit,

but they wanted to be a little more honest and professional. That's the difference between Pod Save the World and Pod Save America right there. That's right. Also, check out the 200th episode of with friends like these uh one of the very first shows we launched at crooked with our friend anna marie cox who always offers some of the most thought-provoking conversations you'll hear on any podcast go check it out if you haven't already and congrats to anna marie for 200 episodes of with friends like these all right let's get to the news uh i hope you all

enjoyed your short break from donald trump because he will be terrorizing america once again at this weekend's conservative political action conference otherwise known as cpac otherwise known as a fucking circus uh many of the 2024 insurrectionist hopefuls will be there jockeying to be the candidate who might get humiliated by trumpockeying to be the candidate who might get humiliated by Trump. But according to MAGA sources who spoke to Axios, the former president's speech will be a, quote, show of force intended to send the message that he is still fully, quote, in charge of the Republican Party and is the, quote, presumptive 2024 nominee should he choose to run. What do other Republican leaders think of this? Well,

here's a fun clip of Kevin McCarthy and Liz Cheney answering that very question. Do you believe President Trump should be speaking or former President Trump should be speaking at CPAC this weekend? Yes, he should. Congresswoman Cheney? That's up to CPAC. I've been clear in my views about President Trump and the extent to which following January 6th, I don't believe that he should be playing a role in the future of the party or the country. On that high note. Dan, let's start with a question that some of our listeners may be asking.

Why are we still talking about Donald Trump? Clicks? Downloads? I mean, the reason we're going to talk about this is it's an amazing story that Donald Trump somehow shook off the shackles of big tech censorship to get his message out. So that's an amazing escape story. How did he do it? He uncanceled himself. We have to acknowledge that Donald Trump, the former president of the United States,

who just last month incited violent insurrection at the Capitol and is potentially maybe planning to run for president in 2024, speaking for the first time about something other than Russian law is a news story. It will get covered. It should get covered. There's a broader conversation about quantity of coverage and tone of coverage around Trump that we can look at, and there will be some good examples. There will be some bad examples to help us understand who in the media has learned

some lessons over the last four to five years here. But it is a very legitimate news story that has real repercussions for every part of politics, how the Biden agenda gets through Congress, what happens in 2024, who's going to be on the ballot in 2022 is part of the things he's apparently going to talk about according to, and I just love this phrase, what MAGA sources told Axios, I love that, is that he's going to support primary challenges against people like Liz Cheney. That is a legitimate political story. Is it a bigger story than the pandemic? No, it's a bigger story than the passage of Joe Biden's agenda to help control the pandemic? No. But is it a story? Is it worth

talking about? Yes. Yeah. I mean, long term guy could be the Republican opponent in 2024. Medium term, he's going to be all over the country for the midterms endorsing Republicans, as you just mentioned. And then just short term, like people need, from our perspective, not just as people who cover the news, but Democratic activists, organizers, strategists, like people need to remember that Trumpism is not gone. Even if Trump doesn't run again, even if Trump just sort of for the next couple of years pretends that he's going to run and then ultimately bows out. The party is still a very Trumpy party. And if we want to beat the Republican Party, we need to understand the influence he continues to wield over this party, which right now is near total.

And it's also reported that he's going to spend a good amount of time in the speech attacking Joe Biden. And so understanding what the message about Joe Biden is going to be from Trump and that Trump both, you know, directs the message for the Republican Party and sort of amplifies the message that you find in right wing media. That is a good barometer of what kind of attacks both Biden and the Democrats are going to get in the next two years leading up to the midterm election. What does it do to the rest of the field and the party if Trump spends the next few years even acting like he's going to run, which is going to start with some of these endorsements for the midterm candidates in 2022?

In terms of what does it do to the 2024 presidential field? Yeah. What certainly freezes it for the candidates who want to be the heir to the Trump base, whether that's Ted Cruz or Josh Hawley or Tom Cotton, there is nowhere for them to go. And it is not unlike the looming prospect of Hillary Clinton's candidacy in 2016 had on the Democratic field. A whole bunch of people who viewed themselves in her same political lane or ideological lane did not run because they thought she would run and win. And it makes it impossible to do a lot of the, you know, the quote unquote shadow primary scut work that you do if you want to win president. You're going to Iowa, you're meeting with activists, you're trying to line up potential

staff. All of that is frozen in place as long as Trump hangs over the field. That has more to do, I think, with the ability of other Republicans to build momentum to be the possible nominee that it does on what the Republican Party can do to take on Joe Biden, right? I think it has more of an impact. Like there's one way you could look at and say, well, is that going to make it harder for them to beat Joe Biden? I don't know the answer to that, but it doesn't stop the work you do to beat the incumbent, presuming Joe Biden is going to run again 2024, but it makes life a lot harder for Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, et cetera. We are not going back into the prediction business just because the 2020 election is over. But I have to tell you, I do not know how any of these

other Republican candidates beats Donald Trump if he runs for this reason. Think about what is the mood of the Republican electorate right now? What is the mood of the Republican base? They are pissed off that an election that they think their candidate won didn't actually go their way. And many of them believe that election was stolen. They think that Donald Trump is the rightful president of the United States. And pretty much all of his competitors, with a few exceptions, potential competitors in 2024, have gone along with that lie that Donald Trump really won the election and have expressed to varying degrees their undying support of Donald Trump. So why would you go with the imitation Trump when you have the real thing?

Yeah, I mean, we are not going to make predictions and predictions for four years from now, or it's really two years from now is when that would start. But you would have to assume that if Donald Trump ran, he would be the nominee. He has 100% name ID and 85% approval rating among the people who are going to choose the next Republican nominee is a lot of things could happen between now and then that would cause him to not run. For example, the news this morning that the Manhattan DA finally got access to Trump's tax returns. I mean, and it's not that what is in those tax returns could prevent Trump from winning the Republican nomination unless on one page he wrote, I love Obamacare. That would be the one thing in the tax returns. nomination unless on one page he wrote, I love Obamacare. That would be the one thing in the tax returns. But it just, it sort of presages the possibility that his legal troubles could get a lot more challenging in the run up to the election. And so there are those things that could prevent

it. There is a world in which Democrats have a very good 2022 that sort of upends expectations that could cause, in part because Trump got a bunch of Trumpy candidates nominated and they lost Senate races they should have won or House races they should have won. And it changes the mood among Republicans about the ability, you know, sort of upends the electability question for them. But, you know, we're also how are we how are we down this rabbit hole talking about Trump in 2024? How did that happen? Basically, because I want to talk about how I mean, like CPAC is going to feature a bunch of 2024 hopefuls talking about it. And people are going to start talking about, play some golf, not care about politics. So far, reading these stories about CPAC and what he's going to do in the midterms, that does not seem to be the case. And so therefore, like we got the Republican Party in this country. They got a spot on the ballot as much as we want to ignore them.

And until Trump decides otherwise, the Republican Party is Trump's party. And so talking about the Republican Party is talking about Donald Trump. And I think he's just going to play a huge role until he decides not to or until the law decides he can't. That's that's about it. So one person who will not be talking about or reacting in any way to Donald Trump's CPAC speech is President Joe Biden. Even though Trump is supposed to tear into Biden during the speech, White House communications director Kate Bedingfield told The Washington Post this week that the Biden administration plans to engage with Trump, quote, never. Here's both Joe Biden and White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki leading by example. Shentake leading by example.

I remember you and I talking during the campaign and you had the former guy saying that, well, you know, we just can open things up and that's all we need to do. We said, no, you got to deal with the disease before you deal with the with getting the economy going. I know I'm tired of talking about Donald Trump. Don't want to talk about him anymore. Well, the president's view is that we've spent a whole lot of time, not we, but in this briefing room talking about President Trump over the last few years. Yes, for good reason. He was president and that his view is we're going to spend the time focusing about the American people and our objectives to help them and our commitment

to helping them. So I wouldn't say he's thought a lot about the president, former president's visit to, you know, I was going to say performance. Maybe that's appropriate at CPAC. I was going to say performance. Nice. Nice, Jen. So the Biden team is thinking, you know, people want the president to beat the virus and fix the economy. They didn't elect him to get in fights with this asshole.

Why give him oxygen? Others might argue, why not hit back? Biden is much more popular than Trump right now. He benefits from the comparison, and he should remind people that Trump still presents a real threat to democracy. Which do you think is right? I think the Biden approach is the correct approach for now, for sure. And we know that the single most important thing for Joe Biden's political success over the long run and Democratic political success in 2022 is get the virus under control and fix the economy. The best way to do that is to pass the American Rescue Plan, which currently has

large bipartisan support. That is the thing it has most going for it. And we live in an era of negative partisanship. So if Joe Biden starts hitting back against Trump or talking about Trump, it's very likely that he'll peel support off the bipartisan elements of his agenda. And so, yes, there will be a time as we get closer to 2022 where Joe Biden and Democrats are going to have to make a case against Republicans. And the role that Trump plays in the party and what a lot of these Republicans did when Trump was president and how they defended him in the insurrection, all those other things will be part of that argument. But there is no reason to make that argument now. It is simply, the press wants him to talk about Trump because it's good. It's a good story. And it is what

political junkies, which was what most of political journalism services want to hear because it's we want to live in 24-7 campaign mode. But it is very clearly not what the rest of the American people want to hear. Also, Joe Biden wants to control the narrative and he's the president of the United States. So he has more power to do that even than he did during the campaign. He is in the process of passing a COVID relief bill that has 70, 75, 80% support among the American people, hugely popular among Democrats,

splits the Republican party in two, half Republican voters are happy about it or supportive of it. Like the Republicans and Donald Trump don't wanna talk about that, right? They want to talk like Donald Trump's going to spend this CPAC speech trying to hit Joe Biden on immigration, migrants at the border, unaccompanied minors. You know, Cliff Sims is a former Trump aide said Trump and Trumpism aren't going away

because Biden represents a return to the issues that gave rise to them in the first place. Mass amnesty, kowtowing to China, crushing American jobs under the weight of radical environmentalism and forever wars in the Middle East. Nice, nice messaging. So like this is what they want to talk about. And if every time Biden hits back at Trump, that becomes the issue that we're talking about in the news. Trump's framing of some fucking issue. So, course he shouldn't hit back at Trump. Of course he should keep talking about things he's doing to improve people's lives and why they're supported by most of the people in the country. It just, it makes sense to me. I would never hit back at Trump if I was the Biden people, at least not now. Yeah. He won the presidency in part because he was very disciplined about not chasing Trump down every

single rabbit hole. Right. And now he's the. So why would he do that now? Well, I was going to say you could at least make an argument during the campaign that he sort of had to deal with Trump at some points because he's running against him. He's not running against him now. Ron Klain told The Washington Post he's running against the coronavirus. He's running against a broken economy. He needs to fix those things. And by the way, that's what people want him to do. It may not be what every Democratic partisan wanted to do. Would it be fun for us to hear Joe Biden go after Trump and Trump go back? Yeah, it would be like, great. We talk about it. It'd be funny. That's not what most people in the fucking country want at all. Probably not even what most Democrats want. They actually want the virus to be fixed

and the economy to fix, and they want to know that their president is working on that. So it just, it makes more sense, I think. Yeah, it's a very strange argument. I will say that if Joe Biden simply did not talk about Trump, I think most voters would not notice that. Right. I mean, they would be like, subconsciously, they might say, oh, that seems nice. But what is benefits Biden is I think voters don't want him to talk about Trump. And now he's got there's a whole bunch of stories that are about Joe Biden not talking about Trump. It's, you know, they would if people just read the script, they wouldn't get that. But since the press has to coverage the stage directions, they know that that is the case. It's this sort of very meta level of communications. Look, I think Joe Biden very sincerely, regardless of the politics, does not want to talk about Donald Trump. I think the Biden staff can't imagine anything dumber in the middle of a pandemic and a recession and in the wake of an insurrection that they should have to talk about what Donald Trump's going to say at CPAC. say at CPAC. But I think the sort of the press coverage dynamic here also benefits Team Biden because it's gone to this meta level of stories about why Biden won't talk about Trump and voters can say, oh, that's cool that Biden doesn't want to talk about Trump.

I will say that the press has a choice here to make as well, though. I mean, it depends on how much oxygen Donald Trump gets for his various stunts. Like right now it's been easy. He's been relatively quiet. He puts out a statement once in a while. He doesn't have Twitter. You know, we'll see what happens at CPAC again. That is a newsworthy event. But like Donald Trump starts doing an event down by the border about migrant children and caravans coming to the country and blames Joe Biden and blames Joe Biden for this and that. And he's always popping up and he's always I wonder if it then becomes a little tougher for Biden to resist the inevitable sort of press narrative that Trump is

whacking the shit out of Biden and Biden's just not saying it. Oh, you can already see, you know, it's I can tell you what's going to happen is you're going to see this small drop in the Washington Post ABC poll. And because Biden's at a high right now, it's going to come back down to earth at some point. the entire Meet the Press panel, which will be Hugh Hewitt and his neighbors, I guess, will talk about how Biden's mistake to not engage with Trump is hurting. You know, they want to they want to assert it. They'll ask the question, is Biden's failure to take on Trump hurting him in the polls? Back after this break, Hugh Hewitt, Rich Lowry and two objective reporters. Hugh Hewitt, Rich Lowry, and two objective reporters.

And then the playbook headline will be like, Dem allies of Biden worried about his stance on Trump. And it'll be like a fucking former Hill staffer and fucking Ed Rendell. Ed Rendell was a good pull, yeah. That's where we're headed. Anyway, all right, let's talk about something more productive. We talk about Texas, where last week's catastrophic failure of governance in response to a deadly storm makes you wonder if voters will finally kick the Republicans who control the state out of office. In 2012, Obama lost Texas by 15 points. 2016, Hillary lost by nine points.

lost Texas by 15 points. 2016, Hillary lost by nine points. And in 2020, the year there was a real chance Texas might go blue, Biden still lost by 5.6 points. And Democrats up and down the ballot failed to make gains in the House or the state legislature. So what happened? The Texas Democratic Party released a very detailed analysis this week that has two primary explanations. One, Republicans registered more new voters than Democrats did, and two, Republicans turned out more of their own base voters than Democrats did. The report cites as causes for all of this lack of Democratic investment in the state, the decision by Democrats to limit in-person canvassing, and poor performance among Latino voters, particularly in the Rio Grande Valley. Can you start by giving people an idea of how the Texas Democratic Party put this report together and sort of what they

looked at and what data they analyzed? Sure. They went and looked at their data model, which they used in the run-up to the election to predict how people would vote. And their model relied on partisanship, whether someone be a Republican or a Democrat. And they actually have an interesting slide in here, which takes the various Democratic Party models out there, the DNC model, some of the Democratic data firms models, and the Joe Biden model. And the Texas Democratic Party model was the second most accurate of them. And then looked at, and they went and looked at both the precinct level data compared to their model to make an analysis of the 631,000 vote difference between Trump and Biden in the state. So yeah. And just so people know, this is not, the most accurate analysis comes from when you

finally look at the voter file and the voting history file and you can actually start matching who voted for who and you have a more granular detail. But this is pretty good because this is, you know, campaigns before an election have basically they have a score for each voter, how likely you are to vote for your campaign. And it's a predictive model. But after the election, you can sort of backtrack and see how your predictive model did. Like you said, the Biden's model was the best in Texas. It was the closest to the actual results. And then the Texas Democratic Party was second. So the report says, quote, the pandemic prevented us from getting the most out

of our most powerful competitive advantage, our volunteers. We struggled to reach voters for whom we did not have phone numbers who who were disproportionately young, and folks of color. What do you think about the decision to limit in-person canvassing in terms of the impact? Could it have had an over 600,000 vote impact on the final results, which is how much Trump won by? No. I mean, and the report's actually relatively clear on that. There's this very – if you have to look at one page in this report, which I highly recommend to everyone, and I want to say kudos to Texas Democratic Party for A, doing it, and B, making it public. Yes. Because millions of dollars were invested in Texas by grassroots donors who really wanted to see this state go

blue and were quite disappointed by the results. So reporting back to your shareholders, if you will, about what happened, what went right, what went wrong, is how you ensure people invest again. So instead of feeling burned by this, they actually lay out a very honest analysis of what happened, and then sort of a roadmap of how we actually get to Texas being blue in a decade. So I think that's very, very important. But if you're going to look at one page on here, it'd be page six, and they have this pie chart that breaks down where the deficit came from, that 630,000 or 5.58%. And 60% of that deficit is simply from the fact that Texas is still a Republican state. It's what they call baseline electoral disadvantage. There are more Republicans than Democrats in the state among the registered voter pool. And that's just an important thing to acknowledge that we have a lot of work to

do. And part of this is, I think, an expectations issue, which is, had there not been a bunch of very incorrect horse race polling that made everyone other than Joe Biden's team think that Democrats were going to win Texas, then, and you were to come back and say, well, Joe Biden only lost Texas by five and a half percent. People were like, well, that's a great year because 16 years ago, John Kerry lost it by 23%. And it is getting closer and closer every time. And we should, and we should tell people when you talk about sort of just baseline differentials there, what that means, what you just read is if every Republican and every Democrat in the state of

Texas all voted, Republicans would win the state because there's just more of them. Now, that doesn't happen in any election. There's some percentage of Republicans and some percentage of Democrats that go out to vote. But as a partisan advantage. With all the voters, Republicans have that overall. Yeah. And then, so your question of, was it the right decision to limit in-person canvassing? I have no idea how to, like, I'm not an epidemiologist. We were in the middle of a pandemic. I understand, I'm very sympathetic and understand why campaigns were hesitant to go ask millions of people around the country to go knock on the door and talk to other people face-to-face in the middle of a pandemic. That seems like a very risky thing to ask people to do, particularly given how little

information we knew over the summer about how the virus was spread, where you were at risk, etc. And so it is hard to say. like, I don't think that would have made the difference in Texas. It could have met larger margins for Biden and some other states. And we did see some evidence comparing Georgia in November to Georgia in January. In January, there was more in-person canvassing from Democratic organizers and how that turned out that implies that, yes, I think it would have been helpful. But it's not the reason we lost Texas. And I think there's an over, it's not almost worth focusing on that because. I was just going to say that.

It's not going to happen, like, God willing. We do these lookbacks and these autopsies in order to not just hang around in the past, but to like learn lessons about the future. Like we're not going to hopefully, hopefully deal with, have a pandemic in 2022 and 2024. Yeah. So maybe we need to learn this time. The next time there's a pandemic,

God, I hope it's not in our lifetime, but we're not going to have this problem again in 22 and 24. So we shouldn't dwell on it that much. One issue that we are going to have to deal with going forward, and this is one of the big stories out of the election, was about how Trump did a lot better among Latinos than he did in 2016. Here's what the report says about that. Quote, Republican Latino voters turned out at a higher rate than Democratic Latino voters in the 2020 cycle relative to expectations.

Many heavily Latino areas, especially in the Rio Grande Valley, broke for Trump. Bad performance among Latino districts was driven by both differential turnout and persuasion. However, Latinos in most of the state supported Democrats roughly as much as they did in 2016. Losing ground among Latino communities appears to be explained by differential turnout.

Dan, will you translate this for everyone who isn't a sad political nerd like us? I mean, even sad political nerds like us kind of needed to read the- I took it. It took me a few times. It took me a few times to figure it out. What it essentially means is Latinos that are Republican voters turned out at a higher rate

than Latinos that are Democratic voters. It does not mean that the shift is attributable entirely to Latinos who voted for a Democrat in 2016, voting for a Republican in 2020. These are different voters. And it's important to remember that over a third of Latino voters vote for Republicans. And so sometimes when we talk about the Black vote, Democrats have traditionally won such a high percentage of the Black vote that the Republican numbers are so small and aggregate. On the Latino side, there's a large pocket of Republican Latino voters in all places around the country, including Texas. And according to this report, that group turned out at a higher rate than Latinos that traditionally vote Democratic. And this goes to a larger debate

that data analysts have, political data analysts have, and we, I did a lot of reporting on this in the wilderness, both seasons, there is a debate about sort of turnout versus persuasion, right? And what this is saying is that, you know, a turnout debate is, okay, Democrats have 100 Latino voters, and they want to turn out all of them, but they turned out like 80 out of 100. Right. Then the other thing they want to do is that they see some Latino Republicans that they want to convince to come vote for Democrats now. They want them to they want to persuade them to come be Democrats now and maybe they get

a couple of those. So that's persuasion. And the other part that I was talking about is turnout. The question is, when you have a result like this, is it because of, you know, better turnout or that we just persuaded more voters to switch parties and to come to our side? But the Texas Democratic Party is saying among Latinos, there was definitely some vote switching, particularly in the Rio Grande Valley of people who voted Democrat in the past and then decided to vote for Trump this time. But most of it was this turnout differential, where just Republican Latinos turned out at higher rates than Democratic Latinos.

Now, it seemed like from the reaction to the report by some data analysts that not everyone agreed with what the Texas Democratic Party found. Nate Cohn of the New York Times said this report is another example of Democrats reducing elections to be about turnout and reducing electoral strategy to be about grassroots organizations because we have this romantic notion about the power of organizing and it also shields activists from questioning their views or at least figuring out how to persuade voters who might disagree with us. What do you think of that argument? I mean, the entire question around how Latinos perform the 2020 election has occurred on Twitter with these sort of like two straw people arguments. One being everything is fine.

Don't worry about the other one is holy shit. The sky is falling. Democrats are fucked as far as the eye can see. And it's obviously something in the middle where I agree. And it's obviously something in the middle where I agree. And I think this report comes down in that this is a nuanced discussion of an issue that people would rather yell about in overly simplistic terms on Twitter. Nate Cohn's point, I think, is accurate broadly. I don't think it's accurate about this report.

But we tend to think about persuasion as a question of message. Like what TV ad, what speech, what piece of direct mail can we show a voter who's deciding between candidate A and candidate B that will make them vote for our candidate? And we think about turnout as purely this logistical function of how many volunteers we can get to knock on how many doors or how many phones they can text or call. And what I think we have to recognize is that there is also a message, agenda, emotional connection element of persuasion to get people to persuade them to either vote or not vote. And that's what gets lost. Every voter is a persuasion target. This is what I heard Jen O'Malley Dillon say this on a podcast during the campaign. That's how the Biden campaign thought of every voter.

And there is there is, you know, we have to fight against the notion that there's a bunch of Democratic base voters sitting home and just waiting for a Democratic organizer to knock on their door and say, come vote for the Democratic candidate. And they'll say, oh, yeah, well, no one asked me. I'm ready to go vote. More often than not, when we talk about expanding the electorate, and you can ask Stacey Abrams about this and everyone in Georgia who just who just pulled this off in Georgia, it wasn't about just simply knocking on the doors and signing them up. If someone someone seems like they should be a Democratic voter for whatever reason, education, race, age, gender, you name it. If they seem like they should be a Democratic voter for whatever reason, education, race, age, gender, you name it. If they seem like they should be a Democratic voter, but they haven't voted in a few elections, there are reasons for not voting that may go beyond the fact that you just weren't asked and you just didn't see a Democratic organizer. You may have issue disagreements with Democrats.

You may not think the election is that important. You may not understand the stakes. You may have some conservative views. You may be cross-pressured on different issues, right? You may think that the party is too centrist. You may think that the party is too far to the left, right? There are a million reasons why you may not have voted that aren't just an organizer hasn't knocked on your door. So I think the lesson that Democrats should take from this is whether it is a voter who cast a ballot for Trump or a voter who stayed home in the past, you are still trying to persuade them to turn out and vote for a Democrat with the most effective message possible. And we especially have to do that in the Latino community, which is not one

monolithic community, but many different communities. And that's something that we haven't understood as well either. It is true that in a low turnout, low attention, special election, knocking on doors and telling people there's an election they did not otherwise know about can be the difference between victory and defeat. In a presidential election with Donald Trump on the ballot, people are not missing the fact of the election. Yes, of course, organizers can help people understand how to vote. And that is often best in a face-to-face conversation. But there is something bigger here. And I think we have to, we can't simply treat a lower turnout or less high turnout than we hope for as a question, as a logistical problem. It is something bigger than it has to do with

brand and message, et cetera. And we have to really understand that going forward. Yeah. And we talked to Chuck Rocha about this when he was on the pod a couple months ago. There's a great Washington Post story about what happened with the Latino vote in Texas from November that I was reading before the pod. And, you know, a man named Trinidad Gonzalez, who's a professor of history and Mexican American studies at South Texas College said, he's talking about Latino communities and said, they are conservative, liberal, indifferent, and hybrid.

Part of the injustice of living as a minority in the United States is not being afforded the same understanding of personhood and its complexities and contradictions that everyone else gets to live with. In other words, like we should not treat demographic groups as it is a it is a stereotype to treat them that they are all going to vote the same, have the same views, believe the same things. Even the idea that that is prevalent in a lot of democratic circles, that all Latinos care about immigration and immigration

is their top issue. That's not necessarily true. In fact, when you look at pollings, it doesn't often seem true. Many times jobs in the economy are at the top of the list. Many times health care is the top of the list. Many times what Latinos care about or what a lot of white families and black families care about. And immigration is up there, but not necessarily the top issue. And I do think and the same goes for black voters and the same goes for women voters and the same goes for college educated voters. Like we do have to do a better job of figuring out the differences within communities and sort of the intersectional differences between geography, class, race, gender in the Democratic Party. As the political conversation has gotten more sophisticated over the years,

there has been this acknowledgement when people talk about the Latino community in Florida that is very diverse. You have Cuban-Americans, there are Puerto Ricans, there are people from Central America, and that those different segments have very different views. But we have not yet expanded that to the rest of the country. And that there is, as you point out, there's a huge diversity of opinion geographically, demographically, all across the board. And it is absolutely essential that Democrats stop thinking about the Latino community in these monolithic terms. We have to understand the differences within that community and speak to them. And, you know, one of the women who talked to The Washington Post was a Democratic Party chair in one of the counties on the border of the Rio Grande Valley.

And you say, OK, well, maybe they don't care about immigration as much there, but, you know, it's a sort of a poor rural area. And she said, you know, you have a lot of folks that feel like they've been neglected and they keep voting Democrat, but not much is changing. This area before the pandemic had a 30 percent poverty rate and a fourth are uninsured. I can see why people might be open to voting Republican. It's a hard thing to hear. Right. But like if you if you are impoverished, if you live in a rural area, if you and you know, we're so used to this conversation being about like rural whites and economic anxiety and oh, fuck, they didn't have economic anxiety there. A lot of them were just racist. And that is certainly true with a lot of Trump voters, perhaps most Trump voters,

perhaps the vast majority of Trump voters. And of course, many of them fly to the fucking insurrection on a private jet. But then you think about you think about some of these folks, Latinos in rural communities on the Texas border, struggling with poverty year after year after year. And some if you keep voting for the same party and your life isn't appreciably better, you're not going to be tuned into all the reasons why, you know, it was Republicans who blocked the Democrats and that's why they didn't improve your life. You're just going to say, I want to try something new at this point. I'm just going to try something new. And I do think back to our earlier conversation about Biden, that is why his primary strategy is to pass legislation and take executive actions that are

going to tangibly improve people's lives. Because if people in 2022 and then in 2024 look around and say, oh, pandemic's better, the economy's better, my life is a little better. Oh, and now I can see the Democrats were in charge when that happened. And maybe I'll go vote for Democrats. That is the bet that how voters will think in a couple of years. That is the bet that how voters will think in a couple of years. You know, when you look at that, Patrata says that 2.7% of the 630,000 vote difference is from persuasion. And you may say, well, that's only a tiny fraction. But remember, Donald Trump has 40,000 votes spread across a handful of states for becoming president. Like we simply cannot afford under the

current political structure that dramatically over-represents Trump's base to bleed voters anywhere. And so that matters. And so we cannot be – you can't look at this and be dismissive of the persuasion effect here. The persuasion effect matters. And if that is a trend, not an anomaly, we have some very big problems, not just in Texas, but all across the country. So what do you think? How close are we to flipping Texas? You think it's the next Georgia? You think it's a bit further away? Yeah, it could very well be the next Georgia, right? As this report shows, there are enough unregistered likely Democrats in the state to negate the inherent Republican partisan advantage. So with organizing, with good messaging, with good branding, with real

work, it can absolutely move in the Democratic direction. I mean, as we said, 16 years ago, lost by 23, lost by almost six. If it continues on its trajectory, it's very close to being blue. If it continues on its trajectory, it's very close to being blue. It will be a battleground state in 2024, I am sure. And there is a little bit of a chicken and egg problem with Texas. It's incredibly expensive to run a campaign there. And so the Biden team made a decision, obviously based on their model, which turned out to project a loss of about this magnitude, that to not spend $50 million there that could be spent on Georgia or Wisconsin or somewhere else. And this is always going to be the problem is that how do you get – how do you invest in an expensive state where it is a longer shot, right, to get there. And this is where sort of the grassroots support of organizations like the Texas Democratic Party,

like Better All Works, Powered by People, can do the work now that make it more likely that the National Democratic Party or the Democratic nominee will invest in there in 2024. Yeah, I remember when Stacey Abrams was pitching me on Georgia during the wilderness, and she said, plus we're a pretty cheap date in terms of investment in Georgia. Texas is not a cheap date, no. Texas is not a cheap date. Texas is not a cheap date. All right. So this week, the House is passing COVID relief. Next week, they're voting on H.R. 1, otherwise known as the For the People Act, otherwise uh as what may be our last chance to save

democracy uh we've seen some very favorable polling for the bill including in our polar coaster series last month but we wanted to test the individual provisions in the bill and find out what's the most effective way to talk about the overall legislation so we partnered with our friends at data for progress to do a poll here's's what we found. 68% support the overall bill, including 57% of Republicans. 57% of Republicans. Then here are the individual provisions. 59% for automatic voter registration. 60% for same-day voter registration. 68% for a mandatory 15-day early voting period. 58% for giving every voter the option to vote by mail. I thought that was particularly notable since the Republicans spent most of 2020 attacking

vote by mail. Still has 58% support. 73% support the use of nonpartisan redistricting commissions. 64% support limiting money in politics. And 61% support increasing election security. Dan, anything surprise you in these results? I mean, the vote by mail number you mentioned is very significant since the person with the largest megaphone in the world spent nearly a year talking about how vote by mail was illegal fraud and you still have enough Republicans supporting it that you can get to 58%. Any provision that affects voting and then the overall bill are sort of viewed through this Any provision that affects voting and then the overall bill are sort of viewed through this zero-sum game of Democrats versus Republicans. And when you take it outside of political operatives and political strategists and elected members of Congress, this is something that is broadly popular in a way that should be shocking to the world given how polarized we are on most things in American politics.

Yeah. And I would say that the one number that stuck out to me that we did not mention is that when you said, we asked an initial question at the top of the poll that just said, how much have you heard about the For the People Act without explaining it? And only 18% of voters had heard of the For the People Act. So we do have, and we said this last time we pulled this, a lot of work to educate the public about what's in this bill and the stakes. We are trying to help change that. If you go to votesaveamerica.com slash for the people, you can learn more about what's in the bill and you can use our call tool to be connected to your representatives in Congress and either thank them for supporting the bill, which is really important to do, even if they're

supporting it, it's important. It's positive reinforcement really helps. Or if they're not supporting it, ask them why they're not. But we do need to start, you know, the House is going to pass it next week. The timeline from there, you know, who knows when it gets to the Senate, not until after COVID relief is done, but probably sometime in March. And we're going to have sort of a short runway to really build a lot of public support for this bill. And so we're going to have sort of a short runway to really build a lot of public support about for this bill. And so we're going to need everyone to both educate themselves, educate your friends, your colleagues, and then start calling Congress about this, because I think we need to

put the pressure on. What do you think, Dan? I mean, this is it. Like one of our friends and former colleagues said to us that it all boils down to Democrats either going to pass H.R. 1 or we're fucked. Yeah. And it's like those are the stakes. This poll suggests that may not be the best message to persuade the overall population, but it is a simple fact. If you look at all of the laws that are being proposed, Iowa just passed a series of incredibly restrictive voter suppression laws just last night, I believe. There are bills moving through the legislature in Georgia, Arizona, et cetera, that all across the country to make it harder for people to vote, surgically targeting, in particular, black and brown voters to prevent them from voting to make it more likely Republicans

will win elections. We have limited leverage in a lot of these states because Republicans control the state legislature and the governorship. We can't stop a lot of these bills just by the mere fact of the number of votes we have, but we can undo a lot of that damage by passing H.R. 1. That is the power before Democrats. It is an absolute essential. It is hard to imagine something that is more important in the short, medium, and long term than passing this bill. We also tested a few messages about the bill against a Republican argument that said, this bill is just a power grab by Democrats to Democratic

politicians, and it gives Washington way too much power over states. So that was the Republican argument tested, and then we tested three Democratic arguments in response. We wrote one message about protecting voting rights and civil rights, one about limiting big donors influence and expanding voting access, and one about the urgency of redistricting and stopping sort of the Republican state legislatures that you were just talking about. They all did extremely well, though the winner by just a few points was the following. Democrats say we need this bill to protect civil rights and voting rights because everyone should have an equal voice in our democracy,

no matter what you look like, where you come from, or how much money you have. Any thoughts on the messaging here? You know, to the point of pass H.R. 1 or we're fucked, we, you know, like I said, we view that through the prism of Democrats. And I am more guilty than

perhaps anyone walking the planet to talk about this issue in the context of Democrats winning elections and why it's so important. But what this polling shows is you can change who the were is and were fucked to America. And if you talk about democracy, change it from Democratic Party capital D to American democracy lowercase d, it is much more appealing to a broader swath of the electorate. Baker Osorio and Heather McGee have taught us about over time in mind, which is you write something that explicitly calls out the racial aspect of it, which I did with civil rights and voting rights. And also, but then you make it, you make the benefit universal to everyone, no matter who you are, what you look like, where you come from. And they've always told us that that is incredibly effective in their polling. And it turned out here as well. And it's interesting that it was an effective in this specific way. If you when you do a party breakdown,

Republicans found the message on voting rights and civil rights least persuasive. But independents found it more persuasive by a huge margin over any of the other messages. And then Democrats sort of all found them similarly persuasive. So it was one that, you know, which is much like the race class narrative is sometimes it pisses some Republicans off, but you end up getting a much broader swath of the electorate and it energizes Democrats, which is what you need to build a majority. So one last thought, one last question on this. Do you have any new thoughts on how we get to a place where we actually pass this bill by convincing Joe

Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema and maybe others to get rid of the filibuster? Because that's what it's coming down to. Well, I think we should not worry about Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin yet. We have more work to do in this poll, it's crystal clear on this, to convince Democrats and Democratic activists just how important this is. And Democrats have this sense that is well-worn over the years that we shouldn't talk about process. We should talk about policy, health care, wages, jobs, quote, unquote, kitchen table issues. But if you want good progressive policy, you have to put in place process reforms.

Republicans have spent all the time and every opportunity they have, not just since this election, but over the last several decades, lying about voter fraud and convincing their voters that elections will be stolen if they do not implement these racially based voter suppression measures like voter ID and limiting, just happening to eliminate the one day with the highest African American turnout for early vote, just as a cost-saving measure, whatever else. And Democrats have not done the work, ourselves included, our former boss included, everyone in the Democratic Party, of convincing Democratic voters why this is so important. You know, we saw this in the

change research polar coaster poll that we talked about a couple of weeks ago. The Republicans are incredibly motivated to stop voter fraud and Democrats are barely motivated to expand voting and put, and you can't see that because it's a podcast, but voter fraud has air quotes because it's not a real thing. Um, and so we have to talk about it more. We have to make the case where we have to build momentum for it. If we are going to ask at some point in the relatively near future for Democratic senators to put pressure on their colleagues to amend the filibuster, change the rules in some way, shape, or form to pass the most important piece of civil and voting rights legislation since the 60s, we have to get people excited about it. And that's what is critical about this message. That's what's critical about talking about. So what's critical about the Vote Save America efforts that you just referenced? Yes. So votesaveamerica.com slash for the people gives you tons of information about what's in the bill. So you can tell all your friends about it. And we provide a call tool so that you can connect to your representatives in Congress

and tell them either thank you for voting for the bill or why they should support it. OK, when we come back, we'll have Dan's interview with immigration reporter Dara Lind. Dara Lind is a reporter who covers immigration policy for ProPublica. She's also a co-host of the podcast, The Weeds. Welcome to Pod Save America. Thanks. Good to be on. Good to be back. Yeah. Thanks for joining us again. I wanted to have you on because there's a lot of conversation happening around immigration policy, changes in policy, new legislation, and some confusion about where things stand. So I want to start with a story and photo that went online a couple of days ago that said the Biden administration opens their first facility for migrant children. People got very worked up about this. Activists retweeted it. Reporters retweeted it.

CNN's Jim Acosta asked, can we be a country who doesn't do this? Members of Congress did. And I think a lot of the, not sure everyone who retweeted about it clicked on the link of the story, but could you help explain what that is and what this facility is and what it says about the Biden immigration policy as it relates to migrant children? Sure. So to be just kind of super 101 level about it, this is part of the system that is set up for dealing with kids who are coming to the US without their parents. Traditionally, they're called unaccompanied alien children, legally speaking. And so the government has a responsibility to, you know, keep them in, to like take care of them while it finds someone in the U.S. to place them with, which is usually a relative. The Trump administration for a while was subjecting these kids to its kind of CDC order to just expel everybody who came to the U.S. without papers. order to just expel everybody who came to the US without papers. A federal court in November said that it couldn't just summarily expel unaccompanied kids, that that was a violation of the law on dealing with unaccompanied children. And the Biden administration, even though that court order got

revoked, and it would have been allowed to do that, decided not to, and in fact, decided to change the text of the CDC order so that it explicitly exempted unaccompanied kids. And so what, but at the same time, like, obviously, COVID is still a problem. The health and human services shelters that are there to like, keep kids in custody and take care of them while they look for sponsors have had to reduce their capacity tremendously in order to comply with social distancing. And so we're quickly kind of as as they're taking these kids in again, the number of kids arriving has risen some and you know, the ceiling for how many people they can keep in custody is much lower. And there have been delays in finding and placing them with sponsors because of COVID. So they're beginning to, all of that means

that they did have to increase kind of the physical capacity. And that's why that Carrizo Springs shelter, which was closed in 2019, you know, under a certain amount of protest, or after a certain amount of protest because of the conditions in which it was holding children, that's why it's now being reopened. So there are kind of two different levels of questions here, right? One is the policy question of what is done with kids who come to the US without parents? And how does that, you know, what is the government obligated to do with them? And then there's the conditions question of, is this particular facility the right place? There have been questions, certainly under the Trump administration about the kind of particular nonprofits that these were getting contracted out

to about whether they were really more like shelters or really more like, you know, prisons or detention centers. But that is that kind of specific question is separate from the bigger, what, you know, are we a country that does this quote unquote question? And so there's two elements. There. One element of confusion, I think, among some of the people who might have seen this online was confusing policies to deal with children who come unaccompanied without parents and the child separation policies of the Trump administration. These are two different things, correct? Right. And this is kind of, to be fully honest with you, this is why I and a lot of other reporters

spent a lot of 2019 and 2020 very uneasy with the way that kids in cages was getting used as shorthand for Donald Trump's entire immigration policy, because it was conflating several different eras of policy. Family separation in like the kind of everybody who comes to the border gets separated from their parents way was really it was only practiced border wide for like a couple of months. And then the Trump administration walked it back. When kids in cages kind of became a thing again in spring 2019. It was because there was a lot of attention to there were tons of really just unprecedented numbers of families coming to the US. And so the conditions

in which they were being held were just these really overcrowded facilities that weren't designed to hold people for a long time at all, much less hold children. And so that was a conditions question. It was not a policy question, but they got conflated under that kids in cages rubric. And so now there's kind of a lot of, I think, the work that, you know, things that were kind of politically good for Democrats to encourage with that conflation. Now that a Democratic administration is in office, there's a little more desire from certain political figures to disambiguate them. But kind of that work is that like that trope's already been laid down. disambiguate them, but kind of that, that work is that like that trope's already been laid down. Um, but yes, this is, there are questions about kids who come with relatives who aren't their parents. Um, before 2020, the government's line was that it had to separate a grandparent from

their, who came with their grandkids. It had to separate an uncle who came with his niece. Um, in 2020, when they put in the CDC order, they said, for the purposes of expelling you, we will count you as a family if you're an uncle and a niece or whatever, so that they didn't have to take in anybody. And it's genuinely unclear, like the Biden administration has not explicitly said which of those two interpretations it's using. So like, in theory, some of these may be children who came with non-parental relatives and were separated, but every indication we have is that they are continuing to expel most families. And so they would probably be continuing to do that.

What, I don't want to suggest that the immigration activist community is monolithic, but what is it that the activists would like to see the Biden administration do with these unaccompanied minors who arrive? Is it simply a question of better conditions in the facilities or is there something else? There, I mean, there is something of a split between people who think that the HHS system is like, okay, but that there was a punitive turn under the Trump administration. And so the priority really ought to be on kind of ramping, you know, on, on finding better, better facilities on kind of returning to a foster care, you know, not like foster facility sort of, I mean, obviously foster care systems are themselves like not ideal, but that it should be seen as that rather than as something punitive. But there's also,

I mean, there are also people who will point out that because a lot of these, a lot of kids who come to the US without parents, or without any relatives, it's because they have relatives in the US. And, you know, obviously, in many cases, these are like teenagers, sometimes older teenagers. So there, there has been an ongoing question of, if someone's relative showed up at the border to take them, wouldn't it be possible for the government to release them much more quickly rather than go through this whole like, oh, we have to find and vet a sponsor and place you with them and that that kind of thing. That's something that some immigration lawyers maintain the government could be doing that would really reduce the amount of time that kids have to spend in custody. also say that like, if you were rewriting the law from scratch, that like, maybe you say that 16 plus,

you know, you can't be held with adults in an adult facility, but you can kind of get released on your own or cognizance or something like that. There's, you know, if you were kind of rebuilding the system from scratch, there would be like more or less, you know, abolitionist ways to do it. But, you know, the concern is that at this point, the HHS facilities do appear to exist along a continuum and that one end of that continuum is a lot closer to detention than it is to, you know, kind of community supported care. Another element of Biden's campaign promises that has been brought into question is he had pledged to pause deportations for 100 days. He has been unable to do that for a number of reasons. Could you talk about what that is and perhaps how the Trump administration sort of hamstrung him in that effort?

Right. So on its way out the door, like literally this was discovered in the last month of the Trump administration, like I think in the last couple of weeks, Trump's DHS signed agreements with a few states and a couple of localities that basically said, we agree not to change enforcement policy. And if we try to change enforcement policy, you have a right of action to challenge that, which there were a lot of questions about the way these contracts were written. It kind of turns out that that's not even that, that Texas, you know, used the contract when the initial pause on deportations was announced to go into a federal court and say, look, we were promised we could do this. You know, this is a violation of, you know, like, like this is a violation of this agreement. Use the exact same argument on why they had standing to sue that they had used in the cases over DACA, et cetera, which is that, just by have anything that makes it, that encourages unauthorized

migration hurts our education system. So the federal judge ruled with Texas and, you know, issued a temporary restraining order against the deportation clause, which has now turned into a preliminary injunction, not even saying this, not even based primarily on the contract, based primarily on the Administrative Procedure Act, which is the exact same federal law that the Trump administration kept getting hung up on in challenges to its immigration policies. Because the argument made by the federal judge is that the Biden administration failed to consider less radical alternatives to this deportation pause and didn't kind of show its work in going through a deliberative process. Now, it's really, really not clear where the line is, because at a certain level,

all immigration enforcement policies are matters of prosecutorial discretion, right? They all operate from the premise of we are not funded or frankly given a political mandate to seek out and deport every unauthorized immigrant in the US and therefore we are making individual decisions about who we should go after. it's really not clear how you, how, like, how much the APA can regulate that, right? Because you can't say that, like, federal law absolutely requires you to do X, Y, you know, to go after X, Y, and Z cases. So there are lots of questions. And like, in the meantime, this litigation has also involved a lot of kind of demands for information and statistics from DHS that they've, some of which they've actually managed to provide, but that is like more transparency being demanded on very short notice by the federal judiciary than like we've routinely seen from ICE in its entire history. So it's not super clear how much this is going to just continue to be a thing for the Biden administration. But so far, it really does look like there's going to just continue to be a thing for the Biden administration.

But so far, it really does look like there's going to be as much, you know, it does look like, you know, because if you find the right court venue, it's very easy to find an ideologically agreeable judge, that there's going to be as much trouble from like the Fifth Circuit under the Biden administration as there was from the Ninth Circuit under the Trump administration. You talked earlier about if we were starting from scratch, if we were rewriting the laws. A few days ago, Democrats unveiled a piece of immigration reform legislation. What are sort of the core elements of that? And what does it say about how democratic views of immigration policy have shifted since the 2013 immigration bill that passed the Senate? So the U.S. Citizenship Act, which is what the Biden administration kind of talked up in its first days in office as its day one immigration bill, has now officially

been introduced. It's what would have been called a comprehensive immigration reform bill before this year. And like there are, you know, to the extent that comprehensive immigration reform has been used for the last like 15 years to mean legalization for unauthorized immigrants currently in the country, plus like a broader readdressing of future immigration. What it doesn't have, the previous comprehensive bills did have, was a ramping up of enforcement. The old theory of the case was, you know, we're going to do this one time legalization, and then we'll set up the system so that we don't have 11 million unauthorized people again by increasing enforcement, you know, by both at the border, and like changing some stuff in the interior, etc.

That isn't in this. interior, et cetera. That isn't in this. And that's because Democrats are, you know, like, it's, it's serving as something of a marker bill. Like, obviously, there's not a whole lot of it's, there isn't a consensus that this could be done through reconciliation by any means. And so you have the question of how do you get 10 Republican votes in the Senate. So Democrats aren't, you know, it's not that they, there is not exactly an expectation that this is the bill that President Biden would sign in a couple of weeks. But it is an illustration that Democrats are no longer kind of negotiating with themselves on this, right? That like, they now see enforcement as something that has to be demanded by Republicans, not as something that is like

good on the policy merits. And between that and the fact that the actual path to citizenship, the legalization program is relatively broader in terms of who would be eligible, and that it's a shorter period of time until people would be able to become permanent residents than we've seen in prior bills. Both of those make it a relatively generous, relatively dovish bill in terms of what we have actually seen, you know, get the backing of Democratic leadership in Congress. One of the, you know, there's very much the lesson of the Obama years in the 2013 bill is that wherever Democrats start on enforcement, Republicans will up it. So I agree with the legislative strategy here. Even beyond the legislation, one of the challenges with setting enforcement priorities is dealing with ICE, the ICE union.

This is, you know, Obama had a, this is what ultimately led, as you know, better than almost anyone, what led to Obama's order in DACA was he kept through Secretary Janet Napolitano saying, do not prioritize DREAMers. And DREAMers kept getting caught up in the system. I imagine this is going to be a huge problem for the Biden administration in terms of figuring out how they're going to deal with enforcement if you have, you know, I think it's a lot of progressives see a rogue element. It's obviously where abolish ICE came from. But have you heard about how the Biden administration or Secretary Mayorkas is thinking of dealing with that challenge of sort of reining in the enforcement side? So we have gotten under the dude who's kind of running ICE on an interim basis,

Tay Johnson, did send out a new enforcement priorities memo about a week ago, which is, it goes, it's a more general, or like a more restrictive version of the memo that Obama issued or through DHS Secretary Jay Johnson in 2014, which was kind of the only one of the Obama administration's many efforts to tell ICE agents who they should and shouldn't prioritize that actually did result in change on the ground. And there were two different arguments. There was an argument that

it actually got changed on the ground because Jay Johnson had done the kind of stakeholder work of getting ICE field offices on board and all of that. And there was another argument that it actually was just clear in laying down who should count as a priority based in very particular guidelines. And that made it a little easier to ensure accountability. The Biden administration appears to be working on the second of those theories insofar as like, this is being issued by an interim chief, we haven't gotten a nominee for ICE director yet. In general, DHS is not really fully staffed with political appointees in any rapid way. And so it's going to be interesting to see how that memo gets implemented. And that really is the question right now is, you know, in an

environment where it's clear that a lot of write and file ICE agents don't like those priorities, like, you know, you have people giving blind quotes saying, oh, they're abolishing ICE through memo, Stephen Miller is, you know, making the rounds in media, essentially encouraging, you know, ICE agents who disagree with these priorities to kind of continue to do what they want. But we are going to have to see and this is the kind of thing that frankly takes a lot of time because you're looking for differences in trends from, you know, like, there isn't like a public blotter of ICE arrests, you know, you you end up relying on the data points of quarterly arrest data, which is not, that's every three months and often doesn't come out until a month after the quarter has ended.

And on particularly on whatever cases happen to blow up, which can certainly give you an indication of, oh, this person shouldn't fit under the guidelines, but is being deported anyway, but doesn't give you a clear idea of whether the problem is this particular regional field office, whether that was a rogue operation, and ultimately, that person will be disciplined. So it's, it's going to really take a while. And, you know, like, in my experience, under the Trump administration, you could figure out the pattern on enforcement after like four months. And then stuff started changing. And with the and like when there isn't enough when there isn't kind of sustained local coverage or when there's other stuff in the news. And so these things are less likely to go viral on social media.

It can be that much harder because you just don't have the eyes everywhere. Last question for you. Just as you point out, progressives or activists sometimes blur the lines on the kids in cages policy dispute. One area where Trump and the right blur the lines was between undocumented immigrants who crossed the border and asylum seekers. And there's some confusion about how the Biden administration has changed the asylum policy. What is going on with that? That is an ongoing process because for the kind of, for the same reasons when we were talking about just unaccompanied kids, like there is a, the current border, the current regime for people trying to seek asylum in the U.S. is that they aren't they're still getting expelled for the most part under the CDC order. That is something that the Biden administration has said it will review. But there isn't as yet any promise that they're going to change it, much less any kind of timeline.

change it, much less any kind of timeline. There are also, meanwhile, people who have been waiting in Mexico under the Trump administration's, quote unquote, migrant protection protocols or the Remain in Mexico policy, who have court dates in the US that keep getting pushed back because they keep getting not allowed to show up to cross the border into the US for COVID reasons. So many of those people have now been waiting for, everyone under that has been waiting for at least a year, potentially two years, or the overall majority of people. And so the Biden administration stopped putting people into MPP, its first day in office, and is now slowly starting to let the people who were waiting in Mexico into the US so that they don't have to be in makeshift, you know, refugee camps and all but name in places that like, as we've known for as we've seen from Texas, like that same weather pattern was happening on the other side of the border, too. So people

were, you know, intense during this intensely cold snap in Matamoros. The process for how they're doing that has been a little bit shaky to get started because it's, it relies on people enrolling online. And that's difficult when not everyone is literate, when not everyone has reliable internet access. So like, it's not super, and frankly, no one knows where a lot of these people are. Uh, the Mexican government, you know, there wasn't like any real effort to track them. The U.S. government as often as not, instead of writing a real address for where they were staying in Mexico, just wrote

domicilio conocido or known address. And, you know, it's totally plausible at this point that some of them have gone back to their home countries that some of them have, you know, settled elsewhere in Mexico. Who knows how many people have, know been killed or disappeared so it's we there isn't a lot of knowledge about how many people will ultimately be able to take advantage of this and you know it's not clear how much effort the u.s government is going to go to or like unhcr which is doing a lot of the implementation of this on the mexican side to really seek those people out but what you have right now is a situation where like, there was, I think the Times recently in its some of its recent border coverage,

identified a couple who the one pair, the father had been in had been enrolled in the remaining Mexico program, and so was a is going to be able to go into the United States. But his partner who had arrived in November of last year was was turned away under the CDC order and is still getting turned away. She's not eligible to come in because people who were subject to that, there isn't a process for them yet. And when that happens is going to depend on how much the Biden, can ramp up capacity to safely process people in without, you know, risking epidemiological dangers, without risking, like people just kind of getting lost in the system or like dumped on, you know, it for a while under the Trump administration, like busloads of people were just getting dumped at bus depots in El Paso. And like, that's not helpful for that community. That's not helpful for the migrants. So, you know, it's just going, it's the kind of infrastructure work that won't necessarily,

that, you know, even kind of under the most motivated circumstances wouldn't be able to happen immediately. And we're with an understaffed DHS, it's not super clear how quickly that can happen at all. Yeah, I mean, that is the, I think immigration is probably the issue where this may be the most complicated given how aggressive the Trump administration was. But President Biden has an understaffed government operating in a pandemic on things that are really hard. So this is very complicated. Thank you so much for joining us and helping shed light on this.

And we will love to have you back soon because this is going to be an issue that is going to remain at the forefront for a long, long time. Thanks. Yeah. Anytime. Anytime. Thanks to Dara for joining us today and hope you all have a great weekend. We'll we'll see you next week after CPAC. Bye, everyone. Pod Save America is a Crooked Media production. The executive producer is Michael Martinez.

Our associate producer is Jordan Waller. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Seglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to Tanya Sominator, Katie Long, Roman Papadimitriou, Caroline Rustin, and Justine Howe for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Narmal Konian, Yale Freed, and Milo Kim,

who film and upload these episodes as videos every week.